Inverted epithets are based on the contradiction between the logical and the syntactical meanings.

an angel of a girl, a horse of a girl, a doll of a wife, a fool of a policeman, a hook of a nose, a vow of-a hat, a jewel of a film, a two-legged ski-rocket of a kid, a forty-pound skunk of a freckled wild cat

All inverted epithets are easily transformed into epithets of a more habitual structure. There is no logico-syntactical contradiction in them: “the giant of a man” = “a gigantic man”; “the prude of a woman” = “a prudish woman”. An inverted epithet should not be mixed up with an ordinary of-phrase: “the toy of the girl” and “the toy of a girl”; “the kitten of the woman” and “the kitten of a woman”.

Subjective qualification is the leading characteristic of an epithet. Such attributes as in “a round table”, “a tall man”, reflect objective features of epithets, but not their subjective qualification. They form the group of logical attributes.

Some more examples:

• Sitting by his side, I watched the peaceful dawn.

• My careful steps reached the attic.

• Her stifled laughter made everybody nervous.

• In the face of such a tragedy, his laughing happiness seemed queer.

• It was a sweet beginning to a tragic end.

The earth is crying-sweet,

And scattering-bright the air,

Eddying, dizzying, closing round,

With soft and drunken laughter..." - In 'Beauty and Beauty' by Rupert Brooke

"My restless blood now lies a-quiver,

Knowing that always, exquisitely,

This April twilight on the river

Stirs anguish in the heart of me." - In Blue Evening by Rupert Brooke

Hyperbole is a SD in which emphasis is achieved through evident exaggeration. Like epithet, it relies on the foregrounding of the emotive meaning:

“Here is the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand”. (W.Shakespear).

Hyperbole may have an ironical ring: “The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave promise of fair weather; winds blew for and against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits to preserve a system of which they were the center”. (Ch.Dickens).

Hyperbole is one of the most common expressive means of everyday speech: “I would gladly see this film a hundred times”. This is the case of a trite language hyperbole. Through long and repeated use, it has lost its originality and it is just a signal of the speaker’s emotion. Hyperbole may be the final effect of metaphor, simile, and irony: “He has the tread of a rhinoceros”. Hyperbole may be expressed by all notional parts of speech. Some words - “all”, “every”, “a million”, “a thousand”, “ever”, “never” - are used in hyperbole more often: “Calpurina was all angles and bones”.

Some more examples:

“I’ve told you a million times”

“It was so cold, I saw polar bears wearing jackets”

“She is so dumb, she thinks Taco Bell is a Mexican phone company

I am so hungry I could eat a horse.

I have a million things to do.

I had to walk 15 miles to school in the snow, uphill.

I had a ton of homework.

If I can’t buy that new game, I will die.

This car goes faster than the speed of light.

That joke is so old, the last time I heard it I was riding on a dinosaur.

Her brain is the size of a pea.

He is older than the hills.

Another example comes from "As I Walked Out One Evening" by W.H. Auden:

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet,

And the river jumps over the mountain

And the salmon sing in the street,

I'll love you till the ocean

Is folded and hung up to dry

And the seven stars go squawking

Like geese about the sky."

Following are some short hyperboles from literature:

The skin on her face was as thin and drawn as tight as the skin of onion and her eyes were gray and sharp like the points of two picks.

It was not a mere man he was holding, but a giant; or a block of granite.

People moved slowly then. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.

Hyperbole is aimed at exaggerating of quantity or quality. When it is directed the opposite way, we deal with understatement.

Understatement means representing things as less, or less strongly, than may be done truthfully. It is considered by many as an essential attribute of English humour: “I am rather annoyed” = “I am infuriated”; “The wind is rather strong” = “There is a gale blowing outside”. These examples are typical of British polite speech.

"A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty." (Mark Twain)

"I have to have this operation. It isn't very serious. I have this tiny little tumor on the brain." (Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye, by J. D. Salinger)

"Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse." (Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 1704)

"The grave's a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace." (Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress")

"I am just going outside and may be some time." (Captain Lawrence Oates, Antarctic explorer, before walking out into a blizzard to face certain death, 1912)

Oxymoron is a SD which consists in the use of an epithet or attributive phrase in contradiction to the noun which it denotes. The syntactic and semantic structures come to clashes. Oxymoron is a combination of two semantically contradictory notions. The speaker’s (writer’s) subjective view is expressed through the members of the word combination:

“Loving hate! Serious vanity!”;

“His humble ambition, proud humility

His jarring concord and his discord dulcet”.

(W.Shakespear).

Originality and specificity of oxymoron becomes especially evident in non-attributive structures. They are also used to express semantic contradiction: “the streets damaged by improvement”; “silence was louder than the thunder”.