Figures of Speech exemplifies, analyses and describes different types of figurative meanings, or tropes, and rhythmical schemes in natural verbal language. It should be of interest to anyone who looks for linguistically oriented information about these questions. The book focuses on figurative language in standard English, but the analyses and explanations given should be valid also for other languages.

Simile, personification, oxymoron, hyperbole, understatement, symbolic language and punning are dealt with, and there is a chapter on rhythmical schemes, but the main part of the book is about metaphor and metonymy, including synecdoche.

A number of theoretical attempts at explaining the character of these tropes are described and discussed. A more comprehensive analytical perspective is argued for, however. Metaphorical and metonymic uses clearly connect to cognition and experience in general in a creative way, but in this study it is also pointed out that there are obvious parallels between metaphor and metonymy and the non-figurative types of relations in language systems termed hyponymy and meronymy. Accordingly, language users seem to operate with general types of semantic strategies.