engleski

Of Chickens And Eels: A Cognitive-Contrastive Look At English And Croatian Dysphemisms

Expanding the issues addressed in Gradečak Erdeljić and Milić (2007), this talk aims at a further elaboration of the intricate and diverse motivating factors behind the proces of creative compounding in English, handled in detail by Benczes (2007). It is based on a case study examining the construction of meaning and the ensuing dysphemistic effect behind the two senses of the compound chickenhawk, one being a (damaging) political epithet in the domain of AMERICAN POLITICS ('a politician or other person who promotes war without having had any personal experience of it ; especially those who have avoided the experience or the draft) and the other limited to gay slang ( 'an older gay man who seeks out boys or young men as his sexual partners'). The factors relevant both for the development of different senses of the said compound and its constant dysphemistic effect are expected to include both the semantic relation between the two constituents resulting from the different ways relevant metaphors and metonymies act upon them, and the multilayered nature/ organization of relevant, culturally determined underlying knowledge structures. Furthermore, a cross linguistic comparison with Croatian, which reveals the nonexistance of exact conceptual and lexical matches in Croatian, should shed further light on the potential causes and dimensions (experiential, cognitive, cultural (Kövecses 2005) of both interlinguistic and intercultural variation, and potential universals, as reflected by the examples. The latter task will be backed by an analysis of suggested (near-) equivalents of the two English uses, namely pobjegulja, as (arguably) a lexical blend for the 'political' sense of the compound (based on the relevant scenario/ subdomain in the domain of POLITICS comparable to the American one, namely involvement in a WAR) and a listing of potential equivalents for the use in gay slang, gained by a preliminary survey of native Croatian speakers' intuitions/ proposals conducted at the Internet forum gay.hr.

dysphemism; creative compounding; conceptual metaphor; conceptual metonymy; polysemy; schema; lexical blends

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