Hyperbole

About: Hyperbole is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 577 publications have been published within this topic receiving 5901 citations. The topic is also known as: exaggeration & overstatement.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Internet Research Surveys: Evidence from the Literature:

Abstract: E-mail and World Wide Web surveys have been the subject of much hyperbole about their capabilities as well as some criticism of their limitations. In this report, the authors examine what is known ...

Irony in Talk Among Friends

Abstract: This article reports the findings of a single study examining irony in talk among friends. Sixty-two 10-min conversations between college students and their friends were recorded and analyzed. Five main types of irony were found: jocularity, sarcasm, hyperbole, rhetorical questions, and understatements. These different forms of ironic language were part of 8% of all conversational turns. Analysis of these utterances revealed varying linguistic and social patterns and suggested several constraints on how and why people achieve ironic meaning. The implications of this conclusion for psychological theories of irony are discussed.

Why Do People Use Figurative Language

Abstract: In this article, we examine the discourse goals that are accomplished by the use of eight forms of figurative language: hyperbole, idiom, indirect request, irony, understatement, metaphor, rhetorical question, and simile. Subjects were asked to provide reasons why they would use a particular figure of speech. Based on their responses, a discourse goal taxonomy that includes each of the eight figures was developed. The goal taxonomy indicates that each figure of speech is used to accomplish a unique constellation of communicative goals. The degree of goal overlap between the eight forms was also calculated, and the results provide support for theoretical claims about the relatedness of certain figures. Taken together, the goal taxonomy and overlap scores broaden our understanding of functional and theoretical differences between the various kinds of figurative language.

A deflationary account of metaphors

Abstract: Introduction Are metaphors departures from a norm of literalness? According to classical rhetoric and most later theories, including Gricean pragmatics, they are. No, metaphors are wholly normal, say the Romantic critics of classical rhetoric and a variety of modern scholars ranging from hard-nosed cognitive scientists to postmodern critical theorists. On the metaphor-as-normal side, there is a broad contrast between those, like the cognitive linguists Lakoff, Talmy or Fauconnier, who see metaphor as pervasive in language because it is constitutive of human thought, and those, like the psycholinguists Glucksberg or Kintsch, or relevance theorists, who describe metaphor as emerging in the process of verbal communication. While metaphor cannot be both wholly normal and a departure from normal language use, there might be distinct, though related, metaphorical phenomena at the level of thought, on the one hand, and verbal communication, on the other. This possibility is being explored (for instance) in the work of Raymond Gibbs. In this chapter, we focus on the relevance-theoretic approach to linguistic metaphors. Relevance theory’s approach to metaphor is deflationary. Most rhetorical, literary and philosophical traditions emphasise both the importance and the distinctiveness of metaphor. We acknowledge its importance but dispute its distinctiveness. Metaphors are indeed ubiquitous in language use and contribute to what Barthes called ‘le plaisir du texte’. Specific uses of metaphors by individual authors or in given literary genres are certainly worthy of study, and so is the very idea of metaphor as a culturally salient notion with a long and very rich history. Still, we see metaphors as simply a range of cases at one end of a continuum that includes literal, loose and hyperbolic interpretations. In our view, metaphorical interpretations are arrived at in exactly the same way as these other interpretations. There is no mechanism specific to metaphors, no interesting generalisation that applies only to them. In other terms, linguistic metaphors are not a natural kind, and ‘metaphor’ is not a theoretically important notion in the study of verbal communication. Relevance theory’s account of metaphor is on the lean side, and is bound to disappoint those who feel that verbal metaphor deserves a full-fledged theory of its own, or should be at the centre of a wider theory of language, or even of thought.

Hyperbole over Cyberspace: Self-Presentation and Social Boundaries in Internet Home Pages and Discourse

Abstract: Futurist sensationalism, journalistic attention, constructivist theory, and appeal to technical determinism all make the genre of literature on cyberspace, described as postmodern, visible and possibly influential. This article takes issue with assertions in this literature that Internet communication alters cultural processes by changing the basis of social identity and that it provides alternative realities that displace the socially grounded ones of everyday synchronous discourse. A main theme of the postmodern perspective is that Internet technology liberates the individual from the body and allows the separate existence of multiple aspects of self that otherwise would not be expressed and that can remain discrete rather than having to be resolved or integrated as in ordinary social participation. The concepts under review presume a prior definition of self as a psychological unity, when the term is open to many definitions including the one that the self is a product of varying social contexts and is...