Submitted by mperdek on 19 April, 2011 - 21:02.
LEXICOLOGY AND LEXICOGRAPHY READING GROUP
invites everyone to the group's meeting that will take place
on
Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 5 p.m. in room 101A
The speakers will be
Sylwia Wojciechowska
ACTION-RESULT metonymies: A corpus-based study of shipment
The typology of metonymic relationships is a controversial issue in the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Metonymy. Just as there are various definitions of metonymy, so there are different systems of classification of metonymic patterns. In line with the typology propounded by Radden – Kövecses (1999), three main types are recognised: WHOLE-PART, PART-WHOLE and PART-PART. The last conceptual configuration does not seem well-established, being sometimes categorised as either WHOLE-PART or PART-WHOLE, and is rejected by e.g. Ruiz de Mendoza (2000). This presentation argues the case for the PART-PART metonymies by means of analysing the highly productive ACTION-RESULT metonymic mapping, an example of regular polysemy in the sense of Apresjan (1995).
The ACTION-RESULT metonymy is studied both from the theoretical and practical perspective. A model of the ACTION-RESULT pattern as a PART-PART metonymy is proposed for the metonymic senses of such lexemes denoting action as publication, purchase, recording, shipment and shopping. Of these examples of the ACTION-RESULT relation, shipment is chosen for a case study of its source and target senses. Hilpert (2006) postulates that metonymic expressions differ from literal ones with respect to collocation and colligation. This enquiry attempts to find out if this hypothesis can be verified on the basis of the usage of shipment. Example sentences of the literal and metonymic meanings of shipment from the Big Five English monolingual learners’ dictionaries are scrutinised for collocational and colligational paradigms. These examples are then checked against the patterns found in the British National Corpus in order to see if they indicate the most frequent collocations and colligations in which the source and target are found. It is also examined how effectively the dictionary exemplification and the corpus demonstrate the difference in countability between the literal and metonymic senses. It turns out that while some lexical and grammatical patterns are specific either to the ACTION or the RESULT meaning, others can appear both with the source and the target of the shipment metonymy. In the latter case, only a thorough analysis of a broader context can tell the ACTION and RESULT senses apart.
The curious case of play down or how many equivalents does a phrasal verb need?
Phrasal verbs (PVs) are considered one of the hallmarks of native-like command of English. Their semantic idiosyncrasy (noncompositionality of meaning) and specific syntactic configurations make them a stumbling block for learners of English. For translators, they prove to be a test of their linguistic competence and creativity. This presentation focuses on idiomatic phrasal verbs and their Polish equivalents found in general-purpose English-Polish (E-P) dictionaries, specialized E-P dictionaries of phrasal verbs and a parallel corpus (PHRAVERB) created for the purpose of the study. Problematic areas related to arriving at equivalents of phrasal verbs will be discussed on the example of selected PVs.
Polish lexicographic equivalents of PVs will be analyzed in terms of their
- precision (Does the equivalent cover all the meaning components included in the English definition? Does it over- or underspecify the original meaning?)
- usability (What is the insertability potential of the equivalent? Is a context-specific alternative inevitable? Does it sound natural when used in sentences derived from English corpora and phrasal verb dictionaries? Does it reflect the register indicated in the definition?
- collocational preferences (Does the equivalent take the same arguments as the English counterpart? Is the meaning retained or changed? )
Additionally, differences in coverage of PVs in E-P general-purpose and specialized dictionaries will also be addressed.
Corpus equivalents will be analyzed in terms of their “lexicographic potential”, i.e. to what extent translations found in the parallel corpus might prove suitable for inclusion in lexicographic works. In order to establish that they will be compared with the existing dictionary equivalents.
