Book review of Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez (2022): Figuring out Figuration
What is it about?
The book presents a broad and inclusive approach to understanding figures of speech as cognitive processes and how they are connected to the way we communicate, bridging the fields of pragmatics (how language is used in context) and cognition (how our minds work).
Why is it important?
The authors provide new definitions for different figures of speech and show how they are related to each other. For example, they group certain figures of speech like hypallage, antonomasia, anthimeria, and merism together as variations of metonymy. And they group others like analogy, paragon, and allegory as variations of metaphor. The framework presented in this monograph is also beneficial in sorting out which tropes can be combined into conceptually more complex configurations, offering a broad integrative framework for the analysis of figurative language.