engleski

Metaphor repositories and cross-linguistic comparison: ontological eggs and chickens. Simpozij Building Figurative Language Repositories: Methods, Risks, and Challenges. Zagreb, Hrvatska.

This paper discusses the role that metaphor repositories have in the cross-linguistic studies of conceptual metaphors arguing for the construction of a metaphor repository as a necessary pre-requisite for any sensible, holistic comparison of the way that conceptual metaphors are used in various languages. As a means of cross-linguistic comparison of metaphors (and metonymies), such a repository provides the necessary systematicity by expressing various network(s) of hierarchical relations a conceptual metaphor consists of: types of linguistic constructions that activate metaphoric mappings, its relation to other metaphors, cross-linguistic lexical equivalences, cultural and structural constraints and its counterpart functions in other languages. The structure of such a repository represents the methodological backbone for such a comparison in that it provides the most basic ontological tertium comparationis, as we show in three case studies. The first is on the two types of time metaphors. Focusing on Croatian and Hungarian, we show that the moving ego subtype is apparently hardly available, unlike the moving time subtype. This contrasts with English, where both are productive. The second case study is on conceptual metaphors used in medical discourse, specifically in organ transplantation. Our third case study deals with some cases of very productive metaphorical expressions that seem to be metaphorical isolates. On the basis of the observations in these three case studies, we formulate some expectations of such a repository and present the architecture of Ontological Model of Concepts and Construction (OMLCC). Rather than just schematically linking metaphoric domains, the OMLCC seeks to capture the ontological and emergent conceptual organization as the embodied human knowledge about the entities, properties and their relations in the world, and (super)impose a referential lexical and constructional layer of language specific knowledge upon it. This type of bottom-up organization of the repository can represent the whole range of the and cross-linguistic/- cultural problems that arise in the figurative language studies, and is robust enough to stand the test of further dynamic requirements for further developments and improvements.

ontological approach, metaphor, metonymy

nije evidentirano