Chapter 4: Meaning

 Chapter 4: Meaning

1.  Introduction

The concept of ‘meaning’ is difficult to define or explain. It has been approached from many very different angles by linguists, by literary theorists and by philosophers. Theories of meaning can be very complex and are often hotly disputed.

If meaning is complicated in language which is primarily concerned with transmitting information or establishing social relations (writing in a scientific journal, or greeting a friend, for example) then it is inevitably going to be very complicated in literary uses of language, where writers may deliberately explore the edges of possible meanings in a language and try to push them a bit further to see what kind of effect they can get. 

2.  Semantics

When we want to know the meaning of an unfamiliar word, we look it up in the dictionary. Discussions of meaning at the level of single words usually come under the scope of semantics, the study of word meaning. Semantics considers how the meanings of words in a language relate to each other: the system of meanings into which words fit and by taking their place in the system, acquire their meanings.

For example, semantics is concerned with the relationships between words such as between the words in the sequence pool—lake—sea—ocean or in village—town—city. A town is smaller than a city but bigger than a village, and so the word town occupies the ‘semantic space’ between the words village and city. Village, town and city have a semantic relationship, in which, at least to some extent, the meaning of each word depends on the meanings of the other two words. 

a.   Gaps and Overlaps: There actually are overlaps and gaps in word meanings. Gaps in meaning can be difficult to identify, but that does not mean that they do not exist. German, for example, has the word Schadenfreude, which means getting pleasure from someone else’s misfortune, and although the idea can easily be expressed in English (as has just been done), there is no single English word that has the same meaning, i.e. there is a gap (sometimes called a lexical gap) in English where German has the word Schadenfreude. 

·      Overlaps in meaning are much easier to identify: teenager and adolescent overlap in meaning; so do cash and money, and watchedand observed. In these cases we appear to have at least two words with very similar meanings—pairs of words like these are called synonyms.

·      However, complete synonymy is actually very infrequent—even if words appear to have the same meaning in some contexts. You can equally well watch the grass growing and observe the grass growing, but while you might have observed three statues in the corner you are less likely to have watched three statues in the corner unless you thought the statues were about to move or that someone was hiding behind them. 

·      The verb to watch seems to be applied more to moving or changing things than to stationary things, while the verb to observe applies equally well to stationary objects as to moving or changing objects.

b.   Opposites: Some words have opposites (or antonyms, their formal name) in English: go and stop, single and married, alive and dead. If you have stopped you cannot be going at the same time. You could say ‘that married man is nice’ but ‘that married man is single’ is a contradiction, and would only be said in relatively unusual circumstances. 

·      Not all words are absolute opposites though. Old for example is not the absolute opposite of young, since someone who is thirty years of age may be ‘young’ to someone of seventy, but ‘old’ to someone of seven. These are known as comparative opposites.

·      For some purposes, you might deliberately want to exploit the contradiction of two opposites; for example, the possibility of being happy and sad at the same time. In Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, Romeo responds to the dispute between his family and Juliet’s with contradictions:

Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love. 
Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
Of anything of nothing first create!

O heavy lightness! Serious vanity!

Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!

Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!

Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!

·     Romeo’s speech brings together contradictions—lightness that is heavy, health that is sick, sleep that is waking. 

·     One purpose the speech might have within the play is to draw attention to the irony that love between family members can bring about fighting and bloodshed between families. It is also a kind of prophecy of what will happen later in the play. 

·     The love between Romeo and Juliet will bring them great joy and great sorrow. Juliet will take a drug that will make her appear dead but from which she will wake. The combination of contradictory words or images is a well-established device in literature known as an oxymoron.

c.   Hyponyms and Superlatives: For example, if someone asks you would you like a drink? in order to respond you would need to establish what kind of drink was on offer as well as what kind you wanted. The type of drink on offer is often signalled by the context. In a pub or at a party would you like a drink? is likely, at least in Britain, to be taken to refer to an alcoholic drink. In a café it is more likely to be taken to refer to a hot, non-alcoholic drink. On a beach beside an ice-cream van, it is most likely to be taken to mean a cold non-alcoholic drink. This range of choices could be presented in a diagram like this:

·      In most cafés in Britain until quite recently, asking for a coffee in a café was a relatively simple business. Now however, a new layer of subcategories exists. You can have a largeor a regular coffee. It can be filter, decaff, cappuccino, espresso, café latte, or a flavoured coffee. This set of choices could be represented as part of the diagram above as:

·      All these different categories of drink can be described in terms of their relationship to each other, and the technical terms are hyponyms and superordinates. Coffee is a superordinate for cappuccino, filter, espressoand decaff. A hyponym is the opposite: a word that can be included in the category above it on the diagram. Decaff is a hyponymof coffee, and coffee is a hyponym of drink.

