Epithet

Epithet is a lexical stylistic device that relies on the foregrounding of the emotive meaning. The emotive meaning of the word is foregrounded to suppress the denotational meaning of the latter. The characteristic attached to the object to qualify it is always chosen by the speaker himself. Epithet gives opportunities of qualifying every object from subjective viewpoint, which is essential in creative prose, publicist style and everyday speech.

Like metaphor, metonymy and simile epithets are also based o n similarity between two objects, on nearness of the qualified objects and on their comparison.

Through long and repeated use epithets become fixed. Many fixed epithets are closely connected with folklore. First fixed epithets were found in Homer’s poetry (e.g. “swift-footed Achilles”).

Semantically, there should be differentiated two main groups. The biggest one is affective (emotional) epithets. These epithets serve to convey the emotional evaluation of the object by the speaker. Most of qualifying words found in the dictionary can be and are used as affective epithets. The second group – figurative epithets. The group is formed of metaphors, metonymies and similes and expressed predominantly by adjectives (e.g. “the smiling sun”, “the frowning cloud”), adverbs (e.g. “his triumphant look”),or rarely by nouns in exclamatory sentences (e.g. “You, ostrich!”) and postpositive attributes (e.g. “Richard the Lion Heart”).

Two-step epithets are so called because the process of qualifying passes two stages: the qualification of the object and the qualification of the qualification itself, as in “an unnaturally mild day”. Two-step epithets have a fixed structure of Adv+Adj model.

Phrase-epithets always produce an original impression (e.g. “shutters-coming-off-the-shops early morning”). Their originality proceeds from rare repetitions. Phrase-epithet is semantically self-sufficient word combination or even a whole sentence which loses some of its independence and self-sufficiency, becoming a member of another sentence.

Example: His charitable works have earned him the epithet “Mr. Philanthropy.”