Hyperbolic idioms in English - Biblioteca de la Universidad de La

TRABAJO FIN DE GRADO
Título
Hyperbolic idioms in English: Formal realisation and
cognitive operations
Autor/es
Patricia García Escribano
Director/es
Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez
Facultad
Facultad de Letras y de la Educación
Titulación
Grado en Estudios Ingleses
Departamento
Curso Académico
2013-2014
Hyperbolic idioms in English: Formal realisation and cognitive operations,
trabajo fin de grado
de Patricia García Escribano, dirigido por Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez
(publicado por la Universidad de La Rioja), se difunde bajo una Licencia
Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 3.0 Unported.
Permisos que vayan más allá de lo cubierto por esta licencia pueden solicitarse a los
titulares del copyright.
©
©
El autor
Universidad de La Rioja, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2014
publicaciones.unirioja.es
E-mail: [email protected]
Trabajo de Fin de Grado
HYPERBOLIC IDIOMS IN ENGLISH:
FORMAL REALISATION AND
COGNITIVE OPERATIONS
Autor:
PATRICIA GARCÍA ESCRIBANO
Tutor: Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez
Titulación:
Grado en Estudios Ingleses [601G]
Facultad de Letras y de la Educación
AÑO ACADÉMICO: 2013/2014
ABSTRACT
iv
RESUMEN
iv
1. Introduction
7
2. Methodology and corpus selection
11
3. Theoretical framework
15
3.1. Hyperbole, Extreme Case Formulations and overstatement
17
3.2. Idiomatic expressions
19
3.2.1. Gradability: strengthening and mitigation
3. 3. Realisation forms
20
22
3.3.1. Numerical hyperbole
23
3.3.2. Words of hyperbolic nature
24
3.3.3. Comparison
24
3.3.4. Metaphor and metonymy
25
3.3.4.1. Metaphors classification
3.4. Cognitive operations
26
28
3.4.1. Formal operations
28
3.4.2. Content operations
29
3.5. Constrains on cognitive operations
31
3.5.1. The Extended Invariance Principle
32
3.5.2. The Correlation Principle
32
3.5.3. Pragmatic Scalar Adjustment
33
4. Analysis of idioms bearing hyperbolic meaning
35
4.1. Hyperbolic expressions based on explicit scalarity
35
4.2. Hyperbolic expressions based on implicit scalarity
39
4.2.1. Hyperbolic meaning based on metaphors
39
4.2.2. Counterfactual scenarios based on metaphors
43
5. Conclusions
47
REFERENCES
49
ABSTRACT
Over the last century, the field of Cognitive Linguistics has not paid much attention to
the study of figures of thought such as hyperbole, litotes, irony, simile, meiosis, and
others. Most of the work has been devoted to metaphor and metonymy. Nevertheless,
Cognitive Linguistics is open to the possibility of introducing new objects of study
within its theoretical framework. The present study tries to be an approach to the study
of hyperbole, and the different cognitive operations involved in the creation of
hyperbolic expressions. The different mechanisms that operate in the creation and
comprehension of hyperbole are analysed in detail in this dissertation, as well as the
impact that hyperbolic utterances have on the hearer. Hyperboles are classified into
different families or categories in order to provide a better understanding of them, and
to facilitate the analysis and classification of the data from our corpus. The corpus is
formed by idiomatic expressions that are especially useful in the creation of hyperbolic
meaning. Nevertheless, this study concludes that other mechanisms are involved in the
configuration of hyperbolic idioms. For example, metaphor and metonymy are
frequently used to convey hyperbolic meaning. It is also important to note the use of
Extreme Case Formulations and overstatement, which also contribute to the production
of hyperbole. However, the study showed some difficulties: hyperbolic expressions are
difficult to find through conventional corpus searches. We have sorted out this problem
through the use of various lexicographic resources that have allowed for manual
searches of hyperbolic idioms.
RESUMEN
Durante el siglo pasado, el campo de la Lingüística Cognitiva no ha prestado suficiente
atención el estudio de las figuras del pensamiento tales como la hipérbole, litotes,
ironía, símil y meiosis, entre otras. Por el contrario, la mayor parte del trabajo se ha
dedicado a la metáfora y la metonimia. Sin embargo, la Lingüística Cognitiva es un
campo abierto a la posibilidad de introducir nuevo objetos de estudio dentro de su
marco teórico. El presente estudio pretende ser una aproximación al estudio de la
hipérbole, y las diferentes operaciones cognitivas implicadas en la creación de
expresiones hiperbólicas. Los diferentes mecanismos que operan en la creación y
iv
comprensión de la hipérbole se analizan en detalle es este estudio, así como el impacto
que tienen las expresiones hiperbólicas sobre el oyente. Las hipérboles se clasifican en
diferentes familias o categorías con el fin de proporcionar una mejor compresión de
ellas y para facilitar el análisis y clasificación de los datos de nuestro corpus. El corpus
está formado por expresiones idiomáticas, las cuales son especialmente útiles en la
creación de significado hiperbólico. Sin embargo, este estudio llega a la conclusión de
que existen otros mecanismos que también están implicados en la configuración de
modismos hiperbólicos. Un ejemplo de esto sería la metáfora y la metonimia, las cuales
se utilizan con frecuencia para transmitir significado hiperbólico. También es importante
tener en cuenta el uso de las Formulaciones de Caso Extremo y de la exageración, que
también contribuyen a la producción de la hipérbole. Por último cabe observar que este
estudio se ha enfrentado a algunas dificultades: es difícil encontrar expresiones
hiperbólicas a través de simples búsquedas en corpus tradicionales. Se ha solventado
este problema mediante el uso de diversos recursos lexicográficos que han permitido la
búsqueda manual de expresiones hiperbólicas.
v
6
1. Introduction
Throughout the history of Cognitive Linguistics, the absence of research focused on
the study of so-called rhetorical phenomena such as hyperbole, litotes, simile, and
meiosis, among others, has constituted an important gap in this framework. The
works of important cognitive linguists such as George Lakoff, Mark Johnson,
Leonard Talmy, and Ronald Langacker, has paid almost exclusive attention to the
study of two other cognitive phenomena, i.e. metaphor and metonymy, and a host of
other construal mechanisms, which they see as necessary to understand the
motivation behind every day uses of language. For example, Talmy (2000) is well
known for his work on fictive motion, to be differentiated form metaphorical
motion. In the case of metaphorical motion, speakers use a motion expression to
understand a target concept that does not necessarily involve motion, as in the
sentence She drove me into despair, where we see a change of state as if it were a
change of location. Fictive motion, by contrast, is a perceptual issue: as people scan
space with their eyes, there is a false impression of motion. This perceptual
phenomenon underlies expression such as The road ran down the valley. Obviously
the road does not move, but we can think of it as moving as we follow its
longitudinal shape with our eyes.
In recent times, however, in noting this excessive emphasis on metaphor and
metonymy made by cognitive linguists, a few of them have begun paying attention
to other figures of thought. In this connection, it is worth mentioning Herrero
(2009), Veale (2012), and a number of studies carried out by Ruiz de Mendoza and
his collaborators (e.g. Ruiz de Mendoza & Perez, 2003, and Ruiz de Mendoza &
Galera, 2012, 2014). The latter, especially focus their attention on the varied types
of cognitive operations that, either alone or in combination, can work on different
kinds of cognitive models to produce predictable meaning effects, which have
traditionally been classified as metaphor, metonymy, irony, hyperbole, etc.
Herrero (2009), first, and then Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera (2012, 2014) have
laid the groundwork for hyperbole, which is the object of our present study. The
study of the effects of hyperbolic utterances is the main concern of the work of
scholars outside Cognitive Linguistics such as Norrick (2004), Cano (2009) or
Colston (1998). However, later research has gone beyond the straightforward
explanation of those effects, with more interest in those cognitive mechanisms that
underlie such meaning effects. In other words, the cognitive operations involved in
7
the production of hyperbolic utterances have become the new subject of study
within the field of Cognitive Linguistics.
In the present study we take into account the line of research started by Ruiz de
Mendoza and his collaborators, based on the notion of cognitive operation. We will
discuss the main cognitive operations involved in the creation of hyperboles. As
mentioned above such operations are central to understanding meaning production
and comprehension processes. More specifically, we will take into consideration
those studies carried out by Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera (2012, 2014), in which they
propose an analysis of hyperbole grounded in the employment of mitigation and
strengthening cognitive operations. We will frame our analysis within the broader
discussion of cognitive operations types initially explored in Ruiz de Mendoza &
Perez, (2003) and Ruiz de Mendoza & Peña (2005). In a complementary way, we
will focus our attention on the investigation of idiomatic expression generated by
means of metaphor and metonymy which at the same time lead to the creation, not
only of hyperbolic idioms, but also metaphors and metonymies with implied
hyperbolic effect.
Most of the research hyperbole emphasizes its effect on certain conversational
situations or contexts (McCarthy & Carter, 2004) as well as its relationship with
irony and sarcasm as in the case of those situations whose goal is the production of
humour (Sperber & Wilson, 1995). Our purpose in the present research goes further.
In spite of being in full consonance with the work of Ruiz de Mendoza & Perez,
2003; Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera, 2012, 2014, who claim that the production and
comprehension of hyperbole is carried out on the basis of mitigation and
strengthening operations, the present dissertation tries to offer a more complete
study of hyperbole that takes into account the different realisations of hyperbole and
other cognitive operations that are involved in the production of hyperbolic
meaning.
The structure of the present dissertation is as follows. In Section 2, we will
discuss the methodology used in the collection of the examples of hyperbole that are
part of our corpus of analysis. We will also address the criteria to determine the
existence of hyperboles and its role in idiomatic expressions. Section 3 constitutes
the core of the present paper. In it we will summarize the main theoretical
approaches focused on the study of cognitive operations, and their application in the
production and processing of hyperbole. In this regard, we take advantage of the
8
analysis of idiomatic expressions to explain their relationship with the creation of
exaggeration effects. In addition, especial emphasis will be placed on the different
realisations of hyperbole, based on the analysis of our own corpus of examples. In
section 4 we present a detailed analysis of English hyperbolic expressions. Those
examples are studied in terms of their own realisation, by taking into account the
cognitive mechanisms involved in shaping hyperbolic meaning. Finally, in Section 5
we summarize the main findings of this research.