·      A literary example of this can be found in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem:

Glory be to God for dappled things
For skies of couple colour as a brinded cow
For rose moles in all stipple upon trout that swim

Fresh free coal chestnut falls, finches’ wings.

·      Here the superordinate is dappled things, and the hyponyms are skies, trout, chestnutsand finches’ wings.

·      The relationships of hyponym and superordinate are to some degree fixed: dogs, cats, cows and polar bears are always hyponyms of animals.

 

3.   Context: Just looking at semantics however would still leave a lot to explain about how meaning in a language actually works. Word meaning in fact explains only a fraction (portion) of how we use words to make meanings. The crucial element that semantics does not consider is context. This word ‘context’ is deceptively straightforward—in fact it refers to an infinite number of factors which could influence how an individual interprets a chunk of language; the area of linguistics that is concerned with the effect of context on meaning is pragmatics. 

a.   Deixis: Some words take part in their meaning from the context. A famous illustration of this aspect of meaning is an anecdote (tale) about a message found inside a bottle washed up on a beach. The message reads:
Meet me here at the same time tomorrow with a stick this long.

·      Many of the words in this message do not have a useful meaning because they are not accompanied by other information. These words are me, here, the same time, tomorrowand this long. All these words do have meaning (for example me means the person speaking/writing; tomorrow means the day after today), but they need contextual information to make their meaning complete. Words like these are called deictics. The name for the process is deixis.

·      Instead of finding the message washed up on the shore, it had been handed to you by a writer of the message, the meanings of me, here, the same time and tomorrow would all be clear. Me would refer to the person who gave you the message, tomorrow would refer to the day after the one you received the message on, and here would refer to the place where you were standing at the time (though the writer of the message would still have to indicate to you how long a stick they wanted you to bring!). This information could also have been provided by the text. For example, the message might have read:
My name is Karma, and I need a stick the same height as the railings. I am standing at the end of Juhu Beach and it is 3 pm on January 3, 2023. Meet me here at the same time tomorrow with a stick this long.

·      The second part of the message now makes more sense. The words me, here, the same time, tomorrow and this long are all explained by the earlier information. This second version of the message is an example of anaphoric reference, i.e. the information we need to understand the meaning of the deictic words like me has been given earlier by the text (in this case, it refers to someone called Karma).

·      The message could also have been written in a different order:

Meet me here at the same time tomorrow with a stick. I am standing at the end of Juhu Beach on January 3, 2023, at 3 pm. My name is Karma, and I need a stick the height of the railings.

·      In this case the referencing process works in the other direction—we can supply the meanings of me and tomorrow from information that comes later in the text. This is known as cataphoric referencing.

b.   Homonyms: Some words have more than one meaning, and you have to rely on the context to decide which meaning is intended. For example, the sentence the pitch is all wrong could refer to a badly planned football stadium, a piece of music played out of tune, or the rigging (fixing) of a rowing boat. Without more contextual information, you would not know what was meant because the word pitch can mean all of these. The technical term for words with more than one meaning is homonyms.

·      Ironically for linguistic terms, you will find the words ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ themselves have more than one meaning. In this section, we are using ‘text’ to refer to written language and ‘discourse’ to refer to spoken language. However, sometimes ‘text’ is used to refer to a particular book/poem/play, and ‘discourse’ can mean a particular conversation or even someone’s set of beliefs about life. Generally, which of these different meanings applies will be made clear by the context.

c.    Other Similar Texts/Discourses: When someone says ‘Knock, knock’, you know you are supposed to reply ‘Who’s there?’. If someone you knew slightly greeted you with ‘Hello, how are you?’ you would most probably respond with a variation of ‘Fine, and you?’. You would probably interpret the same question completely differently if it came from your local doctor’s clinic or GP at their practice. So, we bring our past experience of similar interactions to bear when we decide how to interpret some utterances.

d.   Your Prior Knowledge: As a listener or reader, you bring all your past experiences of the world to everything you hear or read. These experiences influence how you interpret language; to some extent, you have experiences in common with people from the same cultural background as you, and to some extent, your experiences are unique to you. 

