Traditionally literal language has been distinguished from tropes or figures of speech, including metaphor, metonymy, simile, understatement, overstatement or hyperbole, and irony. This chapter concentrates on metaphor, and only briefly discusses irony, which is given fuller treatment in 10.6–10.8 in relation to Relevance Theory.

All these figures of speech are utterances whose meanings fail to match the state of affairs in the world being described. In understatement and hyperbole the mismatch is a matter of scale, as in the headline “‘PLANE TOO CLOSE TO GROUND’ CRASH PROBE TOLD”. Irony is even more extreme, at least the type where what is stated is the opposite of the case, e.g. “Sarah Palin was the best-educated vice-presidential candidate”. Metaphor and metonymy involve using unconventional language, metaphor by substitution, metonymy by deletion. In metaphor a stretch of text has an unconventional referent, so a mouse conventionally refers to a small rodent, and only less conventionally to a computer attachment. Its interpretation depends on some perceived similarity or analogy, in this case shape or colour, wire as a tail, movement in sudden short spurts, etc. But metonymy could be considered a kind of shorthand, so that “I drank five bottles of wine” is a shorter form of “I drank the contents of five bottles of wine”. Its interpretation depends upon contiguity in experience, since experientially we associate bottles with their contents.