Descriptive Discourse: Techniques and Stylistics

The Supportive Role of Descriptive Discourse

Although descriptive discourse has a clear-cut identity as a genuine modality of discourse, unmistakably differentiated from other modalities (narration, exposition, etc.), it rarely appears by itself in a literary passage. Most of the time, due to its ornamental character, it acts in supportive functions as an auxiliary device of narrative discourse (which is generally the emperor of the literary passage), or of persuasive discourse, to contribute to move others to do or agree on something. Occasionally, we can find passages with a balance between description and narration. Very seldom is it the other way around; that is, descriptive discourse working for its own sake.

Objective and Subjective Description

Description can be objective and subjective. Objective description, also called technical description, is the tool of the architect, the scientist, the lawyer, the scholar, or the technician when they write their reports, essays, or chronicles. Accuracy is the main goal, as it attempts to faithfully represent the things being described. It tries to offer a systematic, accurate, almost photographic depiction of the object described by giving generalized information containing itemized lists of facts, qualities, or characteristics. However, some scholars believe objective descriptions in literary passages are not very abundant. They believe there is no such thing as a totally objective description, as we are all affected by external and internal factors that influence our attention. Therefore, our perception of the world can never be dispassionate or impartial. Objective descriptions are better analyzed as a variety of expository discourse rather than descriptive discourse. An objective description could, at best, be conceived as an account of something that refuses to manifest any personal reaction or assessment.

One genuine trait of subjective description is the tension between the representational and the aesthetic demands of description that stirs our imaginations. Consequently, the writer’s (and the reader’s) sensations and emotions are mixed up with the perception of facts. This type of description, which draws both on our power of observation and on our wealth of impressions, is most attractive and fascinating when it is full of life, strength, and freshness—that is, when it possesses vividness. Therefore, accuracy and vividness are respectively the goals of objective and subjective descriptions: the faithful representation of facts, on the one hand, and the production of an emotional response, on the other, in the reader’s mind.

Vividness in Description

The term vividness is a rather subjective term that refers to the emotions aroused in the reader’s mind, including the color, vigor, brightness, liveliness, charm—in sum, the pleasure and the anguish produced by the mood, the characters, and the situation where actions take place. Vividness aims at making the reader experience the scenes as a privileged observer; that is, vividness lets the reader feel all the sensual impressions and vital energy conveyed by the words of the writer.

The attainment of vividness is, therefore, the main goal of subjective description. The question is how vivid language can be produced. There are several answers to this question. Most systematic theorizing about vivid descriptions agrees that vividness can be achieved by means of:

• a) A fascinating appeal to the senses.
• b) An appropriate use of words.
• c) A balanced application of stylistic devices, including figures of speech.

Appeal to the Senses: Intersensory Transfer

Synaesthesia is one of the most powerful linguistic devices that a descriptive text can use to reach full vividness. The expressive power of synaesthesia is so strong that it can generate astounding imaginative effects and evoke striking images. For example, in the sentence, He caught another perfume, something raw and coarse, the adjectives raw and coarse, which are usually applied to sensations perceived in solid objects or bodies, are here used to describe perfumes, which are ethereal and vaporous.

Visual Experience: Landscapes and Portraits

Descriptive discourse has already been divided into objective and subjective. Subjective discourse could also be classified according to the communicative channel that is activated (visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, etc.). We could talk of auditory descriptive discourse, olfactory descriptive discourse, etc. However, as has already been said, of all of these senses, the visual channel has been the most privileged, “for it is the sense of sight that is most appealed to, although it is nevertheless possible for the rest of the senses and also most of all the mind itself to be affected” (Cicero, De partitione oratoria, vi.20). Most of the attempts made in classical Rhetoric (Fontanier, 1821/1977) to classify descriptive discourse have been performed according to the object it visually represents. These are the main classes:

a) Topographies represent a place, a house, a garden, a village, a mountain, a valley, a forest, a town, a monument, a church, etc., displaying a spatial relation among objects themselves with established hierarchies. It must be remembered, however, that they can also be metaphors for the mood or the characters; for example, the obsession with order in Robinson Crusoe’s cave is a reflection of his own personality:

b) Chronologies, or the representation of an age or a period of time where important events took place.

c) Prosopographies, which consist of the fictional or real representation of the physical aspects of a person. The passage from Joyce’s A Portrait is a classical example of prosopography: her long slender legs, her thighs, her bosom, her skirt, her long fair hair, etc.

d) Etopeias, or the representation of moral qualities (habits, vices and virtues, etc.).

e) Portraits, which combine the components of prosopographies and etopeias.

