Accent Reduction Tips: Figurative Language

I Figured You’d like to Learn about Figurative language!

Definition

Figurative Language, or “Figures of speech” include phrases that mean more than just their individual words.  Click here to see a short video about “Vocabulary and Figurative Language.”

Examples of Figurative Language

1. “The seed was planted.”  In the Master Your Accent “About” page, Cher referred to her love for accent modification.  “The seed was planted” just meant that like a seed, her experience of accent modification was “planted” or set into her memory to use at a later date.
2.   “Boiled down to…”  As another example of figurative language, we see that “boiled down to” was also used in the Intelligible Choice “About” page.  “Boiled down to” means something different but similar to heating an item to a very high level and for a long enough time that the item reduces its size to the last remaining item.  This happens when a chef cooks a sauce that has a lot of thin tasty liquid but wants most of the liquid to evaporate-so the remaining ingredient can still hold the taste of the liquid without the actual liquid.  In other words, the “main ingredient” is the result.  Similarly, “boiled down to” for our purposes in this article meant taking a lot of information and describing it in a few categories.
3.  ”Breaking down…”  Why not learn from another example?!  In the article titled, “Speech Sound Production,” we referred to separating words into their individual sound components.  We don’t actually “break” the words as to need repairing; however, we separate each word into sounds that make up the word.

Additional Figurative Language

Idioms, cliches, metaphors, and similes are all types of figurative language.

View my article,  Tips for Successful Communication.