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Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language
Edited by Annalisa Baicchi
[Figurative Thought and Language 9] 2020
► pp. 151–184

Metonymy meets coercion

The case of the intensification of nouns in attributive and predicative constructions in Spanish

| University of Almería

Drawing on Cognitive Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 2006), this chapter furnishes a usage-based analysis of coercion involving the intensification of a prima facie non-gradable category, such as nouns. Our data analysis reveals that, in present-day Spanish, intensifiers (e.g. muy ‘very’, bastante ‘very’, completamente ‘completely’, totalmente ‘totally’, etc.) can felicitously combine, in attributive and predicative contexts, with proper and common nouns connected with fairly disparate semantic areas such as celebrities, animals, internet, music, etc. In these cases, the intensifier coerces the noun into encoding a positive or negative property through a generic for specific metonymic parameterization (Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Pérez Hernández, 2001). The analysis proposed here can nicely capture the semantico-pragmatic commonalities in these two environments, while also accommodating the non-alternation of muy (‘very’) with other intensifiers in lower-level predicative configurations with a concessive interpretation.

Keywords: Cognitive Construction Grammar, intensifier, subjectivity, concession, constructionalization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.An overview of Cognitive Construction Grammar
  • 3.On the role of subjectivity, metonymy and parameterization
  • 4.The coercion of nouns in attributive and predicative contexts in Spanish
  • 5.The gradable construction with muy (‘very’) as an incipient case of constructionalization
  • 6.A fine-grained analysis of the “X es muy N(=A)” construction in present-day Spanish
    • 6.1Celebrity names
    • 6.2Animals
    • 6.3Place names
    • 6.4Brand names
    • 6.5Company names
    • 6.6Internet
    • 6.7Characters (whether real or fictional)
    • 6.8Time
    • 6.9TV shows
    • 6.10Events
    • 6.11Music (style/lyrics)
    • 6.12Movies
    • 6.13Institutions
    • 6.14Specific institutions
    • 6.15Food
    • 6.16Sports
    • 6.17Clothes
    • 6.18Body parts
  • 7.Closing remarks and outlook
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.9.07gon
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