IMAGERY. LEXICAL SDs

Lecture 3.1

The concept of imagery

Ways of cognition: Science - analytically art - synthetically (creating images).

Image – a sensory perception of an abstract notion.

Images in literature

Literary art is a representation of reality in verbal images.

Words: lose their direct signification are adapted for artistic effect get a new, contextual meaning.

The man was drowned in the river.She looked in his eyes, drowning him in

sweetness.

Images in literature

Imagery is the use of images in writing, the use of words that bring pictures to the

mind and force and beauty to speech and give an aesthetic pleasure to the

reader.

Images are made of words, but an image is a supraverbal entity.

Images in literature

The image is an artistic presentation of the general through the individual, of the abstract through the concrete.

Writers create images of everything: human beings, animals, natural phenomena, events, feelings, ideas.

General images embrace a whole book or story (Soames Forsyte). Individual image can give a close-up of a certain thing for a moment to foreground it (cold autumn wind – thistly wind).

Psychological grounds

The image awakens in the reader’s mind the old perception and sensations, different sensuous associations: visual - purple or golden clouds acoustic - swish went the scythe tactile - soft smile thermal – warm embrace gustatory – sweet pleasure

The structure of the Image

T – the tenor – the subject of speech (обозначаемое)

V – the vehicle – the thing with which T is identified (обозначающее)

The ground – the common feature of T and V (основание сравнения)

The technique of identification – the type of trope and its lexical and grammatical peculiarities.

Tropes

The trope denotes the use of a word or phrase in an unusual figurative sense.

I.R. Halperin explains tropes as an interplay between the direct meaning and a transferred meaning

imposed on the word by the context.

The rain poured all day. A stream of letters poured into the office.

Tropes

The transferred and the direct meanings are caught by the reader’s mind simultaneously, because they run parallel, one of them taking precedence over the other.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

(E.Pound)

Tropes

Trope is a figure of speech involving a “turn” or change of sense, the use of a word in a sense other than literal.

Symbol – is something that is itself and yet stands for or suggests something else (a flag – a piece of coloured cloth stands for a nation).

Synaesthesia – the concurrent response of two or more of the senses to

the stimulation of one.; one sensation is described in terms of another; appeals to different senses in one image.

cold eye, soft wind, heavy silence, hard voice, a black look, a sweet melody

Lexical Stylistic Devices

1. Bathos

- dropping from the sublime to the ridiculous

Sometimes it is an attempt to treat poetically a commonplace idea.

But the wisdom of our ancestors shall not be disturbed… or the country is done for.

(Но мудрость наших предков не должна быть потревожена… а то Англия протянет ноги.)

2. Metaphor

applying the name of one thing to another thing in order to foreground some similarity between them.

Something is something (A = B)The world is a great snowball rolling

downhill (contextual meaning, danger.)

Metaphor

A metaphor is an imaginative identification of one concept (the tenor) with another (the vehicle).

Metaphor is an implied analogy, imaginatively indentifying one object with another and ascribing to the first object one or more of the qualities of the second.

The tenor is the idea being expressed (the subject of the comparison).

The vehicle is the image by which this idea is conveyed (the subject communicated).

Types of metaphor

Simple - may occur in a single isolated comparison.

Extended/large – functions as the controlling image of a whole work (an image or metaphor that runs throughout and determines the form or nature of a literary work).

Types of metaphor

Implied metaphor talks about A as if it were B, using terms, appropriate to B A does what B usually does.

The beautiful treacherous Mediterranean. There it lay curled beneath them, its white silky paws touching the shore.

The fog comes On little cat feet…

Grammatical types of Metaphor Grammatically metaphors can be

embodied in a noun (the world is a snowball), an adjective (thistly wind), a verb (the trees danced), an adverb (the leaves fell sorrowfully).

Noun and non-noun metaphorsThe noun-metaphors fall into 3 structural types: Tenor is vehicle (The world is a snowball) Tenor becomes vehicle (The waves turned into

snakes) Something makes tenor into vehicle (The sun

made every cloud a bonfire)

In non-noun metaphors vehicle is implied (its implicit). The vehicle must be guessed by the reader through its properties or actions denoted by adjectives, verbs, etc.

Classes of metaphor

Genuine (fresh): are created by writers to make up images.

Trite/dead: are not created in speech, are used automatically as expressive means, are fixed in dictionaries (cup of satisfaction, ray of hope).

