Metonymic Hierarchies The Conceptualization of Stupidity in German Idiomatic Expressions

Human Cognitive Processing

Volumn 4, Issue , 1999, Pages 309-332

  Feyaerts, Kurt ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEUVEN   (Belgium)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85190677022     PISSN: 13876724     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: 10.1075/hcp.4.18fey     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. I wish to thank Dirk Geeraerts for valuable help with the preparation of the talk on which this article is based, Günter Radden for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper and Jessica Dobratz for proofreading major parts of the text. This article presupposes a certain acquaintance with basic theses and terminology of cognitive semantics and of the Lakovian theory of metaphor in particular.
2. Compare Kövecses (1989: 44): “each and every expression related to a concept has to be examined if we wish to uncover the minute details of the concept,” but see also Geeraerts and Grondelaers (1995: 174ff).
3. In this respect I refer to Langacker’s (1993: 30) characterization of metonymy in terms of reference points: “[...] a well-chosen metonymic expression lets us mention one entity that is salient and easily coded, and thereby evoke — essentially automatically — a target that is either of lesser interest or harder to name. [...] Other things being equal, various principles of relative salience generally hold: human > non-human; whole > part; concrete > abstract; visible > non-visible; etc.”
4. The cognitive basis of person perception makes it a discipline of great interest for cognitive semanticists: “In dealing with person perception we are concerned with it as it occurs in the layman, as a process affecting ordinary human interaction, and not with the person as an object to be diagnosed by the expert” (Tagiuri 1958: xii).
5. Cf. Heider (1988: 341): “Our main concern is not the exact measure of one’s own ability, but right away the relation to others. If somebody would tell us exactly what our ability measures, we still would ask: but how do others do?”
6. Cf. Lakoff (1993) and Kövecses (1995a) for recent studies in this respect.
7. Several examples illustrate that LIFE IS A JOURNEY also elaborates the object dual of both schematic metaphors which are involved here. Compare, for instance, expressions like He lost his life (CHANGE OF STATE IS MOVEMENT OF POSSESSED OBJECT) or His youth has abandoned him (TIME PASSING IS MOVING ENTITY).
8. See also Kövecses (1995b: 193), who distinguishes between a generic, mainly physiologically motivated conceptual level and a specific, mainly culturally determined conceptual level.
9. Argumentation theory provides a good basis for an adequate description of the conceptual relationships underlying these expressions. Crucially, the kind of argumentation (or conceptual linking) involved here is situated on a rhetorical rather than a strictly logical level.
10. Obviously, as this theoretical perspective is inherent in any linguistic research, no linguistic analysis can ever claim to reflect the mental richness of a conceptual structure in full detail.
11. I refer to Sandra and Rice (1995), where the issue of the psychological reality of theoretical notions such as ‘domain’ is discussed in greater detail.
12. According to Dirven (1993: 18), figurative meaning “only arises — or at least can arise — if the conceptual distance between the two (sub)domains or things referred to is large enough.”
13. In order not to complicate the picture too much, not every relationship between source and target or between one source concept and another can be explicated in one single figure. For example, the contiguity relationship and potential metonymy (CAUSE/EFFECT) among the source concepts DEFICIENT SENSORY APPARATUS, DEFICIENT HEAD/BRAIN and DEFICIENT (PRACTICAL) ABILITIES is not represented in this schema.
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