IMAGERY.

LEXICAL SDs
Lecture 3.1
The concept of imagery
Ways of cognition:
Science - analytically
art - synthetically (creating images).

Image
a sensory perception of an abstract notion.
Images in literature
Literary art is a representation of reality in
verbal images.
Words:
lose their direct signification
are adapted for artistic effect
get a new, contextual meaning.

The man was drowned in the river.

She looked in his eyes, drowning him in
sweetness.
Images in literature
Imagery is
the use of images in writing,
the use of words that bring pictures to the
mind and force and beauty to speech
and give an aesthetic pleasure to the
reader.

Images are made of words, but an image

is a supraverbal entity.
Images in literature
The image is an artistic presentation of the
general through the individual, of the abstract
through the concrete.
Writers create images of everything: human
beings, animals, natural phenomena, events,
feelings, ideas.
General images embrace a whole book or story
(Soames Forsyte). Individual image can give a
close-up of a certain thing for a moment to
foreground it (cold autumn wind thistly wind).
Psychological grounds
The image awakens in the readers mind
the old perception and sensations,
different sensuous associations:
visual - purple or golden clouds
acoustic - swish went the scythe
tactile - soft smile
thermal warm embrace
gustatory sweet pleasure
The structure of the Image
T the tenor the subject of speech
()
V the vehicle the thing with which T is
identified ()
The ground the common feature of T
and V ( )
The technique of identification the type
of trope and its lexical and grammatical
peculiarities.
Tropes
The trope denotes the use of a word or
phrase in an unusual figurative sense.
I.R.Halperin explains tropes as
an interplay between the direct meaning
and a transferred meaning
imposed on the word by the context.

The rain poured all day.

A stream of letters poured into the office.
Tropes
The transferred and the direct meanings
are caught by the readers mind
simultaneously, because they run
parallel, one of them taking precedence
over the other.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.
(E.Pound)
Tropes
Trope is a figure of speech involving a turn or change
of sense, the use of a word in a sense other than literal.
Symbol is something that is itself and yet stands for
or suggests something else
(a flag a piece of coloured cloth stands for a nation).
Synaesthesia
the concurrent response of two or more of the senses to
the stimulation of one.;
one sensation is described in terms of another;
appeals to different senses in one image.
cold eye, soft wind, heavy silence, hard voice, a black
look, a sweet melody
Lexical Stylistic Devices
1. Bathos
- dropping from the sublime to the
ridiculous
Sometimes it is an attempt to treat
poetically a commonplace idea.

But the wisdom of our ancestors shall not

be disturbed or the country is done for.
(

.)
2. Metaphor
applying the name of one thing to
another thing in order to foreground
some similarity between them.

Something is something (A = B)
The world is a great snowball rolling
downhill (contextual meaning, danger.)
Metaphor
A metaphor is an imaginative identification of
one concept (the tenor) with another (the
vehicle).
Metaphor is an implied analogy, imaginatively
indentifying one object with another and
ascribing to the first object one or more of the
qualities of the second.
The tenor is the idea being expressed (the
subject of the comparison).
The vehicle is the image by which this idea is
conveyed (the subject communicated).
Types of metaphor
Simple - may occur in a single isolated
comparison.

Extended/large functions as the

controlling image of a whole work (an
image or metaphor that runs throughout
and determines the form or nature of a
literary work).
Types of metaphor
Implied metaphor talks about A as if it
were B, using terms, appropriate to B
A does what B usually does.

The beautiful treacherous Mediterranean.

There it lay curled beneath them, its
white silky paws touching the shore.
The fog comes
On little cat feet
Grammatical types of
Metaphor
Grammatically metaphors can be
embodied in
a noun (the world is a snowball),
an adjective (thistly wind),
a verb (the trees danced),
an adverb (the leaves fell sorrowfully).
Noun and non-noun
metaphors
The noun-metaphors fall into 3 structural types:
Tenor is vehicle (The world is a snowball)

Tenor becomes vehicle (The waves turned into

snakes)
Something makes tenor into vehicle (The sun

made every cloud a bonfire)

In non-noun metaphors vehicle is implied (its

implicit). The vehicle must be guessed by the
reader through its properties or actions denoted
by adjectives, verbs, etc.
Classes of metaphor
Genuine (fresh): are created by writers to
make up images.
Trite/dead: are not created in speech, are used
automatically as expressive means, are fixed in
dictionaries (cup of satisfaction, ray of hope).
Yet trite metaphors can be revived by
extension. They are called sustained
metaphors. The principal image is called the
central image and the additional extended
images are called contributory.
Personification
a kind of metaphor in which the properties of
a person are transferred upon inanimate things.
their grammatical and lexical valency changes,
the pronouns he and she are used instead of
it.
The verbs want, think, smile are introduced.
Personification is often accompanied by
capitalization (Devouring Time). Personification
is an implied metaphor, the trick of talking
about some non-human things as if they were
human.
Related devices
Conceit outrageous metaphor, comparison
between two highly dissimilar objects.

