18. Quasi- identity (квазитождество).

It’s a case of ‘active identification’.

Your neighbor is an ass.

Jane is a real angel.

Traditionally qualified as examples of metaphors, although only words ass and angel are used metaphorically. Taken as a whole, the two utterances differ greatly from similes. The utterances are not metaphors in the strict sense of the tem: the ‘real’ names of objects precede the figurative ones, and the idea of comparison is quite obvious. On the other hand, they lack what is indispensable for a simile – formal signals of comparison.

Rhematic part of the utterance is metonymy:

• “That old duffer? He’s oil, I guess.” (в нефтяном бизнесе)

• - Caracas is in Venezuela, of course.

- What’s it like?

- Why, it’s principally earthquakes and Negroes and monkeys and malarian fever and volcanoes.

Some of quasi-identities manifest special expressive force chiefly when the usual topic – comment positions change places: the metaphoric name appears in the text the 1^st, the direct denomination following it.

“The machine sitting at the desk was no longer a man: it was a busy New York Broker.”

“… she short at me with two blue pellets which served her as eyes.”

“Money is time, and writing an entertainment can bring a novelist a very sweet chunk of it”

19. Repetition of synonyms.

On the whole synonyms are used in actual texts for 2 different reasons:

1. to avoid repetition.

“The little boy was crying. It was child’s usual time for going to bad but no one paid attention to the kid.” – an example of synonymic replacers (заменители)/variations, when the communicator intentionally ignores any differentiation of meaning in the synonyms.

2. to provide additional shades of the meaning intended.

“Dear Paul, it’s very weak and silly of me, I know, to be so trembly and shaky from head to foot.” – an example of synonymic specifiers (уточнители): the speaker is anxious to make more adequate description of his mental and physical state; two more or less synonymous adjectives are supposed to be stronger than one.

Excessive repetition of the same words makes the style poor – in a way it betrays the poverty of one’s vocabulary.

“Piggy’s an awful swell; and he always takes a girl to swell places.<…> where they have swell music and you see a lot of swells…”

Interchange of the same thing in speech is called ‘elegant variation’:

• “He brought home numberless prizes. He told his mother countless stories every night about school companions.”

Situational (contextual) synonyms – co-referential units, it’s not synonyms that replace one another but words with essentially different meanings.

The same person can be referred to as neighbour, student, brother, Richard, he etc.

• “She told his names to the trees. She whispered it to the flowers. She breathed it to the birds.”

• I feel, I’m aware, I must not forget, I well know.

Both synonymous replacers and situational synonyms are usually placed at some distance from one another: they do not immediately follow one another, mostly recurring in adjacent (смежный, соседний) sentences or clauses.

Elegant variation of the names (or synonymic variation) renders the idea of equality, identity to a fuller extent.