How do words change their meaning? This chapter examines semantic change, change in meaning. It reveals the various ways in which words change their meanings and explains what is behind each kind of change, with telling examples from the history of English.

Chapter 2 turns to the important idea in Kyd’s design of rhetorical hyperbole and dramatic excess by comparing the emerging ethical effects engendered by the moral void of Kyd’s play to similar but crucially different devices involving abused emblems of writing in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. These early, near-contemporary responses to Kyd weigh through performance the consequences of violent action when neither the circumstances of plot nor the demands of justice can help explain or assign meaning to such action within any conceivable moral calculus. In the process, the moral-tragic weight of such plays sinks under the irruption of farce and burlesque, thereby forcing the audience to re-evaluate their voyeuristic complicity in the unfolding onstage representation of ritualised, and highly aestheticised retaliatory acts of violence.

Hyperbole is a trope with close relations to irony. People use hyperbole to overly exaggerate the reality of some situation, which implicitly communicates their attitudes toward that topic or event. Barnden specifically argues that hyperbole is another example of “irony-as-affect-expression” in which a hyperbolic statement, such as “Peter has millions of pets,” is not an exaggeration about the number of pets Peter owns, but exaggerates the discrepancy between what some person believes about Peter’s pets and the number of pets Peter really owns. In this manner, hyperbole increases the intensity of “the affect cargo” (e.g., the speaker’s affective purpose in saying “Peter has millions of pets”) beyond that of the cargo (e.g., the actual number of Peter’s pets), which could have been expressed by a nonexaggerating utterance (e.g., “Peter has many pets”). Barnden considers several types of “affect types in ironic cargo,” including contempt, bitterness, criticism, teasing, as well as annoyance, disappointment, regret, relief, and gladness. More generally, irony, including hyperbole, offers far more potential for expressing complex affective states than does nonirony.

This chapter examines the possibility that hyperbole and understatement are distinct notions and not necessarily under the superordinate concept of irony. Hyperbole relates to exaggeration or overstatement, while understatements are viewed as scalar shifts that are quite the opposite of hyperbole (i.e., presenting something as less significant than it is). She examines empirical evidence on the discourse goals associated with irony, hyperbole, and understatement to suggest that irony is frequently a part of hyperbole and understatement (e.g., to achieve the goals of contrast, expectations, and indeterminacy), but can exist on its own (e.g., to achieve the goal of an ironic attitude through evaluation accounts, negative-attitude accounts, and dissociative-attitude accounts). Both hyperbole and understatement are also evaluative, but not necessarily in an ironic way. Most generally, understatement and hyperbole may share common mechanisms with irony, yet are still important rhetorical figures in their own right.

In this chapter we take a closer look at figurative language from a pragmatic perspective. Figurative language is also often associated with literary language. However, as we shall see, from a pragmatic perspective, non-literal use of language extends far beyond the devices and tropes traditionally associated with rhetoric and poetry. The inferential processes that we employ to interpret metaphors, irony, and other figuratively used language, are part of a more general pragmatic system. Non-literal use of language is pervasive, and the processing of non-literal language plays a central role in utterance interpretation. We focus on metaphor, hyperbole, and irony, outlining several of the most influential pragmatic approaches to the analyses of these and starting with the Gricean account. The field of lexical pragmatics is introduced, and a range of examples are discussed to illustrate just how often we use language ‘loosely’. This approach is then applied to approximations, hyperbole, and metaphor. In the second half of the chapter, attention turns to irony, and two leading analyses are introduced and then compared: irony as pretence and irony as echoic use.

Context, plot, character and theme have dominated modern critical understandings of Wilkie Collins’s fiction, and there are relatively few discussions of his idiom, tone or voice. Collins himself seems to have encouraged this approach to his work, and repeatedly downgraded the question of literary style. But the topic takes us to the heart of his work, and helps us both to understand the nature and quality of his achievement and to see the relationship within it between questions of language and signification and those of identity and the sense of self.  Collins is fascinated in many of his fictions by what it means to have a troubled, false or non-existent identity, to have bodies and sensations that are not properly one’s own; the most revelatory texts and inscriptions in his work are often anonymous or unstylised. This chapter is about how Collins’s work explores and exposes the vulnerability of style, as it stages style’s appearances and disappearances.

Chapter 9 reports findings from a study that investigated cross-cultural variation and gender variation in the responses given by participants to marketing videos. It aims to answer the following research questions: To what extent does the figurative make-up of marketing videos evoke different emotions in British and Chinese participants, and how does this affect the extent to which they like and share videos? And to what extent does the figurative make-up of marketing videos evoke different emotions between men and women, and how does this affect the extent to which they like and share videos? With respect to cultural/linguistic background, Chinese respondents are found to be more likely to be surprised by the videos than British respondents, but British respondents are more likely to report negative emotions along with fear and stress. These relationships are sometimes strengthened and sometimes mitigated by the presence of resemblance metaphor, correlational metaphor, dramatic irony, hyperbole, and understatement. Chinese participants are more likely than British participants to indicate that they would share positive and surprising advertisements. In contrast, British participants are more likely than Chinese participants to indicate that they would share negative and frightening/stressful advertisements. With respect to gender, female respondents reported stronger emotional reactions than male respondents, as well as higher levels of appreciation than male respondents. The levels of appreciation and sharing intent expressed by both genders are influenced in a similar way by the emotions that the videos provoked, but male participants are more likely than female respondents to appreciate frightening and/or stressful advertisements.

Chapter 8 explores the role played by figurative language in marketing videos and examines the emotional impact of different kinds of figurative language. It investigates whether there are any combinations of figurative messaging and emotional arousal that predict the success of a marketing video, in terms of how much a video is appreciated and the extent to which viewers would be willing to share the video with others. The aim is to establish whether there is an optimal combination of figurative language type and emotional resonance that makes a video more likely to become popular. The main findings are that hyperbole and dramatic irony enhance the feelings of surprise, positive emotions, and stress and fear in viewers. None of the figurative operations investigated trigger negative emotions. Videos need to be impactful to be liked; the important thing is to have an emotional impact, regardless of whether it is positive or negative.

Chapter 1 looks at the range of figurative language types that can be found in advertising, discusses how and why they are used creatively and reports findings from studies that have explored the relative advantages of different combinations of metaphor and metonymy. It introduces key concepts such as metaphor, hyperbole, understatement, metonymy, and illustrates how they work alone and in combination in effective advertising. The chapter then explores ways of exploiting the creative potential of figurative messaging. These include the use of personification, shock tactics, anaphoric reference, innuendo, and narrative structure. Finally, it shows how figurative language can be used effectively in advertisements to convey humour and irony.

This section introduction furnishes an overview of Trump’s verbal behavior when it verges on or crosses into falsehood, by way of innuendo, gaslighting, and plausible deniability. It compares the Trump administration’s symbolic practices with those of Nazi Germany, including the use of superlatives and hyperbole so extreme it takes on a “fairy tale quality.” The chapter further identifies a favorite Trump discourse sequence here termed “reactive reversal,” related to the concept of “plausible deniability” discussed in a later chapter. First, Trump stakes out a hyperbolic claim, and if a public outcry follows, Trump reacts by reversing his claim and blaming others for their inference. Then he may triumphantly declare victory over whoever “really” claimed/did what he originally claimed. This is one of Trump’s methods of gauging reaction from the public.