Dominant Impression and Consistent Perspective

The failure or success of descriptive discourse depends upon its capacity to activate the reader’s visual sense. To evoke an image of the setting in the reader’s mind, this discourse focuses the reader’s attention first on the prominent features that would strike an actual observer’s attention: there is always a “salient peculiarity,” an exotic feature, a quaint trait, or singular idea that catches the observer’s eye; this salient peculiarity will provide the main or dominant impression around which all the details will cluster.

But prominent features do not always coincide with dominant impressions. Prominent features usually catch our attention, although they are not always the centers around which, or upon which, we build up the dominant impression. Occasionally, some relevant external factors, such as size, color, contrast, symmetry, etc., will not be distinguished by our perceptive mechanisms. These mechanisms, which are conditioned by our education, desires, habits, sense of curiosity, familiarity with the object perceived, etc., will let us inevitably distinguish items that other people may not notice and will, on the other hand, camouflage details that can be most striking to others. Meaningless, unnoticed details may sporadically become the basic support of the dominant impression. This is why it is interesting to note that prominent features do not always coincide with dominant impressions.

Occasionally, there is not one prominent characteristic, but a series of contiguous images, as in Dickens’ Bleak House. This technique, called ‘verbal montage’ by David Lodge (1979: 100-1), alludes to the film technique of montage formed by a rapid sequence of juxtaposed shots: a panorama of London, the Lord Chancellor in his hall (‘special effects’ of a Megalosaurus), smoke lowering down from chimneys, dogs and horses splashed with mud, pedestrians colliding on a street corner.

The object of this technique, which is the creation of an impression of simultaneous features, is easily attained because, lexically, the sentences consist of a catalogue of visual descriptive lexical items (mud, smoke, dogs, horses, umbrellas) and, syntactically, all the structures are uniform, they have no finite verbs (creating an impression of synchrony) and there is a ‘cutting’ transition between sentences.

On the other hand, good descriptions should let the reader feel the position where he stands to look, that is, the place from which he will carry out the careful and detailed visual examination or exploration of the scene or object. This requirement of good descriptions is called the consistent perspective. The reader should get a clear impression of where he stands to perceive the visual experience with thorough words, which means that he cannot be provided with more information or details than those that he would have perceived from the established point of view or perspective; in this sense, the scene is restricted to the space where the observer is directing his attention.

This limitation of space does not affect at all the relationships and links that the writer perceives between the traits and items contained in that space. But ‘consistent’ does not mean immobile, as the consistent perspective can be stationary or dynamic. In James Joyce’s A Portrait, the description is carried out from a stationary perspective, whereas in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the point of view is dynamic.

Appropriate Use of Words

The appeal to the senses might be ineffective, and therefore fail to reach its goal, if it is not transported in the proper language. This appropriate use of words is the second ingredient of vividness. That is why it is necessary to make use of the suitable linguistic devices that prompt the longed-for meaningful vividness, especially in the visualization of a scene or of its characters.

The nominal group consists of three main linguistic layers or ingredients: lexis, syntax, and phonology. Although the three constituents are important, lexis, that is, words, seems to be the most privileged of this modality of discourse. Words are ready-made semantic units identifying unambiguously the objects called to the observer’s attention. But there are other semantic units that are very successful as linguistic depictors. As Holden has pointed out (1980: 99), referring to John Ashbery’s “These Lacustrine Cities”, on occasions, sentences make assertions like the assertions of brushstrokes:

In these cases, sentences, not words, are to be considered analogous to brushstrokes or to any discrete gesture recorded in paint on a canvas.

Semantics examines and describes the structural (also called cognitive or denotative) meaning of linguistic units (words, nominal groups, sentences, etc.). A semantic analysis of the linguistic units used in descriptive discourse will doubtlessly offer us good clues for a deeper understanding and a better grasping of the general meaning of a text.

As descriptive discourse abounds in details and traits of size, distance, color, intensity, density, order, quantity, quality, etc., nouns and adjectives (and also verbs and adverbs) describing a particular voice or sound, a unique smell, or a specific haze are usually abundant.

