Literal vs Figurative Language

Intuition [Beginner]

When you say "it's raining cats and dogs," nobody looks outside expecting to see animals falling from the sky. You are using figurative language -- words that carry meaning beyond their dictionary definition. Literal language, by contrast, means exactly what it says. If you announce "it is raining heavily," each word corresponds to its straightforward, factual meaning.

The distinction matters because writers constantly move between these two registers. A science textbook relies almost entirely on literal language: "Water freezes at zero degrees Celsius." A novel might describe the same fact figuratively: "The lake pulled a sheet of ice over its face." Both convey information, but the figurative version does additional work -- it startles, it paints a picture, it makes you feel the cold.

Every word in English has a denotation (its dictionary meaning) and often a connotation (the associations and feelings it carries). "Home" denotes a place where someone lives, but it connotes warmth, belonging, safety. "House" denotes the same structure but carries fewer emotional associations. Writers exploit this gap between denotation and connotation constantly. When Shakespeare has Macbeth say "life's but a walking shadow," he is not making a factual claim about biology. He is using figurative language to compress an entire philosophy about mortality into five words.

Visual [Beginner]

LITERAL LANGUAGE                    FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE
    |                                     |
    v                                     v
"Night fell at 7:43 PM."            "Night crept in like a thief."
    |                                     |
    Denotation only                       Denotation + Connotation
    |                                     |
    +-- Factual                           +-- Imagistic
    +-- Direct                            +-- Layered
    +-- Unambiguous                       +-- Open to interpretation

COMMON FIGURATIVE CATEGORIES:
+-------------------+--------------------------------+
| Technique         | Example                        |
+-------------------+--------------------------------+
| Metaphor          | "All the world's a stage"      |
| Simile            | "Brave as a lion"              |
| Personification   | "The wind whispered"           |
| Hyperbole         | "I've told you a million times"|
| Understatement    | "It's just a scratch"          |
| Irony             | Saying the opposite of meaning |
| Symbolism         | A dove representing peace      |
| Allusion          | "He met his Waterloo"          |
+-------------------+--------------------------------+

Worked Example [Beginner]

Consider the opening line of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..."

Step 1: Identify literal elements. The sentence is literally describing a historical period -- France and England in the years before and during the French Revolution. Those are real places and a real era.

Step 2: Identify figurative elements. "Best of times" and "worst of times" cannot both be literally true of the same moment for the same people. Dickens is using paradox (a figurative structure) to make a point about contradiction.

Step 3: Analyze the gap. Literally, the late eighteenth century had economic growth and political upheaval. Figuratively, Dickens is saying that extremes coexist -- that prosperity for some meant misery for others. The figurative language captures what a purely literal summary could not: the simultaneity of opposites.

Step 4: Determine effect. By refusing to settle on a single literal description, Dickens forces the reader to hold two contradictory ideas at once. That tension mirrors the tension of the novel itself.

Check Your Understanding [Beginner]

Formal Definition [Intermediate+]

Literal language is discourse in which the speaker's intended meaning corresponds directly to the conventional (denotative) meanings of the words used, governed by the semantic rules of the language. Figurative language is discourse in which the speaker's intended meaning departs from the conventional meanings of the words, requiring the listener or reader to construct an inferred meaning through processes of analogy, comparison, substitution, or contradiction.

The major categories of figurative language include:

• Tropes (figures that change or transform the meaning of a word or phrase): metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, hyperbole, litotes, periphrasis, personification.
• Schemes (figures that rearrange or pattern words without necessarily changing their meaning): repetition (anaphora, epistrophe), parallelism, chiasmus, inversion.

Denotation is the referential or "dictionary" meaning of a word -- the class of objects, actions, or qualities it picks out. Connotation is the network of secondary associations, emotional coloring, and cultural overtones attached to a word. The distinction was formally developed in semiotics by Roland Barthes, who identified a first-order system of denotation and a second-order system of connotation (myth).

Paul Grice's theory of conversational implicature provides a pragmatic account: figurative language often involves a deliberate "flouting" of the maxim of quality (truthfulness) or manner (clarity), prompting the listener to recover the intended meaning through inference.

Subtypes and Related Distinctions

• Dead metaphor: A figurative expression so conventionalized that speakers no longer process it figuratively (e.g., "the leg of a table").
• Idiom: A fixed phrase whose meaning cannot be derived from the literal meanings of its constituent words (e.g., "kick the bucket").
• Analogy: A broader category of figurative comparison that includes metaphor and simile but also extends to argumentative structures.

Key Concepts [Intermediate+]

Exercise 1. Explain how Grice's cooperative principle and maxims account for the way readers interpret figurative language. What maxim is being flouted when a speaker says "I'm absolutely thrilled" in a flat tone after failing an exam? How does the listener recover meaning?

Exercise 2. Barthes argued that connotation operates ideologically -- that the "secondary meanings" of signs naturalize cultural assumptions. Choose a common figurative expression (e.g., "the sunrise of a new era") and analyze what ideological assumptions its connotations carry.

