Vossian antonomasia is a stylistic device which attributes a certain property to a person by naming another (more well-known, more popular) person as a reference point. For instance, when Jim Koch is described as “the Steve Jobs of Beer”, certain qualities of Steve Jobs, be it entrepreneurship or persuasiveness, are assigned to Jim Koch, co-founder and chairman of the Boston Beer Company. VAs consist of three parts: a source (in our example “Steve Jobs”) serves as paragon to elevate the target (“Jim Koch”) by applying a modifier (“of Beer”) that provides the corresponding context. VA is named after Gerardus Vossius (1577– 1649), the Dutch classical scholar and author of rhetorical textbooks, who first distinguished and described VA as a separate phenomenon.
Ich begrüsse Sie herzlich auf meiner Website! Als Linguist arbeite ich am Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim und bin Mitbegründer von semtracks, dem Laboratory for Computer Based Meaning Research. Von 2001 bis 2009 war ich in verschiedenen Positionen am Deutschen Seminar der Universität Zürich tätig sowie von 2008 bis 2009 am Heidelberg Center for American Studies.