engleski

Is a Human's Bark Worse Than His Bite? Animal Sounds in Croatian Verbs of Speaking

Verbs of speaking play a specific role when it comes to referring to the processes of thinking (i.e. describing them) and interlocutors use them to inform each other about facts, ideas and emotions. All this makes them particularly interesting for cognitive linguists and in this paper we will approach them using the methodology of cognitive linguistics. This paper is a part of a wider project that encompasses all the categories and groups of verbs of speaking in Croatian (found in the dictionaries of the contemporary Croatian language and the HrWaC web corpus). Here we focus on the group of verbs that employ the metaphor of animal sounds with the goal of referring to human speech (e.g. beknuti ‘to bleat once’, blejati ‘to be bleating’, cvrkutati ‘to chirp’, kreketati ‘to be croaking’, kokodakati ‘to be clucking’, lajati ‘to be barking’, kriještati ‘to be squawking’, etc.). Our research has revealed that these metaphoric verbs contain a strong component of evaluating speech as boring, empty, fast, repetitive, tiring, persistent in the negative sense, sweet (with the goal of manipulating someone), flattering (with the goal of manipulating someone), banal, etc. The examples from the corpus reveal that this group of verbs is used for extremely negative evaluation of and for making ironic remarks about the content of speech (doubts with respect to: the veracity of the content, the accuracy of the speaker’s transfer of information, the rational foundation of the conclusions presented by the speaker). We also analyse this dominance of negative evaluation and irony with respect to gender. The results of the semantic and pragmatic analyses will be compared to the results obtained in our study of the semantics of the verbs of writing.

verbs of speaking, Croatian

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