Words can be classified according to several criteria, namely, their origin (Latin-root words, Anglo-Saxon words, etc.), their register or degree of formality (formal words, colloquial words, vulgar words, etc.), their formation (simple, derived, compound), their defining power (transparent and opaque), etc.

Nouns can also be abstract and concrete. Concrete nouns specifying the above-mentioned peculiarities and traits are usually bountiful in descriptive discourse, and abstract nouns are no less abundant. To heighten descriptive vividness, there is a tendency to create captivating images by turning one of the most striking (semantic) features of the qualifying attributes into abstract nouns through the process called ‘reification’. For example, “The pallor of her bare arm” instead of “Her pale bare arm”.

Adjectives can be condensed and expanded; condensed adjectives usually perform an attributive function. In these cases, they precede the noun head of the nominal group following this order: epithet or characteristic, temperature, form, size, age, color, provenance, and attributive noun precedence. However, attributive adjectives can also go behind their noun heads.

This examination of words and sentences gives us hints and suggestions about structural or denotative meaning, which can be useful although incomplete, as there are many other meaningful layers in a word.

Meaning is probably the most elusive and slippery part of linguistic analysis and description. Most words and sentences denote and connote at the same time, and any grouping, arrangement, or repetition of linguistic units is always meaningful, etc. All these phenomena and some other layers of meaning can be better analyzed in the province of stylistics.

Since there are so many ingredients in the meaning of an utterance, in chapter two, meaning was conceived as an endless source of senses, which can be arranged under three headings: (a) literal meaning, (b) textual meaning, and (c) stylistic meaning. Stylistics examines the techniques used to exploit the descriptive potential of language. For this purpose, three branches of stylistic meaning are being considered here:

• a) Meaning under stylistics of expressivity.
• b) Meaning under stylistics of choice.
• c) Meaning under stylistics of deviation.

As our main aim is to explore the descriptive techniques, that is, the linguistic devices (strategies and techniques) used by descriptive discourse to attain the goal of letting the reader experience the vividness of the text, we will try to examine as many of the meaningful features as possible within the framework of stylistics.

The dichotomy denotation/connotation has been borrowed from logicians. Denotative language is more intellectual or cognitive and general, whereas connotative language is usually more affective and individual. The former is proper scientific language and the latter reveals an aesthetic appreciation. We shall distinguish three trends in connotation:

Connotation of the ‘langue’

Connotation of the ‘langue’ refers to stable features.

a) Words can be euphoric and dysphoric.

Probably the first connotation that we perceive when we approach a text is the connotation of “something pleasurable” or “something unpleasurable”. Words that convey positive, optimistic, pleasurable connotations are called euphoric. The passage on page ? from The Portrait is completely euphoric, as words such as white, slate-blue, and ivory create a positive atmosphere.

On the other hand, The Secret Agent and Bleak House offer many examples of dysphoric vocabulary:

On one side the low brick houses had in their dusty windows the sightless moribund look of uncurable decay; empty shells awaiting demolition.

Sometimes these dysphoric or negative qualities are introduced by means of morphosyntactic devices, such as the negative expression in the first part of the passage from For Whom the Bell Tolls, as unseen, unnoticed, not, no other thing, no other now, no now but now, not anything else, not why not every why, no other one, etc.

b) Some words have been hypostasized, that is, impersonated or embodied into a symbol (e.g. fire stands for ‘passion’ or ‘love’; water for ‘purity’ or ‘life’, etc.).

Connotation of the ‘parole’

It is formed by occasional features; e.g. beady means “small, round and bright”, but it may connote ‘hostility’ in beady eyes.

Cultural Connotations

The words “drunk” or “ambitious” can carry positive connotations in English (He is an ambitious young man) whereas in Spanish they will probably convey negative connotations.

Descriptive Techniques (II): Stylistics of Choice

Within this perspective of stylistics of choice, a style is a system of coherent ways or patterns of doing things. The job of this stylistics is to discover the many recurrent linguistics devices that an author may use to create or suggest shades or nuances of meaning.

Detailed Accounts in Descriptive Discourse

We have already mentioned the wealth of vivid description. This wealth abounds in detailed assertions, most of them alluding to traits of size, distance, color, intensity, density, order, quantity, quality, etc., which are selected by the writer not only to give vividness to the passage but to give the impression of truth, that is, to give a plausible picture of the scene, as if the reader were an actual eyewitness of it.

