Multimodal Hyperbole

Gaëlle Ferré

doi:10.1515/mc-2014-0003

Article

Multimodal Hyperbole

Gaëlle Ferré
Gaëlle Ferré is an Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Nantes, France. She mainly teaches English phonetics and phonology but also (multimodal) discourse analysis both at undergraduate and at graduate levels. In research, she works primarily in Multimodality in English and French, adopting a linguistic-oriented approach, which aims at understanding the organization of information from the different modes in speech to form a message, with a strong emphasis on the links between gesture and prosody in discourse units.

Published/Copyright: May 29, 2014

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From the journal Multimodal Communication Volume 3 Issue 1

Abstract

This paper presents a study of hyperbole in the framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, based on video recordings of conversational English. Hyperbole is a figure of speech used to express exaggerated statements which do not correspond to reality but which are nevertheless not perceived as lies. Hyperbole opens up a discourse frame and establishes a new focus on information in speech making that piece of information more salient than surrounding discourse. The emphasis thus created thanks to various semantic-syntactic processes is reflected in prosody and gesture with the use of focalization devices. At last, prosodic patterns and gestures do not only reinforce verbal emphasis, they may fully contribute to the emphasis in a complementary way, and even constitute hyperbolic communicative acts by themselves. In the conclusion, we propose that hyperbole is used by speakers to construct an individual, intersubjective identity element.

Keywords: hyperbole; multimodal discourse analysis; prosodic and gestural enactments

About the author

Gaëlle Ferré

Gaëlle Ferré is an Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Nantes, France. She mainly teaches English phonetics and phonology but also (multimodal) discourse analysis both at undergraduate and at graduate levels. In research, she works primarily in Multimodality in English and French, adopting a linguistic-oriented approach, which aims at understanding the organization of information from the different modes in speech to form a message, with a strong emphasis on the links between gesture and prosody in discourse units.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants of the dialogues as well as the students who kindly contributed to the Envid corpus used in this study. I am also particularly indebted to an anonymous reviewer and to David McNeill for his very enlightening comments on a previous version of the paper, especially on communicative dynamism as well as its prosodic and gestural materialization.

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1
Examples from my corpus are transcribed using Sacks et al.’s transcription conventions (1974). Punctuation reflects intonation patterns and contours. The corpus itself is described in Section Corpus and methodology.
2
The semantic field of “death” will also be referred to in examples (26) and (29) later in the paper with the mention by two speakers of “heaven” and “banshee”.
3
McNeill (2005) distinguishes observer-viewpoint iconics (representational gestures in which the speaker’s hand(s) represent(s) the whole character) from character-viewpoint iconics (representational gestures in which the character is represented by the whole body of the speaker).
4
The Channel Tunnel is a 50 km long tunnel linking France and England.

Published Online: 2014-5-29

Published in Print: 2014-6-1

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https://doi.org/10.1515/mc-2014-0003

Keywords for this article

hyperbole; multimodal discourse analysis; prosodic and gestural enactments