The Branches of Semantics "Simile"

A. Simile

A simile is a figure of speech in which two fundamentally unlike things are explicitly compared, usually in a phrase introduced by like or as.

grammar : a phrase that uses the words like or as to describe someone or something by comparing it with someone or something else that is similar.

The simile sets two ideas side by side; in the metaphor they become superimposed. It would seem natural to think that simile, being simpler, is older." (F.L. Lucas, Style. Macmillan, 1955).

Examples : 

1)      Our soldiers are as brave as lions.

2)      He is as funny as a monkey.

3)      The water well was as dry as a bone

4)      "When Lee Mellon finished the apple he smacked his lips together like a pair of cymbals."
(Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General From Big Sur, 1964) 

5)      "She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat."
(James Joyce, "The Boarding House"

6)      “Her mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by.”
(Jonathan Franzen, Purity. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015)

7)      "Good coffee is like friendship: rich and warm and strong."
(slogan of Pan-American Coffee Bureau)

8)      "He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow."
(George Eliot, Adam Bede, 1859)

9)      "Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep."
(Carl Sandburg)

10) "My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain."
(W.H. Auden, quoted by Humphrey Carpenter in W.H. Auden: A Biography. Harper Collins, 1981)

11) "He's got a face like a wet Sunday in a debtors' prison."
(Joe Bennett, Mustn't Grumble. Simon & Schuster, 2006)

12) "It is all, God help us, a matter of rocks. The rocks shape life like hands around swelling dough."
(Annie Dillard, "Life on the Rocks: The Galápagos")

13) "you fit into me
      like a hook into an eye
      a fish hook
      an open eye"
      (Margaret Atwood) 

14) "A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard."
(George Orwell, "A Hanging," 1931)

15) "Matt Leinart slid into the draft like a bald tire on black ice."
(Rob Oller, Columbus Dispatch, Feb. 25, 2007)

Simile inputs vividness into what we say. Authors and poets utilize comparisons to convey their

sentiments and thoughts through vivid word pictures like a simile.

Simile Examples in Literature :

a) Written by Joseph Conrad,

“I would have given anything for the power to soothe her frail soul, tormenting itself in its invincible ignorance like a small bird beating about the cruel wires of a cage.”

The lines have been taken from Lord Jim. The helplessness of the soul is being compared with a bird in a cage beating itself against the merciless wires of the cage, to be free.

b) In her novel To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf compares the velocity of her thoughts about the two men with that of spoken words.

“. . . impressions poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one’s pencil . . .”
She says both are difficult to follow and cannot be copied in words by a pencil.

c) Taken from a short story Lolita written by Vladimir Nabokov,

“Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed toward me like towers of Pisa.”

This simile produces a humorous effect by comparing old women leaning on walking sticks with the ancient leaning tower of Pisa.

d) Robert Burns uses a simile to describe the beauty of his beloved.

“O my Luve’s like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly played in tune.”
He says that his love is a fresh red rose that blossoms in the spring.

B. Function of Simile

From the above discussion, we can infer the function of similes both in our everyday life as well as in literature. Using similes attracts the attention and appeals directly to the senses of listeners or readers encouraging their imagination to comprehend what is being communicated. In addition, it inspires life-like quality in our daily talks and in the characters of fiction or poetry. Simile allows readers to relate the feelings of a writer or a poet to their personal experiences. Therefore, the use of similes makes it easier for the readers to understand the subject matter of a literary text, which may have been otherwise too demanding to be comprehended. Like metaphors, similes also offer variety in our ways of thinking and offers new perspectives of viewing the world.

References :

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/simile

http://grammar.about.com/od/rs/g/simileterm.htm

http://literarydevices.net/simile/

The Branches of Morpheme "Allomorphs and Zero Allomorphs"

Allomorphs

An allomorph is ‘any of the different forms of a morpheme’. (Richards, Platt & Weber) that is, when a unit of meaning varies in sound without changing meaning. The term allomorph explains the comprehension of phonological variations for specific morphemes. They occur in all types of morphemes : in lexical morphemes such as official from office, in roots as in reception from receive, in derivational morphemes as in impossible vs. incorrect and in grammatical endings, such as voiced /d/ in loved vs. unvoiced /t/ in walked.

phonological conditioning - morphological conditioning - grammatical conditioning

If these allomorphs ar e determined by a preceding phoneme, they are called phonologically conditioned allomorphs. If there is no phonemic conditioning, they are called morphologically conditioned allomorphs, i.e. a certain lexical morpheme constitutes the realisation of a certain affix.