Contrast as a Descriptive Technique

Humans make use of two large epistemological strategies to understand reality: identification (synonymy, comparison, simile, metaphor), and contrast (antonymy, oxymoron, antithesis, paradox), i.e. to seek something similar or for its contrary.

Thematic Preferences

To create certain stylistic effects, some authors, in their description, resort to some key words that become the center of their thematic preferences. In the first pages of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, there are three lexical items, air, wave, and solemnity, that are essential for the creation of a singular setting. Air is the first lexeme:

The word air connotes nature and light. As nature, it is the setting for the constant allusions to trees, branches, buds, and flowers, with which, in all their diverse classes and species, the text is inundated. In its connotation of light (sunlight, page 17, daylight, page 23), it spans the gamut of colors incessantly kept in view, from white to black, passing through the greys, browns, duns and hazels, and producing the most unexpected combinations:

But, in addition, the important point about wave is its connotation. Wave suggests something ephemeral, something which is but which is beginning to cease to exist.

Semic Loads

The author uses in the same nominal groups or sentences several semic features to attain a special effect (tension, for example):

With a hoarse cry of pain and anger (noise, pain, anger)

He shrieked with sudden violence (noise, suddenness, violence)

Articulators of Experience

In some descriptive paragraphs, there are some words, repeated over and over again throughout the text, that a writer chooses as the axis of the whole expression. For example, sense, air, load, etc.

Sense: his sense of defeat, his sense of liberation, his glorious sense of having won, a suffocating sense of having won, etc.

Air: with the air of one striving, that air of positive calm, a ludicrous air of injured, etc.

Load: the crushing load of his ingrained conventionality, insufferable load of presuppositions and reflexes, etc.

The Presentation of Experience

To quantify or characterize particular aspects of experience, some nouns, that may be preceded by one or more adjectives, act as the ‘presenters’ or introducers of that experience. Unlike articulators, these “presenters” usually add a metaphorical nuance to the whole expression and offer the reader an image that, to a certain extent, evaluates the whole experience.

When we read the jungle of the nineteen-fifties, the ‘presentator’ jungle gives us a negative or dysphoric evaluation of the nineteen-fifties as “something confusingly complicated”.

Repetition as Stylistics of Choice

Stylistic Repetition

We have already pointed out the importance that repetition has in discourse (cf. 1 and 2). Repetition is essential for cohesion and coherence, and repetition of features is necessary so that readers or receivers of a message can foreground some possible meanings and background others. Recurrent features also contribute to vividness.

Stylistic repetition produces aesthetic functions. Lotman has clearly said that the aesthetic elements of a text cannot be restricted to the field of images (Lausberg, H., 1976), as all the arrangements in a text are meaningful (Lotman, J. et al., 1977: 125-35). This stylistic repetition can be perceived in the presence of partial synonyms. For example, in John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, we can feel the sensation of ‘quietness’ thanks to the presence of partial synonyms like: ‘bride of quietness‘, ‘foster child of silence‘, ‘peaceful citadel’, ‘will silent be?’, ‘why art thou desolate?‘ And the same sensation can be felt in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway due to the repetition in the same passage of calm, still, hush, silence, loneliness, solemn, etc.

This repetition does not exclusively refer to lexical units; it can also affect smaller semantic units like features or semic units. In the following passage, the semic feature ‘multitude’ is present in many words although it is only obvious in one as a lexical unit:

He became disagreeably affected by the sight of the roadway thronged with vehicles and of the pavement crowded with men and women. He was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an immense multitude.

But what is stylistic repetition? In our opinion, nobody has expressed it more clearly than Jakobson in his famous dictum “The set towards the message” (Jakobson, R., 1983: 41-2), that is, the group or set of units of a paradigm spread out over the horizontal line of the syntagm. In this way, no textual repetition will be considered as random or purposeless, that is, without a definite plan or pattern.

The study of systematic repetition, in the field of figures of speech, has been the concern of classical rhetoric. For example, in pleonasms like He’s standing on his own two feet, epithets like He’s a stupid idiot, tautologies like Children will be children, or in metaboles or accumulations of synonyms like fabulous, fantastic, great! Since the works of Greek and Roman scholars, there has been, as Todorov has put it, “a constant obsession for new arrangements and classifications”. Figures of speech should be taken as open classes that can become enriched with new linguistic designs created by human wit and inspiration. In our opinion, the classification carried out by Dubois and the group µ in Rhétorique de la poesie is full of freshness and life, and Leech’s “Verbal repetition” contained in A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry is very clear and useful.

