Patterns of comparison

Compatible and clashing similes in a contemporary Hungarian novel

Abstract

In this study, I investigate similes in the language of the narrator of a contemporary Hungarian novel applying the theoretical perspective of cognitive linguistics and the methods of corpus stylistics. The analysis aims at demonstrating that similes have a huge importance in the texture of the novel: through them, the text confronts its reader with serious challenges in cognition as well as in the narrative repre-sentation of events. My argument is that simile is not as simple as it is widely assumed to be in the stylis-tic literature. The present analysis, which adopts the principle of conceptual directionality andelaborates a fine-grained system of categories, aims at shedding new light on the cognitive potential of simile. The results of analysing the novel as a corpus demonstrate that more or less incompatible similes have almost the same frequency in the text as compatible structures. Consequently, one of the main strategies of the narration is to modify the process of construing analogical meaning expected by the reader.