Another conditioning is the so-called grammatical conditioning, which changes the bases and not the affixes. This is the case in plural or past tense forms knives, thieves, houses and wept, slept, where the ending conditions voiced word final consonant viz. shortening of the basis. This can be demonstrated in the English plurals and past tense morphemes :

	phonologically conditioned	morphologically conditioned
plural	[z] after voiced consonants and vowels : beds, knees [s] after voiceless consonants: tulips, parents [Iz] after sibilants (Zischlaute): horses, bushes	Umlaut: feet, geese, teeth, mice -en: oxen, children zero-allomorph: fish, deer Latin/Greek loans: fungi, antennae, phenomena, theses
past tense	[d] after voiced consonants and vowels: rubbed, judged, entered [t] after voiceless consonants: stopped, kicked, laughed [Id] after [t, d]: wanted, decided	portmanteau morpheme: took, gave zero-allomorph: put, cut

Portmanteau

For cases like took or mice linguists suggested the term portmanteau morphs, i.e. one morph realises more than one morpheme or function. In these cases took contains the meaning of ´take + the meaning of past tense´ and mice contains both the morpheme ´mouse + the plural morpheme´. This is also the case in your (cars), which has three morphemes (2nd person, plural, possession) or in Latin amo (first person, singular, present, active).

Zero-Allomorph

A further abstraction is the concept of the zero-realisation (no visible affix, but a specific meaning) in plurals such as fish and deer and past tense forms such as cut and put. 

Consisting of no phonetic form, is an allomorph of a morpheme that is otherwise realized in speech. In the phrase two sheep-∅, the plural marker is a zero morph, which is an allomorph of -s as in two cows.

References :
www.anglistik.phil.uni-erlangen.de

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_(linguistics)

The Branches of Morpheme "Free Morpheme and Bound Morpheme"

Morphemes

A morpheme can be defined as a minimal unit having more or less constant meaning and more of less constant form.

Free and Bound Morphemes

Free morphemes are those that can stand alone as words.
Also called an unbound morpheme or a free-standing morpheme. They may be lexical morphemes ({serve}, {press}), or grammatical morphemes ({at}, {and}).

Free morphemes :

• constitute words by themselves – boy, car, desire, gentle, man.
• can stand alone

Bound morphemes can occur only in combination—they are parts of a word.

They may be lexical morphemes (such as {clude} as in include, exclude, preclude) or they may be grammatical (such as {PLU} = plural as in boys, girls, and cats).

Bound morphemes :

1. can’t stand alone – always parts of words - occur attached to free morphemes. cats:  cat à free morpheme         
     -s à bound morpheme 
   undesirable: desire à free morpheme             
                        -un, -able à bound morphemes
   
2.  affixes

• prefixes – occur before other morphemes.ex : unhappy, discontinue, rewrite, bicycle, bipolar
• suffixes – following other morphemes.ex : sleeping, excited, desirable.
• infixes – inserted into other morphemes.
•  circumfixes – attached to another morpheme both initially and finally

Roots and Stems

morphologically complex words consist of a root + one or more morpheme(s)

1. Root : a lexical content morpheme that cannot be analyzed into smaller.ex : painter , reread, conceive

• may or may not stand alone as a word.ex : read, -ceive

      2. Stem : a root morpheme + affix may or may not be a word.                           ·         painter à both a words and a stem                   
      ·         -ceive+er à only a stem

§  as we add an affix to a stem, a new stem and a new word are formed 

root:           believe

stem:          believe + able

word:          un + believe + able

root:           system

stem:          system + atic

stem:          un+ system + atic

stem:          un+ system + atic + al

word:          un+ system + atic + al + ly

References :

www.albany.edu
www.mathcs.duq.edu

The Branches of Semantics "Denotation, Connotation and Implication"

Denotation and Connotation

Denotation and Connotation, are used to convey and distinguish between two different kinds of meanings or extensions of a word. Denotation is the literal meaning or definition of a word--the explicit, particular, defined meaning, which usually can be pinned down with reasonable precision. Perhaps it could be called the overt, intellectual meaning of a word. Dictionary definitions are denotative meanings. Denotation is the strict, literal, definition of a word, devoid of any emotion, attitude, or color. Denotation of a word or phrase is a part of its meaning; however, several parts of meaning may take this name, depending on the contrast being drawn. In logic and semantics, denotational always attracts the extension, meaning "in the pair," but the other element genuinely varies.

