ABSTRACT
The traditional meaning of ‘figurative’ has always involved a contrast with the ‘proper’ meaning of a given word, its supposed rightful meaning, the idea which comes directly to mind when the word is employed. Figures of speech twist the meaning of the word – the Greek word for figures of speech is trope which means ‘turn, twist’.1 The figurative system of language has rhetorical and political force. The word is as powerful as the bullet. Thus, figures of speech have psychological force and are the chief element of eloquence and the skill to convince your audience of the truth of your thesis. The present chapter provides a detailed account of the figures of speech which are referred to as cilm al-baymn in Arabic rhetoric. The three major figures of speech that have featured in Arabic rhetorical studies are simile, allegory, and metonymy. An explicated analysis is furnished by the present discussion in which we investigate the definition of cilm al-baymn and simile, the components, ends, categories, and types of simile as well as the pragmatic functions of simile. This chapter also investigates allegory in Arabic, the lexical and cognitive clues in allegorical propositions, cognitive and linguistic allegories, the relationship between the verb and its allegorical subject, the pragmatic functions of cognitive allegory, and the two categories of linguistic allegory which are metaphor and hypallage. Metonymy in Arabic is also accounted for in the present discussion as well as its categories. It is worthwhile to note that simile is culture-specific. In other words, semantically speaking, what is a simile in Arabic may not be appreciated by speakers of other languages such as English. This is due to the fact that the two languages, Arabic and English, have distinct connotative significations to the same expression which denotatively represent the same entity (see 5.3.1 later).
