Билет №12.

Antonomasia, periphrases and hyperbole.

Antonomasia is a lexical stylistic device in which a proper name is used instead of a common noun or vice versa. The word “Mary” does not indicate if the denoted object refers to the class of women, girls, boats, cats, etc. But in example: “He took little satisfaction in telling each Mary, some­thing…” the attribute “each”, used with the name, turns it into a common noun denoting any woman. Here we deal with a case of antonomasia of the first type. Another type of antonomasia we meet when a common noun is still clearly perceived as a proper name. So, no speaker of English today has it in his mind that such popular English surnames as Mr.Smith or Mr.Brown  used to mean occupation and the color. While such names as Mr.Snake or Mr.Backbite immediately raise associations with certain human qualities due to the denotational meaning of the words “snake” and “backbite”. Antonomasia is created mainly by nouns, more seldom by attributive combinations (as in “Dr.Fresh Air”) or phrases (as in “Mr.What’s-his-name’).

Periphrasis is a very peculiar stylistic device which basically consists of using a roundabout form of expression instead of a simpler one, i.e. of using a more or less complicated syntactical structure instead of a word. Depending on the mechanism of this substitution, periphrases are classified into figurative (metonymic and metaphoric), and logical. The lamp-lighter made his nightly failure in attempting to brighten up the street with gas. [= lit the street lamps] (Dickens).

Hyperbole is a lexical stylistic device in which emphasis is achieved through deliberate exaggera­tion. Hyperbole is one of the common expressive means of our everyday speech (e.g. “I have told it to you a thousand times”). Due to long and repeated use hyperboles have lost their originality. Hy­perbole can be expressed by all notional parts of speech.