9
10
2. Methodology and corpus selection
For the successful development of the present research an important selection of
idioms and expressions bearing hyperbolic meaning has been done, in order to
analyse, and establish the different cognitive operations involved in the formulation
of hyperboles. Those samples have been taken from a wide range of sources, from
large-scale language corpora, through dictionaries of idioms, literary works.
Nevertheless, it is essential in this section, to highlight, the importance of the
different online databases and linguistic corpora used throughout the present
research, as they show how hyperbolic expressions operate in context. The selected
variety of hyperbolic expressions is a good representation of the different uses
people give to them, and of the diverse kind of hyperbolic forms whose further
analysis will take place in Section 4. The two corpora employed in this research are
the British National Corpus (BNC henceforth), in its latest version, the BCN XML
Edition (2007), and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA
henceforth). Both corpora provide data that, to some extent, contribute to reinforce
the expected results established at the beginning of the present dissertation. The
COCA is a linguistic database composed by more than 420 million words from more
than 170,000 texts, collected from 1990 to 2012, and divided into five different
categories: spoken, popular magazines, fiction, newspapers, and academic journals.
The COCA is brought up to date once or twice a year. On the other hand, the BNC
consists of 100 million words in written and spoken samples from the later part of
the 20th century. As in the case of the COCA, the BNC’ samples come from a wide
range of different sources.
Nevertheless, despite the undeniable opportunity provided by those corpora to
study hyperbole in context, it is important to note the problem we faced during the
sample selection process. As happened with other figures of speech such as
metaphor or metonymy, hyperbole is not easily detectable through corpus searches.
In this regard, in order to face this challenge, we have used certain hyperbole
detection strategies which help us in our corpus findings, in particular those
established by Sert (2008) which identify “hyperbole-proneness” through five basic
categories:
(1) Expressions of number (e.g. millions of, hundreds of, etc.).
(2) Words referring to large amounts/quantities (e.g. masses of, loads of, etc.).
(3) Adjective modifications of amount(s) and number(s) (e.g. adjective +
11
amount of, etc.).
(4) Time expressions (e.g. years, weeks, hours, etc.).
(5) Size, degree and intensity (e.g. enormous, endless, gigantic, etc.).
Most of the hyperbole examples of this dissertation, despite being taken from
linguistic corpora, are taken form spoken samples. For this reason, it is necessary to
make note of those characteristics that, according to McCarthy and Carter’s study
(2004) on hyperbole, may be displayed by hyperbolic meaning in conversation (Sert,
2008: 9-10):
(i)
Disjunction with context: the speaker’s utterance seems at odds with the
general context.
(ii)
Shifts in footing1: there is evidence (e.g. discourse marking) that a shift in
footing takes place in a conversational frame where impossible worlds or
plainly counterfactual claims may appropriately occur.
(iii)
Counterfactuality not perceived as a lie: the listener accepts without
challenge a statement that is obviously counterfactual. A counterfactual
statement can be defined as one that creates an impossible world. Although
hyperbole does not necessarily create an absolutely impossible world, the
greater exaggeration ingredients the greater the degree of impossibility
involved in the hyperbole. I told you a hundred times, it is not necessarily
counterfactual, because it is possible to considerer it as true, but an statement
like He’s as tall as a mountain is fully counterfactual
(iv)
Impossible worlds: the speaker and listener engage themselves in the
construction of fictitious worlds where impossible, exaggerated events take
place.
(v)
Listener take-up: the listener reacts with supportive behaviour such as
laughter or assenting back-channel markers and/or further contributes to the
counterfactuality, impossibility, contextual disjunction, etc. Nevertheless,
irony can be intended by the speakers buy not understood by the hearer, or
1
Goffman (1981: 128), one of the fathers of conversation analysis, defines “footing” as “the alignment
we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or
reception of an utterance”. In a conversation, participants may change their footings based on linguistic
and/or contextual clues. In one of Goffman’s examples, he describes a conversation between President
Nixon and a female reporter, who was one of several witnesses for signing of a bill at the White House.
After the ceremony the President teased the reporter about her wearing slacks thus forcing her out of her
professional role into one where women have to receive comments about their appearance. A shift in
footing can affect prior status and social distance arrangements among interlocutors.
12
even ignored. In these situations, listener’s uptake is no clue as to the
existence of irony.
(vi)
Extreme case formulations and intensification: the assertion is expressed in
a most categorical way (e.g. adjectives such as endless or massive) and/or
extreme intensifiers such as nearly, totally are used. These are not
necessarily counterfactuals or absurd worlds, as many may be heard as
(semi-) conventional metaphors. These adjectives, although rarely, can be
used literally (e.g. the endless universe). Besides, massive has moved its
original meaning from objectively denoting a large amount to connoting an
“impressively large amount”. This change results from its common
hyperbolic use.
(vii)
Relevant interpretability: all tropes are interpretable as relevant to the speech
act being performed, and are interpreted as figurative within its context,
though there may also be evidence of literal interpretations being exploited
for interactive/affective purposes. Taking into account Gricean approach
(Grice, 1975) when talking about the creation of hyperboles in particular, we
flout (i.e. blatant violation) the first maxim of Quality in the Cooperative
Principle (“do not say that which you believe to false”). Thus, it is obvious
that when constructing a hyperbolic utterance, the speaker does not intend to
deceive, although, what he says is a lie. On the other hand, metaphor,
metonymy, irony, etc., also flout the maxim of Quality. Hence, this makes
the Gricean approach a very weak one because it does not tell the distinction
between hyperbole and other figures of thought, and in the same way, Sert’s
“relevant interpretability” criterion is incapable of differentiating among the
different tropes.
However, it is important to note that Sert’s listing does not involve reliable
indicators of hyperbole. These characteristics are rather frequent discourse-based
features of hyperbole and, fairly reliable pointers to its presence in a text. They help
when trying to find examples of hyperbole, but do not eliminate the need to examine
examples carefully in their context.
Besides the linguistic sources mentioned above for the selection of hyperbolic data,
an additional source is employed in the present dissertation. Owing to the problems
caused by the difficulty of searching hyperboles via corpora and linguistic databases, we
looked for other sources that could provide updated and modern examples of the use of
13
hyperbole, and the way in which the hyperbolic effect is generated nowadays. We found
that a highly productive solution was the analysis of so-called situation comedy or
sitcoms. These are a subtype of the type of comedy belongs to comedy genre, which is
characterized by a proliferation of witty remarks, often based on irony, sarcasm, and
hyperbole, as a way of creating constant humorous effects. Thus, we took advantage of
those humorous and ironical situations created in sitcoms so as to make our selection of
the exaggerated and hyperbolic expressions found in their dialogues. The selected
sitcoms are on television now (The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother and
Modern Family) or have been very well-known in the late 20th century and early 21 st
century (Friends).
It is necessary to note that, for the sake of convenience and because of their fixed
natures, hyperbolic idioms have been taken from the Cambridge Dictionary of
American Idioms and The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms.
As mentioned in the introduction, the present research aims to analyse different
ways of creating hyperbolic meaning by means of cognitive operations, whether in
isolation or in combination. As a subsidiary goal, we will analyse our corpus in terms of
“hyperbole families”, that is, by taking into account the different realisations of
hyperbole. In our attempt to provide a well-grounded study we will make use of
relevant analytical tools recently developed to deal with so-called figurative language
within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. More specifically, as the basis of our
research and subsequent analysis, we follow Ruiz de Mendoza & Perez (2003) and Ruiz
de Mendoza & Galera (2014).
14
3. Theoretical framework
Cognitive Linguistics is focused on the analysis of natural language (Geeraerts &
Hubert, 2007). The Cognitive Linguistics framework was born in the late 70s and early
80s and it was characterized as one of the most dynamic theories at that time centred on
the analysis of how concepts are structured and on the range of conceptualizations. This
linguistics approach has its roots in the work of three influential researchers of
linguistics: George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker and Leonard Talmy who claim that
language can be seen as a noteworthy tool for organizing, processing and
communicating information (Geeraerts & Hubert, 2007). These researches are interested
in studying the relation of language and mind, avoiding to follow the prior paradigm
and also claiming that meaning should be consider an essential and central part in
language, that is, it must be a fundamental focus of study. Although it may seem a
simple and organised theory, Cognitive Linguistics underwent a huge growth due to the
development of compatible theoretical approaches related to linguistic meaning and
structure. These approaches share the same perspective: an important internal part of
cognition is language, and cognitive processes are involved in the language
representation, and together make room for a unified paradigm, Geeraerts (2008) and
Dirven & Ruiz de Mendoza (2010) have pointed out. In this regard, as Geeraerts &
Hubert (2007) argue in their work, we can regard Cognitive Linguistics as a flexible
framework instead of as a single, unified theory of language. Among the different
theoretical perspectives or topics of interest that come together under the label of
Cognitive Linguistics, Geeraearts (2008: 2) lists the following: cognitive grammar,
grammatical construal, prototype theory, conceptual metaphor, frame semantics,
construction grammar, usage-based linguistics, radial network and schematic network.
According to Dirven & Ruiz de Mendoza (2010), one of the principal characteristics
of Cognitive Linguistics is the interaction between language and the cognitive faculties
that include perception, attention, categorization, memory, or reasoning. In this regard,
Croft & Cruse (2004) claim that we organize language in our mind by means of the
same cognitive faculties we use in other cognitive tasks; we can say that our linguistic
knowledge is grounded in cognition (Croft & Cruse, 2004), which includes not only
how we construe events but also how we store knowledge in our minds, i.e. how we
organize information on our experience with the world.
