In synecdoche, the term for a part is used to refer to the whole. This limits and focuses the reference because the source domain is usually less rich in meaning than the target domain.
Consider the following figure: "All hands appeared on the deck. But the term "hands" is nevertheless metaphorical; it is not literally the hands of the sailors, but rather the sailors themselves to which it refers. The effect of this synecdochal reference is to focus on and magnify specific capacities in which the sailors serve.
They are on the deck to perform the activities that they perform with their hands work activities , rather than other activities which might be associated with sailors e.
To refer to them with the term "hands" rather than the explicit label "men" is to define, limit, and magnify their role in relation to the speaker. The tendency to think and speak in metaphors can be seen almost universally wherever and whenever language is used. The previous sentence is an example: we don't literally see language; we usually hear it.
Even when we do see language in written form, we don't "see" abstract phenomena like tendencies and metaphors; we intuit them. As that sentence was being written, the author was not consciously aware that he was using the word "see" metaphorically. It is common for metaphorical uses of words and phrases to become so ingrained in conventional speech that the original metaphorical derivation of their meaning is either ignored or completely forgotten.
Metaphors whose literal meanings are forgotten are "dead metaphors. It is in this process of metaphorical extension and the subsequent death of those metaphors which contributes to the constant transformation of language over time. But to understand how metaphor death contributes to language change demands a working definition of "meaning. Peripheral referents tend to accumulate to the word over time as its meaning is extended through metaphorical usage.
According to Turner and Fauconnier , when a word is used metaphorically, the source domain and the target domain are blended in the metaphor, and often new ideas arise within the resultant blend which cannot be found in either the source domain or the target domain. They offer the example of the "bullish" traders on Wall Street who, during a slump in the market, "[had] their horns pulled in" p.
In the blended metaphor, the normally aggressive traders have metaphorical horns which they can retract when the market is not favorable, an ability that real bulls do not have. For the present discussion of metaphor, it is important to understand that the resulting conceptual mix enriches the metaphor, which, in turn, enriches the referential scope of the source term if that metaphorical usage becomes conventional.
The metaphorical uses of a given term can become quite diverse, and this can lead to a remarkable variety of reflexes. This diversification of the reference of a given word can lead to the evolution of its meaning and the rise of new words from it; as a peripheral meaning of a given word becomes more widely used, it may eventually replace the original central meaning of the word, or it may assume a divergent pronunciation and become a distinct word.
When this occurs, the word has made a metaphorical shift in meaning. Ultimately, the original central meaning may be entirely forgotten.
An example of this is the word "engine," which comes from the Middle English ingen , meaning "inborn talent"; originally, the modern meaning of the word arose as a metaphorical reference to the things created by people with such talent.
As that meaning has come into general usage, the original meaning of the word has been lost. This is not to say that all metaphorical extension of a word will necessarily lead to the loss of the original meaning of that word; our language has many frozen metaphors which can easily be traced back to the original literal meanings. But those meanings are generally not conscious to the speaker who uses those terms. The derivation of terms for technological innovations, for instance, can often be deduced easily, although the use of those terms invokes little association with the objects to which those terms originally referred.
For example, we refer to the "face" and "hands" of a clock without feeling that we have personified the clock, although those terms were originally derived metaphorically from the personification of the clock. I am not referring here to a simple shift in the part of speech of a given word; for example, the noun "course" comes into English from the French cours , which in turn comes from the Latin noun cursus , which means both "course" and the action which is done on the course, "run.
Although the phonology of the word has changed from its Latin form, the word "course" is still the same thing that it was in Latin, "that which is run. Metaphorical shifting, by contrast, really amounts to a shifting of meaning from the original root to the new meanings of the reflexes.
Many words begin as metaphorically descriptive phrases which later collapse into single words. For example, the word "window" originally comes from the metaphorical description of that object as the " wind eye," although we no longer recognize the description as metaphorical, and , in fact, "eye" is not even recognizable anymore as a part of the word Neufeldt, , p.
This collapsing of phrases is also exemplified by the word "alarm. This is a subtle shift from description to metonymy, but it demonstrates how metaphors can increase in their "metaphorical" quality as they come into wider usage. The term "alarm" was originally a simple substitution of a descriptive prepositional phrase for the noun it described "call" , but as the phrase collapsed into a single word, it also made a semantic shift, becoming a verb.
The semantic shift from the original noun form has increased the difference of meaning between the original non-metaphorical sense of the phrase "to arms" and the current usage of the word "alarm.
A related phenomenon is the collapse of words and phrases into affixes. The Spanish adverbial suffix -mente is an example. In Latin, the language from which Spanish is descendent, there is a complex set of adverbial inflections denoting three types of adverbs, simple adverbs, comparative adverbs, and superlative adverbs Ashley and Lashbrook, , p.
But as the inflectional system was simplified in the Vulgar Latin language which eventually evolved into Spanish, this elaborate adverbial system fell out of use.
Thus, the word "alone" i. Most Spanish adverbs which use the -mente suffix can be demonstrated to be a composite of the Latin feminine ablative form of the adjective and -mente , the ablative case of mens "mind". A remarkably similar pattern can be seen in the English adverbial suffix "-ly.
But the adverbial declensions were not easily distinguishable from several of the adjectival declensions. For this reason, a new, clearly adverbial suffix was adopted, the adverb -lice , which meant "-like. As Old English became Modern English, both suffixes were simplified into the modern "-ly" suffix, which either converts a noun into an adjective, or converts an adjective into an adverb.
The difference between the phenomena that we see in the Spanish -mente and the English "-ly" is that where the former suffix is derived from a metaphorical construction, the latter is derived from a simile "gladly" literally means "glad-like". It makes him capable of doing the worst act. Dr Jekyll is stated to be middle-aged, but readers never learn his exact age. He is probably around fifty. Hyde, I will be Mr. Tony Cooper. Katy Jennison. Neither term is neutral.
To argue that the. Stan Brown. Saying "passed on" instead of dead, or "downsized" instead of fired. I was thinking about "downsized", and trying to think what the name for such a figure of speech is. No, that seems to be the opposite, making smaller instead of bigger. The Wikipedia article give "The Pond", much used in aue, as an example.
The example I was thinking of is terms like "the kettle's boiling" when you mean that the water in the kettle is boiling. When the firm one is working for downsizes or retrenches, then if one is laid off one says "I've been downsized" or "I've been retrenched".
Perhaps it is meiosis, applying the bigger term to the smaller. Neither of those is either a metaphor or a simile. They are both perfectly straightforward comparisons. Over Here we revere that document. Jennifer Murphy. Peter Moylan.
Forced abortions are often part of ethnic cleansing. He must have helped too.
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