Seminar task Answer the following questions

7. What types of Personification do you know?
There are two meanings of the term "personification". One refers to the practice of giving an actual personality to an abstraction. This practice has its origins in animism and ancient religion, and it is called personification by modern theorists of religion and anthropology.
The other meaning of personification is the historical sense of prosopopoeia. This refers to the practice of giving a consciously fictional personality to an abstraction, impersonating it. This rhetorical practice requires a separation between the literary pretense of a personality and the actual state of affairs.
8. Can you name English or American writers known for their ingenuity and versatility in the use of Personification?

The sea was angry that day, my friends – like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.” (Seinfeld television series)

“Life moves pretty fast.” (movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”)
“The dish ran away with the spoon.” (“Hey, diddle, diddle” by Mother Goose) 
“The Heart wants what it wants – or else it does not care” (Emily Dickinson)
“Once there was a tree, and she loved a little boy.” (“The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein).
"But the house on Mango Street is not the way they told it at all. It’s small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you’d think they were holding their breath." The House on Mango Street (Sandra Cisneros)


9. What is metonymy, what lexical meaning is employed in its formation?
Metonymy reflects the actually existing relations between two objects and is thus based on their contiguity. Since the types of relations between two objects can be finally limited, they are observed again and again, and metonymy in most cases is trite (to earn one's bread; to live by the pen; to keep one's mouth shut, etc.). Most cases of original metonymy present relations between a part and the whole and are known as synecdoche. In metonymy we observe a different type of relation between the dictionary and contextual meaning, based not on identification, but on contiguity (nearness) of objects or phenomena. Transference of names in metonymy does not involve a necessity for two different words to have a common component in their semantic structures, as in the case with metaphor, but proceeds from the fact that two objects (or phenomena) have common grounds for existence in reality. Metonymy is in many cases trite and registered by dictionaries in the semantic structure of a polysemantic word, e.g. the press (i.e. a printing or publishing establishment), the bench (i.e. magistrates and justices), a hand (a worker), etc.
Metonymy is expressed by nouns or substantivized numerals. (She was a pale and fresh eighteen.)