Naslov
The Metaphorization of Practical Action and Everyday Life Experience in the Words, Emblems and Coverbal Gestures of Spoken Language

Autori
Bogdanka Pavelin Lešić

Izvornik
Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia (0039-3339) 1. (2010), LV; 223-233

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Radovi u časopisima, članak, znanstveni

Ključne riječi
metaphorization; utterance; segmental; suprasegmental; gestures

Sažetak
This paper focuses on the impact of practical action and experience on all aspects of oral language, segmental and suprasegmental, verbal and visual (i.e. gestural). It is based on observations of emblems and coverbal gestures in synergy with the words of spoken language over a number of years annotating and studying visual and verboacoustic manifestations in videotaped oral interactions. Facial expressions, postures, gestures, and body movement in general visually manifest the close semiotic interweaving of movement, space, and words in human thought and consequently in human oral expression. The important part of this interweaving results from the metaphorization or analogical converging of two notions that share one or more features but otherwise belong to different categories. Thinking and speaking are experienced as just another form of activity such as the practical actions of walking, running, handling objects, only transposed into the virtual world of cognitive and linguistic reality. Thus, when speaking, we are handling concepts by using gestures and words as if they were the objects experienced in the outside material reality. The etymology of words expressing abstract ideas often hide the metaphorical source domain of a concrete phenomenon in our practical life. For example, not only is the Latin word comprehendere, equivalent in meaning to the English words catch, get, grasp, or comprehend ; the French saisir or comprendre ; and the Croatian shvatiti, but all of these words also share the same underlying metaphor: Understanding is catching. The coverbal metaphorical hand gesture of grasping an imaginary object seems to visually revitalize in the gesture space the metaphor, which had become ´dead´ in the linguistic system. The correspondences in the verbal and gestural structure of metaphorical mappings in a given language are possible because words and gestures are parts of a single framework. They developed out of practical action and everyday life experience and stay deeply embedded in it.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

POVEZANOST RADA