In the second respect, we must to take into consideration the notion of idealized
cognitive model or ICM. Lakoff (1987) postulates in one of his works, that ICM are
15
used to capture the ways in which we organize our knowledge of the world as we
perceive and experience it. ICMs are cognitive structures, idealized for the purpose of
understanding and reasoning, whose main purpose is to represent reality from a certain
perspective (Lakoff, 1987). There are four main types of ICM: frames, image schemas,
metaphor, and metonymy. Each of these ICM types is the result of a structuring
principle used to organize our knowledge: propositional structure, image-schematic
structure, metaphoric and metonymic mappings respectively. Let us discuss each type
briefly:
(i) The notion of propositional structure, and in particular, the notion of frame were
first proposed and studied by Fillmore (1982, 1985). According to Ruiz de
Mendoza & Galera (2014: 60), frames relate the different entities linked with a
particular culturally embedded scene from human experience. In other words,
frames are collections of facts that capture the properties, functions and relations
among those entities that form the frame. An oft-quoted example of frame is the
commercial event situation, which underlies the use of different words
designating either from elements or relations, such as, buyer, seller, sell, pay,
price, money, etc. (cf. Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera, 2014: 60). In other words, we
would not be able to understand the word sell, if we knew nothing about buy,
pay and all the different elements involved in a commercial transfer.
(ii) Firstly introduced by Johnson (1987), image-schemas are defined as abstract,
topological, and pre-conceptual (non-linguistic) structures based on recurrent
representations of experience. According to Peña (2003, 2008), we can group
image-schemas into different categories where the different types of imageschemas are linked by a series associations (e.g. conceptual dependency such as
container, part and part-whole, or spatial orientations such as up and down)
(Peña, 2008: 1043).
(iii)Metaphoric and metonymic mappings, as described by Lakoff & Johnson (1980,
1999) are the two last structuring principles of ICMs. They are sets of
correspondences between conceptual domains. Metaphor and metonymy use the
frames and image-schemas. Love is a journey is an example of metaphor where
we find two domains, source and target, which maps the “motion-along” a path
image-schema. In the mapping, lovers are travellers, the love relationship is a
vehicle, motion forward is progress, impediments to motion are difficulties in
the relationship, and lovers’ common goals are the destination at the end of the
16
journey (Lakoff, 1993). Another example could be My wife really mothers me;
in this case it is a metaphorical extension of the concept mother as a nurturer. In
contrast to metaphor, metonymies do not take place across domains, i.e. they are
one-correspondence mappings within a single domain (e.g. Britain has declared
war on Iraq is an example of metonymy where Britain stands for the British
government; cf. Croft & Cruse, 2004: 220). Both metaphor and metonymy can
contribute largely in the creation of hyperbolic effects.
3.1. Hyperbole, Extreme Case Formulations and overstatement
As commented in the introduction of the present paper, our focus of attention is to
analyse the ways in which speakers produce hyperbolic effects in their utterances.
Nevertheless, it is also important to take into account the distinction between different
concepts used by speakers to create this hyperbolic effect. Hyperbolic meaning is very
common in conversation, and speakers produce utterances with exaggerated expressions
that are conceived by an automatic cognitive process. However, as said above, it is
essential to highlight the different mechanisms used in the creation of not only
hyperboles, but also expression with hyperbolic or exaggerated meaning. In this regard,
we may focus our attention on three notions: overstatement, Extreme Case Formulation
and hyperbole. The three of them involve exaggeration, but there are significant
differences among them.
Norrick (2004) discusses the main similarities and differences between Extreme
Case Formulations, hyperboles and overstatements. According to Norrick (2004: 1728),
hyperbole can be defined as a trope of bold exaggeration (e.g. His head is in the clouds),
so that, it traditionally has been regarded as a figure of speech related to metaphoric
expressions. On the other hand, overstatement is defined as an amplified or attenuated
exaggerated statement (e.g. I am starving); and, extreme case formulations (ECFs
henceforth) are extreme expressions (e.g. Everybody loves you), which, as Edwards
(2000) states, do not follow any fixed structure or formula, and which are produced by
means of a wide variety of grammatical categories such as an extreme adjective (total,
absolute, complete), quantifiers (all, every, none, no), nouns (everybody, nothing),
adverbs (totally, always never, absolutely) and phrases like as good as it gets or brand
new.
According to Norrick (2004), we can distinguish between different methods to
17
create hyperbolic or exaggerated expressions as follows: ECFs, on the one hand, and
overstatements and hyperboles, on the other hand. However, we disagree with this
division, and we share Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera's view (2014) when they claim that
there is no reason to differentiate overstatement from hyperbole. This calls for a
reconsideration of the nature and scope of these notions.
On the one hand, although overstatement and hyperbole involve exaggeration, in
our proposed reconsideration, overstatement becomes a cover term for ECFs and
hyperboles, which become subcategories of overstatements. Overstatements can be a
simple exaggeration, as in the case of hyperboles, in which we can negotiate the degree
of the overstatement, or can be extreme cases of exaggeration by means of absolute
expressions, as in the case of ECFs. However, we agree with Norrick (2004) when he
states that the addition of hedges to ECFs does not destroy their hyperbolic force as
overstatements (e.g. You almost never write), although as Edwards (2000) states, ECFs
generally occur unhedged. Hyperbole, according to Norrick (2004), is a figure of
amplification or attenuation by which the speakers expresses emotional involvement
trough an exaggeration (e.g. It never pours but it rains). Overstatements, and therefore
hyperboles too, interact with the figurative or non-literal meaning, and the result is that
hyperbole may be seen as a one component of a metaphor in the traditional sense. For
instance if we take the expression an iceberg of a woman making reference to a teacher,
iceberg has hyperbolic meaning, because hyperbolically we identify a human with a
mountain of ice. As said above, ECFs and hyperboles, although both of them occur in
everyday conversation, differ in the scale of exaggeration; while ECF uses extreme and
absolute expressions producing as a result extreme exaggerations, hyperbole tend to
appear in the form of imagery (Norrick, 2004).
In addition, besides the fact that we may not take ECFs and hyperboles literally,
Norrick (2004) claims that in conversation, it is so obvious that ECFs are false that they
are completely defeasible. Consequently, speakers freely refuse to accept their literal
sense in succeeding talk. However, on the contrary, hyperboles are not considered
defeasible since speakers negotiate the degree of overstatement. Hence, as opposed to
EFCs, we can affirm that hyperboles are not clearly false, and instead they are just
examples of overstated expressions.
After this brief explanation of the different methods involved in the creation of
hyperbolic meaning, we have to take all the aspects commented above into
consideration in the analysis of our selected examples where we will study how the
18
exaggeration is produced in each instance of our corpus.
3.2. Idiomatic expressions
On characteristic way of producing hyperbolic meaning is by means of idiomatic
expressions. Idiomatic expressions, as Kovecses & Szabó (1996) state, are fixed
linguistic expressions whose overall meaning cannot be predicted from the meaning of
their constituent parts. Taking into consideration this definition, we might relate it to the
notion of construction in Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995, 2006). In this
approach to grammar, constructions are the basic units of linguistics analysis.
Construction is defined as a “form-meaning pair in which some aspects of the form or
some aspects of the meaning are not strictly predictable from the component parts that
compose the construction” (Goldberg, 1995: 205). On the other hand, some recent
studies on idioms relate them to the notion of motivation and transparency in order to
establish a link between their form and meaning by means of devices such as conceptual
metaphor and metonymy (Kovecses & Szabó, 1996, Shoufaki, 2008). In terms of
motivation, these studies state that motivation can be defined as a cognitive mechanism
that links domains of knowledge to idiomatic meanings, that is, the figurative meaning
of idioms can be motivated by means of different ways: by using conceptual metaphors
and metonymies, or by people´s conceptual knowledge. Secondly, another significant
aspect to take into consideration in the description of the nature of idiomatic expressions
is transparency. An idiom is transparent when it is easy to figure out its meaning on the
basis of its components. The mechanisms that underlie idiomatic constructions (e.g.
conceptual metaphors and metonymies) may contribute to their transparency. According
to Keysar (1995), the transparency of an idiom is gradable. In this connection, hightransparency idioms receive smaller number interpretations than low-transparency
idioms, due to their higher easiness in terms of making sense of the idiomatic meaning.
Following Kovecses & Szabó (1996), and taking account of the terms transparency
and motivation, we can claim that idioms are a simply matter of language but rather
they are fundamentally a conceptual phenomenon that is then reflected in our use of
language. Idioms are not only expressions whose meaning is linked to the meanings of
their constituents parts, but also they are expressions motivated by our knowledge of the
world, i.e. our encyclopaedic knowledge stored over our lives in our conceptual
reservoir; in other words, this knowledge provides the motivation to figure out the
19
overall idiomatic meaning. Consequently, idiomatic expressions are conceptual in
nature and not purely linguistic, as argued in the past (cf. Gibbs 1990, 1994). According
to Goldberg (1995: 4) idioms, phrasal verbs, words, collocations, and even morphemes
are instances of constructions because we cannot predict their form or their meaning
only by means of its component part or from any other prior established construction;
they are constructions, since constructions are not predictable grammatical structures. In
the same way, Barddal (2005: 23) claims that constructions cannot arise from any
general rules of the language. Thus, as Kovecses & Szabó (1996) observe, speakers use
some cognitive mechanisms, such as metaphor, metonymy, and conventional
knowledge, which are relevant in the formation of many idioms (Lakoff, 1987). These
mechanisms act on meaning construction beyond what mere rules of compositionality
can predict. For examples, the metaphor There is electricity between us refers to
physical attraction between people, but its real range of meaning implications goes well
beyond substituting “physical attraction” for electricity. This metaphor conveys the idea
that there is particularly strong physical attraction accompanied by physiological
symptoms that resemble those of electrical current. This extra meaning arises from the
metaphor and cannot be obtained compositionally.
Another important notion to take into consideration on the analysis of idioms is the
notion of prediction contrasts with motivation. As said before, idioms are not
predictable units, but the thing is that in some cases, the meaning of idioms is not
motivated at all. However, it is important emphasize that this prediction is not an
affirmation of the claim that we can predict what a word means in a given expression. In
the example kick the bucket, we can know what the word bucket means. However, when
it takes part of this idiomatic expression it is not possible to use the conventional
meaning to predict the whole meaning of the idiom, that is, there is not claim to know
what the word bucket means in an expression such as kick the bucket which means ‘to
die’.
