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It is sometimes claimed that litotes, the rhetorical trope in which the negation of the contrary is asserted, is largely limited in the New Testament to the Acts of the Apostles, and Paul does not commonly use it. But in fact Paul does use it and with greater sophistication and complexity than Luke. This article reviews the ancient rhetorical handbooks and scholia with respect to litotes, surveys its various functions, and then demonstrates that Paul uses it frequently and deftly as a rhetorical technique of restraint to enhance his credibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even a superficial scan of the titles of press articles published online supports the statement that they often include rhetorical devices. An example of such a device is understatement. In this paper, I attempt to briefly characterise understatement, to present similar devices, and to analyse selected examples of its use in the titles of Internet press articles in terms of their content and probable effects. The analysis leads to the observation that understatement is commonly and intentionally used in the titles of Internet press articles as a rhetorical means of influence to attract attention. Overall, the paper tentatively suggests the importance of sensitivity to rhetorical means of influence, such as understatement, to preserve autonomy in forming judgments and making decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics often note the similarity between the short stories of Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, and Raymond Carver, citing their uneventful plots, fragmented character portraits, and lack of epiphanies and other narrative tools of compensating for their understated representation and anticlimactic endings. Some even regard them as stories about nothing—too sparse and open ended to be well-rounded literary narratives. This study compares the use of understatement and anticlimax by Chekhov, Hemingway, and Carver. It argues that each writer develops a unique version of understated and anticlimactic storytelling that endows the purported nullity of his stories with a distinctive meaning by accentuating his created literary world. These worlds and how they are produced form a countertradition to that of modernist so-called "impressionist" tales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings shows a remarkable tendency to withhold information from its readers, apparently as a deliberate narrative strategy that aims to reflect the limited point-of-view of primary characters and thereby heighten the realism of its presentation. This paper discusses four examples of this strategy, beginning with one that (uniquely) cannot be verified by external confirmation: the suggestion that Aragorn secretly witnesses the coming of the Ent-wood to Helm's Deep. The second case concerns the true identity of Gandalf as an incarnate angel, a detail hidden from most of the characters, and hence from the narrative. The remaining examples concern the treatment of erotic relationships: the long engagement of Arwen and Aragorn, a private family matter from which most characters (and consequently the reader) are excluded, and Sam's courting of Rosie, revealed only in the closing chapter despite its direct influence on the way Sam behaves when first introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few important areas of the law exhibit the unpredictability of the free speech overbreadth cases. In a dramatic understatement, the Supreme Court has recognized that "[t]he concept of 'substantial overbreadth' is not readily reduced to an exact definition." In reality, overbreadth claims are often resolved in ways that seem readily contestable, if not arbitrary. This Article illustrates this systematic unpredictability and presents several suggestions for more consistently defensible results in the overbreadth cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Tikrit University for Humanities is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Domínios de Lingu@gem is the property of Dominios de Lingu@gem and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on the influence of Thomas Disch on Michel Houellebecq. Topics include the literary connections between Disch and Houellebecq, emphasizing stylistic similarities in their works. The analysis delves into various aspects such as language levels, prosaic style, use of litotes, descriptions of gruesome elements, and the objective portrayal of mundane details, highlighting Disch's potential impact on Houellebecq's writing style and thematic choices.

The article is devoted to social aspects touched by Ernest Hemingway in his early works. The basis of the literary analysis is made by the short stories Cat in the Rain and Hills Like White Elephants. The purpose of the paper is to study an artistic explication of gender relationships. The discussion of the understatement technique used by the writer has shown that these relations are characterized by inequality of partners, thus negatively affecting the conversion of loose ties into a family as the basic unit of a society.

This paper reports on an analysis of litotes in English research articles from two distant fields, life and social sciences. As a device for understatement, litotes denies the semantic opposite of what is meant to mitigate the literal content of the utterance. This feature makes litotes a useful means of academic communication which should remain cautious in tone and impartial. However, the results of the analysis reveal disciplinary variation in the frequency, structural types and syntactic functions of such constructions in the considered discipline-specific expert writing. The social sciences texts use twice as many litotes as the life sciences texts, and show a greater functional variation of litotes. There are also dissimilarities in the specific patterns by means of which the analysed structural types of litotes are realised.

