3.2 Metaphor
Metaphor can also transfer qualities from one thing to another. There is a formal difference between metaphor and simile, however, in metaphor the word like or as do not appear. A metaphor, like a simile, also has a comparison between two unlike elements, but unlike a simile, this comparison is implied rather than stated. This means the words "like" or "as" are omitted. For instance, "You are like the sun" is a simile, but "You are my sunshine" is a metaphor.
Metaphor is not explicitly signaled, so they are more difficult to identify. In metaphor, one thing is directly compared to another thing, without the marker—“like” or “as”. Thus the relationship between them is implied in other words is unstated. The use of metaphor in rhetoric is primarily to convey to the audience a new idea or meaning by linking it to an existing idea or meaning with which the audience is already familiar. By making the new appear to be linked to or a type of the old and familiar, the person using the metaphor hopes to help the audience understand the new.
The following is a good example:
Franklin Roosevelt used this technique in his 1933 inaugural address when he stated that, to cite one example, "the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side."
One would not immediately compare factories with a forest; but by doing so, Roosevelt suggests to his audience that the bleak autumn of the Great Depression would eventually turn back into spring. By using metaphor, the image is more vivid.
Another example of metaphor is this passage attributed to a speech by Abraham Lincoln about a political adversary in which Lincoln said that his adversary had "dived down deeper into the sea of knowledge and come up drier than any other man he knew".
This attributed quote uses a body of water as a metaphor for a body of knowledge with the ironical idea of someone who gained so little from his education that he achieved the impossible of jumping into a body of water and climbing back out without getting wet.
More examples,
①“With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” (Martin Luther King, Jr. I Have a Dream)
In this sentence, King used “the mountain of despair” as a metaphor for the system of apartheid, “a stone of hope” for the racial equality society, the “the jangling discords” for racists’ advocacy for white people, and “a beautiful symphony of brotherhood” for the peace propaganda toward Washington. Through using metaphor, his speech, was deeply inspired the audience.
②“And, if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor — not a new balance of power, but a new world of law — where the strong are just, and the weak secure, and the peace preserved.”毕业论文http://www.youerw.com
(John Kennedy, Inaugural Address)
Kennedy used “a beachhead of cooperation” as a metaphor for the peaceful contact and negotiation between America and The Soviet union at that time, “the jungle of suspicion” for the distrust of both sides. The image of metaphor tactfully struck a chord with his audiences.
3.3 Parallelism
Parallelism structure is the most commonly used in English speech is an important rhetorical tool, it’s a common rhetorical devices which grammatical structure symmetry (including the same or similar word, phrase or word) to highlight the significance.
Parallelism is syntactic over-regularity. It means exact repetition in equivalent positions. It differs from simple repetition in that the identity does not extend to absolute duplication, it “requires some variable feature of the pattern-some contrasting elements which are ‘parallel’ with respect to their position in the pattern”.
To put it simply, parallelism means the balancing of sentence elements that are grammatically equal. In parallel construction it is necessary to balance word for word (noun with noun, verb with verb, adjective with adjective, etc) phrase with phrase, clause with clause, sentence with sentence and so forth. The use of parallelism can make a speech with the appeal and enhance language potential to improve expressive effect.
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