ALL OR NOTHING: A SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF HYPERBOLE

Abstract

This paper focuses on hyperbole, a long neglected form of non-literal language despite its pervasiveness<br />in everyday speech. It addresses the production process of exaggeration, since a crucial limitation in<br />figurative language theories is the production and usage of figures of speech, probably due to the intensive<br />research effort on their comprehension. The aim is to analyse hyperbole from a semantic perspective in order<br />to devise a semasiological taxonomy which enables us to understand the nature and uses of the trope. In<br />order to analyse and classify hyperbolic items a corpus of naturally occurring conversations extracted from<br />the British National Corpus was examined. The results suggest that the evaluative and quantitative dimensions<br />are key, defining features which often co-occur and should therefore be present in any definition of this<br />figure of speech. A remarkable preference for negative affect, auxesis and absolute terms when engaging in<br />hyperbole is also observed.

Keywords

• figurative language
• hyperbole
• semantic field
• corpus analysis