3.2.1. Gradability: strengthening and mitigation
The present work approaches to the study of hyperbole from a cognitive-linguistic
perspective. But previous to discussing hyperbole, it is still necessary to address not
before commenting the notion of gradability. A concept is gradable if it can be arranged
in terms of degrees. The notion of degree is basic to understand the nature of hyperbole;
nevertheless before going into even the basics of this concept, it is important to take into
20
consideration some of the claims made by Ruiz de Mendoza & Pérez (2003), on the
basis of an adaptation of previous ideas from Sperber & Wilson´s (1995) Relevance
Theory or RT. This theory recognizes the existence of non-implicational pragmatic tasks
used by speakers to adjust explicitly conveyed assumptions to ongoing communicative
needs. For example, completing an underspecified assumption is one such task, as in the
utterance I´m ready meaning, in one possible context, ‘I am ready to go to the party
with you’. Another task is called strengthening. It consists of concerting a weak
assumption into a stronger one. This is the case of understatements. The sentence It may
take some time to repair your car uses the weaker ‘some time’ to actually mean the
stronger “a long time”. The assumption thus developed (i.e. ‘It will take a long time to
repair your car’) is stronger than the one directly derived from the utterance, but the
stronger assumption supplies the intended meaning.
Ruiz de Mendoza & Pérez (2003) state that strengthening is in fact a cognitive
mechanism that operates on scalar concepts, i.e. concepts that are gradable. A case in
point of the use of strengthening by speakers is the creation of hyperbole (commented
above in section 3.1). Hyperbole provides a stronger assumption that hearers have to
mitigate in order to understand its intended meaning. For example, That suitcase weighs
a ton, in a context in which the case weighs too much for the speaker to be able to carry
it, provides a stronger assumption that a literal utterance like That suitcase weighs
pounds. The stronger (in the case exaggerated) assumption has to be mitigated by the
hearer in order to be able to come up with the correct context-compliant interpretation.
Mitigation is, therefore, proposed by Ruiz de Mendoza & Pérez (2003) as another
cognitive operation, the converser of strengthening. The question now is why produce a
stronger assumption that has to be mitigated later. The answer comes by the hand of an
important meaning making process that has also received attention within Relevance
Theory: implicature derivation.
An implicature is the result of the application to interpretation of a reasoning
schema based on premises and conclusions. Such a schema is to be consistent with socalled relevance criteria: requiring the hearer to get involved in a greater amount of
processing effort calls for the compensatory production of a larger number of meaning
effects. In the example above, the greater processing effort involved in mitigating initial
exaggerated assumption is offset by a larger number of meaning effects, among them
the idea that the speaker feels unable to lift the case and, depending on the specific
context, that he finds this situation frustrating, or at least worthy of special notice.
21
Implicatures thus play an important role on interpreting hyperbole. These
implicatures test the ability of an addressee to figure out what a speaker pragmatically
implies on the basis of what is literally said (Ruiz de Mendoza & Perez, 2003). The idea
of scalarity is closely connected to hyperbolic statements, since hyperbole makes use of
a higher point in a scale to refer to a lower one (Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera, 2014: 199),
and the contrast between those points in the scale creates the hyperbolic effect.
In hyperbolic utterances, the correct meaning interpretation involves the use of
mitigation; that is, hyperbole tends to exaggerate what is said. In the example I have
told you a million times, the speaker increases the real number of times into an
exorbitant one, while the hearer needs to make it consistent with reality through
pragmatic adjustment (cf. Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera, 2014: 145). The main
implications derived from this hyperbole are that the speaker has told the addressee
something a lot of times, and that the speaker feels frustrated by this fact, because it is
perceived by the speaker as an excessive amount of times (Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera,
2014: 200), Thus, we can conclude by stating that mitigation and strengthening are
essential cognitive mechanisms to produce and understand hyperbole.
3. 3. Realisation forms
This section is concerned with the different realisations of hyperbole. Although the
classification of hyperbolic forms may seem a trivial thing, to name all the diverse
realisations is a complex task. The reason, as noted in the description of our
methodology, is not only the difficulty to find them within the literature, but also the
wide variety of different forms used in the production of hyperbolic meaning. On the
one hand, in some cases, the exaggeration is carried out by only a word, but, on the
other hand, sentences and fixed expressions work to produce exaggeration.
According to Claridge (2011), the only classification of hyperbole that can be found
in the present literature is given by Spitzbardt (1963):
(i)Numerical hyperbole
(ii)Words of hyperbolic nature
- Nouns (e.g. ages)
- Adjectives (e.g. colossal)
- Adverbs (e.g. astronomically)
- Verbs (e.g. die)
22
(iii) Simile and metaphor (e.g. cross as the devil)
(iv) Comparative and superlative degrees (e.g. in less than no time)
(v) Emphatic genitive (e.g. the finest of fine watches)
(vi) Emphatic plural (e.g. all the perfumes of Arabia, Shakespeare)
(vii) Whole sentences (e.g. he is nothing if not deliberate)
However, besides this classification of the different realisations of hyperboles, we
will provide our own categorization. We will take into account some of those provided
by Spitzbardt, but we will base our classification on the examples from our corpus of
analysis.
3.3.1. Numerical hyperbole
In this category we deal with expressions such as millions, hundreds or thousands, and
their reciprocal singular forms, which contribute in a large degree to the creation of
hyperbolic meaning. Expressions such as I told you a million times are good examples
of the types of numerical expressions used in hyperboles, mainly dealing with
expressions of time, amount, or quantity. According to our investigation, and taking into
account Claridge's study of hyperboles, we cannot agree more with her and her
description of the types of numbers included in the numerical hyperboles.
It is undeniable that high and rounded-up numbers (e.g. 10000) as well as smaller
and more precise ones (e.g. six) are surely found in hyperbole. However, the most
striking and compelling numerals in the creation of exaggeration are the higher and
rounder ones, especially multiples of hundreds, thousands, etc. which are easy to
recognise. Rounded-up figures are easier to process than specific figures, so that, they
are more effective in terms of their intended hyperbolic meaning. That is, taking into
account Sperber & Wilson´s (1995) observations on relevance criteria, based on the
balance between processing effort and meaning effect, we can state that rounded-up
figures are optimally relevant within the context of the creation of hyperbolic meaning
effects. Whereas high numbers are frequently present in exaggerated expressions,
hyperboles based on precise and low numbers are, contrastingly, less predictable than
the formers. The example I told you a million times uses a high and round figure,
million, which largely contributes to conveying speaker's annoyance.
McCarthy & Carter's study (2004: 179) reveals a list with the most common cases
seen as hyperbole proneness: dozens, zillions, millions, hundreds, thousands, and
billions of, and a dozen, a million, a hundred, a thousand. By and large, all these
23
numeral expressions and expressions of quantity seem to produce very rich hyperboles.
3.3.2. Words of hyperbolic nature
A step forward regarding the classification of the form of hyperbole is taken by Claridge
(2011) who explores words with hyperbolic nature. In the example She is allergic to
everything, the exaggerated content is found only in one word: everything, thus
resulting in an example of extreme case formulation. Regarding the hyperbolic nature of
words, we can claim that all lexical word categories are described as “hyperbole-prone”,
although the most commonly used ones are adjectives and nouns. In the case of nouns,
the use of words such as loads or ages is very significant. Their hyperbolic meaning
requires whole sentences (e.g. I ate loads of chocolate), but the hyperbole is inherent
only in the world itself. As an alternative description of these words, we can take into
account Claridge's (2011) classification of what she calls universal quantifiers, in which
she includes quantifiers (e.g. all, every), pronouns (e.g. everything, nothing, nobody),
and adverbs (e.g. always, never, ever). These categories work as hyperbole-prone,
giving as a result in most cases extreme cases formulations (e.g. She knows everything).
In the case of adjectives, examples such as incredible which expresses the idea that
something is harder than usual to believe, or endless, used in cases of strengthening
cases, contribute to the creation of hyperboles.
3.3.3. Comparison
Another common way of producing hyperbole is by means of comparison (analysed as a
cognitive operation in section 3.4.) which can create very forceful exaggerations. In
some cases, hyperbolic comparison is based on conventional and established examples,
as we will comment later on in this section. However, it is necessary to note that there
are different ways of expressing comparison. One way to do this is through resemblance
metaphors (Grady, 1999), which exploit similarities between concepts (e.g. Her teeth
are pearls, meaning that her teeth are white and bright like pearls). Regarding
hyperbole, similarity can underlie exaggeration as in the case of His nose is an
elephant's trunk, in which the size and shape of a person`s nose is compared to an
elephant's trunk which expresses exaggerated connotations (further explanations in the
following section).
Another way to construct hyperbolic comparisons is through the use of similes
24
(Carston & Wearing, 2011) which in this case are considered grammatical structures
marked by as or like, and in which we map only the similarities of two different
concepts (Galera, 2010, Veale, 2012). Within this category, as commented before, a
wide range of idiomatic similes are found, due to some similes containing a hyperbolic
ingredient is found, such as as strong as an ox, as crazy as a goat, or as easy as ABC
(Veale 2012).
3.3.4. Metaphor and metonymy
The production and comprehension of idiomatic expressions, as commented in section
3.2, is linked to the use conceptual of metaphors and metonymies. Metaphoric and
metonymic mappings operate in the creation of hyperbolic meaning; for this reason, it is
also convenient at this point to provide a clear explanation of the nature of metaphor
and metonymy.
Cognitive Linguistics claims that metaphor is a conceptual mechanism, based on
our experience of the world, which is used in daily language communication. Therefore,
the traditional view according to which metaphor is simply literary or rhetoric device is
here rejected. The main distinction between both conceptual mappings is proposed by
Ruiz de Mendoza (1997a, 1997b), and Ruiz de Mendoza & Perez (2003) who establish
a clear differentiation in terms of correspondences between domains. According to the
definition provided by Cognitive Linguistics, metaphors are domain-external mapping
from a source to a target domain. However, Ruiz de Mendoza & Perez (2003) propose
an improved analysis of this phenomenon considering the existence of two types of
metaphor depending on the nature of the mapping. On the one hand, we can find onecorrespondence metaphors, with one correspondence between the source and the target
domains, as in the case of PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS, in which animal behaviour is
mapped onto human behaviour (e.g. He is a lion “fierce and brave”); on the other hand,
there are of many-correspondence metaphors, which involve more than one
correspondence between the source and the target domain, such as the metaphor LOVE
IS A JOURNEY briefly described above.