Examples #1

Rose

The denotation of this example is a red rose. The connotation is that is a symbol of passion and love, this is what the rose represents.

Examples #2

Brown Cross

The denotation is a brown cross. The connotation is a symbol of religion, according to the media connotation. To be more specific, this is a symbol of Christianity.

Examples #3

Heart

The denotation is a representation of a cartoon heart. The connotation is a symbol of love and affection, not in the way of a rose, but a symbol of true love.

Connotation is a subjective cultural and/or emotional coloration in addition to the explicit or denotative meaning of any specific word or phrase in a language. Connotation is the suggestive meaning of a word-all the values, judgments, and status implied by a word, the historical and associative accretion of "unspoken significance" behind the literal meaning. Connotation branches into a culmination of different meanings.
The connotation essentially relates to how anything may be associated with a word or phrase, for example, an implied value judgment or feelings.

•  A stubborn person may be described as being either "strong-willed" or "pig-headed." Although these have the same literal meaning (that is, stubborn), strong-willed connotes admiration for someone's convictions, while pig-headed connotes frustration in dealing with someone. Likewise, "used car" and "previously owned car" have the same literal meaning, but many dealerships prefer the latter, since it is thought to have fewer negative connotations.
• It is often useful to avoid words with strong connotations (especially disparaging ones) when striving to achieve a neutral point of view. A desire for more positive connotations, or fewer negative ones, is one of the main reasons for using euphemisms. (Although, not all theories of linguistic meaning honor the distinction between literal meaning and connotation).

Many words have evaluative implications behind them, and convey a positive or negative attitude toward the things they name; this flavor of the word or its overtone of meaning--whether it makes you feel like smiling, sneering, kissing, conquering, or giving up--is the word's connotation. We might say it is the emotional meaning of the word. This meaning is seldom found in the dictionary.
Here are just a few examples :

Word	Denotation	Connotation
new	recent origin	better, improved
snake	round reptile	horrible beast
adequate	good enough	not very good
excuse	explanation	weak reason

Let's look at the word "adequate" for a moment. Our society has become so drenched in exaggeration that a word like this is almost insulting in its connotative force, while its original denotative meaning was rather positive.

Suppose you hear an interchange like this: "How do you like your car?" "Oh, it's adequate." What is your reaction? Or suppose you hear this: "How do you like your wife?" "Oh, she's adequate." This last speaker may love his wife deeply, but he does not convey that impression, even though he used a denotatively nice or positive word, because the connotations of a word are inescapable--they remain attached to it, whether we like it or not.

Connotation is often a product of context. Depending on how it is used, a word might have a positive, neutral, or negative connotation to it. Note this variability in these paired examples :

• The pastor preached yesterday. (neutral connotation)
• Joe preached at me about book buying. (negative connotation.)
• This place is crawling with bugs! (negative connotation.)
• Fred is as cute as a bug. (positive connotation)

Many words do have personal connotations for each individual. The feelings or images evoked by the word "cemetery," for example, depend upon your experiences--the cemeteries you have visited, whether you have buried a loved one, and so on. But generally we mean by connotation the common suggestive meaning or evaluative sense, shared and understood by all educated users of the language. Connotation is not the slang meaning of a word, though, of course, slang meanings can affect connotations.

Implication

Implication is meaning which a speaker or writer intends but does not communicate directly. Where a listener is able to deduce or infer the intended meaning from what has been uttered, this is known as (conversational) implicature.

Example :
We are late!
→ It is mean that they must quickly.

“A bus!” 
→ Implicit meaning : “We must run.”

References :

www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Denotation_and_connotation

www.dictionary.com/browse/implication

www.virtualsalt.com/think/semant2.htm