engleski

English verb conversions and their German and Croatian counterparts

This paper aims to compare three languages: English, German and Croatian in terms of their grammatical recognition of alternative construals of the same underlying conceptual event schemata. While it is possible to say that there is a rough parallel between the three languages in the prototypical morphosyntactic castings of the event schemata in that each relevant participant of the schema occupies its typical morphosyntactic slot, we will claim that there is a marked difference in whether/how the three languages give morphosyntactic recognition to one alternative construal of the schema. More precisely, English is known to freely allow metonymic mappings within event schemata resulting in rearrangements of morphosyntactic structure and the emergence of verb conversions. However, while it is reasonable to expect that similar conceptual alternatives are available in the other two languages, German and especially Croatian will be shown to be less flexible in providing morphosyntactic means of conveying those alternatives. Where they do accommodate different construals, these will, not surprisingly, reflect differently on the plane of the linguistic expression. In other words, they will sometimes result, in German more often than in Croatian, in patterns of clause elements containing such verbs as could be said to resemble, but still differ from, English verb conversions. Nevertheless, these verbs, however different in terms of their morphological makeup, reflect the same metonymic mappings as underlie English verb conversions.

construal; conceptual event schemata; metonymic mapping; verb conversions

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