engleski

The role of metaphor and metonymy in the construction social identities in Croatia. A corpus based study of the concept NATION in Croatian

This paper discusses the role of figurative speech in conceptualization of abstract sociocultural concept nacija ‘nation’ in the corpus of Croatian. The theoretical framework is based on the cognitive linguistic approaches to figurative language conceptualization of nation (Lakoff 2008 ; Musolff 2016), socially distributed cognition and cultural models (Sharifian 2015), as well as new methods of ontological analysis using frame semantics and system theory (Capra and Luisi 2014 ; Perak and Puljar 2013). The data for the study is provided by the Croatian hrWac corpus of 1, 4 Mw (Ljubešić and Erjavec 2011). Empirical use of the corpus data allows us to gain insight into two important and related questions: 1) what concepts are conceptually and ontologically saliently (co)related with the concept nacija 'nation’, and 2) what are the syntactic- semantic processes that serve to construe the content of the target concept nacija ‘nation’? The list of 50 nation related concepts is acquired by the NLP distributional method that measures similarity between words in hrWac corpus (Rychly and Kilgarriff 2007). The related concepts, such as društvo ‘society’, obitelj ‘family’, stranka ‘party’, građanin ‘citizen’ as well as nogomet ‘soccer’ are taken to represent the elements of a NATION CULTURAL MODEL. These target concepts are analysed in relation to the 50 most frequent types of collocations in the construction [V+Ntheme], revealing salient construal of concepts in thematic semantic roles. In terms of semantic roles this network answers the question: “what can you (conceptually) do with (nation related) concepts”? The lemmatized syntactical relations [V+Ntheme] are used to construct directed graph comprising 713 lexical nodes with 2368 edges and compute (Blondel et al. 2008) 11 modular clusters and show the conventionalized patterns in this construction. In order to qualitatively determine the nature of the concept nacija ‘nation’, the syntactic constructions (edges) are analysed using frame semantics and Ontological Model of Lexical Concepts and Constructions. This method enables formal identification of metonymic or metaphoric constructions on the ground of ontological congruence or incongruence of the roles of arguments, respectively. The results show that meronymical networks profiled by metonymies and metonymical chains such as PEOPLE / PLAYER / REPRESENTATIVE / POLITICIAN FOR NATION have major role in emergence of abstract concepts while metaphors enable representations of nation related concepts as OBJECTS that can be possessed, lead, united, etc. or as PERSONS with animate and cognitive properties. The role of the metaphors is seen to give ontological existence to nation concepts via experientially established meronymic network with function to activate affective appraisal and enact behavioural tendencies.

metaphor, nation

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