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.
M. Ruiz-Casado, E. Alfonseca, and P. Castells. Natural Language Processing and Information Systems, volume 3513 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Verlag, (2005)
R. Bunescu, and M. Pasca. Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL-06), Trento, Italy, page 9-16. (April 2006)