COLLOCATION

When you start learning English you actually try to find many new methods that might help you to learn it faster. While doing so, you might come across some general tips to improve English, such as, reading books, watching English movies, reading newspaper, writing blogs etc. English as a language has many components to learn, namely, grammar, sentence structure etc. Before you start writing, you must understand what words actually pair with each other. This makes it easy to maintain the flow of writing. Have you ever wondered what are these words called?

These words are called as collocations. Let us know them in a better way. When a group of two or more words go together they are called collocations. A good way to learn collocations is to look at the words and try to match them. For a beginner, there are no specific rules to learn collocation. Since native speakers are good with their vocabulary, it makes them easy to combine words.

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SYNONYM, ANTONYM, HYPONYM

A synonym is a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language. Words that are synonyms are said to be synonymous, and the state of being a synonym is called synonymy.

Synonyms can be any part of speech (such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs or prepositions), as long as both words belong to the same part of speech. Examples: 

Antonym is a word that has the opposite meaning of another word. It refers to a word that is completely different from another one. They also are called opposites. The opposite of a antonym is a synonym. Hot and cold are antonyms, whereas hot and torrid are synonyms. For instance, the antonym of 'hot' may be 'cold.'

Hyponymy is a relation of inclusion. In the words of Lyons (1968, 453), "...the meaning of tulip [or rose or geranium] is said to be 'included' in the meaning of flower." To take another example from Lyons (1968, 453), "the 'meaning' of scarlet is said to be 'included' in the 'meaning' of red." When represented hierarchically, "The 'upper' term is the superordinate and the 'lower' term the hyponym" (Palmer: 1981, 85). Therefore, the term tulip is a hyponym with respect to flower, while tulip, rose and geranium are co-hyponyms, i.e. hyponyms of the same superordinate term. Looking at this from the opposite angle, flower is the superordinate with respect to tulip, rose and geranium. (It should be noted that the designation of a term as a superordinate or hyponym is relative, not absolute. For example, tulip is hyponym of flower, but in turn would be a superordinate of parrot tulip).

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SIMILE

A simile (/ˈsɪməli/) is a figure of speech that directly compares two things. Although similes and metaphors are similar, similes explicitly use connecting words (such as like, as, so, than, or various verbs such as resemble),though these specific words are not always necessary. While similes are mainly used in forms of poetry that compare the inanimate and the living, there are also terms in which similes and personifications are used for humorous purposes and comparison.

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METAPHOR

The English metaphor derived from the 16th-century Old French word métaphore, which comes from the Latin metaphora, "carrying over". Metaphor is a figure of speech which makes an implicit, implied or hidden comparison between two things that are unrelated but share some common characteristics. In other words, a resemblance of two contradictory or different objects is made based on a single or some common characteristics. 

        
            In simple English, when you portray a person, place, thing, or an action as being something else, even though it is not actually that “something else,” you are speaking metaphorically. “He is the black sheep of the family” is a metaphor because he is not a sheep and is not even black. However, we can use this comparison to describe an association of a black sheep with that person. A black sheep is an unusual animal and typically stays away from the herd, and the person you are describing shares similar characteristics.

           A metaphor is a figure of speech that refers to something as being the same as another thing for rhetorical effect. It may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two ideas. Where a simile compares two items, a metaphor directly equates them, and does not use "like" or "as" as does a simile. One of the most commonly cited examples of a metaphor in English literature is the "All the world's a stage" monologue from As You Like It:

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances[...]

—William Shakespeare, As You Like It,

       This quotation expresses a metaphor because the world is not literally a stage. By asserting that the world is a stage, Shakespeare uses points of comparison between the world and a stage to convey an understanding about the mechanics of the world and the behavior of the people within it. 

Metaphors are most frequently compared with similes. The Columbia Encyclopedia (6th edition) explains the difference as:

a simile states that A is like B, a metaphor states that A is B or substitutes B for A.

Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor

http://english.tutorvista.com/literary-response/metaphor.html

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AMBIGUITY

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