engleski

Metaphorical collocations: A linguistic phenomenon at the intersection of metaphor and collocation

Collocations have been in the focus of interest of theoreticians and practitioners for quite some time and within a variety of fields, such as applied linguistics, phraseology, lexicography, SLA, etc. Although no single definition of a collocation has been widely accepted, it is known that they are more or less fixed word combinations on the syntagmatic level whose components cannot be freely combined. Metaphors have likewise been thoroughly studied, but, unlike collocations, they have a widely accepted definition. In this presentation I focus on an underexplored type of collocations at the intersection of metaphor and collocation: metaphorical collocations, that is, collocations in which one of the constituents has a figurative meaning. An example in English is to quench thirst, and it is interesting to see that in other languages, such as Croatian (ugasiti žeđ) and German (Durst löschen), the underlying metaphor is the same: THIRST IS FIRE. Thus, the same extra- linguistic reality is in this case lexicalized in all three languages with the help of a metaphor that motivates meaning. However, sometimes there is less correspondence between languages. For example, the English confirmed bachelor is in Croatian okorjeli neženja (literally ‘hardened bachelor’) and German eingefleischter Junggeselle (literally ‘carved in meat bachelor’) is motivated by different background images, but both basically describe the characteristic of thickness or depth. I find that these differences make metaphorical collocations particularly interesting for exploration within the field of SLA due to possible crosslinguistic influences. In addition, it appears that metaphorical collocations are perceived differently by different researchers ; therefore, it is of relevance to linguistics in general to try to come to an understanding of what a metaphorical collocation is or, at least, is not. Hence, the aim of this presentation is to share the preliminary results of a corpus-based project titled “Metaphorical Collocations – Syntagmatic Word Combinations between Semantics and Pragmatics” and explore the particularities of metaphorical collocations uncovered thus far.

collocations ; metaphorical collocations ; conceptual metaphor

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