engleski

Metaphorical meanings and the corpus

Metaphorical meanings in language use are often more frequently employed than the non-metaphorical ones. This assumption can best be examined using a computer corpus. Based on the test version of Croatian National Corpus which includes contemporary texts of 7.67 million tokens, the article investigates the frequency of examples of some basic conceptual metaphors, as described in Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Lakoff and Turner (1989). Some lexemes representing metaphorical concepts have been chosen, with respect to the frequencies of their metaphorical and non-metaphorical meanings in two Croatian corpora. The relationship of these frequencies will be explored. Meanings in particular lexical entries, as defined in a monolingual Croatian dictionary, 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 examples from the corpora. Therefore, new meanings have to be defined. Meanings will be extracted from concordances (KWIC), as has been described in Sinclair, (1991) and Oai (1997) Frequency data on basic conceptual metaphors acquired from the corpus can also serve as a starting point for the creation of a semantic description or lexicographic entry in a monolingual Croatian dictionary. The results of the research prove that use of large corpora is necessary in contemporary lexicography, as they are indicators of the actual state of language use.

computer corpus; conceptual metaphor; KWIC

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