·      William Golding gave an illustration of the role this kind of experience can have in interpretation, using his novel, The Lord of the Flies. On visiting a South Seas island, similar to the one on which his novel was set, he realized that the inhabitants of this island had acquired an interpretation of his book which he had not intended when he wrote it. The conch shell, which in Golding’s book is blown by the characters to call meetings, and is used as a symbol of who has the right to speak, was believed to summon island spirits by the indigenous people. So, when they read the book, they interpreted some parts of the book differently from British readers, because of their different cultural backgrounds.

·      Some more examples:

The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak – The vodka is good but I don’t recommend the meat.
Out of sight – Out of mind. 

4.   REGISTER: The meaning of the word is acquired through the way words are used—and the people who use them. This is the sociolinguistic aspect of meaning, and it is another reason why many words that might semantically appear to be synonyms are not actually synonymous in use. 

·      Home, abode and residence all mean ‘the place where I live’. However, you are not likely to use these words interchangeably. You might invite a friend home with you any day of the week; you might invite them to your abode if you were making a joke, but you would probably not invite them to your residence. The difference between the words is in the degree of formality/informality.Home is the least formal word and therefore the word most likely to be used in ordinary conversation. Residence is the more formal, and only likely to be used frequently in legal documents or when talking about a very high-status member of society—you will hear news broadcasters observe that the Queen is in residence at Buckingham Palace, or refer to the Prime Minister’s country residence of Chequers, for example.

·      Most formal English words are derived from Latin and Greek roots, while many of the most ordinary and informal ones have Germanic origins. Home, for example, resembles the German word Heim, while residence comes from Latin. Word length is also closely connected to how formal a word is, and often to its origins. Home has just one syllable (i.e. it is monosyllabic), while residence has three (i.e. it is polysyllabic).

·      The difference between formal and informal language is also called a difference of register. Register refers to a style of language appropriate for a specific context. Thus, a formal register is appropriate for legal documents and official occasions like the opening of Parliament, while an informal register is appropriate for casual conversations. Consider the following extract from Small World by David Lodge:

For more elaborate ablutions, or to answer a call of nature, it was necessary to venture out into the draughty and labyrinthinecorridors where baths and showers and toilets were to be found—but little privacy and unreliable supplies of hot water.

·      The italicised words are derived from Latin or Old French; some of them (labyrinthine, ablutions) are relatively infrequent in casual speech; all of them have more than one syllable. Compare the effect of these words on the passage with a rewritten version below which omits them:

If you wanted to have a bath or a shower, or to use the loo, you had to go out of your room, and the corridors were draughty and hard to find your way around. The bathrooms weren’t terribly private, and there wasn’t always hot water.

·      The rewritten passage, while carrying substantially the same meaning as the original is much more informal, much more like casual speech. We have not only changed some of the lexis (from elaborate ablutions tohave a bath or shower; from to venture outto to go out) to create this effect of course; we have also changed the word order, changed the passive form into the active and used the second person ‘you’, which is a less formal form, and turned the one long sentence into two shorter ones. All of these contribute to making the text less formal and more like speech.

5.   Literal Language and Figurative Language: The first meaning for a word that a dictionary definition gives is usually its literal meaning. The literal meaning of the word tree, for example, is a large plant. However, once we start talking about a tree in the context of a family tree for example, it is no longer a literal tree we are talking about, but a figurative one. The literal use of the word tree refers to an organism which has bark, branches and leaves. A family tree shares some of these qualities—graphically, a plan of a family and a representation of a tree can look similar, and in a way, they are both a process of organic growth, so we use the same term for both. But when we use the term for a plant it is a literal usage, and when we use the term to describe our ancestry, it is a figurative usage.

