We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2011
Conventional hyperbole
The spoken corpora used in this study (cf. Chapters 3, 4, 5) exhibit many highly familiar forms of overstatement. As many as two thirds or over three quarters of instances attested in speech are conventional as shown in Figure 4.1 on p. 101.1 These are forms which one has heard quite often, uses oneself or which are even listed in dictionaries. Some of such conventional single-word and phrasal examples are provided in (1):
(1) ages, all over the place, all the time, always, brilliant, constantly, dead, desperate, die, disaster, dreadful, end of the world, every(body/thing/where), eyes popping out, fabulous, freezing, ghastly, give sb. a heart attack, hate, hopeless, horrible, incredible, kill, like a beanpole, loads of, love, massive, miles away, million, never, nothing, starve, vandal etc.
The question of conventionality has already been touched on in Section 2.5, when the question of literal versus non-literal language was dealt with, and briefly in Section 4.2. For Ariel (2002), conventionality is one determinant of her linguistic type of minimal meaning, while for Giora (1997) it plays a role in establishing the degree of salience of a word or utterance. As in these cases conventionality as such is not being defined, it is necessary to go back one step further. A convention according to Lewis (1969: 78) is ‘an arbitrary regularity in the behaviour of members of a population in a recurrent situation’.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
