engleski

Of chickens and eels: A cognitive-contrastive look at English and Croatian dysphemisms

The paper is organized as follows: in the first section, a cognitive approach to compounding in general and so-called creative compounding (Benczes 2006) is briefly presented. Section two offers the analysis of the factors motivating the “ political” sense and the achieved dysphemistic effect of the compound, ascribing it to an interplay of culturally, experientially and cognitively determined factors. The latter include the relevant semantic relation between the two constituents resulting from the different ways relevant conceptual metaphors and metonymies act upon them, and the multilayered nature/ organization of relevant, culturally determined underlying knowledge structures of differing specificity. The analysis of meaning construction and motivating factors behind the sense peculiar to gay discourse in section 4 should further exemplify the workings and crucial role of previously introduced factors in the construction of compound meanings. Finally, a cross linguistic comparison with Croatian based on the relevant compound and its meaning(s) and the proposed (near-)equivalents should shed further light on the potential causes and dimensions (experiential, cognitive, cultural (Kövecses 2005)) of both interlinguistic and intercultural variation, and/ or potential universals, as reflected by the examples. The latter task is rounded off 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, and a listing of potential equivalents for the use of chickenhawk in gay slang, gained by a preliminary survey of native Croatian speakers’ intuitions/ proposals conducted at the Internet forum at gay.hr. The former expression should also point to the usefulness of the schema construct, as propounded by Langacker (1987) and Kemmer (2003).

conceptual integration; creative compounds; dysphemisms; euphemism; metaphor; metonymy; schema

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