·     Another word for the figurative usage of language is a trope, which refers to the language used in a figurative way for a rhetorical purpose. To illustrate a trope, consider one of the most famous pieces of rhetoric in English Literature, Mark Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar:
Friends, Romans and Countrymen, lend me your ears …

·     Lend me your ears is a trope (figurative language), used figuratively for rhetorical ends in order to make more impact than a literal variation such as listen to me for a moment. We do not interpret the line literally as a wish to borrow the flesh-and-blood ears of the audience but as a figurative request for attention. Tropes are frequent in most language use. 

·      Similes: A simile is a way of comparing one thing with another, of explaining what one thing is like by showing how it is similar to another thing, and it explicitly signals itself in a text, with the words as or like. The phrase as cold as ice is a common simile; the concept of coldness is explained in terms of an actual concrete object. The word assignals that the trope is a simile.

O, my love’s like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June:
O, my love’s like the melody
That’s sweetly played in tune.

·       The first line of the poem above, O, my love’s like a red, red rose, is a simile. To communicate his feelings, the poet invites the reader to perceive in his sweetheart some of the properties of a rose. Properties this might include are beauty, freshness, scentedness, specialness and rarity. 

b.  Metaphor: Metaphor is another linguistic process used to make comparisons between the attributes of one thing/person and something else. Metaphors can be very simple, but there are many ways in which they can also be extremely complex.

Metaphor as Transport: In the example of the Robert Burns poem above, the process of transferring qualities from one object to another, from a rose to a person, was discussed. The concept of a ‘transfer’ is actually embedded in the etymology (i.e. the linguistic background) of the word metaphor, which is Greek for ‘transport’. Perceiving a metaphor as a kind of transport draws attention to the way a metaphor transports a concept from where it is normally located, to somewhere else where it is not usually found. Thus, a metaphor allows to create correspondences in the world which did not exist before and allows new meanings to occur. 

Collocation: Another useful term for discussing metaphors is collocation, which refers to words which are associated with each other. The word green for example, is often found next to other words: green with envy, green politics, or village green. The word green is ‘co-located’ with these other terms, that is, they are found in the same places.

§  More generally, you could make a list of words which broadly collocate with the word green, for example, you might come up with grass, trees, countrysideand so on because a text which contained the latter three words is quite likely also to contain the word green.

c.    Simile versus Metaphor: There is a literary argument that similes and metaphors are fundamentally different. Because a simile explicitly says something is like something else, it is clearly establishing a comparison. A metaphor, on the other hand, draws attention to one or two features shared by two very dissimilar things. 

·     Similes contain like or as while metaphors don’t. For example, if someone said, your hands are as cold as ice one day and your hands are blocks of ice the next, we do not think there would any significant difference in meaning to be found between the two comments, although the first is a simile and the second a metaphor.

·     Metaphors are often harder to identify than similes and can be used in more varied, complex and subtle ways since they can appear as almost any part of speech.

d.   Explicit and Embedded Metaphors: One aspect of metaphors which can create confusion is the difference between explicit and embedded(fixed/surrounded) metaphors.

·      Explicit metaphors are often easier to identify than embedded ones. Explicit metaphors take the form X is Y, as in the examples below. In these, the tenor (the subject of the metaphor) and the vehicle (the thing or person introduced for the purpose of comparison) are in bold; they are both nouns. The tenor comes first in each sentence:

You are my knight in shining armour
You are my sunshine
You are a pain in the neck
He is the apple of her eye
She was my worst nightmare
The house will be paradise
That pudding was an absolute dream
You’re a brick!

·      In all these examples, something or someone is being compared to something/someone else through construction using the appropriate part of the verb to be (i.e. am, are, is, was, were, will be). Other verbs are also possible, as long as the person/thing being compared and the person/thing they are being compared to are explicitly stated. For example:

·      The children made pigs of themselves
My angel of a father said he would help
(the vehicle—angel—comes before the tenor—father—in this sentence)

·      In contrast, embedded metaphors are far less predictable. Sometimes the tenor and/or the vehicle are not always actually stated. Consider:

The cash machine ate my card

·      The cash machine in this example is the tenor, the thing about which the comparison is being made. It is being compared to something which is not explicitly stated, by means of the verb ate (the ground of the metaphor, i.e. the attribute that the vehicle and the tenor have in common). Since machines do not usually eat but animals do, this metaphor compares the cash machine to an animal which devours things, via the verb not the noun, as was the case with the explicit metaphors.