In the case of metonymies which are domain-internal mappings in nature, they are
defined as examples of one-correspondence mappings; nevertheless, Ruiz de Mendoza
(1997a, 1997b) and Ruiz de Mendoza & Perez (2003) divide they concept into two
different types of metonymies. Firstly, they distinguish the target-in-source metonymy,
where the target is a subdomain of the source. The example Let’s drink one more glass
25
taken from Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera (2014: 41) shows very clearly this type of
metonymy, in which glass, the source, stands for its content, the target. Secondly,
another type of metonymy is the source-in-target (the source is a sub-domain of the
target), as in Superman fell off his horse and broke his back (Ruiz de Mendoza & Perez,
2003: 34), in which the character, Superman, is the source and the actor who played the
role is the target for which the source stands.
3.3.4.1. Metaphors classification
Lakoff & Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980) note that most concepts are
understood via mappings onto a small set of basic concepts grounded in experience.
Owing to that, they proposed the following classification of metaphors. They
distinguish three main types: structural, orientational, and ontological. Structural
metaphors are based on one concept that is structured and understood in terms of
another concept (e.g. LOVE IS A JOURNEY; ANGER IS FIRE). In orientational
metaphors, a whole system of concepts is structured with respect to another (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980: 14). This type is related to special orientations (e.g. GOOD IS UP).
Ontological metaphors allow us to deal with abstract entities as if they were physical
objects or substances (e.g. LIFE IS A GIFT).
In later classifications, Lakoff & Turner (1989) included the image-schema
resulting in the establishment of a groups image-schema metaphors. Hence, in this
regard, the concept of ‘container’ is now regarded as the source of an image-schema
metaphor (e.g. He is in love). Another innovation carried out by Lakoff & Turner (1989)
is the consideration of the Great Chain of Being in the configuration of metaphors. This
model concerns a scale of beings along with a scale of properties (Lakoff & Turner,
1989: 167). In that way, humans are considered as higher-order beings in comparison to
animals that belong to natural physical things, and they are located in a lower position.
In other words, the Great Chain of Being determines the relationship between the
different orders of the hierarchy. The example John is a bull illustrates this model,
because of it based on the PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS metaphor. Regarding the Great
Chain of Being, it is possible to appreciate that humans (e.g. John) have the properties
assigned to lower forms of being (e.g. bulls). In relation to the main purpose of the
present research, we can note that the use of this model can result in hyperbolic
expressions.
Later on, Peña (2001) proposed a classification involving all the previous criteria.
26
She distinguished between two types of metaphors: situational metaphors, and
metaphors based on the Great Chain of Being. Situational metaphors involve structural
and image-schematic metaphors and they are many-correspondence mappings, whereas
those metaphors based on the Great Chain of Being include ontological metaphors and
are one-correspondence metaphors. In the same classification of metaphors, Peña
(2001) went further and subdivided situational metaphors into experiential and scenic
metaphors. Experiential metaphors are the expression of the situation that affects the
person involved in the metaphor; that is, they are the expression of a certain state of
affairs which is hard to describe (e.g. She is in a good mood). By contrast, scenic
metaphors refers to events or situations which can be described (Peña, 2001: 38). In the
scenic metaphor example You make my blood boil, situation expressed can be described
taking into account the visible effects of a liquid boiling, and the visible effects of anger.
Hitherto, we can see how metaphors entail hyperbolic meaning.
A later revision of Peña´s classification is carried out by Ruiz de Mendoza & Otal
(2002) who proposed a revised categorization. They distinguish between structural
metaphors always based on many-correspondence mappings, and non-structural
metaphors that involve one-correspondence mappings. Non-structural metaphors can be
divided into two groups that resemble Lakoff & Johnson´s (1989) classification:
orientational (e.g. BAD IS DOWN), and ontological (PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS).
Structural metaphors are divided into two different subgroups: situational and nonsituational metaphors, as well subdivided into three types of metaphors: imageschematic, image, and propositional. Image-schematic metaphors are based on imageschemas which are essential for the constructions of metaphors. In the example I can´t
eat more, I´m full, the CONTAINER image-schema is crucial for the creation of the
metaphor. Image metaphors are the result of mapping two images which share a
common typology. If we consider the example She closed her blue curtains when she
slept, we can map the word curtains onto the eyelids of a person. Both images, the
source and the target domain, share common features. Finally, propositional metaphors
involved metaphorical mappings such as LOVE IS DISEASE, in which the target
domain is sometimes hard to understand. Finally, the second subdivision within the
structural metaphors group corresponds with situational metaphors that depict a
situation which should be developed by means of metonymy. This group of metaphors
is subdivided into non-scenic metaphors, and scenic metaphors which present an
observable situation as in the example He ran away with his tail between his legs which
27
refers to a person who is embarrassed, situations with corresponds with the scene in
which a dog is beaten and runs away with its tail between its legs.
Hitherto, we have noted the different metaphor classification. The main purpose in
analysing all those different types of metaphors has been previously commented.
Metaphors, as well as metonymies, entail hyperbolic meaning implications in their
realisations, which become these phenomena something crucial in the analysis of
hyperbole.
3.4. Cognitive operations
Cognitive operations are mechanisms used by our mind in order to store information
that allow us to make mental representations. However, as proposed in recent research
by Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera (2014), these cognitive operations are regulated by a set
of constraints that regulate their activity, and allow speaker to use the different concepts
and information stored in our minds. As proposed in previous research, Ruiz de
Mendoza & Peña (2005) and Ruiz de Mendoza (2011) make a distinction between two
broad types of cognitive operation: formal and content operations.
3.4.1. Formal operations
Formal operations are high-level operations that allow the act as constraints on
content, or lower-level operations. It is possible to identify different formal operations:
cueing, abstraction, selection, and integration (Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera, 2014).
Here, each one is briefly described:
(i)
Cueing promotes the access to the relevant textual information of a concept. It
works as a guide for the activation of our knowledge of the world, which takes
the form of ad hoc, internally consistent conceptual packages called mental
spaces (Fauconnier & Turner, 1995). Serving as an example two sentences like
My mother breastfed most of her children and The little spaceship returns to
the mother spaceship safely (Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera, 2014: 87), in which
the concept of mother refers to a person in the former, and to the idea of a
spaceship that provides supplies to other spacecraft in the latter.
(ii)
Selection refers to all those operations based on concepts in which we select the
28
most relevant information by means of textual and contextual information.
Selection is much related to cueing because the latter is involved in the
realisation of the former; that is, in the instances eat and wear rabbit (Ruiz de
Mendoza & Galera, 2014: 88), both verbs are the textual cues which are used
to trigger the relevant information about rabbits. This information is taken
from our encyclopaedic knowledge stored in our minds. Seemingly, when we
state wear rabbit, we refer to wearing clothes made of rabbit’s pelt, because we
cannot think of other parts of rabbits that can be used to make clothes. In the
same way, when we refer to eating rabbit, evidently we interpret we are talking
about meat, although other parts of rabbits are edible.
(iii) Abstraction consists on the derivation of the structure that different cognitive
models have in common. It becomes essential to the activation of cognitive
processes such as metaphor and metonymy. In other words abstraction is used
in order to select the particular conceptual structure from both source and target
domains. One example of this cognitive operation, taken from Ruiz de
Mendoza & Galera (2014: 89), is the sentence She has wavy hair. Here,
metaphorical connotations are interpreted on the basis of shared topological
structure between hair and waves (Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera, 2012, 2014).
(iv) Conceptual integration refers to the combination or blending of different
elements in conceptual structure. In previous works, Peña (2003) and Ruiz de
Mendoza (2011) distinguish two different types of conceptual integration:
enrichment and combination. Combination is based on the integration of
concepts which are independent of each other. However, integration by
enrichment is defined as the integration of structures related by a relationship
of subsidiarity.
3.4.2. Content operations
Content operations are based on the prior formal operations, and they are the
mechanisms that regulate the activity of the different cognitive models. In the present
dissertation, we focus our attention on those content operations that are involved in the
establishment of hyperbolic meaning. Later on in this section, we will analyse the
different content constraints that affect the creation of hyperboles. However, it is
29
important to point out that according to Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera (2012, 2014),
content operations can be grouped into two different categories: identity relations (A IS
B), or “stands for” relations (A FOR B). In this regard, we will focus our attention on
identity relations, since they motivate the formulation of hyperbolic expressions; hence
we will comment those content operations related to the identity relations.
(i)
Comparison can be defined as a cognitive operation that attaches either
similarities or differences across concepts. As said above, this process can be
used in the creation of hyperbolic meaning, due to the fact that some hyperbole’s
realisations are based on comparisons. We can distinguish two types of
comparison: comparison by resemblance in which concepts are linked by
relations of similarity (e.g. He is older that the hills), or comparison by contrast
that focus its attention in the differences between them (e.g. The ground is dry as
dust2). Accordingly with section 3.3.1, in which we study the nature of metaphor
and metonymy, it is important to note that, in the same way that as commented
previously, metaphor when it works in the creation of hyperbolic meaning, only
takes part on the basis of showing the similarities between two concepts (Ruiz de
Mendoza & Galera, 2014: 93), an aspect that is very relevant to take into
consideration in the analysis of our corpus of examples.
(ii)
Previously commented in the present dissertation, strengthening and mitigation
are two cognitive processes involved in idiomatic expressions, which in most
cases are based on exaggeration. These two operations work on the basis of
scalar concepts. In this regard, language is rigged with different grammatical
tools (gradable adjectives or adverbs) that allow speaker to express exaggeration
by means of intensification (e.g. She is slower than a tortoise), or mitigation
(e.g. I told you a million times).
(iii)
In many cases, the hyperbolic meaning is based on the use of irony (previously
commented), aspect in which echoing plays an important role. Echoing was
proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1995). The communicative impact of irony
arises from echoing a state of affairs or a thought representing a state of affairs
(Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera, 2014: 94). Nevertheless, apart from these cognitive
aspects, it is important to point out that irony is a highly pervasive phenomenon
in language; although much more relevant for our present study it is the
2
http://www.learn-english-today.com/idioms/idiom-categories/comparisons/comparisons-sim1-blindfit.html. Accessed on May 8, 2012
30
statement that hyperbole is a recurring pattern in ironic utterances. According to
Kreuz & Roberts (1995), in the creation of hyperbolic irony we can use
intensifying adverbs combined with extreme adjectives: absolutely amazing.
