Plan: Introduction 3 Main body 15

Chapter II. The Cognitive, Psychological, and Metaphorical Essence of Simile: Its Invariant Model

1. 
   Structural Types of Similes
   

Having studied the syntactical aspect of similes in emotive literary texts, we came to the conclusion that similes vary structurally in the text, and this is mostly conditioned by the set of pragmatic factors of intersubjectivity and interactionality. The analysis of similes showed that they can vary according to the author’s communicative intention and subjective modality as well as under the influence of the addressee-orientated categories of transparency and expressiveness. As a result, we have singled out seven structural types similes the analysis of which we offer below.
Analytical and Synthetic Similes
Analytical similes are realized in a three-componential structure, having for its central component a P comp. through which the heterogeneous objects are brought together within the conceptual model:
Example: His mouth was perfect like a Cupid’s bow.
Example: The sun hid behind the great torn leaves of the plantain and then shot a gold ray like outstretched paw of a Persian cat. Synthetic similes are represented only by two components, the language markers of comparison like and look like having merged with the name, denoting the RO. This causes the change of their linguistic status from that of a functional word to a suffixal morpheme which reduces a three-componential structure of simile to an attributive syntagma. Here are some examples of synthetic similes:
Example: The raftlike tree-house seemed to be floating over the vaporish waters.
Example: She saw a fresh flowerlike face.
Example: Rosemary put her armround those thin, birdlike shoulders of the girl.
Example: Three little spiderlike steps were all Fenella saw.
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Gentner, D., & Bowdle, B. (2001). Convention, form, and figurative language processing. Metaphor and Symbol, 16, 223-247.
We consider all these examples as a synthetic structural type of similes that can be reconstructed in an analytical form if necessary. For example: “The tree-house seemed to be floating over the vaporish waters like a raft”, “She saw a fresh face that looked like a flower”, and so forth. The results of our research have confirmed that analytical similes significantly outnumber synthetic ones, emphasizing once again the analyticity of the English language structure.