0 Every figure of speech can be divided into TWO parts

corresponding to what is literally said and what is

meant.
0 What is literally said, when it stands for something
else, may be termed the image. What is meant, what
the image stands for, may be called the subject.

0 Of the hundreds of figures of speech, four have been
singled out by the literary theorist Kenneth Burke as
figures of thought, as indispensible means to the
discovery and representation of reality.
0 The four master tropes are metaphor, metonymy,
synecdoche, and irony.

0 Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is usually credited with
being the first to identify metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche
and irony as the four basic tropes (to which all others are
reducible), although this distinction can be seen as having
its roots in the Rhetorica of Peter Ramus (1515-1572)
0 Each of these four tropes represents a different
relationship between the signifier and the signified;
Hayden White suggests that these relationships consist of:
resemblance (metaphor), adjacency (metonymy),
essentiality (synecdoche) and doubling (irony) (White
1979, 97).
METAPHOR
0 Metaphor is a device for seeing something in terms of
something else.
0 It brings out the thisness of a that, or the thatness of
a this (Burke 503).
0 Metaphor is the substitution of a word, image, or
idea for another, based on an implied
resemblance or analogy.

METAPHOR
0 A metaphor is an implied comparison as opposed to a
direct comparison in a simile.
METAPHOR
0 Shakespeare's sonnet 147 offers several examples of
metaphor in its opening lines:

0 My love is as a fever longing still, For that which
longer nurseth the disease; Feeding on that which doth
preserve the ill, The uncertain sickly appetite to
please. My reason, the physician to my
love, 5 Angry that his prescriptions are not
kept, Hath left me....

METAPHOR
Sonnet 18 William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more
lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the
darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too
short a date.

Metonymy
0 Metonymy is substitution of the name of an
attribute or an adjunct for the name of the thing
meant. To put it another way, it is substitution based
on contiguity or proximity.
METONYMY
0 effect for cause ('Don't get hot under the collar!' for 'Don't get
angry!');
0 object for user (or associated institution) ('the Crown' for the
monarchy, 'the stage' for the theatre and 'the press' for
journalists);
0 substance for form ('plastic' for 'credit card', 'lead' for 'bullet');
0 place for event: ('Chernobyl changed attitudes to nuclear power');
0 place for person ('No. 10' for the British prime minister);
0 place for institution ('Whitehall isn't saying anything');
0 institution for people ('The government is not backing down').
METONYMY
0 Roman Jakobson argues that whereas a metaphorical
term is connected with with that for which it is
substituted on the basis of similarity, metonymy is
based on contiguity or closeness
Synecdoche
0 Synechdoche is the substitution of part for whole or
whole for part.
0 When we speak of something as a "microcosm," we are
using a synecdoche, comparing a part to the whole.
0 At the same time, our synecdoche is a metaphor since we
are saying that the part resembles the whole, that the
microcosm is a blueprint of the cosmos or world.
0 On the other hand, if the synecdoche does not posit a
resemblance between part and whole, it must be a
metonymy since the part is an adjunct of the whole and
vice versa. A hand has something of the relation to the
sailor or farmworker it belongs to as a sword has to a
soldier or a pen to a writer who wields it .
IRONY
0 Irony is the substitution of a statement for its
opposite. Put another way, in irony what is said in
some way contradicts what is meant. The
contradiction need not be absolute. In irony, what is
said may be understood as true in one sense and false
in another.
IRONY
0 Example
IRONY
0 This first example of irony is called verbal irony because
the speaker intends a meaning at odds with what he says.
In novels or drama.
0 However, it is possible for the speaker to mean what he
says and yet his words are still ironic because the author
intends us to see that in some sense what he is saying is
untrue. We call this type of irony dramatic irony.
0 A third kind of irony may be termed irony of
circumstance since it involves a situation in which what
happens is exactly contrary to expectation. To call a fire in
a fire station ironic is to refer to this kind of irony.
IRONY
0 Irony is the most radical of the four main tropes. As with
metaphor, the signifier of the ironic sign seems to signify one
thing but we know from another signifier that it actually signifies
something very different. Where it means the opposite of what it
says (as it usually does) it is based on binary opposition.
0 Irony may thus reflect the opposite of the thoughts or feelings of
the speaker or writer (as when you say 'I love it' when you hate
it) or the opposite of the truth about external reality (as in
'There's a crowd here' when it's deserted). It can also be seen as
being based on substitution by dissimilarity or disjunction.
0 Whilst typically an ironic statement signifies the opposite of its
literal signification, such variations as understatement and
overstatement can also be regarded as ironic. At some point,
exaggeration may slide into irony.
IRONY
0 However, irony is often more difficult to identify. All of
the tropes involve the non-literal substitution of a new
signified for the usual one and comprehension
requires a distinction between what is said and what
is meant. Thus they are all, in a sense, double signs.
0 An ironic statement is not, of course, the same as a lie
since it is not intended to be taken as 'true'. Irony has
sometimes been referred to as 'double-coded'.