engleski

The meaning of English conversions: Quirky or not?

Some notable exceptions aside (e.g. Clark and Clark 1979, Dirven 1988, Dirven 1999) many studies of English verb conversions have left their semantics unexplained by either ignoring it altogether or by relegating it to the domain of pragmatic knowledge. Conversions have sometimes been likened to nonverbal compounds, whose interpretation is relatively unconstrained and is only harnessed by the requirement of pragmatic soundness. While much of the information that must be accessed in the interpretation of these verbs does indeed belong to the realm of encyclopaedic knowledge, it would be utterly strange for cognitive linguists not to move into that arena. In this paper the authors shows what cognitive linguistics can contribute to the study of the meaning of conversions. It is suggested that construal operations (detopicalisation), coupled with the idea of linguistic constructions as symbolic pairings of meaning and form, and the basic cognitive tools like metonymy and metaphor can take us a long way in our endeavour. It is not only shown that there is much more structure to the meaning of conversions, but also that there are principled reasons why certain types of conversions are not likely to occur.

conceptual integration ; conversion ; grammatial constructions ; metaphor ; metonymy

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