engleski

Metaphorization of linguistic production, or how to speak about bad speech in Croatian

Linguistic production is a manifestation of the processes that go on in the mind and it is not surprising that cognitive linguistics is particularly interested in this relationship. Linguistic production is a daily activity and it cannot be separated from human beings – it is one of the most basic characteristics of human beings as thinking beings which set them apart from other animals. Therefore, it is understandable why a community can stop seeing it just as a means of a utilitarian transfer of information among the members of the community and start seeing it as an indicator of an individual’s mental state. The interpretation of the message thus almost changes its course and instead of the message being simply transferred from the Speaker to the Hearer, the Hearer stops the message and engages into an analysis of its quality. A message the quality of which is bad is assessed as a bad linguistic (spoken) message – literally as “bad speech”. The verbs of speaking that are analysed in this paper were excerpted from all three contemporary dictionaries of the standard Croatian language and their usage has been attested with the help of the hrWac web-corpus. On the basis of a semantic network, constructed on the basis of a corpus consisting of 370 verbs of speaking, we identify groups of verbs the meaning of which conveys a negative assessment of the quality of speech and analyse the metaphorization of (bad) linguistic production: e.g. bad verbal production can be compared to the sounds animals produce (blejati ‘to bleat’, lajati ‘ to bark’, kvocati ‘to cackle’, kriještati ‘to shriek’…), unpleasant noise that indicates destruction (lupati ‘to bang’, mlatiti ‘to beat’…), reducing the entity to its smallest parts which causes its essence to be lost (drobiti ‘to crush’, mljeti ‘to grind’, žrvnjati ‘to grind’…), an unstoppable rush of a clumsy entity (valjati ‘to roll’, provaljivati ‘to collapse’…) etc. This analysis of the metaphorization of linguistic production enables us to gain insight into how we, as members of society, approach the assessment of other people’s speech and which aspects of speech we see as important – meaning, perception of sounds, speed of speech, coherence, persuasiveness or veracity of the verbalized content.

verbs of speaking, Croatian

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