Metonymy, metaphor and the “weekend frame of mind”
-
Mario Brdar
Abstract
A series of corpus-based case studies on the availability of metonymically used proper names in the language of media, where the name of a capital is used to refer indirectly to the government, shows that this particular type of metonymy is available in Hungarian and Croatian but underused in comparison with English and German. The picture is all the more puzzling because the distribution of metonymies is very uneven in Hungarian and Croatian – some texts exhibiting hardly any such metonymies while they abound in some other texts. When examined along the temporal dimension, the data reveal a cyclic variation in the availability of these metonymies, with productivity regularly peaking at the weekend. These contrasts appear to be ultimately motivated by the workings of a cultural model whose essential ingredient is a correlation obtaining between two very general conceptual metaphors: time is space and social and mental world is physical world.
Abstract
A series of corpus-based case studies on the availability of metonymically used proper names in the language of media, where the name of a capital is used to refer indirectly to the government, shows that this particular type of metonymy is available in Hungarian and Croatian but underused in comparison with English and German. The picture is all the more puzzling because the distribution of metonymies is very uneven in Hungarian and Croatian – some texts exhibiting hardly any such metonymies while they abound in some other texts. When examined along the temporal dimension, the data reveal a cyclic variation in the availability of these metonymies, with productivity regularly peaking at the weekend. These contrasts appear to be ultimately motivated by the workings of a cultural model whose essential ingredient is a correlation obtaining between two very general conceptual metaphors: time is space and social and mental world is physical world.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface vii
- Introduction 1
-
Part I. Motivation in grammar
- Semantic motivation of the English auxiliary 29
- The mind as ground 49
- Motivating the flexibility of oriented - ly adverbs 71
- The cognitive motivation for the use of dangling participles in English 89
- What motivates an inference? 107
- The conceptual motivation of aspect 133
- Metaphoric motivation in grammatical structure 149
- Motivation in English must and Hungarian kell 171
- The socio-cultural motivation of referent honorifics in Korean and Japanese 191
-
Part II. Motivation in the Lexicon
- Conceptual motivation in adjectival semantics 215
- Metonymy, metaphor and the “weekend frame of mind” 233
- Intrinsic or extrinsic motivation? 251
- Motivational networks 269
- The “meaning-full” vocabulary of English and German 287
- Name index 299
- Subject index 303
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface vii
- Introduction 1
-
Part I. Motivation in grammar
- Semantic motivation of the English auxiliary 29
- The mind as ground 49
- Motivating the flexibility of oriented - ly adverbs 71
- The cognitive motivation for the use of dangling participles in English 89
- What motivates an inference? 107
- The conceptual motivation of aspect 133
- Metaphoric motivation in grammatical structure 149
- Motivation in English must and Hungarian kell 171
- The socio-cultural motivation of referent honorifics in Korean and Japanese 191
-
Part II. Motivation in the Lexicon
- Conceptual motivation in adjectival semantics 215
- Metonymy, metaphor and the “weekend frame of mind” 233
- Intrinsic or extrinsic motivation? 251
- Motivational networks 269
- The “meaning-full” vocabulary of English and German 287
- Name index 299
- Subject index 303
