Figures of Speech
When attending to the synthetic, figural register in what we read, we cease to look through, and begin to look at the ways in which words and sentences create and play with meaning. Words and sentences matter; they act, and they either do so in an expected, customary way, or they turn away from the customary in unexpected ways.
As Jane Gallop (2000) has argued, most of us have been trained to treat language transparently, as if words and sentences don't matter, only the ideas within the thematic domain matter, which words and sentences merely point to. We should not discount that which language points to, but attending only to what language points to leaves us without the power only possible when we seriously explore the synthetic, figural register, especially to the degree that doing so turns us away from the expected and toward the surprising.
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Figures of speech and of thought, at their best, transform what is customary in language use by turning us away from common usage. Tropes and schemes provide the shapes to figures of speech and thought, though schemes operate at the syntactic level of the sentence, and tropes at the semantic level of words.
The central operation of all tropes is metaphorical because that is what happens whenever we cross-appropriate one word that belongs in one language game, and carry it over into a language game the word does not ordinarily belong to: that movement of carrying over meaning from one domain to another is operative in the other rhetorical tropes, including metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Figures of speech and thought, and the tropes and schemes that express them, do not easily submit to categorization, but they all perform in some way that diverges from everyday usage.
Figures of ThoughtTropes and schemes also perform as figures of thought, but the nature of rhetorical figures of thought is a bit more contentious than figures of speech. We may begin with how Quintilian distinguishes between figures of speech and of thought, where figures of thought are “in the conception, [and figures of speech are] in the expression of our thought” (Institutio Oratoria IX.1.16). This view suggests that a given figure of thought governs expression, and yet also exceeds any given attempt to express the “thought” definitively, that is, the figure of thought provides the primal form, of which there might be endless versions.
In her book Rhetorical Figures in Science (1999), Jeanne Fahnestock noted the inadequacy of the predicate “thought” and recommends that these figures might be better understood as figural “gestures, ways of marking in speech or constructing in written texts the intentions, interactions, and attitudes among participants.” As evocative of thought and feeling, Fahnestock suggests, these figures resemble the speech acts of speech act theory, and so belong to “the pragmatic or situational and functional dimension of language” (10), rather than to the semantic tropes or syntactic figures of speech. With this turn to include illocutionary force, the realm of audience response becomes the distinguishing feature of a figure of speech act. Thus, unless a response is evoked, no figure of speech act is present, only the expression of a particular figure of speech, and so the scheme of antithesis, or the trope of metaphor, may also perform as a figure of speech act, depending on its evocative effect on the listener or reader. Consequently, any trope or scheme in the form of a figure of speech is implicitly a figure of thought (speech act), and might become one only through its performance, and when such performances turn audiences, even if just slightly, from their inherited inventories of style, we then have what I call a figure of transformation. |
Longinus On the Sublime 29
Incomplete List of Figures of Thought
Antithesis
Aetiologia (giving the cause)
Prosapodosis
Color
Apostrophe
Merismos (partitioning the audience)
Purging the audience
Licentia (Parrhesia)
Understatement (Litotes)
Enargia
Congeries
Sententia
Expolitio (unwriting)
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Speech Acts
These definitions are taken from the Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership Course, delivered by the Erhard-Jensen Initiative.
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Assert
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Whenever you have given your word to others as to the existence of some thing or some state of the world, your word includes being willing to be held accountable that the others would find your evidence makes what you have asserted valid for themselves.
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Command
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With authority comes the right to make certain commands or demands on others. While we tend to think of a command or a demand as undeclinable, one can decline if one is willing to suffer the consequences of that decline.
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Commit
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Saying “I commit to …” is investing yourself in and putting yourself at risk for realizing the possibility you committed to. Your commitment organizes you and gives you a direction in which to move in your life that allows you to experience fulfilling on what you are standing for and what you declared as a possibility.
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Request
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A request is the asking of another (or others) for a promise, that is, a request for another (or others) to promise to take some specific action or to produce some specific result by some specific time. A request is only a request if the person to whom one is making the request has the opportunity to decline, accept, counteroffer, or to promise to respond at a timely later time.
When you make a request, possible responses are:
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Invite
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An invitation is distinct from a request. Unlike a request, with an invitation there is no commitment for you to do something, only an opportunity.
You can decline an invitation without explaining yourself or providing a basis upon which you are declining (if this is a true invitation). In the domain of committed speaking and listening, leaders use invitation to have others engage in the possibility as a possibility. When people get present to a possibility they may not take it on for themselves, but it does live for them as possible. |
Offer
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People can offer to make promises. Why would anybody do this? That is to say, why would anybody put
themselves at risk for doing something they were not asked to do? They do so because they are committed, that is they have invested themselves in the realization of a future that wasn’t going to happen anyway. |
Promise
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Once you have brought forth a realm of possibility through declaration, and generated what you are standing for and the commitments you have invested yourself in and put yourself at risk for, the question is: What are the promises which if delivered on make real this new future (the realm of possibility you declared)?
A promise is your word given to a person or to an entity for a specific action or a specific result by a specific time. In other words, there is always a “what”, “to whom” and “by when”. Be clear that promising is a creative act that puts you at risk, and if you don’t experience being creative and at risk you have not promised. |
Revoke
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Revoking your word is taking back your word to keep your word.
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