engleski

Metaphorical meanings of dimensional adjectives: speakers' judgments and the corpus

This paper investigates different meanings and usage of dimensional adjectives deep and shallow. The aim of the research is to see whether the meanings of both deep and shallow are likely to occur with words that are water-related, designating either the quality of water or some sort of container or some other, more figurative meanings. In order to do that two types of evidence are combined: speakers' judgments and corpus research. The results indicate that the most common meaning of deep is the one of water/container, as is the case with the speaker data. The corpus results for deep are different in a way that the meanings of deep are most frequently extended (deep breath, deep trouble, deep concern etc.). The corpus research results show that most examples that are water-related occur with shallow, including items such as shallow pond and shallow pool. On the other hand there are examples with a variety of figurative senses in which the physical sense extends to intellectual sense, as in shallow person. To conclude, the study shows that bodily experience constitutes part of the semantics of the dimensional adjectives (for example the container concept). The experiential frames are not created equally for both members of the pair and the basic scene will motivate more meanings for the stronger member, which suggests that they really are an antonym pair.

dimensional adjectives; deep; shallow; English; motivation

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