e.   Types of Metaphor

·      The Extended Metaphor: One common literary use of metaphor is the extended metaphor. ‘I’m really fond’ by Alice Walkeruses an extended metaphor:

I’m really very fond of you,
he said.
I don’t like fond.
It sounds like something you would tell a dog.
Give me love,
or nothing.
Throw your fond in a pond,
I said.
But what I felt for him
was also warm, frisky,
moist-mouthed,
eager,
and could swim away
it forced to do so

·     I don’t like fond. /It sounds like something you would tell a dog is a simile; it introduces the vehicle of a dog into the poem; the narrator perceives the emotion her lover declares as more appropriate to a dog than a human. Although she uses the image of a dog to indicate her dislike of his emotion, she then turns the image to her own ends. This is done first by suggesting that he throw [s his] fond in a pond, playing with the idea of throwing sticks for dogs. Second, she elaborately compares herself to a dog, emphasizing her playfulness and her independence from him: warm, frisky, moist-mouthed, eager, and could swim away/if forced to do so. This metaphor, therefore, is exploited at length, with the different grounds for comparison between the narrator and a dog drawn out.

·     Anthropomorphic Metaphors

·      When animals, objects, or concepts are given specifically human attributes, anthropomorphism is said to have taken place. Anthropomorphism occurs very frequently in children’s books, where trains and animals have personalities and can talk. Animated cartoon films like Tom and Jerryare also anthropomorphic. Writers make use of this device, as in the following opening line to a sixteenth-century sonnet by Sir Philip Sidney:

With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies

·      The narrator of the poem addresses the moonas if it were a person slowly climbing stairs. Another term used to describe this phenomenon is personification. Another poet, W. B. Yeats, describes the emotion of love as a person, treading the skies like Sidney’s moon:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep...
...And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled 
And paced upon the mountains overhead 
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

·     Pathetic Fallacy

·     Another form of metaphor that attributes human responses to the environment is pathetic fallacy. This refers to the practice of representing the world as a mirror reflecting human emotions. This was a device particularly exploited by writers in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, when the beauty and the power of nature was often a strong theme in literature. The effects produced can be very forceful, as the surrounding world echoes the feelings of the protagonists, as in this extract from Middlemarch, by George Eliot. The characters, Dorothea and Will, who are in love with one another, believe they are parting for ever:

·      He took her hand, and raised it to his lips with something like a sob. But he stood with his hat and gloves in the other hand and might have done for the portrait of a Royalist. Still it was difficult to lose the hand, and Dorothea, withdrawing it in a confusion that distressed her, looked and moved away.

‘See how dark the clouds have become, and how the trees are tossed’, she said, walking towards the window with only a dim sense of what she was doing....

While he [Will] was speaking there came a flash of lightning which lit each of them up for the other—and the light seemed to be the terror of a hopeless love.

·      The dark clouds and the tossing trees can be read as metaphors for the unhappiness and confusion of the characters, while a simile is used to make explicit the connection between the lightning and their hopeless love.

·     The Mixed Metaphor

·      This is usually a less praised device; it refers to switching metaphors in the middle of a description so some kind of incongruity (oddness/absurdity/strangeness) is produced. 

·      A mixed metaphor occurs when an author combines two incompatible metaphors, forming an absurd or irrational comparison. In a mixed metaphor, there is no connection between what the author compares.
Metaphor 1: It’s not rocket science.
Metaphor 2: It’s not brain surgery.
Mixed Metaphor: The test is easy; it’s not rocket surgery. 

Metaphor 1: You’re sailing too close to the wind.
Metaphor 2: You’re on thin ice.
Mixed Metaphor: You’re sailing close to thin ice.

Metaphor 1: You’ve buttered your bread, now eat it.
Metaphor 2: You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.
Mixed Metaphor: You’ve buttered your bread, now sleep in it.

·      What happens in a mixed metaphor is that the tenor—the subject of the metaphor—stays the same, but the vehicle and ground change. 

