6 - Conventionalisation

Summary

Conventional hyperbole

The spoken corpora used in this study (cf. Chapters 3, 4, 5) exhibit many highly familiar forms of overstatement. As many as two thirds or over three quarters of instances attested in speech are conventional as shown in Figure 4.1 on p. 101.¹ These are forms which one has heard quite often, uses oneself or which are even listed in dictionaries. Some of such conventional single-word and phrasal examples are provided in (1):

(1) ages, all over the place, all the time, always, brilliant, constantly, dead, desperate, die, disaster, dreadful, end of the world, every(body/thing/where), eyes popping out, fabulous, freezing, ghastly, give sb. a heart attack, hate, hopeless, horrible, incredible, kill, like a beanpole, loads of, love, massive, miles away, million, never, nothing, starve, vandal etc.

The question of conventionality has already been touched on in Section 2.5, when the question of literal versus non-literal language was dealt with, and briefly in Section 4.2. For Ariel (2002), conventionality is one determinant of her linguistic type of minimal meaning, while for Giora (1997) it plays a role in establishing the degree of salience of a word or utterance. As in these cases conventionality as such is not being defined, it is necessary to go back one step further. A convention according to Lewis (1969: 78) is ‘an arbitrary regularity in the behaviour of members of a population in a recurrent situation’.