But our area of concern is non-systematic repetitions used by writers to create “impressions” about characters, plots, topics, etc. We have divided non-systematic repetitions into three groups:

• a) Isophony or phonological repetition.
• b) Isotaxy or syntactic repetition.
• c) Isosemy or semic repetition.

Isophonic Repetition

Isophonic repetition, for example in Her long slender bare legs, formed by the repetition of segmental and non-segmental phonemes produces, at least, three effects: symphonic or orchestral, affective and iconic.

Isotaxic Repetition

Isotaxic repetition can be analyzed in the study done by Dámaso Alonso (1961: 1-47) about parallelistic and correlative repetition. Parallelistic repetition corresponds to normal utterances (A, B, C):

Isosemic Repetition: Stylistic Themes

In music, a theme is a melody that forms the basis of a set of variations. Likewise, in a text, a stylistic theme is a recurrent idea that manifests itself repeatedly in the text in a variety of ways. It need not be the main topic or subtopic of the text; it is usually an ancillary concept that contributes to reinforcing the ideas expressed in the topic or subtopics. For example, in the passage from A Portrait, there are two stylistic themes ‘solitude’ and ‘silence’ that are not the main topic of the passage.

In short, repetition is a very powerful linguistic device that can bring about many effects: orchestral, ornamental, emphasizing, emotional, intensifying, playful, ironical, etc.

Descriptive Techniques (III): Stylistics of Deviation

Stylistics of deviation tackles the departures from the norms that we expect to find at various places in the linguistic chain, where these norms are built into our memory on the basis of our experience with the language (Levin, S. R., 1963: 276-90). The Chomskyan dichotomy grammaticality/acceptability has provided sufficient theoretical inspiration for the analysis of diversion from the norm in (literary) discourse. In this way, a third form of stylistics branches out, ‘stylistics of deviation’, which encompasses the other two (stylistics of choice and stylistics of connotation) to constitute a three-tier stylistics.

One linguistic item can show deviation in respect to the text in which it appears, or in relation to language as a system. For example, the use of legal terms in an ordinary description of a house may mean deviation in relation to the text; the use of legal language in that context is not incorrect but it is very improbable. The sentence The rock laughed shows a deviation in relation to the language; it is incorrect or unacceptable in the first instance, although it may be very correct from a metaphorical point of view, as it produces stylistic effects.

The stylistic effects that the deviation of linguistic items produce is due to their low predictability in a specific context, that is, the probability of emerging in the contexts where they actually appear is zero or near-zero. In this case, we say that they are unpredictable. The notion of predictability is based on expectations, which are in turn based on experience. This experience then results in the establishment of certain implicit models, patterns, norms, or some similar standard, and a deviation is then interpretable against that background. As J. P. Thorne (1970: 194) has stated “the excitement I receive in reading a sentence like He danced his did comes from its immediate realization that it breaks the rules of Standard English. But its total effect is controlled by the fact that the kind of irregularity it exhibits is regular in the context of the poem”. In the sentences of the three verses that follow analyzed by Samuel Levin (1963:281), the native speaker might intuitively detect clear deviations:

Ezra Pound’s deviation is the most extreme of the three, being more radical than that of Thomas, while Crane’s deviation is the smallest of them all. In other words, to an educated native speaker, Pound’s syntactic order is totally unacceptable. Thomas incorrectly uses a transitive verb and Crane combines a series of incongruous words. Pound’s sentence breaks the rule S ──’ NG + VG (Adv), which could also be re-written as S ──’ VG (Adv) + NG, but this rule could give rise to such clauses as works in the factory John, which is obviously unacceptable. In the second sentence, the formalized morphosyntactical rule would be obstructed by using the intransitive ‘marvel’ as a transitive. The error in the third sentence is a lexicological one to the effect that ‘to strangle this … moonlight’ suffers from incoherence in the rules of subcategorization, so that ‘to strangle’ requires a [+human] object.

Most of these deviations, that take place in literary texts, have been classified as figures of speech from ancient times to the present. Conceptually, a figure of speech is a word or group of words used by literary writers to create, to strengthen, and to embellish the ornamental idiosyncrasy of descriptive discourse or to give more force or relevance to the expression of an idea or feeling. To achieve the strength of these figures of speech, the user makes a conscious or unconscious deviation from the literal sense of a word or expression. In the previous sentences, the deviations that a native speaker of English will have probably detected without much toil, have been due to the clash between the semantic features of the lexical items.

