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Simile, metaphor and personification.

Lexico-Syntactical Stylistic Devices. Simile is an imaginative comparison of two unlike objects be­longing to two different classes. The one which is compared is called the tenor, the one with which it is compared, is called the vehicle. The tenor and the vehicle form the two semantic poles of the simile, which are connected by one of the following link words "like", "as", "as though", "as like", "such as", "as...as", etc. Simile should not be confused with simple (logical, ordinary) comparison. So, "She is like her mother" is a simple comparison, used to state an evident fact. "She is like a rose" is a simile used for purposes of expressive evaluation, emotive explanation, highly individual description.

Lexical stylistic devices

Metaphor. The most frequently used, well known and elaborated among lexical stylistic devices is a metaphor – transference of names based on the associated likeness between two objects, as in the “pancake”, “ball” for the “sky” or “silver dust”, “sequins” for “stars”. So there exist a similarity based on one or more common semantic component. And the wider is the gap between the associ­ated objects the more striking and unexpected – the more expressive – is the metaphor. If a meta­phor involves likeness between inanimate and animate objects, we deal with personification, as in the “face of London” or “the pain of the ocean”. Metaphor, as all other lexical stylistic devices, is fresh, original, genuine when first used, and trite, hackneyed, stale when often repeated. In the latter case it gradually loses its expressiveness. Metaphor can be expressed by all notional parts of speech. Metaphor functions in the sentence as any of its members. When the speaker (writer) in his desire to present an elaborated image does not limit its creation to a single metaphor but offers a group of them, this cluster is called sustained (prolonged) metaphor.