However, the hyperbolic irony forms are generated only in a certain type of
situation; that is, irony and hyperbole co-occur only in contexts where the
purpose is humorous.
Another example of hyperbolic irony is the statement She is an angel. It is an
exaggeration to attribute exemplar features of an angel to a person, even when
this attribution is ironic in the sense that the speaker wants to express that the
girl behaves in a malicious way.
(iv)
As commented at the beginning of the present paper, Cognitive Linguistics states
that our experience of the world helps us in the production and comprehension
of most of expressions that we process. Accordingly, the term correlation is used
in Cognitive Linguistics to explain those metaphors that are based on our
previous experience of the world rather than in the similarities between objects;
that is, we use our encyclopaedic knowledge in the interpretation of abstract
concepts (Gibbs 2006ab). A clear example of correlation is the metaphorical
expression
terms of
LOVE IS A JOURNEY,
JOURNEY.
in which
LOVE
is structured and understood in
Hence, it is important to bear in mind correlation in the
analysis of our hyperboles, above all, when the exaggerated meaning is establish
by means of a metaphor. An example is the expression His popularity has skyrocketed to talk about a sudden and quick increase, where “sky rocketing”, when
mapped onto increasing introduces on this notion a degree of exaggeration.
3.5. Constrains on cognitive operations
Formerly commented, cognitive operations can be grouped into two different types:
formal and content operations. Nevertheless, for the successful development of the
present dissertation, we will focus our attention on the content operations due to the fact
that they regulate the cognitive operations involved in the creation of hyperbolic
meaning. The content operation constraints which are important to our analysis are
explained in the subsequent subsections.
31
3.5.1. The Extended Invariance Principle
The Extended Invariance Principle is grounded in the Invariance Principle (Ruiz de
Mendoza, 1998; Ruiz de Mendoza & Pérez, 2011) is a development of the Invariance
Principle put forward by Lakoff (1990, 1993). It is applicable in the case of metaphors,
where the topological structure of the source domain coincides with corresponding
structure in the target domain. For example, we can map the top of a tree onto a
person´s head, but never onto the body or the feet. The Extended Invariance Principle,
however, holds for all cases of generic level structure. One example that could explain
this metaphorical correspondence between structures is Stop acting like a chicken, in
which the behaviour of an animal corresponds to human behaviour. However, the
Extended Invariance Principle also applies to other cognitive operations of the
A IS B
kind. As case in point is hyperbole, as in This suitcase weights a ton. According to Ruiz
de Mendoza & Galera (2014) this sentence maps an impossible situation where
someone tries to carry a one-ton case onto a real one where someone tries to carry a
case that is (perhaps) almost impossible to lift. The source (B) maps the speaker´s
implicated frustration onto the frustration in the real-world situation. In compliance with
the Extended Invariance Principle weight maps onto weight and feelings onto feelings.
It must also be noted that this principle is also applied in the case of the hearer’s
mitigation of the same structure, in which a correspondence is established between the
real weight and the mitigated weight of the suitcase.
3.5.2. The Correlation Principle
This principle leads speakers to select, from among several possible alternatives, the
best source domain in accordance with the implicational structure of the target domain.
Thus, in the tree-to-person mapping, a tree is a good source domain to talk about such
attributes as firmness, stillness, and height (He is a firm/still/tall as a tree) but not about
behavioural ones (cf. *He is as silent as a tree) for which there are more conspicuous
source candidates: He is as silent as a mouse. In the case of This suitcase weights a ton,
the extreme quantity “ton” is chosen because it allows the hearer to calculate the
intended meaning implications about the feelings of frustration produced by the
excessive weight of the suitcase.
32
3.5.3. Pragmatic Scalar Adjustment
Pragmatic Scalar Adjustment constraints attenuation processes in understatements (e.g.
The park is a bit far) and litotes (e.g. Your exam is not bad), but also hyperbole. Taking
into account the focus of analysis of the present paper, it is important to bear in mind the
latter case. In the example This suitcase weights a ton, ton needs to be reduced to a
realistic amount of weight, although excessive for the hearer to deal with it (Ruiz de
Mendoza & Galera, 2014: 145); that is, in a default context, the weight could range
between 20 and 30 kg. Hence, as described in Ruiz de Mendoza & Pérez (2003), and in
previous sections of this dissertation, this reduction process is accomplished through a
mitigation operation. Nevertheless, as has been shown, it is important to have in mind
the contextual needs before adjustment can take place. The pragmatic adjustment
process is responsible for the additional meaning implication that has become a
characteristic feature of hyperbole, i.e. the ideas that there is a situation of excess in the
given expression.
33
34
4. Analysis of idioms bearing hyperbolic meaning
This dissertation focuses on the analysis of idioms bearing hyperbolic meaning. In this
section we will see the different cognitive operations involved in the creation of
hyperbolic effects, and the different meaning implications involved in their formulation.
For the present study we have especially taken into consideration the notion of scalarity,
which has been chosen as a criterion for the classification of our examples, in this case
in terms of explicit and implicit scalarity. Explicit scalarity is given by the linguistic
expression, whereas, implicit scalarity is provided by different cognitive mechanisms.
We have also taken into account the distinctions between hyperbole, overstatement and
ECFs, due to the fact that they are based on scalar concepts. Explicit scalarity is
identified in our corpus of data in metaphors, comparisons, and counterfactual
statements. In the subsequent sections we will examine each type of hyperbolic
expressions in terms of scalarity.
4.1. Hyperbolic expressions based on explicit scalarity
As previously noted, explicit scalarity is directly provided by the linguistic expression.
This section contains examples of comparison in which scalarity is clearly observable,
as well as other examples of explicit scalarity.
Let us first take example (1):
(1) His smile was a mile wide. 3
In (1) the hyperbolic effect is based on a person’s facial expression. The topological
structure of smiling is associated with a rising curving of the corners of the mouth. This
curving lengthens the person’s mouth wide, and the result of smiling results in a longer
lip line. The source domain contains an impossible situation, a scenario where the
mouth line is a mile long. By contrast, the target domain represents the real situation of
someone smiling widely. This mapping underlines the impact of the person’s smile on
the speaker, based on very strong exaggeration along the scale of distance.
The mapping is possible due to the application of the Correlation Principle and the
3
http://fos.iloveindia.com/hyperbole-examples.html Accessed on May 14, 2014.
35
Extended Invariance Principle. On the one hand, the Correlation Principle prompts the
speaker to choose the appropriate hyperbolic source domain that expresses the speaker’s
communicative intentions; in other words, the source domain is chosen in accordance
with the target domain. The choice of a non-hyperbolic expression would have resulted
in very different communicative impact. For example, saying His smile was very broad,
which I found striking, does not carry the emotional overtones of the hyperbolic
expression. On the other hand, the Extended Invariance Principle guarantees that we
map the same type of topological configuration which is based on the lip line. Finally, it
is also important to consider the use of the Principle of Scalar Adjustment which is
responsible for bringing the distance expression down to a more realistic measure.
Consider now the following examples, which make use of a different linguistic
device:
(2) ‘Oh, I've been inside the big house hundreds of times,’ boasted Jackie 4
(3) I have been inside the big house 38,568 times.
In (2) and (3) the hyperbolic effect is created by means of the numerical expression
however, the communicative intentions in both of them are different depending on the
figure used. Example (2) uses the expression hundreds of times, but it is difficult to
interpret as a case of hyperbole to the extent that it is actually possible for a person to
get into a house hundreds of times literally. For hyperbole to be clearer, we would need
a more exaggerated expression, probably beyond the range of hundreds and thousands,
which could convey realistic figures (e.g. I’ve been inside the big house a million
times). On the other hand, in example (3), the use of an exact figure, which is not
unreasonable in terms of the amount (it is possible for a person to be inside a house
38,568 times), gives the expression a feeling of unlikelihood (people do not count the
exact number of times they get into a house). So, this will be identified as a case of
hyperbole, whose source domain involves a scenario of someone being in a house
38,568 times which is scarcely conceivable. In this respect, it is important to note that
4
http://bnc.bl.uk/saraWeb.php?qy=boasted+jackie&mysubmit=Go Accessed on
December 30, 2013.
36
the use of rounded-up figures in the source is more effective, in terms of the expression
of the communicative intentions of the speaker than exact figures. With the use of
rounded-up figures, hearer will be led to derive specific meaning implications because
hearer knows that quantity is not real. These meaning implications perhaps are based on
anger or sarcasm, as in the case of example (3), where the non-rounded-up figure is
used to express that speaker has been inside the house a large number of times. In this
regard, the Correlation Principle is responsible for choosing the adequate source domain
by taking into account the speaker’s communicative intentions. However, the Pragmatic
Scalar Adjustment principle in in charge of bringing that exaggerated number of times
down to a more reasonable quantity, as in example (2).
The example that follows now bases the hyperbolic effect on simile:
(4) All those different types of coffee and the footstool ritual that seemed older than
the hills. 5
In (4) the hyperbolic effect is based on the idea of something being old, which is put on
the same level on the scale to something with a long life. The scalar referent in this
example is life duration. Simile works like metaphor through a conceptual mapping. The
source domain in (3) is hills which in geological terms can be millions years old. In the
target domain the types of coffee and the ritual are very old, so much so that their age
impresses the speaker. Here is where the hyperbolic ingredient of the source plays its
most important role. In order to better convey the special impact that the age of the
target elements have on him, the speaker, in application of the Correlation Principle,
needs to search for a source domain that will convey these meaning implications. This is
in fact the connotational aspect of the meaning of the sentence. Of course, at the same
time scalar adjustment brings the denotational aspect into alignment with the real-world
situations, where customs and rituals can go back in time for hundreds or at most
thousands of years.
The previous example can be contrasted with (5), where a dog’s bark is literally
presented as worse that its bite through a carefully crafted comparison.
