engleski

Metonymic profiling in alternate construals of complex events: The case of verbal idioms and collocations

In his discussion of background as one aspect of construal, Langacker (2000: 208) stresses that metaphor can be seen as one type of linguistic manifestation of background, "[...] where the source domain serves as a background for structuring and understanding the target domain". It is our aim in this paper to demonstrate that conceptual metonymy (often interacting with metaphor) has a similar role in providing such alternate construals. The empirical basis of the investigation will be some English, German, Croatian, Russian and Hungarian verbal idioms and collocations (exemplified in (1-3)) that - when taken literally - focus on different phases of an event or on different subevents of a macroevent but are, due to the conceptual metonymy of the type PART-OF-A-SCENARIO-FOR-THE-WHOLE-SCENARIO (cf. Lakoff 1987, and Thornburg/Panther 1997), conventionalized ways of coding the whole event or macroevent (cf. Talmy 1991) and thus make possible different ways of construal. (1) pack one's bags (2) roll up one's sleeves (3) throw up the sponge Our study is intended to establish preferences in profiling certain phases of a complex event, i.e. which part (the initial, central or final part) of macroevents is most likely to get profiled in cross-linguistic terms.

metonymy; metaphor; idiomatic expressions; contrastive linguistics

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