engleski

The roles of metaphor and metonymy in English – er nominals

We are not the first cognitive linguists to attempt a non-rule based account of -er nominals in English. Mary Ellen Ryder (199la, 1991b, 1999) has analyzed these formations in the last decade and has recently published a cognitive model for -'er' nominals. We have also been working on these formations in recent years and agree with Ryder on two important points, namely: - that formal syntactic accounts like those of Levin and Rappaport (1988) and Rappaport and Levin (1992) should be dismissed as empirically inadequate ; - that -er formations and their bases evoke conceptual schemas, though Ryder (1999) does not propose any specific schemas. Following traditional analyses, Ryder treats verb-based and non-verb-based -er nominals separately. She argues that verb bases evoke fairly specific event schemas with a certain number of participants having certain roles, which facilitate the task of interpreting an -er word. In contrast to that, she notes that noun bases evoke an indefinite number of more idiosyncratic schemas, although world knowledge and context narrow down the possible range of readings. In our view the putative contrast between noun and verb schemas is not as significant for the problem at issue as Ryder and others assume. We have found that all -er nominals can be accounted for with the analytical tools available in cognitive linguistics, namely: (i) a general conceptual schema independent of the syntactic category of the -er base, (ii) two high-level conceptual metaphors, personification and reification, acting at the level of -'er', and (iii) conceptual

-'er' base; -'er' nominals; applied cognitive linguistics; cognitive semantics; conceptual analysis; conceptual metaphors; conceptual metonymy; conceptual schema; English; personification; reification

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