The Grammar of Figurativeness, with Illustrations Drawn from English

Abstract

This paper looks at the linguistic status of traditional figurative phenomena, and classifies these in terms of how they are effected linguistically. Different figurative types—tropes, schemes, figures of speech—are articulated by different aspects of linguistic structure. Some involve lexical structure, some syntactic, some phonological and some involve pragmatics. It is suggested that their classification and their individual characters arise naturally from the potentialities of ordinary language and are properly described in linguistic terms. Conversely, many aspects of linguistic structure are figuratively based, some of them necessarily; figurativeness is basic to language structure and use, and to the development of languages.