“How Much I Dissemble I shall not Utter”: on Aposiopesis in the Poems by Wisława Szymborska and Their Translation into German Krystyna Pisarkowa emphasises the importance of means which participate in shaping the expression of emotions in a poetic text, and calls for extracting from the text “essential ingredients from seemingly minor semantic accents” (Pisarkowa 1998: 36). In this article, the author takes this inspiration and analyses how Wisława Szymborska applies silence in her poems as an aesthetic category and an expression of choked emotions, what indicators of silence she uses, and what happens with this silence in the translation of her poems into German by Karl Dedecius. The author concludes that a translator should be able to empathise with emotions and be an intermediary not only for the word, but also for the unspoken.

Different societies have traditionally conveyed status in different ways. Elegance is one of the examples through which modern and capitalistic societies express it. Based on subtraction and understatement, the practice of elegance is at the cross road between several aspects: class, gender, morality and taste. As this essay will explain, the emergence of elegance during Modernity is to be found in the very same elements and moral attitudes that generated capitalism. For this reason, this essay will delve into the analysis of the emergence of capitalism provided by Max Weber which will be considered against some of the most influential works written about fashion during the 20th Century, aiming not only to define the rules of elegance and its origins, but also its functions. Elegance is the favoured child of modern capitalism as it fulfils its contradictory needs of display and understatement.

Krystyna Pisarkowa emphasises the importance of means which participate in shaping the expression of emotions in a poetic text, and calls for extracting from the text “essential ingredients from seemingly minor semantic accents” (Pisarkowa 1998: 36). In this article, the author takes this inspiration and analyses how Wisława Szymborska applies silence in her poems as an aesthetic category and an expression of choked emotions, what indicators of silence she uses, and what happens with this silence in the translation of her poems into German by Karl Dedecius. The author concludes that a translator should be able to empathise with emotions and be an intermediary not only for the word, but also for the unspoken [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In religious teachings of Imamiyyah, both overstatement and understatement about Imams are forbidden, which are rooted in incorrect knowledge of states of Imamate and Imam's existential position in the creation. The present paper criticizes a part of the book "School in the Process of Perfection" in terms of its methodology, in which the author understates about Imams when introducing them. The author believes that some of the intellectual foundations of Imamiyyah (such as foreknowledge and infallibility of Imams) were not discussed in the first century after Hijra, that Imams were introduced as pious religious scholars, and that these attributes were proposed by companions and perfected, evolved, and popularized among the followers of Imamiyyah in subsequent centuries, while they were regarded as the cases of overstatement at the age of Imams themselves. The paper, however, proves how the honorable author reasons fallaciously and fails to understand the evidence and documents correctly and directly due to his semantic errors, lack of a comprehensive understanding of narrations, and misunderstanding them.

