Volume 25, Issue 2

In the three versions of Hamlet translated during the Franco regime in Spain, metaphors related to the censored themes of sex and religion were altered or removed. In this study, we employ the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz Group 2007) to identify all metaphors involving sex and religion in Shakespeare's Hamlet and its three Franco-era Spanish translations. We find that under the influence of censorship, authors employ many of the strategies for metaphor translation also used for uncensored texts, such as those identified by Newmark (1981), van den Broeck (1981), and Toury (1995). However, we argue that censorship encourages strategies judged as less preferable, more extreme, or which are not usually discussed in translation studies. These strategies appear to be selected specifically to remove the material subject to censorship, whether this is found in the source domain (vehicle) or the target domain (tenor) of a metaphor.

Internationally recognized brands are an increasingly essential asset for present-day companies. This paper takes a cognitive perspective on the semantics of commercial brands (and their related logos), and explores the role of image schemas in endowing them with a cross-culturally significant core meaning. Two surveys were carried out among speakers of four different languages (i.e., English, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic) in relation to the logos of several car categories (minis, family cars, 4 × 4s, and sports cars) and a limited set of image schemas (CONTAINER, FORCE, and ATTRIBUTE). The analysis of the results reveals a consistent correlation between the participants' semantic interpretation of the car brands, and the basic meanings deriving from the image schemas included in their logos. The outcome of the surveys also points to the existence of potential constraints on the universal reach of image-schematic-based communication. These limitations emerge either from the combination of image schemas with additional idealized cultural models, or from the use of specific richer configurations of the image-schematic visual cues at work. In this connection, the present study explores the inventory of visual configurations available for the representation of the image schemas under scrutiny, assesses their universal significance, and raises awareness about differences in the cross-cultural communicative effectiveness of the various layouts of a given image-schematic cue.

The sentence No head injury is too trivial to be ignored is often presented as a verbal illusion. According to the standard view, this sentence, which seems perfectly acceptable at first sight, is in fact logically incorrect. It is usually assumed that sentences such as these are produced as the result of negation overload, but get a coherent interpretation because of shallow processing, and because of pragmatic factors, which overrule semantics and syntax. In this paper it is argued that this analysis is incorrect and that No head injury is too trivial to be ignored can be seen as an instance of the negative ‘No X is too Z to Y’ construction, which is a sub-construction of the abstract ‘No X is too Y to Z’ construction. This negative construction can be seen as a conventionalized construction (form-meaning unit) that has a transparent (i.e. linguistically analyzable) syntactic structure that can be linked to and motivated by other constructions. It is shown that the occurrence of negative ‘No X is too Z to Y’ construction has to do with the rhetorical function of the infinitival verb in these sentences, and the need to express particular information by a form-meaning element. This study stresses the importance of the rhetorical dimension of constructions.

Adults and children aged 3;0–3;6 were presented with ungrammatical NVN uses of intransitive-only verbs (e.g., * Bob laughed Wendy ) and asked – by means of a forced-choice pointing task – to select either a causal construction-meaning interpretation (e.g., ‘Bob made Wendy laugh’) or a non-causal sentence-repair interpretation (e.g., ‘Bob laughed at Wendy’). Both age groups chose casual construction-meaning interpretations on at least 82% of trials, regardless of (a) verb frequency and (b) the construction used for grammatical control/filler trials (transitive – e.g., Bob moved Wendy – or intransitive – e.g., Wendy moved ). These findings constitute support for cognitive linguistic approaches under which verb argument structure constructions have meanings in and of themselves and – further – suggest that construction meaning is sufficiently powerful as to overrule verb meaning when the two conflict.

In a recent paper published in this journal, Laura Janda makes a number of claims about metonymy, specifically about metonymy in word-formation as part of grammar. In a nutshell, what she says is that suffixed nouns such as Russian saxarnica (from saxar ‘sugar’) ‘sugar bowl’, Czech břicháč (from břicho ‘belly’) ‘person with a large belly’, or Norwegian baker ‘baker’, are metonymic extensions from saxar ‘sugar’, břicho ‘belly’, and bake ‘bake’, respectively. It is our contention that this claim about metonymy being involved in word-formation phenomena such as suffixation is misconceived and leads to an overuse of the term ‘metonymy’. We first comment on Janda's views on cognitive linguistic research on metonymy in grammar and word-formation, and then evaluate the evidence that she provides to support her central claim – from some general claims about metonymy and grammar to the way she identifies metonymy in word-formation. Finally, we point out a series of problems ensuing from the concept of word-formation metonymy. The analytical parts of Janda's article are in our view a more or less traditional cross-linguistic inventory of suffixation patterns that do not exhibit metonymy as such. However, some genuine metonymies that crop up among her examples are glossed over. In other words, we claim that her analysis ignores metonymies where they appear and postulates metonymies where they do not exist.

Brdar and Brdar-Szabó (this volume) offer a critique of Janda (2011). Janda (2011) found that the same cognitive strategy that facilitates metonymy, namely use of a conceptual source to access a target, can also be invoked in many patterns of affixal word-formation. In other words, many cases of word-formation appear to be motivated by metonymic association. Brdar and Brdar-Szabó claim that it is incorrect to refer to word-formational processes as metonymies. In addition to the robust parallels evidenced in my data, I offer three arguments to defend my use of the term “metonymy”: (1) a broader definition of metonymy facilitates more insightful generalizations; (2) there is no fixed boundary between lexical metonymy and word-formational metonymy since they coexist in the lexicon-grammar continuum; and (3) context, whether it be a suffix or other cues, is always a factor in metonymy.