Yet trite metaphors can be revived by extension. They are called sustained metaphors. The principal image is called the central image and the additional extended images are called contributory.

Personification

– a kind of metaphor in which the properties of a person are transferred upon inanimate things. their grammatical and lexical valency changes, the pronouns “he” and “she” are used instead of

“it”. The verbs want, think, smile are introduced.

Personification is often accompanied by capitalization (Devouring Time). Personification is an implied metaphor, the trick of talking about some non-human things as if they were human.

Related devices

Conceit – outrageous metaphor, comparison between two highly dissimilar objects.

Your mind and you are my Sargasso Sea.

Allegory - form of extended metaphor in which objects, persons and actions in a narrative are equated with meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The characters are usually personifications of abstract qualities (fables).

3. Simile

Foregrounding of one feature of the object described and comparing it with another object, which has this feature, but belongs to a different class of things (A is like B).

May be based on different grammatical relations: adjectives (attributes), adv. modifiers, verb – predicative.

Simile

Similes have in their structure formal elements, connective words, such as like, as, as if, seem, appear, etc.

e.g. She ran up the steps, light as a bird.

There are many traditional similes: as sly as a fox, as busy as a bee, etc., which have become set expressions.

Simile and comparison

Comparison - two objects of the same class of things.

The purpose of simile is to establish sameness or difference between objects of different classes. The boy is as clever as his father. // Her dog

is as clever as a professor. My house is like your house. // Her house

was like a bee-hive.

Simile and metaphor

Unlike metaphor, simile establishes the comparison explicitly, with the words like or as.

My daughter dances like an angel.My daughter is an angel.

Simile expresses explicit analogy and metaphor – implied analogy. Simile specifically highlights one aspect of an object of comparison.

4. Metonymy

- is a trope in which instead of the usual word denoting an object, another word is used, because the things these two words name are connected in life. The theatre laughed. I’m fond of Dickens.

Metonymy involves continuous association of a part and a whole. Metaphor – discontinuous association of two wholes.

Metonymy: relations within

The main types of relations between tenor and vehicle: an abstract notion is named instead of a concrete

thing (and vice versa): and Captive Good attending Captain Ill…

the container is named instead of the contained: cup, tray, glass;

the relations of proximity: the table was merry; the material instead of the thing: the marble spoke; the instrument instead of the action: his sharp pen|

tongue; give every man thine ear and few thy voice

Metonymy

Synechdoche – a trope in which a part signifies the whole or when the whole signifies the part. e.g. wheels – car; hands – man-labour

When metonymy is used creatively, it belongs to SDs. When it is fixed in dictionaries, it belongs to the language and is called trite.

5. Irony

- a figure of speech in which the actual intent is expressed through the words that carry the opposite meaning.

Irony is based on simultaneous realization of two opposite logical meanings of the word – dictionary and contextual (good - bad).

The word containing irony is strongly marked by intonation, it has an emphatic stress.

Types of comic

Humour is a combination of mockery and sympathy, in which the positive attitude prevails.

In irony the negative attitude prevails. The true sense is masked, implied in words of contrary meaning.

Satire is a direct outright derision and ridicule of smb’s faults and follies, there is no mask.

Sarcasm is a form of verbal irony in which under the guise of praise a bitter expression of strong and personal disapproval is given. It is intended to hurt.

Dramatic irony – the words or acts of a character in a play carry a meaning unperceived by the character but understood by the audience.

6. Zeugma

is the use of a verb in the same grammatical but different semantic relation to two subjects or objects in the context.

The semantic relation is literal to one word and figurative or phraseological to the other. e.g. The boys took their places and their books.

Zeugma produces the stylistic effect of foregrounding in the form of defeated expectancy.

Zeugma

is widely used in English emotive prose, especially in humouristic writing and poetry.

Its function - to keep the main common meanings of words from fading away, to keep them fresh.

e.g. Tom paid him a visit and a fee. Пришел поэт, осыпанный почестями и

перхотью.

7. Antonomasia

is a trope based on the interplay between logical and nominal meanings of a word, as a result of which the person is given a new proper name.

Two types: a proper name is used as a common noun:

Her husband is an Othello. a common name is used as a proper name:

Miss Simplicity.

Antonomasia

Function: to point out the leading, most characteristic

features of a person at the same time fixing this trait as a

proper name.

Antonomasia can be fresh and trite: The Iron Lady, The Prince of Peace, mother

Theresa.