Publications

Publication details [#14314]

Lederer, J. 2019. Lexico-grammatical alignment in metaphor construal. Cognitive Linguistics 30 (1) : 165–203. 39 pp.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISBN
9365907

Abstract

In this paper authors analyse the metaphorical lexicalization in specific syntactic constructions. Theircorpus comprises source and target language of conventional conceptual metaphors used in economy, extracted from The corpus of contemporary American Englishtodocument howthey combine with the following set of constructions: A-NP, N-N, NP-of-NP, V-NP, and X is Y.Results show that source domains function to provide structure to the target domain while filling positions in the predication in a disproportional way. They also argue that syntactic alignment is predictable when a lexeme is used in a source-target metaphor syntactic alignment is predictable (e.g. “market climate” is metaphorical whereas “climate market” is not). However, genre-specific lexicalization processes provide an explanation to exceptions to this tendency. They defend the use of corpus methodology to provide an account of the import of frequency for the documentation and comprehension of metaphorical lexicalization.