5
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ Accessed on May 17, 2014.
37
(5) My boss sounds tough, but her bark is worse than her bite. 6
The expression “someone’s bark is worse than their bite” means that although people
can get angry and shout, when it comes to acting they actually do no harm. The
hyperbolic effect is based on the comparison between someone’s temperament and the
dog’s bite. The bark is mapped to the idea of the speaker´s boss´s threats, while the fact
that the bite is nothing to be afraid of expresses the idea that the person´s actions are not
as bad as her threats. The exaggeration in this statement is conveyed through the
assertion that a dog’s bark is worse than its bite, which, if taken literally, is impossible.
The Correlation and the Extended Invariance Principle operate in the formulation of this
comparison. In the source domain of the metaphor we have the concepts of bite and
bark, and both are selected in accordance with someone’s character and actions.
Two more examples of hyperbole built on simile are found in (6) and (7). Here,
simile is of the “like” kind:
(6) He eats like a horse 7
(7) He eats like a bird 8
Examples (6) and (7) represent extremely low and high points on the scale of the
quantity of food that animals ingest. Of course, other animals, like elephants, eat more
than horses, and insects eat less that birds, but both horses and birds are conspicuous for
the respectively high and low amounts of food they ingest. This makes them excellent
candidates, from the point of view of the Correlation Principle, to act as source domains
of a mapping between human eating habits and animal’s habits where the speaker
expresses astonishment at the uniqueness of the human habits. The source domain
contains the concept of “horse” or “bird” which is mapped onto the target domain where
a person noticeably eats very much or very little. The hyperbole underscores the
singularity of the real world situation and at the same time it highlights the speaker’s
astonishment about it. As with previous examples of hyperbole, scalar adjustment is in
6
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ytJNRDL0zDgC&printsec=frontcover&hl=es&source=gbs_ge_sum
mary_r&cad=0#v=snippet&q=bark&f=false Accessed on May 17, 2014.
7
http://www.bonniedoerrbooks.com/pdf/revised%20figurative%20language%20lesson%20-%20PDF.pdf
Accessed on March 15, 2014.
8
http://www.bonniedoerrbooks.com/pdf/revised%20figurative%20language%20lesson%20-%20PDF.pdf
Accessed on March 15, 2014.
38
charge of the non-connotational meaning of the utterance (“like a horse” is toned down
to “a large amount of food” and “like a bird” to “a very small amount of food”).
4.2. Hyperbolic expressions based on implicit scalarity
This section constitutes an analysis of the hyperbolic effect obtained by the creation of
metaphors whose scalar meaning is not explicit. In all the examples commented in the
subsequent sections, the hyperbolic effect is the product of processes such as
metaphoric and metonymic mappings or the creation of counterfactual scenarios,
although in some cases both processes are involved.
4.2.1. Hyperbolic meaning based on metaphors
We will focus our attention on those examples in which the situation expressed is not
directly observable in the context due to their metaphorical nature. Let us start with (8)
and (9):
(8) Since I work at university, I feel I am swimming with sharks 9
Example (8) is a many-correspondence resemble metaphor in which the source domain
includes the concept of sharks and the action of swimming with them. On the other
hand, the target domain contains the idea of the university environment. The expression
to swim with sharks refers to the state of affairs in which people are in an environment
where they feel uncomfortable, unsafe and surrounded by other people that they do not
trust. Thus, this mapping underlies a person being in an unsafe and uncomfortable
situation.
The Correlation and Extended Invariance principles are involved in the
establishment of the hyperbolic meaning since the metaphor maps behaviour onto
behaviour and the shark scenario is paradigmatic of extremely dangerous situations. In
the scale of the most dangerous animals, sharks are among the highest positions. They
are some of the most ruthless predators, which is an attribute that makes us feel unsafe
when we are close to them. Hence, in this metaphor, sharks refer to students to which
we attribute the features of this animal, i.e. dangerous and hurtful, whereas the action of
9
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychlangsci/research/linguistics/publications/wpl/05papers/vega_moreno
Accessed on April 17, 2014.
39
swimming with sharks shares its characteristics with the university environment,
uncomfortable and risky, where you are surrounded by students who can hurt you. Thus,
the Correlation Principle leads the speaker to choose a hyperbolic source domain, in
accord with speaker’s communicative intentions. If instead of sharks, the source domain
had been ‘rabbits’, that is, a non-hyperbolic source domain, the communicative
intentions would not have been the same due to the fact the speaker cannot express the
idea that the person is in a risky situation.
Consider now the following sentence:
(9)
Bob’s new corner office was just the icing on the cake.10
In (9) we map the best part of a cake i.e the icing onto a good situation. The target
domain of the metaphor represents something that makes a situation even better, and the
source domain of the metaphor contains the idea of the icing. In this regard, we can say
that the hyperbolic effect is based on the comparison between a situation and the icing.
If we add icing on the top of a cake, it becomes even more tasteful and good, and this
explanation is mapped onto a situation that is likewise desirable. The Correlation
Principle is involved in the establishment of the hyperbolic meaning since the metaphor
maps the icing scenario onto positive and advantageous situation.
The previous examples can be contrasted with (10) and (11) which are also built on
metaphors. Let us start with example (10):
(10) Fixing the car is going to cost an arm and a leg. 11
In example (10) the high price for a service is understood in term of the high value of
body parts. The origin of this idiom goes back to World War I. Soldiers sometimes lost
one or more limbs during the war and after coming back home they used this expression
to refer to the high price they paid for the war: it cost them an arm and a leg.
10
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ytJNRDL0zDgC&printsec=frontcover&hl=es&source=gbs_ge_su
mmary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=icing&f=false Accessed on May 14, 2014.
11
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UgrUjXLI0TgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=DICTIONARY+OF+ID
IOMS&hl=es&sa=X&ei=_TVyU4WrAqOJ0AXawIHYAw&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=arm
&f=false Accessed on April 28, 2014.
40
In this metaphor the source domain contains the idea of losing body parts, and the
target refers to a situation where something is very expensive. The hyperbolic meaning
is based on the scalar concept of a high price, which is grounded in the idea of losing
body parts. This fact is represented as the highest price that someone can pay. The
Correlation Principle leads the speaker to select a hyperbolic source domain, which is
responsible for expressing the hyperbolic speaker´s intentions. The expression “to cost
an arm and a leg” is mapped onto a situation where something is overpriced; that is the
high price a soldier had to pay for losing some of his body parts is related to something
very expensive. However, this exaggeration is to be levelled down to a more realistic
situation where the price of something cannot be compared to the price of losing limbs.
This takes place through mitigation cognitive operation. In addition, the mitigation
process is regulated by the Pragmatic Scalar Adjustment Principle which is in charge of
bringing the price expression down to one that is consistent with the context in question
(regular car fixing tariffs). The Extended Invariance Principle is also
at work by
mapping prices onto prices and the impact of those prices on the speaker on onto the
impact that losing limbs would have on him or her.
The following example also activates a hyperbolic metaphoric source:
(11) You make my blood boil. 12
This example was analysed by Peña (2001) and has also been briefly commented on
previously in the present dissertation. However, it is important to pay more special
attention to it owing to its hyperbolic meaning implications. Example (11) is a scenic
metaphor in which the container full of boiling liquid is mapped onto the target domain
of an angry person whose visible symptoms correspond with characteristics of a boiling
liquid: heat, bubbles, vapour, etc. Those physical symptoms suggest an internal ‘heat’ in
the person’s body. Nevertheless, it is an obvious exaggeration to state that human blood
in a living person can reach the boiling state. The present example is also a manycorrespondence metaphor, where a person is represented as a container. This container
is full of liquid, but in the case of a person, it contains blood. Finally, a boiling liquid
refers to an angry person on the basis of the external symptoms produced by emotions,
12
Peña, S. 2001. Situational metaphors and metonymy. Paper presented at 11th Susanne Hübner Seminar,
University of Zaragoza.
41
which correlate with the perceptual signals of a boiling liquid. Therefore, this is an
excellent source domain to match the target domain of being angry. Owing to its
hyperbolic component, which makes it such a good source, in actual interpretation, this
example needs to be mitigated to a point regulated, as in other cases of hyperbole, by
Pragmatic Scalar Adjustment. This process attenuates the exaggerated impossible
situation of blood boiling inside a living human body to a more realistic situation where
there is redness in the face and excess of bodily perspiration indicating a relative
increase in body temperature caused by the emotional outburst. It is also important to
note that the Correlation Principle is also involved in the creation of this hyperbolic
idiom due to the fact that the source domain is selected in accordance with the target
domain because it helps the speaker to express his communicative intentions. The
selection of a non-hyperbolic source domain would not convey the same intentions, and
therefore, the effect of the hearer would not be the same.
(12) Jane looks as though she has one foot in the grave. 13
The following hyperbolic effect is based on a topological metaphor. In the present
example the expression to have one foot in the grave means to be almost dead; however,
we should not take it literally. The source domain depicts a person who is about to be in
his or her grave; having one foot in one´s grave suggests closeness to death14. By
contrast, the target domain contains the real situation of a person who is very ill. When
someone is about to die, specific physical symptoms are observed: the person looks pale
or has yellowish skin, he/she is apathetic, weak, etc. When we are extremely ill we
13
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9QuEiIMaBt0C&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14&dq=american+hyperbolic+
idioms&source=bl&ots=fHDUkKwT8b&sig=QfH92w8xziIMFDwtVJbMXcm1lSw&hl=es&sa=X&ei=7
k5zU4OmEvOb1AWM-oHYDw&ved=0CD8Q6AEwAg#v=snippet&q=hyperbolic&f=false Accessed on
May 14, 2014.
14
It is interesting to note that this kind of conceptualization is intuitive but at the same time it runs
counter to logic: people die before they are placed in the grave. So the action of gradually stepping into
one´s grave cannot logically stand for dying. However, it is suggestive of dying through a process of
conceptual integration of images, as studied in blending theory by Fauconnier & Turner (2002). The mind
first integrates (or conflates) –and then mixes up- being in the grave with being dead. In this way getting
closer to the grave has come to stand for dying. This process of conflation is not any different from the
ones that are commonly cited as giving rise to correlation or primary metaphors, like MORE IS UP
(Prices are high ‘Prices have increased’). Here the metaphor is based on mixing up (conflating) quantity
and height, so it talks about quantity as if it were height (which is the metaphor).