However, not all the figures of speech arise from a semantic clash between the semantic features of the lexical units. As we have already seen, some figures of speech like the pleonasm (He’s standing on his own two feet), the epithet (He’s a stupid idiot), the tautology (Children will be children), the metabole (Fabulous, fantastic, great!) and others come into existence because of the repetition of a semantic feature. Here is a list of the most common figures of speech not based on repetition.

Personification

Probably one of the most common conscious or unconscious deviation from the strict literal sense of a single or compound lexical unit corresponds to the human tendency to assign human traits to non-human beings or abstract ideas (Idleness is the mother of all vices). For example, in The Lagoon, we see the adjective hesitating (+human) applied to a thing (the hesitating river), and when Charles Dickens applies the adjective implacable to the weather or when he says that

This figure of speech, called prosopopeia or personification, is based on ‘Humanization’.

Dehumanization

The opposite process of perception also exists. If in prosopopeia non-human beings are perceived as possessing a [+human] attribute, in the case of dehumanization, human beings are perceived as deprived of their [+human] attribute.

This process is also very common in ordinary conversation: I’m a heap of rubbish. Many metaphors are based on the loss or the gain of the [human] attribute, as in He barked some orders at me. In general, the example from James Joyce is exceptional, in that dehumanization is usually negative; if humanization is a step up the ladder in our consideration, dehumanization, like the proverbial reincarnation into a lesser being, tends to disparage the person to which it is applied.

Reification

A third process of human perception is called reification, which consists in the presentation of a quality not as an accident but as a substance. For example, if, instead of speaking of the white swords, we talk about the whiteness of the swords, our human perception has awarded an identity to a quality (white) and has given it a substantive existence. It seems evident that The whiteness of the swords (whiteness is an abstract substance) conveys more vivid and communicative strength than the white swords (‘white’ is a trait or an accident of the object).

In the following passage from The Portrait, an adjective has been is turned into an abstract noun: white becomes whiteness. In the same passage, the girl’s quality ‘wonderful’ of her wonderful beauty is reified to become ‘the wonder’ in The wonder of mortal beauty, and his riotous blood becomes the riot of his blood.

This tendency to reify qualities is, to a certain extent, an enhancement of Plato’s world of ideas or ‘noetós cosmos’, i.e., the world of things ‘aesthetós cosmos’ exists as a consequence of the world of ideas. According to Maritain, abstract nouns are more powerful than adjectives, because they are presented as a substance not as an accident of the object.

Hyperboles

A hyperbole is a form of immoderate exaggeration according to which some of the traits of a person or thing are presented as larger or smaller or more or less pleasant than they actually are.

Onomatopoeia

It is the imitation of natural sounds by words, as in the following examples:’the humming bee’,

‘the cackling hen’, ‘the whizzing arrow’, etc.

10.6 Oxymoron

It is the figure of speech formed by the combination of incongruous or contradictory words as in

Sweet pain.

10.7 Comparisons, similes and metaphors. The classifications of metaphor.

For the description of a setting, humans usually resort to two great strategies called identification and contrast. Many of the techniques used in daily description of the things of the world, for example, comparison and antonymy, or the mentioned oxymoron, belong to either the strategy of identification or to  the  strategy of contrast. Comparison is a very powerful technique of descriptive discourse and can be full, partial or elliptical. Besides being full, partial and elliptical, comparison can also be implicit; the figures of speech called personification, dehumanization, reification and hyperbole may be said to contain an implicit comparison.

In a full comparison the two members that are being compared are present; in a partial comparison, although it is an explicit comparison, only one member is present; a simile is a partial comparison by means of the words ‘like’ or ‘as’ between two of ideas or objects; in an elliptical comparison, the linguistic devices of the comparison are absent. If we say She is as beautiful as a flower we are using a full comparison; in She is like a flower we are making use of a partial comparison or simile.

However, in She is a flower there is no explicit comparison, although the receiver of the utterance interprets the message as containing a comparison (as beautiful/fresh/pure as a flower, etc.); in this case we talk of a metaphor or elliptical comparison. However, it is not enough to say that the metaphor is an elliptical comparison, as there is also a tangible leap from a rational comparison, to an identification or fusion of two objects, creating a new entity that shares the traits of both.