This paper reports on an analysis of litotes in English research articles from two distant fields, life and social sciences. As a device for understatement, litotes denies the semantic opposite of what is meant to mitigate the literal content of the utterance. This feature makes litotes a useful means of academic communication which should remain cautious in tone and impartial. However, the results of the analysis reveal disciplinary variation in the frequency, structural types and syntactic functions of such constructions in the considered discipline-specific expert writing. The social sciences texts use twice as many litotes as the life sciences texts, and show a greater functional variation of litotes. There are also dissimilarities in the specific patterns by means of which the analysed structural types of litotes are realised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how pre-existing music has been employed in British cinema, paying particular attention to the diegetic/nondiegetic boundary and notions of restraint. It explores the significance of the distinction between diegetic music, which exists in the world of the narrative, and nondiegetic music, which does not. It analyses the use of pre-existing operatic music in two British films of the same era and genre: Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), and demonstrates how seemingly subtle variations in the way music is used in these films produce markedly different effects. Specifically, it investigates the meaning of the music in its original context and finds that only when this bears a narrative relevance to the film does it cross from the diegetic to the nondiegetic plane. This reveals that whereas music restricted to the diegetic plane may express the outward projection of the characters' emotions, music also heard on the nondiegetic track may reveal a deeper truth about their feelings. In this way, the meaning of the music varies depending upon how it is used. While these two films may differ in whether or not their pre-existing music occupies a nondiegetic or diegetic position in relation to the narrative, both are characteristic of this era of British film-making in using music in an understated manner which expresses a sense of emotional restraint and which marks the films with a particularly British inflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit einem Aspekt der mehrfachen Negation, der in der historischen Linguistik bisher kaum Beachtung gefunden hat. Bei dem hier thematisierten Phänomen, das oft mit dem rhetorischen Begriff Litotes in Zusammenhang gebracht wird, sind die beiden Negationselemente semantisch aufeinander bezogen (nicht unlieblich). Behaghel (1918: 244) geht in einer Nebenbemerkung von lateinischem Einfluss und einem Eindringen ins Deutsche ab dem 18 Jh. aus. Im vorliegenden Beitrag weist eine Korpusanalyse des DTA unter Einbezug des REM und des FnhdC bereits frühere Verwendungen nach. Dabei wird deutlich, dass die in Neuhaus (2016a) skizzierten synchronen pragmatischen Verwendungsweisen (Verneinung, Mitigation, Understatement) und quantitative Ergebnisse aus Neuhaus (2019) sich parallel im DTA zeigen. Die Rolle des Lateinischen und die Einordnung als Lehnphänomen wird darüber hinaus kritisch evaluiert. Diese Analyse leistet somit einen Beitrag zu einer formorientierten und empirischen historischen Pragmatik. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the emergence of a Quaker literary sub-culture in the nineteenth century through an analysis of the work of Bernard Barton, the first Quaker poet to gain cultural prominence. Although the Society of Friends was perceived as a quintessentially unpoetic sect with little or no literary history, Barton developed a poetics that resonated with contemporary readers despite, and in some ways because of, its Quaker inflections. After tracing the lineaments of his authorial persona, in both reviews and his own self-fashioning, I examine the way in which Barton re-works Romantic-era literary styles and modes: first through a consideration of three specific intertextual dialogues, and then through a more general reading of his nature and landscape verse.What emerges is a body of poetry that is marked by Quakerism in thematic aspects,such as radical pacifism and the quietist spirituality of silence, but also through consistent and coherent tendencies of style. In the context of Quaker plainness and reserve,Barton adopts and adapts a range of aesthetic traits, ranging from the Spenserian stanza to forms of picturesque, to construct a poetics of simplicity underpinned by his favoured rhetorical stance of litotes. In doing so, he makes the paradoxical proposition of a Quaker poet imaginable for a nineteenth-century readership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The enunciative heterogeneity would be an intrinsec trait to speech figure especially in the journalistic discourse. It provides information while operating an ideological and cultural modelling. Through this article, we will try to show that the enunciative heterogeneity is deployed at the macro-textual level, as well as at the micro-textual level of the figurative expression. Moreover, it comes in many forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the literary text as a valuable source of figurative language and analyses basic tropes such as metaphor and metonymy and specific tropes like hyperbole, understatement, irony and oxymoron from a cognitive linguistic perspective, by discussing their functions and the cognitive operations underlying them. The remarkable laboratory where figurative meanings are created is explored with the aim to understand how witty, brilliant prose can emerge through the use of figurative structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Although metonymy has been the object of an outstanding amount of research, the issue of how it can accomplish mitigation or exaggeration effects has received scant attention from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics. By analysing the underlying cognitive operations, the aim of this paper is to go beyond previous research in order to demonstrate how some cases of understatement and overstatement can be explained via metonymies in a systematic way. We shall show how (1) situational metonymies that stand for an initial/final stage in a given scenario, and (2) CAUSE FOR EFFECT and EFFECT FOR CAUSE metonymies respectively (the latter complemented by metaphors, similes, or other mechanisms that generate hyperbolic effects) may contribute to the creation of understatement and overstatement. Highlights • Via metonymies, contextual effects can be mitigated or strengthened. This can be systematised through: (1) situational metonymies that stand for an initial/final stage in a given scenario. (2) CAUSE FOR EFFECT or EFFECT FOR CAUSE metonymies. • These patterns may appear in metonymic chains, or combined with metaphor or the caused-motion construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the authors offer an illustration of a pedagogical routine designed to support students' critical consciousness and literacy learning through the collective examination of shared texts. Topics include considering the subject matter of English and its relation with goals of critical consciousness and civic engagement, and literary practices include framing interpretive questions, closely reading the text by analyzing literary devices (example imagery, symbolism, litotes).

