Lexical Expressive Means and Stylistic Devices

Words in a context may acquire additional lexical meanings not fixed in the dictionaries, what we have called contextual meanings. The latter may sometimes deviate from the dictionary meaning to such a degree that the new meaning even becomes the opposite of the primary meaning. What is known in linguistics as transferred meaning is practically the interrelation between two types of lexical meaning: dictionary and contextual.
The transferred meaning of a word may be in dictionaries as a result of long and frequent use of the word other than in its primary meaning. In this case we register a derivative meaning of the word. Hence the term transferred should be used signifying th£ development of the semantic structure of the word. In this case we do not perceive two meanings. When we perceive two meanings of the word simultaneously, we are confronted with a stylistic device in which the two meanings interact.