ABSTRACT |
This paper focuses on hipérbole, a long neglected trope despite its
ubiquity in everyday speech. It addresses the production process of
exageration since a crucial limitation in figurative language theories
is the production and usage of figures of speech. The aim is to show
that the taxonomy of illocutionary acts can serve as a powerful
analytical tool for arriving at a classification of the different
actions or functions this figure may fulfil in discourse. In order to
determine what kind of speech acts can be exaggerated and the way this
trope distributes over the different illocutionary forces, 310
overstated utterances from naturally-occurring spoken texts extracted
from the British Nacional Corpus (BNC) were examined. The results
suggest that although the study of hyperbole has traditionally been
relagated to the representative class, other illocutionary forces can be
exaggerated too. Apart from assertives, this figure features in
directives, commissives and expressives, showing thus that the theory
of speech acts provides an optimal framework for the description of the
trope. However, hyperbolic manifestations of speech acts are not equally
distributed over the different illocutionary forces. The trope manifests
itself predominantly in the performance of representatives, which is
implicitly corroborated by the literature on the subject, since the
majority of figurative language researchers limit themselves –usually
without explicit motivation -to the análisis of assertions.
Haveratke 1990:89.
|
