Individual Task

School: Foreign Trade University

Course: English Semantics (TAN118(GD1+2-HK2-2122).2)

Topic: Non-literal meaning: Idioms, Metaphors, and Metonymy

1. After having studied English Semantics, how can you apply the language
phenomena to your life?
Through the English Semantics course, I gained a much better understanding of
the meaning of words, how sentences are constructed, and how they can all be analyzed
and interpreted. One of them is that the meaning will start from the literal meaning; and
also related to how they are expressed etc,.. Coming to the group assignment when we are
assigned to do a presentation about non-literal meaning: Idioms, metaphor, and
metonymy; we have a chance to understand more about non-literal meaning, which
phenomena we see almost every day.
If we look closely, idioms, metaphors, and metonymy exist in all aspects of life;
from daily conversations to literary works like novels, poems, songs, books, and the arts.
We use them as a way to express ourselves in such a great way. The interesting thing
about not literal meaning is that to understand non-literal language, the listener has to go
beyond the literal meaning of the utterance and draw on the situational context of the
utterance as well as the world knowledge of the listener and speaker to reach the implied
non-literal meaning. However, some idioms such as “go the extra mile”, can be
understood with the literal meaning that you move further in distance, as it is somehow
related to its implied meaning “make an extra effort to do something”. Another example,
is if someone asks you “Cat got your tongue?”, they did not mean to ask if a real cat eats
your tongue, which sounds horrible and hurtful, but instead asked you to speak. The other
two: metaphor and metonymy are also used very often; we might see slogans such as
“life is a race" - a metaphorical expression that we usually do not notice;...

1
 By learning about non-literal meaning; I can understand more about these
phenomena; and how to analyze or guess the implied meaning. Moreover, through the
semantics course, I have learned phrases to express myself better and I realized that using
non-literal meaning in daily life is not hard but rather a very usual thing to do.

2. Present a situation in which individuals (or observers around them) have applied
phenomenal languages in daily life or in studying and working.
As I have said earlier, the use of non-literal meanings is very common. There was
an occasion when I was listening to my favorite artist: Taylor Swift, I came across this
line “My castle crumbled overnight, I brought a knife to a gunfight, they took the crown
but it’s alright” (Call It What You Want, 2017). This lyrics line has many metaphors
which not only make the sentence full of images but also very interesting and catchy to
listeners. Her "castle" crumbling is about bad things like negative portrayals of her in the
media or people making jabs at her. Her "knife" at the "gunfight" is her being
under-prepared for the level of hate or anger that others are pointing at her. She feels like
they've taken "the crown" or success that she was seeking, but she's not too worried about
it--someone else is distracting her.
Another time, I ordered food in a KFC store, and when I was waiting for my food,
I heard them yelling my order “Shrimp Burger and Coke is still waiting”. So this is a
metonymy phenomenon “a part for a whole” and “Shrimp Burger and Coke” implied me,
who ordered them.
There are thousands of cases where we use non-literal meaning in daily life,
working and studying apart from two examples I presented above. This topic is very
realistic and close to our daily life, as well as other phenomena that we learned in the
English Semantics course. Thanks to this course, I have gained more knowledge about
the meaning, and layers of meaning of words as we use them to express ourselves and
communicate every day.