Hypallage is a rare bird. Not.

Abstract

Hypallage, a “marginal” rhetorical trope, is defined as a combination of seemingly incompatible features and has been exploited since antiquity in poetic and narrative discourse, e.g., angry crowns of kings (Odes of Horace). Here the hypallactic incompatibility arises from the position of angry as a prenominal modifier of crowns rather than of kings. We deny that hypallage is a rare phenomenon restricted to belles-lettres; rather, we claim that hypallage is a highly entrenched mechanism in ordinary language. We demonstrate that structural and semantic parallelisms exist between prototypical hypallactic transpositions and the marked placement of constituents in clausal, morphological, and speech act constructions, as well as quantifier and adverbial placement. Hypallactic expressions constitute a violation of the Iconic Proximity Principle. Nevertheless, they are a means for a speaker to convey complex meanings at any level of grammar and discourse with a minimum of coding effort. The exploitation of hypallactic anti-iconicity by a speaker and its resolution by a hearer are made possible by shared conceptual models, the conceptual metonymies and/or metaphors operating on them, and pragmatic inferencing. We conclude that the prioritizing of figurative motivation at the expense of iconicity is a pervasive cognitive mechanism in language.