Ministry of higher and secondary special education of republic of uzbekistan

Retardant (Delayed) Similes

The structural peculiarity of this kind of similes is conditioned by the fact that the figurativeness of the comparison is revealed not directly in the comparative predication, but later. In such cases, the TO of the comparison is primarily introduced into the text by the quantifier “something” which, due to its general meaning, identifies the TO in an abstract way as a representative of the class of things (in its wide sense) without its individualization. Hence, the figurativeness of the comparison is realized later, only after

introducing into the text a taxonomic name or nominal phrase which designates the TO and makes the meaning of the quantifier concrete, thus turning the comparison into a simile. Accordingly, we define a retardant simile as a textual phenomenon, characterized with double expressiveness that is marked both lexically and syntactically.
Example
A doctor came out followed by a nurse. He held something in his two hands that looked like a freshly skinned rabbit and hurried across the corridor with it and through another door. I went down to the door he had gone into and found them in the room doing things to a new-born child.
Example shows that the structure of the retardant simile is split as the first part represents an ordinary comparison (something… that looked like freshly skinned rabbit), which acquires transparency and figurativeness later, after bringing into the text a taxonomic nominal phrase (a new-born child) that concretizes the meaning of the quantifier something and converts the ordinary comparison into a simile, logically inferreing that it was a new-born child that looked like a freshly skinned rabbit. This logical conclusion is only implied in the given text. But there are cases when the identification of the TO, introduced by the quantifier something, is explicated emphatically with the help of a special identifying construction.
Example
Trembling all over, I stole to the window. There, pattering up and down the asphalt path, was something white, that would bounce like a ball or take short flights like a bird or glide slowly like a wraith. Then realization came to my disordered mind—it was Eustace in his white night shirt. We consider this textual segment as a microtext represented by a retardant simile with a split structure. It is only in the final identifying construction (it was Eustace in his white night shirt), that the reader finds out that something, that would bounce like a ball or take short flights like a bird or glide slowly like a wraith, was Eustace. We think that the use of retardant similes and the introduction of the subject matter into the text with the help of the quantifier manifests not only the author’s metaphorical associative mapping of the world but his communicative strategy as well, which is aimed at stimulating the reader’s interest to get the information necessary for the identification of the TO as fast as possible.