Concept
Literal and figurative language
Overview
The distinction between literal and figurative language exists in all natural languages; the phenomenon is studied within certain areas of language analysis, linguistics, and the humanities, in particular stylistics, rhetoric, and semantics.
Literal language is the usage of words exactly according to their direct, straightforward, or conventionally accepted meanings: their denotation.
Figurative (or non-literal) language is the usage of words deviating beyond their conventionally accepted definitions in order to convey a more complex meaning or achieve a heightened effect. This is done by presenting words in such a way that their audience equates, compares, or associates the words with normally unrelated meanings. A common intended effect of figurative language is to elicit audience responses that are especially emotional (like excitement, shock, laughter, etc.), aesthetic, or intellectual.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, and later the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, were among the early documented language analysts who expounded on the differences between literal and figurative language. A comprehensive scholarly examination of metaphor in antiquity, and the way its use was fostered by Homer's epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, is provided by William Bedell Stanford.
Within literary analysis, the terms "literal" and "figurative" are still used; but within the fields of cognition and linguistics, the basis for identifying such a distinction is no longer used.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
But, though the language of Poetry is equally grand and ornamental with that of an Orator, she undoubtedly takes greater liberties both in making and compounding word; and frequently administers to the pleasure of her hearers, more by the pomp and lustre of her expressions, than by the weight and dignity of her sentiments. Though judgment, therefore, and a proper choice of words, is alike common to both, yet their…
Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators
States what Literal and figurative language is.
Poetry, we shall find, habitually adopts those symbols of thought, and those methods of using them, which instinct and analysis agree in choosing as most effective, and becomes poetry by virtue of doing this. On turning back to the various specimens that have been quoted, it will be seen that the direct or inverted form of sentence predominates in them; and that to a degree quite inadmissible in prose. And not only…
Herbert Spencer, The Philosophy of Style
States what Literal and figurative language is.
It may be said to be, at once, both what the logicians call, a singular, and what they call, a common term; and to join, in its signification the seemingly opposite qualities of the most precise individuality and the most extensive generalization. This word, therefore, expressing so very abstract and metaphysical an idea, would not easily or readily occur to the first formers of language. What are called the…
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
States what Literal and figurative language is.
Philosophers who discussed Literal and figurative language
Related ideas
- Homer
- Word
- Emily Dickinson
- Language
- Hyperbole
- Metaphor
- Natural language
- Linguistics
- Paradox
- Denotation
- Rhetoric
- Semantics
- Aristotle
- Literary criticism
- Ancient Greece
- Quintilian
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.
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