Copyright of Studies about Language / Kalbu Studijos is the property of Studies about Language / Kalbu Studijos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of International Journal of Language Academy is the property of Rota Kariyer and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This work is concerned with the study of the inverse problem of determining two coefficients in a hyperbolic-parabolic system using the following observation data: an interior measurement of only one component and data of two components at a fixed time over the whole spatial domain. A Lipschitz stability result is proved using Carleman estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept of Understatement as a lingua-cultural category and analyses the main linguistic means of realization of this phenomenon. Besides, some stylistic and pragmalinguistic aspects of Understatement are analyzed from the perspective of a distancing strategy. The researcher is primarily interested in Understatement as a lingua-cultural category relying on historically stipulated cultural traditions of Anglo-Saxon society which gave rise to the forming of the British national character, and which reflect age, gender and social differences of the English. The author does not use the Russian variants of the translation of Understatement in the article, as they do not fully convey all the aspects of denotative and connotative meaning of this concept. Further on it is emphasized that the structure of Understatement is complex, diverse and can be expressed by a variety of lexical as well as grammatical means, among which double negation, modal verbs, the adverbs of degree and particles can often be encountered which are in most cases dependent on the context. From the pragmatic angle Understatement can be used to conceal embarrassment, anxiety or offence. Moreover, Understatement is used while singling out the positive aspects of the communicative situation. The understatement of the positive characteristics of the speaker is reflected in the so called «effect of modesty », which finally boils down to such a strategy as «fishing for compliments», that is an intentional understatement of one’s positive qualities in order to «fish for compliments». Understatement used to and continues to play a special role in the English speech behavior. Its aim is to minimize the impact of the negative factors on the message addressee, to lower the categoricity of the utterance and to take the interlocutor’s interests into account.

Situations such as an entrepreneur overstating a project’s value, or a superior choosing to under or overstate the gains from a project to a subordinate are common and may result in acts of deception. In this paper we modify the standard investment game in the economics literature to study the nature of deception. In this game a trustor (investor) can send a given amount of money to a trustee (or investee). The amount received is multiplied by a certain amount, k, and the investee then decides on how to divide the total amount received. In our modified game the information on the multiplier, k, is known only to the investee and she can send a nonbinding message to the investor regarding its value. We find that 66% of the investees send false messages with both under and over, statement being observed. Investors are naive and almost half of them believe the message received. We find greater lying when the distribution of the multiplier is unknown by the investors than when they know the distribution. Further, messages make beliefs about the multiplier more pessimistic when the investors know the distribution of the multiplier, while the opposite is true when they do not know the distribution.

The article discusses the understatement and overstatement understanding of figures of speech. It also states the different role of overstatement and understatement in communication. Topics discussed includes meiosis, hyperbole, synonymous, antonyms and more than one means formulation in figures of speech.

The article discusses the understanding and actual meaning of figurative talk or figure of speech as we usually use this kind of talk in our day-to-day life in order to achieve something. Topics discussed includes litotes, metaphor, figurative elements, stipulative pronouncement and assertive content.