Hyperbole and speech acts: Is the term "overstatement" a misnomer?

• Autores: Laura Cano Mora, Antonia Sánchez Macarro
• Localización: Proceedings of the 30th International AEDEAN Conference: [electronic resource] / María Losada Friend (ed. lit.), Pilar Ron Vaz (ed. lit.), Sonia Hernández Santano (ed. lit.), Jorge Casanova García (ed. lit.), 2007, ISBN 978-84-96826-31-1
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper focuses on hyperbole, a long neglected trope despite its ubiquity in everyday speech. It addresses the production process of exaggeration, since a crucial limitation in figurative language theories is the production and usage of figures of speech, probably due to the intensive research effort on their comprehension. The aim is to show that the taxonomy of illocutionary acts is a powerful analytical tool for arriving at a classification of the different actions this figure fulfils in discourse. In order to determine what kind of speech acts can be exaggerated, 310 overstated utterances from naturally-occurring conversations extracted from the British National Corpus were examined. The results suggest that although the study of hyperbole has traditionally been relegated to the representative class, directives, commissives and expressives can be exaggerated too. However, hyperbolic manifestations are not equally distributed over the different illocutionary forces. The trope manifests itself predominantly in the performance of representatives which seems to justify the use of the term "overstatement".