Considering all the theories and perspectives discussed in sections 2.1.1 and 2.1.2, this study will follow the definitions of hyperbole proposed by Claridge (2011), who developed a multifaceted, corpus-based study of overstatement in English. As her work on hyperbole is the broadest one I have had the opportunity to read so far and as the author takes into consideration most if not all the discussions presented up to this point, the initial choice of adopting her concepts was also a means of being able to compare the results of hyperbole in Portuguese and German to the ones previously found in English. It must be noted, however, that, as she works with big corpora of natural language and this is a case study of elicited conversations (see Section 3 for more detail), extensive, definite comparisons cannot be made. Also, as will be seen in Section 4.2, other difficulties in comparing results have also arisen.
Claridge (2011) considers hyperbole any kind of exaggeration, including ECFs. Schematically, her definition is as follows:…show more content… 5). This is because one must have in mind what is standard and usual in order to be able to determine what exceeds that and therefore becomes an overstatement. Moreover, it should be noted that the term ‘expression’ is being used here to denote not only words and phrases but also longer texts (p. 5). Additionally, the author presents the term ‘gradability’, shown in Figure 1, by discussing the connection between linguistic scales and hyperbole, which has been explored in other texts as well (see COUPER-KUHLEN; THOMPSON, 2005; NORRICK, 2006, BRDAR-SZABÓ; BRDAR,