engleski

The meaning of English verb conversions: quirky or not?

Some noteworthy exceptions aside (Clark and Clark 1979, Dirven 1988, 1999), there has been a persistent neglect of the semantics of English verb conversions in the linguistic literature. Even though there are some general reasons for this neglect, which explain similar fates of other word formation phenomena, verb conversions have been ostracised or at least regarded as different from other derived verbs due to their semantic openness (Plag 1999). Moreover, they have been claimed to be unamenable to systematic (formal) treatment (Lieber 1992, 2004). The point of this talk is to show that this class of verbs need not be semantically as quirky as claimed provided we analyse them as emerging and being interpreted within a dynamic model of meaning construction and reconstruction. In other words, the goal is not to arrive at a formalized and limited system of (possibly) universal features or metalinguistic fomulae to predict the semantics of these verbs, but to show what motivates the meanings that they have in on-line meaning construction. We will show that different types of metonymy play a key motivational role and reduce the idiosycracy of these verbs considerably: a) predicational metonymy of the general type SALIENT EVENT PARTICIPANT FOR EVENT e.g. to knife somebody ; b) referential metonymy: diceN (instrument) for diceN (game played with the instrument) to diceV 'to play dice' ; c) 'formal' metonymy: to ODV for to overdoseV, to tunnelV tunnel-netN 'to catch birds with a tunnel-net' ; other types of metonymic operations like metonymic domain expansion: to table a motion 'to formally propose' and metonymic domain reduction (here + metaphor): to waltz out of the room  'to walk casually out of the room'. No less importantly, there is metaphor that provides either both the conceptual structure and lexical content for verb conversions: to land a job, to milk rich clients or primarily conceptual structure as in to fragment, to thrill, whereby the latter could be understood as 'to go into fragments/into thrill' on account of the STATES ARE LOCATIONS metaphor ; and finally some non-metaphorical analogical mappings that might take place in the (re)construction of a significant class of conversions called performatives: to captain a ship, to pilot a plane etc.

verb conversions; metaphor; metonymy; grammatical integration; conceptual integration; constructional polysemy

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