This classification into comparison, simile and metaphor is based on the external form, but in all cases the underlying idea is the same, i.e. the comparison between A and B. There is, however, another way we can classify metaphor (and all comparisons), especially relevant if we consider its potential effects upon addressees: lexicalized metaphors (i.e. those which have become a part of everyday language), “literary” metaphors (those which are identified as such, but the comparison between the element is in no way new), and innovative metaphors (those which are used for the first time, and have the greatest power to surprise the reader). There are frequent examples of these: for instance, there are lexicalized metaphors in expressions like

10.8 Metaphors, metonyms and synecdoches

Metaphors are very abundant in subjective descriptions, although they are the figures of speech par  excellence of poetic discourse. There are two figures of speech also abundant in poetic discourse, called metonymy and synecdoche, which are closely associated with the metaphor, or even conceived as metaphors. For example, the word hand is often explained as a metaphor in the expression ‘All hands on deck’, which is the order given by a captain to the crew of a ship.

Metonymy is a figure of speech formed by the substitution of the name of the thing meant by one of its attributes, qualities or semantic features contained in its definition; the substitution of the cause for the effect or the effect for the cause is also considered a metonymy. For example, sceptre is a metonymy of authority.

Synecdoque, however, is formed by the substitution of ‘the part for the whole’, ‘the genus for the species’ or vice versa. In the order ‘All hands on deck’, hands, which is a part of a person, is substituted by the whole, sailor. The sentence ‘The hand that rocks the cradle …’ includes both a synecdoche and a metonymy, as hand is a synecdoche of ‘person’ (or ‘mother’ by inference) and the word cradle is a metonymy of ‘child’, that is, the substitution of the word meant CchildC by a term CcradleC(where that word is contained as a semantic feature of its definition, a cradle being ‘a bed for a newborn child’).

As we have said before, a metaphor can be interpreted as an elliptical comparison. However, since Aristotle envisioned metaphor as ‘a well-built enigma’, many have been the attempts made to define this figure of speech within the current linguistic framework of each cultural period. Two of the most outstanding efforts to give a clear account of metaphor have been those carried out by I. A. Richards40  and the linguist Roman Jakobson.

The explanation given by Jakobson within the framework of structuralism sheds a clear light for a better comprehension of the meaning of these three terms: metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche.  Jakobson, following David Lodge’s account of his ideas (1979), argues that metaphor and metonymy (and synecdoche as well) are opposed, because they are generated according to opposite principles. In his opinion, language, like other systems of signs, has a twofold character; its use involves the operations of selection and combination: a selection of certain linguistic entities from the paradigmatic (vertical) axis and their combination into linguis- tic units of a higher degree of complexity in the syntagmatic (horizontal) axis.

If we transform the sentence Ships crossed the sea into Ships ploughed the sea, we have substituted ‘ploughed’ for ‘crossed’, having perceived a similarity between the movement of a plough through the earth and of a ship through the sea. But the awareness of difference between ships and ploughs is not suppressed; it is indeed essential to the metaphor; as the perception of similarity must be accompanied by a feeling of disparity since they must belong to different spheres of thought. As Stephen Ullmann observes: “It is an essential feature of a metaphor that there must be a certain distance between tenor and vehicle”.

But if we transform our model sentence, Ships crossed the sea into Keels crossed the deep we have used a synecdoche (keels: a part for the whole ships) and a metonymy (deep is an attribute or semantic feature of sea), but this time it has not been on the axis of similarity but of contiguity. Keel may stand for ship not because it is similar to a ship but because it is part of a ship, and deep may stand for sea not because of similarity between them but because depth is a property of the sea.

Metaphor, as we have seen, belongs to the selection axis of language; metonymy and synecdoche belong to the combination (horizontal or syntagmatic) axis of language. In the metaphor there has been an association by comparison, joining a plurality of worlds, whereas in the metonymy (and synecdoche) there has been an association by contiguity, of movement within a single world of discourse.

In short, the fundamental structural opposition of metaphor and metonymy rests on the basic opposition between selection and combination: Selection (and correspondingly substitution) deals with entities conjoined in the code, but not in the given message, whereas in the case of combination the entities are conjoined in both or only in the actual message.

In David Lodge’s words, the preceding example shows the clear advantages that the structuralist approach may have over a commonsense empirical approach in giving account of the differences between metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche.