ALL OR NOTHING: A SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF HYPERBOLE

Abstract

[EN] This paper focuses on hyperbole, a long neglected form of non-literal language despite its pervasivenessin everyday speech. It addresses the production process of exaggeration, since a crucial limitation infigurative language theories is the production and usage of figures of speech, probably due to the intensiveresearch effort on their comprehension. The aim is to analyse hyperbole from a semantic perspective in orderto devise a semasiological taxonomy which enables us to understand the nature and uses of the trope. Inorder to analyse and classify hyperbolic items a corpus of naturally occurring conversations extracted fromthe British National Corpus was examined. The results suggest that the evaluative and quantitative dimensionsare key, defining features which often co-occur and should therefore be present in any definition of thisfigure of speech. A remarkable preference for negative affect, auxesis and absolute terms when engaging inhyperbole is also observed.