Hyperbolic language and its relation to metaphor and irony

Abstract

Hyperbolic use of language is very frequent but has seldom been thought worthy of serious analytical attention. Hyperbole is usually treated as a minor trope which belongs with one or the other of the two dominant figurative uses of language, metaphor and irony. In this paper, we examine the range of ways in which hyperbole is manifest, in both its 'pure' uses and its prevalent co-occurrences with other tropes.We conclude that it does not align closely with either metaphor or irony but is a distinctive figure of speech in its own right, characterized by the blatant exaggeration of a relevant scalar property for the purpose of expressing an evaluation of a state of affairs. The relative simplicity of hyperbole enables its exploitation of a range of independent mechanisms of non-literal linguistic communication including loose use, metaphor, simile, and expressions of ironical and other attitudes.Keywords: hyperbole, metaphor, irony, quantitative shift, qualitative shift, evaluative component 3 hyperbole and metaphor are essentially continuous; that is, they are 'not genuinely distinct categories, at least from descriptive, psycholinguistic, or pragmatic points of view' (2008: 95). Irony, by contrast, works quite differently on this account: it is treated as an echoic use of language, and hence as essentially metarepresentational in a way that metaphor and hyperbole are not (Wilson and Sperber 1992, 2012;Wilson 2013).Clearly, at least one of these views cannot be right. So the question presses: where does hyperbole belongwith metaphor or with irony (or with neither)? We shall use this 'metaphor or irony?' question to structure our investigation of hyperbole, but our ultimate conclusion will be that, while the reasoning of each camp provides important insights which any complete account must accommodate, hyperbolic language use is a distinctive phenomenon in its own right and one that combines in interesting ways with a range of other figures of speech. 2The rest of the paper is structured as follows. In section 2, we start with some initial (pre-theoretical) observations about hyperbole and provide some relatively clear examples to work with, including cases that involve hyperbole co-occurring with other figures; in section 3, we set out some necessary background concerning the distinction between metaphor and irony. Then, in sections 4 and 5, we assess the lines of thought that have led some theorists to align hyperbole with irony and others to align it with metaphor, extracting the key insights of these opposing positions. Finally, in section 6, we draw together the conclusions of the earlier sections and argue that there are reasons to think that hyperbole is neither like metaphor nor like irony, but that it functions in a distinctive way that exploits a range of kinds of language use (loose uses, comparisons, categorizations, and expressions of ironical and other kinds of attitude). 2 We want to emphasise from the outset that the uses of language labeled by these terms -'hyperbole', 'metaphor', irony', 'metony...

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