Article published in:
À la recherche de la prédication: Autour des syntagmes prépositionnels
Sous la direction de Christiane Marque-Pucheu, Fryni Kakoyianni-Doa, Peter A. Machonis et Harald Ulland
[Lingvisticæ Investigationes Supplementa 32] 2016
► pp. 89–104

Metaphorical construction in Spanish pseudo-partitives and PP-adverbials

This paper deals with the metaphorical exploitation of nouns like avalancha ‘avalanche’, nube ‘cloud’ and ola ‘wave’ in Spanish pseudo-partitive constructions (PPCs) of the type avalancha de información ‘avalanche of information’ and PP-adverbials, such as la gente entró en avalancha ‘the people entered in avalanche’.1 Based on an analysis of the structure and meaning of PPCs, including their possibilities of restructuring, the paper argues that the conceptual blending processes which take place at the NP and sentence levels are not isolated phenomena, but follow identical semantic principles for the cognitive integration of concepts triggered by prepositions. Although Spanish functions as the example language in this paper, the observations and results presented here apply to many other languages.
Keywords: conceptual blending, metaphor construction, prepositional phrases, pseudo-partitives, restructuring
Published online: 24 November 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/lis.32.05mul
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