The gradual exposure of Goneril’s and Regan’s motives and Lear’s blindness to them is foreshadowed in their speeches, including through the kind of language Shakespeare puts in their mouths. Similarly, Cordelia’s honest love and devotion are reflected in her forthrightness and the pared-down statements, which contrast well with both her sisters’ more flowery speech. One of Lear’s flaws is his extreme susceptibility to flattery, about which the Fool teases him to no avail. The two greedy daughters understand their father’s character, and they set about using the specific words and the message that they believe will sway him in their direction.

However, Goneril and Regan cannot function as a team but must compete against each other. Although they are both opposed to Cordelia, each of them hopes to gain the entire kingdom, not merely the half of it they would get by forcing out the third sister. In that regard, we can also see the escalating competitive language that Regan employs.

Goneril establishes a paradox through alternating between hyperbole, extreme exaggeration, and litotes—positive emphasis through understatement with negation. She first says, in essence, that words are inadequate: she loves her father “more than word can wield the matter.” Later as well, she says her love renders her speechless: her love makes “breath poor and speech unable,” as she not only continues to talk but piles on the hyperbole: “Beyond all manner of so much I love you.” In addition to the length and ornateness of her speech, which make it clear that the negative understatements are untrue, she generally deploys abstract concepts, including liberty, grace, and honor, and avoids the conventional concrete things like gold or jewels. Only father and child are concrete, emphasizing them as equal in stature to those prized abstractions, including life itself.

Regan, at first hard pressed to outdo her sister’s eloquence, begins by just trying to match her. Me too, she basically says: Goneril covered the subject; I am made of the same material; she took the words out of my mouth. But then she changes tack and says that Goneril’s deployment of hyperbole was inadequate: “she comes too short.” She also deploys negative understatement, saying that all other joys and sensations are her “enemy.” Then, departing from comparisons that exaggerate her love, she reverses the equation, saying that she only needs her father’s love for her (and presumably, not his inheritance).

Cordelia employs a completely different strategy, as she refrains from trying to convince her father. No flowery language, just one simple metaphor: I cannot put my heart in my mouth. The rest of her short speech rejects hyperbole and litotes: “no more nor less.”