Hyperbole in English: A Corpus-based Study of Exaggeration

Book Description
The first investigation of hyperbole in English, drawing on genres such as spoken language, TV, newspapers, and literary works. Using approaches from semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and classical rhetoric, it explores both speaker- and addressee-related aspects of hyperbole, and shows it to be an important contributor to language change.
About the Author
Claudia Claridge is Chair in English Linguistics at the Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany. She is one of the compilers of the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts and is the author of Multi-word Verbs in Early Modern English (2000), based on the above corpus. Her main research interests lie in the fields of historical linguistics, pragmatics, discourse studies, and corpus linguistics. Within these fields, she has published articles on such diverse topics as irony, similes/comparison, superlatives, questions, conditionals, and discourse deixis. She has also contributed articles to various recent handbooks, such as the Handbook of Corpus Linguistics (2008) and the Handbook of Historical Pragmatics (2010).