Hounded by Dogs and Bitches: a Cognitive-Linguistic Analysis of Figurative uses Involving the Concept DOG in English and Croatian

Hounded by Dogs and Bitches: a Cognitive-Linguistic Analysis of Figurative uses Involving the Concept DOG in English and Croatian

Goran, Milic

The paper aims to examine the power of two major cognitive linguistic approaches to figurative language, the Conceptual Metaphor and Metonymy theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Kövecses 2002) and the Conceptual Integration Theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002) to account for the motivation (Panther and Radden 2004) and axiological effects of linguistic instantiations of animal metaphors (Fernández Fontecha and Jiménez Catalán 2003) involving the concept of DOG/PAS (and their linguistic variants) in (American) English and Croatian respectively. A quantitative (Geeraerts 2006, Glynn 2010) and qualitative analysis of expressions and examples from dictionaries and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Croatian National Corpus (HNK) along a number of selected dimensions of (sex/age of the language users and referents, discourse/ register type etc.) will serve as the basis for discussing their impact on the usage and (degree of) conventionalization of linguistic instantiations in the two languages. Special emphasis is put on differences in slang use and across different discourse types/groups (e.g. different senses and effects of use of dog in rap/hip-hop as opposed to the more conventionalized figurative readings involving the lexeme and concept, calling for the introduction of the notion of lexical concepts (Evans 2006) in the analyses. The goal of the intended extensive intra- and cross-linguistic analysis of a concept (differently) productive in the languages examined is threefold: to emphasize the need for a greater focus on the subjective and intersubjective dimension, i.e. socio-cultural situatedness (Frank, Ziemke, Dirven and Bernárdez 2008) in usage-based approaches to metaphor as a linguistic and conceptual phenomenon (Sharifian 2008), to test the power of quantitative approaches for a more extensive analysis of figurative language, and propose possible repercussions in the field of ESL teaching.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05

867