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II. A General Introduction of Hyperbole
2.1 Definitions of Hyperbole
Hyperbole is a rhetorical device which has been analyzed for quite a long time. A lot of scholars have studied it in our country and foreign countries. So there are many ways to explore hyperbole and we may understand it better. This thesis will study the differences in many aspects such as language, culture, philosophy and so on.
The famous writer Liu Xie once said that hyperbole can be used in any content if it is necessary to use a rhetorical device. But he did not mention the exact word of hyperbole. He only talked about the effect of it such as exaggeration. Chen once made a definition about it that hyperbole is an exaggeration to the fact. Hyperbole is used when the author needs to exaggerate and exceeds the truth. After that, there were a lot of people who studied a lot and wanted to give a complete definition about hyperbole in China. A lot of scholars explained it separately according to their own understanding of it. Therefore, there are some common points among their studies. First, they all focus on the exaggeration a lot because it is quite important in hyperbole. Hyperbole contains overstatement and understatement which will be discussed later in the thesis. Second, many people have neglected one thing that hyperbole is used only to exaggerate a certain part of the subject such as its characteristics, special effect and so on. So most people think hyperbole needs to be defined more comprehensively.
Hyperbole is used to exaggerate the real truth because of the requirement of the emotion or accurate description about something. The use of hyperbole can achieve the unique influence.
The western scholars have also studied hyperbole for quite a long time. In the ancient Greece, a lot of philosophers had discussed the rhetorical devices which had been formed by grammar of language study (Anderson, 1988). In the American Heritage Dictionary, it says hyperbole is an exaggeration which belongs to the rhetorical devices. The New World Dictionary thinks that hyperbole is used to achieve certain effect which is not only literally. In the Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, it says hyperbole is just exaggeration. The Random House College Dictionary thinks that the definition of it has two aspects. The first one is that it is an exaggeration. The second is that it is not literally. That is to say, the western scholars also focus only on the exaggeration which is one of the characteristics of hyperbole. For example, Dwen Walson once gave a quite different definition of hyperbole in his book which was called Longman Modern English Dictionary that hyperbole was a kind of figure speech that is used to exaggerate the real things.