·     The Dead Metaphor

·     A dead metaphor (also called a frozen metaphor or historical metaphor) is a figure of speech that readers or listeners are so familiar with that it ceases to surprise or conjure/charm an image in their minds, thereby becoming ineffective as an actual metaphor.

·     A metaphor that has been absorbed into everyday language usage and become naturalised, so that most language users are not aware of it as a metaphor anymore is a dead metaphor. Common examples include the foot of a bed, or the foot of a page, a table leg, the arm of a chair: usages so every day that their metaphorical origins are forgotten. The meaning of some words has expanded to include their metaphorical usages, as is the case for the word clear, for instance. The literal meaning of clear is that light can pass through, as in clear water or clear glass.

·     Is that clear? doesn’t mean can you see through it; but metaphorically, is it comprehensible?

·     Dead metaphors tend not to be considered poetic: some literary critics are scathing/mocking/scornful about them, and people sometimes regard them as a sign of poor writing in other contexts—but since a lot of the language we take for granted derives from dead metaphors, perhaps we cannot afford to be too squeamish (nice) about them.

·     Resurrecting the Dead Metaphor

·      It is possible to bring dead metaphors ‘back to life’, however. Two ways this can happen are through poetryand through politics.

·      The poet Liz Lochhead is a good example of someone who takes everyday figures of speech and makes them seem strange by breaking them down so that the reader has to think of them again, in a new way. In the poem ‘Bawd’ she writes:

It’ll amaze you, the company I keep -
and I’ll keep them at arm’s length -
I’ve hauled my heart in off my sleeve.

·      There are two metaphors which would usually be considered ‘dead’ here: to keep at arm’s length and to wear your heart on your sleeve. The two are combined in such a way as to call attention to themselves and to their exact phrasing. Keep is used twice, in the first line to suggest proximity (nearness), and in the second to suggest distance. The word arm in the second line and the word sleeve in the third draw attention to themselves because they collocate (have a strong tendency to occur side by side)when they are used in their literal senses. The metaphorical usages of both words refer to emotional distance or availability. The words of the metaphors are being explored, instead of being taken for granted.

·      Politically Motivated Resuscitation: Another way we can become conscious of the literal meaning of dead metaphors is through someone, or a group of people, objecting to a particular language usage or deliberately introducing an alternative. This happens quite frequently, and today is often called political correctness. For example, the word blackhas all sorts of negative associations in English in its metaphorical usages, which are not linked with its literal meaning of a colour. A lot of people find expressions such as to blacken someone’s name, blackleg, blacklist, black magic, a black look, black-hearted or the black market racially offensive. In an effort to dispel (dismiss) these connotations, phrases such as black is beautifulwere coined. Writers such as Toni Morrison, the Nobel prize-winning black writer, use positive and beautiful images in association with black skin, working against a whole tradition of metaphorical language usage. 

·      Another area where political intervention occurs is when words develop a range of metaphorical meanings in English that are apparently non-gender specific, but where their literal meaning is gendered. 

·      An example is the word master, in the sense of to master something, or in the sense of an academic qualification: Master of Science or of Arts(MSc/MA). The literal meaning of master is a male person in authority, the male-gendered equivalent of a mistress (e.g. the master and mistress of the house). The metaphorical meaning of master is that one has achieved a level of proficiency or expertise, and it is used of males or females: a woman can be said to have mastered the art of car maintenance and can hold a Master of Science degree. Comparing the metaphorical usages of master to the metaphorical uses of a mistress (e.g. his wife met his mistress) provides an illustration of what typically happens to gendered terms in English. When a male term develops metaphorical meanings, these tend to be positive, while if the female term develops metaphorical meanings, they tend to be pejorative. Master has a range of uses that are quite different from the range of uses of mistress. Another reason for becoming aware of the metaphorical ways in which words are used, therefore, is that pressure groups pick up on certain usages and draw attention to the embedded inequalities contained within them.

f.    Metonymy

·      There are other forms of trope, or figurative language, which are frequently found in literary and non-literary texts; the two which will be considered here are metonymy and synecdoche.

