Figurative language creates comparisons by linking the senses and the concrete to abstract ideas. Words or phrases are used in a non-literal way for particular effect, for example simile, metaphor, personification. Figurative language may also use elements of other senses, as in hearing with onomatopoeia, or in combination as in synaesthesia.
Examples:
Metaphor – A metaphor makes a resemblance between one thing and another declared by suggesting that one thing is another, for example, ‘My fingers are ice’. Metaphors are common in spoken and written language.
Personification – A figure of speech which attributes human characteristics to abstractions such as love or things . For example:
The trees sighed and moaned in the wind.
Idiom – An idiom is an expression peculiar to a language that cannot be taken literally. For example, 'I’ve got a frog in my throat’.