Critical Theory [Master]

Formalist / New Critical approaches. The New Critics treated figurative language as the defining feature of literary discourse. Cleanth Brooks argued that poetry achieves its meaning through "the language of paradox" -- the tensions, ambiguities, and ironic resolutions produced by figurative expression. I.A. Richards distinguished between the "tenor" and "vehicle" of a metaphor, treating figurative language as a cognitive act rather than mere ornament.

Structuralist approaches. Structuralists analyze figurative language as operations within the semiotic system of the text. Roman Jakobson identified metaphor and metonymy as the two fundamental poles of language -- the paradigmatic axis (selection by similarity) and the syntagmatic axis (combination by contiguity). Figurative language, in this view, reveals the deep binary structures that organize meaning.

Post-structuralist approaches. Derrida's critique of metaphor destabilizes the literal/figurative binary itself. In "White Mythology," Derrida argues that all philosophical concepts are ultimately rooted in metaphors that philosophy has "forgotten" were figurative. The literal is not prior to the figurative; rather, the literal is figurative language that has been naturalized. This has radical implications: if all language is ultimately figurative, then the distinction between literal and figurative is a matter of degree and convention, not of kind.

Marxist approaches. Marxist critics examine how figurative language can either reveal or obscure material conditions. Georg Lukacs criticized modernism's reliance on metaphor and symbolism as a retreat from historical reality, while Bertolt Brecht's "alienation effect" used figurative distancing to make social relations visible. Raymond Williams analyzed how certain metaphors (e.g., "the market") naturalize economic ideologies.

Feminist approaches. Feminist critics have analyzed how figurative language encodes gendered power. Judith Butler's theory of performativity draws on the figurative nature of all identity categories. Helene Cixous advocated for "ecriture feminine," a mode of writing that resists the dominant (masculine) figurative conventions of Western literature. Metaphors of penetration, enclosure, and territory have been analyzed as encoding patriarchal assumptions.

Postcolonial approaches. Postcolonial critics examine how the language of colonization -- and resistance to it -- operates figuratively. Frantz Fanon analyzed how the colonized subject's relationship to the colonizer's language is fundamentally metaphorical. Salman Rushdie's use of magical realism and hybrid figurative language has been read as a strategy for representing postcolonial experience that cannot be captured in the colonizer's literal discourse.

Reader-response approaches. Reader-response critics emphasize that figurative meaning is not fixed in the text but constructed by the reader. Wolfgang Iser's concept of "gaps" (Leerstellen) applies directly to figurative language: the reader must actively fill in the meaning of a metaphor or symbol. Stanley Fish argued that interpretive communities share conventions for processing figurative language, meaning that what "counts" as figurative is itself a social phenomenon.

Historical Context [Master]

The distinction between literal and figurative language dates to classical rhetoric. Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric treated metaphor as the master figure of speech, arguing that the ability to perceive resemblances -- and to express them figuratively -- was a mark of genius. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian systematized the classification of tropes and schemes.

In the medieval period, figurative language was central to biblical hermeneutics. The fourfold scheme of scriptural interpretation (literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical) institutionalized the idea that texts carry meaning beyond their literal sense. Dante's Letter to Can Grande explicitly framed the Divine Comedy as operating on multiple levels of figurative meaning.

The Enlightenment rationalists, particularly John Locke, grew suspicious of figurative language. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke called figurative speech "perfect cheats" that manipulate passion rather than inform reason. This suspicion of figurative language persisted in certain traditions of analytic philosophy.

The Romantic poets reversed this valuation, treating figurative language -- particularly metaphor and symbol -- as the highest form of cognition. Coleridge's distinction between fancy and imagination, and his concept of the "symbol" as a participation in the reality it represents, elevated figurative language to an almost metaphysical status.

Twentieth-century linguistics and philosophy returned to the question with renewed rigor. Max Black's interaction theory of metaphor (1954) challenged the traditional substitution view. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (1980) argued that metaphor is not a literary decoration but a fundamental structure of human thought, shaping how we reason about abstract domains.

Bibliography [Master]

• Abrams, M.H. and Harpham, G.G. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 11th ed. Cengage, 2015.
• Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts.
• Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. Hill and Wang, 1972.
• Black, Max. "Metaphor." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55 (1954-55): 273-294.
• Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn. Harcourt, 1947.
• Cuddon, J.A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 5th ed. Wiley, 2013.
• Derrida, Jacques. "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy." New Literary History 6.1 (1974): 5-74.
• Grice, H.P. "Logic and Conversation." In Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3, ed. P. Cole and J.L. Morgan. Academic Press, 1975.
• Jakobson, Roman. "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances." In Fundamentals of Language. Mouton, 1956.
• Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1690. Book III, Chapter X.
• Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria. Trans. H.E. Butler. Loeb Classical Library.
• Richards, I.A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford UP, 1936.
• Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor. Trans. Robert Czerny. University of Toronto Press, 1977.