ciated objects the more striking and unexpected and expressive is the metaphor.

e.g. Through the open window the dust danced and was golden.

His words were coming so fast; they were leap-frogging themselves. (R. Chandler)

Those which are commonly used in speech and are sometimes fixed in the dictionaries as expressive means of language are trite metaphors or dead metaphors

e. g. a flight of fancy, floods of tears. to fly into a passion, to jump to conclusion, to fall in love.

Trite metaphors are sometimes injected with new vigour, their primary meaning is re-established alongside the new derivative meaning. This is done by supplying the central image created by the metaphor with additional words bearing some reference to the main word.

e. g. Mr. Pickwick bottled up his vengeance and corked it down. (Ch. Dickens)

The verb "to bottle up" is explained as "to keep in check, to conceal, to restrain, to repress". So the metaphor can be hardly felt. But it is revived by the direct meaning of the verb "to cork down". Such metaphors are called sustained or prolonged.

Functions and stylistic effects:

·to carry out the aesthetic function (it appeals to imagination rather than gives information);

·to create imagery;

·to make the author’s idea more exact, definite and transparent;

·to reveal the author’s emotional attitude towards what he describes.

There are several structural varieties of metaphors – personification, allusion, allegory, metaphorical epithet.

2. Personification is a transfer of features and characteristics of a person to a thing (very often nature); prescribing to a phenomenon qualities, feelings and thoughts of a human being.

e.g. She had been asleep, always, and now life was thundering imperatively at all her doors. (J. London)

Slowly, silently, now the moon walks the night in her silvery shoon (shoes) (de la Mare)

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster.

It is realised only within a certain context and is used only in emotive

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prose/fiction.

Functions and stylistic effects:

·to give vivid characteristics to a phenomenon;

·to create the imagery;

·to enhance the expressiveness of the text.

3.Allusion – is a brief reference to some literary or historical event or character commonly known. The speaker (writer) is not explicit about what he means: he merely mentions some detail of what he thinks analogous in fiction or history to the topic discussed

e.g. "'Pie in the sky' for Railmen" means nothing but promises (a line from the well-known workers' song: "You'll get pie in the sky when you die").

e.g. No little Grandgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow with the crumpled horn that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow swallowed Tom Thumb; it had never heard of those celebrities (Dickens, Hard Times). The meaning that can be derived from the two allusions, one to the nursery rhyme "The House that Jack build" and the other to the old tale "The history of Tom Thumb".

4.Allegory is the expression of an abstract idea through some exact image or object. It is realised within the frames of the whole text.

It may be presented by:

·a proverb/saying: e.g. It’s time to turn ploughs into swords. All is not gold that glitters. Still waters run deep.

·fable

·literary fiction

Some genres of literature are fully based on allegory: fables, fairy tales. Functions and stylistic effects:

·to stress the logical meaning of speech by adding to it some emotive colouring;

·to enhance the poetic expressiveness of the text.

5.Metonymy is based on a different type of relation between the dictionary and contextual meanings, a relation based not on affinity, but on some kind of association connecting the two concepts which these meanings represent, on proximity.

Proximity may be revealed:

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