خُذْ هَذَا الْفَرَسَ
Take this horse.
If the speaker points to a book and mistakenly treats it as an instance of “faras,” this is an erroneous application of an assigned term. Not every deviation from the expected referent is a meaningful figure of speech.
Figurative usage requires an intelligible relation and suitable context. Arbitrarily calling a book a horse, with no communicative relation to exploit, does not amount to the structured transfer of meaning examined in rhetoric.
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Defining Literal Usage: Linguistic Assignment and Speech Convention
خُذْ هَذَا الْفَرَسَ
Take this horse.
If the speaker points to a book and mistakenly treats it as an instance of “faras,” this is an erroneous application of an assigned term. Not every deviation from the expected referent is a meaningful figure of speech.
Figurative usage requires an intelligible relation and suitable context. Arbitrarily calling a book a horse, with no communicative relation to exploit, does not amount to the structured transfer of meaning examined in rhetoric.