Chapter published in:
Studies in Figurative Thought and Language
Edited by Angeliki Athanasiadou
[Human Cognitive Processing 56] 2017
► pp. 42–73

Chapter 2
Construing and constructing hyperbole

| University of La Rioja
| University of La Rioja

Hyperbole has received little attention in Cognitive Linguistics, while studies within psychology and pragmatics leave aside its representational aspects. To fill this gap, this chapter looks into linguistic evidence of the cognitive operations that underlie its communicative impact. Following up on recent research on figurative thought in terms of cross-domain mappings (e.g. Ruiz de Mendoza 2014), this chapter provides further evidence for an analysis of hyperbole in such terms. It offers a critical account of existing taxonomies of this phenomenon, argues for a twofold distinction between inference-based and constructional hyperbole, and discusses the usually hyperbolic X is not Y but Z and ‘God-related’ constructions. Finally, the chapter contends that hyperbole is regulated by the joint activity of two sets of constraints.

Keywords: cognitive operations, constraints, cross-domain mapping, inference-based and construction-based hyperbole, figurative expressions of emotions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A brief note on methodology and corpus selection
  • 3.Creating mental models of how we perceive the world
  • 4.A cognitive-linguistic approach to hyperbole
    • 4.1Hyperbole as a cross-domain mapping
    • 4.2Classifying hyperbole
  • 5.Hyperbolic constructions
    • 5.1 X is not Y but Z
      • 5.1.1NP1 is not NP2 but NP3
      • 5.1.2NP is not ADJP1 but ADJP2
    • 5.2‘God-related’ constructions
  • 6.Constraints on hyperbole
    • 6.1General constraints
    • 6.2Specific constraints
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 April 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.56.02pen
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