Understanding figures of speech: Dependency relations and organizational patterns

Abstract

Except for metaphor and metonymy, the study of most traditional figures of speech has largely been neglected in Cognitive Linguistics. This article attempts to fill this gap by exploring a broad range of figures of speech in terms of their dependency relations and organizational patterns. It distinguishes between basic and non-basic figures of speech, where the latter arise from variants of the basic cognitive operations that shape the former. It then discusses these figures in terms of their interrelationships, their shared features, and the attitudinal or denotational nature of their meaning effects. The result is a unified account of figurative language.