Hyperbole

Hyperbole and understatement

Hyperbole is a lexical stylistic device in which emphasis is achieved through deliberate exaggeration. This stylistic device based on the interaction between the logical and emotive meanings of a word. It is a deliberate over statement. Both the writer and the reader (or the speaker and the listener) are fully aware of the deliberateness of the exaggeration. The use of hyperbole shows the overflow of emotions in the speaker, and the listener is carried away by the flood.

Very often the hyperbole is used to create humorous or satirical effect and so to express the author’s attitude towards the described.

Through continuous usage hyperbole may lose its originality and become trite.

Hyperbole is one of the common expressive means of our everyday speech (e.g. “I have told it to you a thousand times”). Due to long and repeated use hyperboles have lost their originality.

Hyperbole can be expressed by all notional parts of speech .

It is important that both communicants should clearly perceive that the exaggeration serves not to denote actual quality or quantity but signals the emotional background of the utterance. If this reciprocal understanding is absent, hyperbole turns into a mere lie.

Hyperbole is aimed at exaggerating quantity or quality. When it is directed the opposite way, when the size, shape, dimensions, characteristic features of the object are not overrated, but intentionally underrated, we deal with understatement. Understatement is a kind of hyperbole with the same inner mechanism of the device which is, too, based on the interaction between the logical and emotive meaning and shows the overflow of the speaker’s sentiments.

The specific feature of this kind of hyperbole is the direction of the exaggeration: hyperbole enlarges, while understatement deliberately diminishes the described object, phenomenon, etc.

e.g. “The little woman, for she was of pocket size, crossed her hands solemnly on her middle.”

English is well known for its preference for understatement in everyday speech. “I am rather annoyed” instead of “I’m infuriated’, “The wind is rather strong” instead of “There’s a gale blowing outside” are typical of British polite speech, but are less characteristic of American English

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Both inversion and repetition labeled as SYNTACTICAL STYLISTIC DEVICES.

Inversion

The violation of the traditional word order of the sentence (subject-predicate-object-adverbial modifiers) which does not alter the meaning of the sentence only giving it an additional emotional coloring is called stylistic inversion.

Stylistic inversion may be of various types:

1) the predicate may precede the subject of the sentence;

2) the object is placed before the predicate;

3) the attribute stands after the word it modifies (the post-position of an attribute).

Stylistic inversion is used to single out some parts of the sentence and sometimes to heighten the emotional tension.

e.g. Then he said: “You think it’s so? She was mixed up in this lousy business?”