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Article In: Review of Cognitive Linguistics: Online-First Articles

All bark or all bite?

The role of cultural knowledge in the semantics of the Russian verb sobatchitsya versus the English to dog

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Abstract
The article presents a contrastive analysis of two metaphorical “animal verbs” in English versus Russian, focusing specifically on the diverging semantics of the English to dog ‘to follow with a malicious intent’ and its Russian counterpart собачиться [sobachitsya, lit. ‘to dog oneself/each other’] ‘to quarrel loudly, to rant’. Historical corpus data as well as lexicographical data paired with semantic field analysis are employed to selectively reconstruct the respective cultural models of dog around the attested time of N→V conversion in each language. This reconstruction points to a link between chronologically dominant cultural conceptualisations and the resulting differences in the lexical meanings of both denominal verbs.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Overlap in the cultural models of dog in English and Russian
    • 4.2The 16th Century English cultural model of dog
    • 4.3The 19th Century Russian cultural model of sobaka
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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