Naslov
Counting sheep...and then some: A multifactorial look at instantiations of animal metaphor

Autori
Milić, Goran

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, sažetak, znanstveni

Izvornik
English Studies as Archive and as Prospecting: 80 Years of English Studies in Zagreb / Department of English, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia - Zagreb, 2014, 77-78

Skup
English Studies as Archive and as Prospecting: 80 Years of English Studies in Zagreb

Mjesto i datum
Zagreb, Hrvatska, 18.09.2014. - 21.09.2014

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Nije recenziran

Ključne riječi
animal metaphor; multiple correspondence analysis; corpus driven research

Sažetak
Following a growing trend toward empirical usage-based analysis in cognitive linguistic studies (Geeraerts 2005, Stefanowitsch & Gries 2006), the present study starts from the broad conception of the phenomenon commonly referred to animal metaphor (Talebinejad & Dastjerdi 2003, Fernandez Fontecha 2003, Martsa 1999, 2003) and focuses on specific classes of its instantiations to study the factors contributing to and the consequences of multifactorial polysemy (Glynn 2008) inherent to the process of meaning construction and conventionalization of instantiations of the above mentioned phenomenon. To this end, a number of instances of so-called zoosemy (Rayevska 1979: 165), i.e “nicknaming from animals which means that names of animals are often used to denote human qualities", as well as a number of critter verbs (Panther & Thornburg 2012), i.e. verbs converted from nouns denoting animals (to dog, to bitch, to horse around etc.), or figuratively used to denote facets of human behaviour) are extracted from purposefully selected subcorpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and submitted to Multiple Correspondence Analysis (Glynn 2008) to examine the relation between the principal formal, extralinguistic, and semantic features and contexts, be they morphological, syntactic, or prosodic, claimed to influence their use and meaning. Such corpus-driven research seeks to account for the many different facets of usage simultaneously and test their relevance by means of statistical methods commonly used in similar analysis such as Logistic regression analysis (Glynn 2006). The results thus gained are then discussed and their relevance is evaluated along two lines. First, the results are considered with respect to potential methodological difficulties/ problems regarding the proposed multifactorial approach to the phenomenon at hand, and the different types of its instantiations (e.g. problematic formulation of relevant parameters for multivariate analysis and their relevant types) especially with respect to zoosemy as defined above. Brief mention will also me made of repercussions of (and on) other types of instances of animal metaphor (e.g. proverbs and idioms). Secondly, the results are used to addresses the extent to which more traditional theoretical construct proposed by authors in standard cognitive linguistic approaches to the topic, like the cultural model of the Great Chain of Being (Lakoff & Turner 1989) or main meaning focus (Köveceses 2002) match the results gained by multifactorial analyses and how current usages fare in respect to both (differently) conventionalized uses recorded in dictionaries and compare to the diachronic development of these usages (Kieltyka & Kleparski 2005, Kieltyka 2002). In general, the study aims to further the current research on the theoretical and methodological aspects of the study of figurative language, as well as to contribute to the description of animal metaphor as a pervasive linguistic and conceptual phenomenon.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

POVEZANOST RADA