engleski

"“Shall I (compare) compare thee?”: A corpus-based study of a special type of modification of English as-similes"

This paper presents the results of a corpus-based analysis of a special type of modification of the English ( as ) Adj as NP similes. The modification involves filling the property slot with a cognate noun-adjective compound, i.e., a compound adjective consisting of the original adjective and the noun representing the original source of comparison, and inserting a new source of comparison into the construction ( red as blood vs blood-red as a raw steak ). Our data come from three sources: the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the iWeb Corpus, and material published on the Google website. Using quantitative methods we first explored whether there is a relationship between various distributional and formal features of the “original” as -similes and their likelihood of exhibiting this type of modification behavior. We then performed a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the semantic and, to a lesser extent, discourse-related features of authentic examples of this type of modification. Our results indicate that while these modifications are not abundant, the as -similes that have been found to modify in this way are significantly different from the as- similes that have been found not to modify in this way, on a number of formal and distributional features. The analysis of the semantic and discourse-related features of the modifications themselves revealed (i) the typical semantic domains of the three nominal entities featured in the modified simile: the original source, the new source, and the target, including the semantic fit among the domains of those entities ; (ii) the typical semantic domains of the properties for which the three nominal entities are compared, including the semantic fit among the domains of those properties ; and (iii) the typical text varieties accommodating these modifications. The latter results confirm, and to some extent elaborate on, some earlier findings about the semantic and discourse-related profiles of similes at large.

as-simile, modification, source of comparison, target of comparison, expressivity

nije evidentirano