42
experience similar symptoms, which may make us feel close to death. Thus, in this
example disease symptoms are related to what one feels when one is close to death, but
there are by far less serious. Therefore, there is hyperbole or exaggeration, which is
communicatively convenient on the bases of the Correlation Principle, in order to
highlight the speaker’s concern on the person’s symptoms. If the sentence is not taken
literally, what it explicitly says needs to be mitigated through the Scalar Adjustment
Principle in order to achieve a correct understanding of the statement. The hearer should
attenuate the exaggerated expression, because even if you cannot move, and you feel
you have the worst illness in the world, to have one foot in the grave is a gross
exaggeration In turn, the Correlation Principle, as noted above, prompts the speaker to
select that source domain that map onto his intentions.
Note that in some cases, certain diseases may result in death. Nevertheless we are
dealing with extreme cases that are far away from the context in which this hyperbolic
expression is used. It is used in a colloquial register to refer to minor ailments, like a
bad cold, which make us stay in bed for a while.
4.2.2. Counterfactual scenarios based on metaphors
As previously explained, a frame or scenario is a collection of facts that capture the
properties, functions and relations among those entities that form the frame. For that
reason, we would not be able to understand the world sell without knowing anything
about the situation of commercial transfer, which also involves other entities such as a
seller, a buyer, goods, etc. In this regard, hyperbolic meaning is sometimes related to
impossibilities, that is, hyperboles can be the expression of impossible situations. In the
present section, we will analyse the creation of counterfactual scenarios in hyperbolic
idioms.
Let us start with examples (13) and (14) which exploit the metaphor
STATES ARE
LOCATIONS:
(13) She got the job. She was over the moon.15
Example (13) shows a situation of a person being beyond the moon, which is a
counterfactual exploitation of the non-scenic metaphor
15
STATES ARE LOCATIONS.
The
http://bnc.bl.uk/saraWeb.php?qy=over+the+moon&mysubmit=Go Accessed on March 14, 2014.
43
source domain of the metaphor represents the situation of a person being blissful in a
remote place. However, the place chosen (i.e. beyond the moon) is impossible to reach
for most people. The target domain shows an overjoyed person who has got the job she
desires. This metaphor suggests extreme psychological distance from reality, from being
on earth. The mapping is possible due to the application of the Correlation Principle, on
the one hand, and Pragmatic Scalar Adjustment, on the other. The Correlation Principle
regulates the creation of the implications in this example, that is, it leads the speaker to
choose the hyperbolic source domain that best suits the target domain meaning of being
overjoyed about something. The meaning implication suggests that speaker´s happiness
is so great that it is not from this earth, that is, it is not real. The scalarity in this example
reflects the “higher” psychological state you can reach in a situation of great happiness
and luck. Finally, as with all cases of hyperbole, Pragmatic Scalar Adjustment is in
charge of bringing the expression down to a more realistic situation.
In a similar vein, take now example (14):
(14) After that amazing day, he had his head in the clouds. 16
This example follows the same steps as example (13). The hyperbolic effect is based on
the source domain of the metaphor that creates a counterfactual situation (it is hardly
conceivable for a person’s head to be in the clouds). The source domain represents the
impossible situation of a person being in such a remote place, whereas the target domain
contains a happy and euphoric person. As in the previous example, the Correlation
Principle works in the establishment of the hyperbolic effect, since the selected source
domain corresponds to the target domain, and helps the speaker to communicate his
intentions. In the same way as in (13), Pragmatic Scalar Adjustment is responsible for
mitigating the expression down to a more realistic one. It is also important to note that
the Extended Invariance Principle allows for the mapping to be possible; that is, we map
the same type of generic-level structure (distance from a place maps onto psychological
distance from a state or situation). Hence, “to have one’s head in the clouds” represents
the psychological state of happiness, a state that is not worldly because it is beyond the
earth.
16
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UgrUjXLI0TgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=DICTIONARY+OF+ID
IOMS&hl=es&sa=X&ei=_TVyU4WrAqOJ0AXawIHYAw&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=cloud
&f=false Accessed on May 10, 2014.
44
The previous examples can be contrasted with (15), where a very slim person is seen in
terms of a bag of bones:
(15) She came home from her trip nothing but skin and bones.17
Example (15) refers to a condition of extreme thinness, usually as a result of
malnutrition. In this case the expression nothing but skin and bones describes an
impossible situation based on some visible symptoms of malnourishment: people can
lose fat and muscle to such an extent that their bones become extremely noticeable
under their skin. The source domain depicts the counterfactual scenario of someone
being only skin and bones. The target contains an extremely slim person. The mapping
underlines the impact that an excessively slim person can have on the speaker. This
mapping is possible due to the application of the Correlation Principle and Pragmatic
Scalar Adjustment. On the one hand, the Correlation Principle ensures the correct
selection of the hyperbolic source domain to express the speaker’s communicative
intentions, in this case, to express that someone is very slim. By contrast, in these
examples mitigation operates in order to facilitate a better understanding of the
statement by means of Pragmatic Scalar Adjustment. Thus, the hearer should attenuate
the expression to a lower level in the scale of thinness, to a more realistic physical state.
Consider now:
(16) After the crash, Marie had her heart in her mouth. 18
Another example of a counterfactual situation is examples (16), which is also based on
the metaphor
STATES ARE LOCATIONS.
In this case, this example is another non-scenic
metaphor in which the hyperbolic effect derives from the fact, taken literally, in real life
people cannot have their hearts in their mouths. The source domain contains that
17
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9QuEiIMaBt0C&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14&dq=american+hyperbolic+
idioms&source=bl&ots=fHDUkKwT8b&sig=QfH92w8xziIMFDwtVJbMXcm1lSw&hl=es&sa=X&ei=7
k5zU4OmEvOb1AWM-oHYDw&ved=0CD8Q6AEwAg#v=snippet&q=hyperbolic&f=false Accessed on
April 5, 2014.
18
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UgrUjXLI0TgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=DICTIONARY+OF+ID
IOMS&hl=es&sa=X&ei=_TVyU4WrAqOJ0AXawIHYAw&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=heart
&f=false Accessed on 21 April, 2014.
45
impossible situation, a scenario where someone has his heart in his mouth. The target
domain represents someone who is scared or nervous. The mapping is possible due to
the application of the Correlation Principle and Pragmatic Scalar Adjustment. The
hyperbolic source domain allows the speaker to communicate that situation where
someone is very scared of something. Pragmatic Scalar Adjustment allows the hearer to
access to the real situation in which Marie is scared or nervous and her heart is so
agitated that she can subjectively feel as if it were in her mouth or throat (another
version of this idiom is heart in one´s throat). This principle is in charge of bringing this
impossible and exaggerated situation down to a more realistic level.
46
5. Conclusions
The study of hyperbole within the field of Cognitive Linguistic was one of the most
important innovations within this framework. The excessive emphasis on other figures
of thought such as metaphor and metonymy, and the study of the different cognitive
operations that work in their creation led other cognitive linguistics such as Herrero
(2009) and Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera (2012, 2014) to go beyond the previously
established research, and to pay attention to other figures of thought, such as hyperbole.
The main purpose of the present dissertation has been the study of the effects of
hyperbolic utterances and to trace the analysis of such effects to their underlying
cognitive mechanisms. The examples from our corpus were analysed in terms of their
hyperbolic meaning, which posed some difficulties. We decided to make idiomatic
expressions part of the object of study owing to their wide range of possibilities in the
creation of exaggerated expressions. In all idiomatic expressions analysed in the present
dissertation, the hyperbolic effect is based on processes such as metaphoric and
metonymic mappings, the creation of impossible or counterfactual scenarios, and on
comparison. Nevertheless, the main problem of this research was that examples could
not be found easily. Thus, it was necessary to carry out a careful analysis of our corpus
of examples in order to know if a certain idiomatic expression could be considered an
instance of hyperbole or not. It is worthy to note that Sert’s (2008) classification of the
different ways of identifying hyperbolic utterances has allowed us easily identify
hyperbole in idiomatic expressions. Claridge’s categorization of the different hyperbolic
realisations was also a useful tool in the analysis of our corpus of data. In addition, we
paid attention to expressions conveying extreme values, such as absolutely, endless,
none, everybody, etc., and numeral expressions such as hundreds of, and the like.
Expressions of this kind are frequently used in the production of hyperbolic meaning.
Scalarity was a notion broadly studied in our research. In fact, it became a crucial
concept in our analysis since exaggeration is based on moving a concept to a higher
position on a scale of exaggeration. We have seen that Extreme Case Formulations and
comparisons show scalarity, as well as counterfactual scenarios which can be used to
make a situation extreme. Nevertheless, it is also important to note that despite these
linguistic and conceptual clues most of the present study was based on the analyst’
intuition of what could be regarded or not as hyperbole.
One of the most essential phenomena in the configuration of hyperbolic expressions
is metaphor, if understood as a cross-domain conceptual mapping. As we have already
47
noted, metaphor and metonymy are important processes that give rise to implicit
hyperbolic effects while obeying a number of constraints that regulate nature of the
mapping process between the source and the target domain. Principles such as the
Correlation Principle, Pragmatic Scalar Adjustment, and the Extended Invariance
Principle help the speaker in the formulation of hyperbolic expressions and they allow
us to understand our mapping choices; for example, they explain why we can associate
the concept of boil with the concept of being very angry in the example She makes my
blood boil, in which the Correlation Principle prompts the speaker to choose the
hyperbolic source domain that expresses his exaggerated communicative intentions.
We hope that this dissertation has been able to offer a solid analysis of the different
realisations of hyperbolic meaning, and together with the different cognitive operations
involved in the formulation and understanding of hyperbole. Finally, it is also worthy to
note the crucial role of Extreme Case Formulations, and idioms as natural bearers of
hyperbolic meaning effects.
48
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approach. Language and Cognition, 3 (2): 283–312.
Claridge, C. 2011. Hyperbole in English. A Corpus-based Study of Exaggeration.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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