Essay On Figurative Language

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2. Literal Language According to Leech as cited by Love (1983) there are seven types of meaning in semantics, namely conceptual or denotative meaning, connotative meaning, social meaning, affective meaning, reflected meaning, collocative meaning, and thematic meaning. Here, the researcher analyses two kinds of meaning which are denotative meaning and connotative meaning. Denotation in denotative meaning deals with the literal referential aspects of word meaning (Jay, 2003: 314). Besides, connotation in connotative meaning “refers to the affective meaning and culturally supported assumptions associated with the denotative meaning of a word” (ibid). Heller (2011) states that words in literal expressions denote what they mean according to common…show more content…
Figurative Language Figurative language refers to words or phrases which do not represent exactly what are written. Jay (2003) confirms that “figurative speech is not intended to be interpreted literally”. In his book entitled The Psychology of Language, Jay (2003) also says that “figurative language can describe something or compare two different things to make the situation clearer and more interesting”. However, it is not easy to understand the meaning of the figurative language because sometimes the meaning can be ambiguous; it always depends on the context. In the daily communication, people may use both literal and figurative languages, but as it is explained above that understanding figurative meaning is not as easy as understanding literal meaning. If the addressee cannot understand the meaning of the figurative language then the communication is not delivered well which means that “figurative language requires a special process that occurs only after the literal fails” (Jay, 2003:314). Here, as cited by Jay (2003), Grice (1978) “assumes that the listener has to do extra cognitive work to figure out the meaning of figurative language”. It is then, the listeners need to think harder and beyond the lyrics which are written in the
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