engleski

A New View of Frequency and Prototypes

Based on the thirty million Croatian National Corpus, the paper investigates the frequency of metaphorical meanings in examples generated by two basic conceptual metaphors - People are plants and Ideas are plants - as described in Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Lakoff and Turner (1989). Taking as the starting point the assumption that metaphorical meanings of lexemes are in language use sometimes more frequently employed than the non-metaphorical ones, several lexemes representing metaphorical concepts have been chosen, and the frequences of their metaphorical and non-metaphorical senses have been extracted from the Croatian corpus. The relationship of these frequencies will be explored, with particular emphasis on the fact that in many cases the most frequently occuring sense of a lexeme (i.e. the methaphorical one) is not its prototypical sense. For instance, although the prototypical sense of the Croatian noun plod (English fruit) is the one denoting � part of a plant� , metaphorical senses of the same lexeme in the corpus account for 72.8% percent of the total number of occurences of the lemma plod (fruit). Also, senses in particular lexical entries, as they are defined in a monolingual Croatian dictionary (Anić, 1991), will be compared with the concordances obtained from the corpora. The majority of cases will show that the dictionary does not define all metaphorical meanings found in the corpora examples. Therefore, new meanings have to be defined. Meanings will be extracted from concordances (KWIC), as has been described in Sinclair (1991) and Ooi (1998). Since results of corpora research are often applied to lexicography, data on basic conceptual metaphors from the corpus can also serve as a starting point for the creation of lexicographic entries in a monolingual Croatian dictionary, taking into account frequencies of both metaphorical and non-metaphorical senses and the distribution of grammatical categories, as well as the relationship between them.

metaphor; prototypical sense; concordances; frequency

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