·      Metonymy, like metaphor, is a figurative use of language rather than a literal one. As metaphor is Greek for transport, metonymy is Greek for a change of name. The name of an object or concept is replaced with a word closely related to or suggested by the original, such as “crown” to mean “king”. People use figurative language every day whether they realize it or not. Common examples of metonymy include in language include:

·      Referring to the American film industry or celebrity culture as "Hollywood"

·      Referring to the New York Stock Exchange as "Wall Street"

·      Referring to a member of the British royal family as "the Crown"

·      Many famous quotes from literature contain metonymy examples, too. In William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Antony commands attention at Julius Caesar’s funeral by saying: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” Here, Antony is using the word “ears” to refer to people’s attention.

·      We talk about the kettle boiling when, literally, it is the water in the kettle that is boiling; the metonymy is a result of the proximity of the water to the kettle. Further examples of metonymy in common usage are: the pressto describe newspapers on account of the printing press used to produce them; the crown to describe the monarch on account of their headwear; cardigan to describe a garment (on account of Lord Cardigan who famously wore them), giving someone a ring or a bell to describe making a telephone call to them, on account of the sound a telephone makes.

g.     Synecdoche <sih-nek-duh-kee>

·      Another kind of figurative language is synecdoche, which is usually classed as a type of metonymy. For example, "The captain commands one hundred sails" is a synecdoche that uses "sails" to refer to ships—ships being the thing of which a sail is a part. A less common form of synecdoche occurs when a whole is used to refer to a part. An example of this is when the word "mortals" is used to mean humans—"mortals" technically includes all animals and plants (anything that dies), so using "mortals" to mean humans is a synecdoche that uses a category to stand in for one of its subsets.

6.  Metaphor and Language Change

·     The meaning of a word can be generated in two different ways: literal and figurative. The literalmeaning of a word tends to be quite stable. For example, the word book is agreed by speakers of English to refer to a book rather than a newspaper, journal or magazine. It is unlikely that we will wake up tomorrow and find the word book being used to refer to a car instead. However, figurative meaning is not always very stable, and there is a lot of scope for creativity. Figurative language use is one way in which the phenomenon of language change takes place, as words acquire metaphorical or metonymic meanings different from their original literal ones, and the new usages become absorbed into the language as commonplace.

a.  New Ideas or Areas of Knowledge

·     When we have a new object or concept, terms of reference are needed to discuss it. Completely new words are relatively rare; mostly words are borrowed from somewhere else. Thus, art movements are named metaphorically: the Fauvists (‘the wild beasts’), or the Cubists, for example. In these cases, a word has been transferred from one area to another, recycled in fact. In terms of new technologies, films were called the talkieswhen sound was introduced—a metonym, referring to an aspect of the film. The terms netand web, used to describe the revolutionary new systems of electronic communications, are metaphors to allow us to talk easily about transporting language and pictures through fibre-optic cables to anywhere in the world, immediately. They are a tiny part of a new vocabulary developed over the last few years to allow people to talk about inventions and experiences new to the world.

b.  Abstract Ideas made Concrete

·     Another reason for language change through metaphor and metonymy is that an area of shared experience may be relatively abstract, and in order to be able to talk about it, terms are drawn from another, more concrete, area. Newspapers are a good place to observe this happening: headlines frequently use metaphors as bold, simple and direct ways of conveying an abstract idea.

7.  Analysis of Meaning: Checklist

·     When you are exploring the meaning of a text, or part of a text, you may find the following suggestions helpful.

§  If you are not sure where to start on a text, you might try rewriting it. By comparing the differences between the original text and your rewritten version, you should be able to comment on the degree of formality or informality of the original (i.e. its register), and its effect on the reader. Rewriting a text is also a very good way to identify other significant features in the original.

§  What structural aspects of the meaning are being exploited, if any? For example, are overlaps in word meaning, or lexical gaps, being explored? Is the text using opposites or oxymorons, or hyponyms and superordinates in a playful or unusual way?

§  How significant is the context of the text to your understanding of it? Might readers with different background knowledge from yours form a different interpretation?

§  Does the literal meaning of a particular word or phrase apply here? If not, you are dealing with figurative language. Check for similes, metaphors, metonymy and synecdoche. What is the function of the figurative use of language? It might be to make the abstract seem concrete; to make the mysterious or frightening seem safe, ordinary and domestic, or to make the day-to-day seem wonderful and unusual.

END OF THE PART