A Lexico-pragmatic Study Of English Figures Of Speech

The study of Western rhetorical principles and practice is perhaps the oldest subject.So far,there have been many articles on figure of speech which is the main part of rhetoric.They either focus on a certain figure of speech or figures of speech in teaching,but research on this phenomenon from linguistic point of view is far from enough.Even few studies have been conducted from the perspective of lexical pragmatics.Lexical pragmatics emphasizes the temporary,flexible and context-dependent features of lexical meaning in use.The present thesis is an analysis of English figures of speech from this new perspective,with purposes of finding out whether the figure of speech is a way to adjust the lexical meaning from static storage to dynamic use,and how the listener relies on context to understand different meanings of the words and the uncertainty of speaker’s intention by means of figures of speech,in order to understand the real communicative intention of the speaker.All the figures of speech in discussion come from three monographs which are Modern English Rhetoric,English Rhetoric and Writing and A Detailed Study of Figures of Speech in English.14 types are selected and they are: simile,metaphor,analogy,personification,allegory,pun,irony,allusion,plantification,metonymy,synecdoche,hyperbole,euphemism and parody.The theoretical foundation of this thesis is context classification under different levels(intra-linguistic context,extra-linguistic context and cognitive context)and different types of lexical pragmatic enrichment(horizontal classification containing zero enrichment,pragmatic narrowing,pragmatic broadening,and pragmatic transfer;vertical classification containing pragmatic enrichment among senses,pragmatic enrichment within the sense,and pragmatic enrichment out of the sense).Those 14 figures of speech are first divided into different levels of context according to the focus,and then are analyzed from the horizontal and vertical classification of pragmatic enrichment types.The thesis arrives at the following conclusions: First,in order to understand the words in figures of speech accurately and completely,it is necessary to raise them to different levels of context.Simile,metaphor,analogy and personification can be explained in the intra-linguistic context.But understanding of allegory,pun,irony and allusion needs to rise to the extra-linguistic context.Others,such as plantification,metonymy,synecdoche,hyperbole,euphemism and parody should be explained in the cognitive context;Second,from the perspective of lexical pragmatic enrichment,it is found that when there is only one statically stored sense in the dictionary,there is no need for lexical pragmatic enrichment among senses.When a word has more than one static sense stored in the dictionary,the lexical pragmatic enrichment among senses is required.At the end of this process,other figures of speech need lexical pragmatic enrichment of meaning transfer in horizontal classification(it also involves pragmatic enrichment out of the sense in vertical classification)except parody.