engleski

Metonymy-induced polysemy and the role of suffixation in its resolution in some Slavic languages

The present paper is intended as a contribution towards exploring the vast unexplored area of lexical-semantic typology in three respects. Although, there is a broad consensus among cognitive linguists concerning the fact that both conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy are basic cognitive operations whose universality is not doubted, there is a whole series of publications trying to establish which metaphors are universal and which are culture-specific (cf. Barcelona 2001, Boers 2003, Charteris-Black 2003, Kövecses 2005). By the same token, the elucidation of how conceptual metonymy is exploited across languages is an interesting and legitimate enterprise, which forms the first goal of the present contribution. This also presupposes the study of the strategies employed to reduce and/or resolve metonymy-induced polysemy, which is the secondary goal in this paper. Thirdly, the central concern of the paper is with metonymy avoidance strategies as a limiting case of polysemy resolution. Specifically, I look into the role of suffixation in the resolution of metonymy-induced polysemy in a number of languages (Germanic, Romance, Slavic and Hungarian) in two frames, animals and their meat, and trees and woods. The two case studies amply show that in addition to metonymic polysemy, which is present in all the languages under study to a variable degree, there is a whole continuum of metonymy avoidance strategies. The particular mix of strategies a language makes use is of course dependent on its structural makeup. Slavic languages rely heavily on suffixation to resolve metonymy-induced polysemy. It is established that Slavic languages do not really have many choices apart from suffixation in the resolution of metonymy-induced polysemy. Compounding, which is regularly found in Germanic languages as a polysemy-resolving tool, is far less productive in Slavic languages. The analysis of patterns of suffixation found in six Slavic languages reveals that unlike compounding, which as good as removes any ambiguity in spite of its underspecificity, suffixation as a polysemy-resolving strategy is even more underspecified, and as an interesting twist, prone to contract additional polysemy or just relegate it to another level. The suffixations found in Slavic languages as metonymy-resolving strategy are polysemous at two levels, at the level of the constructional schema obtaining with individual suffixes and at the level of constructional instance, i.e. individual words containing a given suffix may have more than one sense. The latter type is shown to cause more difficulties from a functional point of view. Two solutions are noted: one is to relieve the burden by shedding some of the concepts, the other is to rely on a larger number of suffixes.

polysemy; metonymy; lexical typology; Slavic languages; word formation; suffixation; comppound

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