Your mind and you are my Sargasso Sea.

Allegory - form of extended metaphor in which

objects, persons and actions in a narrative are
equated with meanings that lie outside the
narrative itself. The characters are usually
personifications of abstract qualities (fables).
3. Simile
Foregrounding of one feature of the object
described and comparing it with another
object, which has this feature, but belongs
to a different class of things (A is like B).

May be based on different grammatical

relations:
adjectives (attributes),
adv. modifiers,
verb predicative.
Simile
Similes have in their structure formal
elements, connective words, such as
like, as, as if, seem, appear, etc.
e.g. She ran up the steps, light as a bird.

There are many traditional similes: as sly

as a fox, as busy as a bee, etc., which
have become set expressions.
Simile and comparison
Comparison - two objects of the same
class of things.
The purpose of simile is to establish
sameness or difference between objects
of different classes.
The boy is as clever as his father. // Her dog
is as clever as a professor.
My house is like your house. // Her house
was like a bee-hive.
Simile and metaphor
Unlike metaphor, simile establishes the
comparison explicitly, with the words like or as.

My daughter dances like an angel.

My daughter is an angel.

Simile expresses explicit analogy and metaphor

implied analogy. Simile specifically highlights
one aspect of an object of comparison.
4. Metonymy
- is a trope in which instead of the usual
word denoting an object, another word is
used, because the things these two
words name are connected in life.
The theatre laughed.
Im fond of Dickens.
Metonymy involves continuous
association of a part and a whole.
Metaphor discontinuous association of
two wholes.
Metonymy: relations within
The main types of relations between tenor and
vehicle:
an abstract notion is named instead of a concrete
thing (and vice versa): and Captive Good attending
Captain Ill
the container is named instead of the contained:
cup, tray, glass;
the relations of proximity: the table was merry;
the material instead of the thing: the marble spoke;
the instrument instead of the action: his sharp pen|
tongue; give every man thine ear and few thy voice
Metonymy
Synechdoche a trope in which a part
signifies the whole or when the whole
signifies the part.
e.g. wheels car; hands man-labour

When metonymy is used creatively, it

belongs to SDs. When it is fixed in
dictionaries, it belongs to the language
and is called trite.
5. Irony
- a figure of speech in which the actual
intent is expressed through the words
that carry the opposite meaning.
Irony is based on simultaneous
realization of two opposite logical
meanings of the word dictionary and
contextual (good - bad).
The word containing irony is strongly
marked by intonation, it has an emphatic
stress.
Types of comic
Humour is a combination of mockery and sympathy,
in which the positive attitude prevails.
In irony the negative attitude prevails. The true sense
is masked, implied in words of contrary meaning.
Satire is a direct outright derision and ridicule of
smbs faults and follies, there is no mask.
Sarcasm is a form of verbal irony in which under the
guise of praise a bitter expression of strong and
personal disapproval is given. It is intended to hurt.
Dramatic irony the words or acts of a character in a
play carry a meaning unperceived by the character
but understood by the audience.
6. Zeugma
is the use of a verb in the same grammatical
but different semantic relation to two subjects
or objects in the context.
The semantic relation is literal to one word
and figurative or phraseological to the other.
e.g. The boys took their places and their books.
Zeugma produces the stylistic effect of
foregrounding in the form of defeated
expectancy.
Zeugma
is widely used in English emotive prose,
especially in humouristic writing and
poetry.
Its function - to keep the main common
meanings of words from fading away, to
keep them fresh.

e.g. Tom paid him a visit and a fee.

,
.
7. Antonomasia
is a trope based on the interplay between
logical and nominal meanings of a word,
as a result of which the person is given a
new proper name.

Two types:
a proper name is used as a common noun:
Her husband is an Othello.
a common name is used as a proper name:
Miss Simplicity.
Antonomasia
Function:
to point out the leading, most characteristic
features of a person
at the same time fixing this trait as a
proper name.

Antonomasia can be fresh and trite:

The Iron Lady, The Prince of Peace, mother
Theresa.