Reflexive hyperbole, both ways

Abstract

This article continues the author's exploration of a substantially neglected form of hyperbole that he calls reflexive hyperbole. Such hyperbole can arise as one meaning option for sentences such as “Alex Salmond was the Scottish National Party,” “When Jack watches Supergirl films, he becomes Supergirl”, “I am England” and “Teenagers are money for social media companies.” Such sentences can convey that the two things mentioned have some graded relationship to a remarkably high degree—for example that Alex Salmond was associated in the public mind with the Scottish National Party to a remarkably high degree. The conveying is done by hyperbolically identifying the two things (Salmond and the party, in that example). This phenomenon can arise with an indefinitely wide range of graded relationships, but its different manifestations are deeply unified because the relationship has to be of a special type that the author calls “broadly reflexive.” A relationship is broadly reflexive when an item of the appropriate sort normally bears the relationship to itself to an extremely high degree. The present article extends the study of reflexive hyperbole by focusing on “two-way” cases, as for instance in “I am England and England is me.” The article is theoretical and conducts an initial exploration of the wide variety of ways in which such cases can, in principle, be interpreted by a hearer.