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A list of metaphors in the English language organised alphabetically by type. A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels".
Figurative language examples include “similes, metaphors, personification, hyperbole, allusions, and idioms.”” [4] One of the most commonly cited examples of a metaphor in English literature comes from the "All the world's a stage" monologue from As You Like It:
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Authors writing their texts consider not only a word's denotation but also its connotation. For example, a person may be described as stubborn or tenacious, both of which have the same basic meaning but are opposite in terms of their emotional background (the first is an insult, while the second is a compliment).
However, the metaphor does not work in exactly the same way in each case, as seen in: (a') She gave him a kiss, and he still has it. (b') She gave him a headache, and he still has it. The invariance principle offers the hypothesis that metaphor only maps components of meaning from the source language that remain coherent in the target context.
Metaphoric criticism is one school of rhetorical analysis used in English and speech communication studies. Scholars employing metaphoric criticism analyze texts by locating metaphors within texts and evaluating those metaphors in an effort to better understand ways in which authors appeal to their audiences.
For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men").
Likewise, there is a correlation between knowing and seeing forming the primary metaphor knowing is seeing. Understanding an expression such as glass ceiling rests on two such primary metaphors. Evidence for primary metaphors is usually observed in the use of language, though evidence from the visual domain has also been researched. [3]