Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

JEZIK U UPOTREBI / LANGUAGE IN USE
Many people believe that these lines are the most beautiful lines in English poetry.
Although we know that such judgments are extremely subjective, it makes sense
to raise the issue of why the lines have acquired such reputation. (The example
is analyzed by Kövecses 2006b.) What makes the lines so highly appreciated?
First, the lines employ a variety of conceptual metaphors and metonymies. “Now
cracks a noble heart” is based on the life is a fluid in a container metaphor and
the heart for the person metonymy. “Good night, sweet prince” employs three
metaphors: death is night, the object of liking/love is sweet, and the object of
love is a young child. Moreover, the expression “sing thee to thy rest” relies on
the death is sleep/rest metaphor again. Second, we have an innovative case of
the ‘caused motion’ construction in the phrase “And flights of angels sing thee to
thy rest”. Sing primarily is an intransitive verb, like sneeze and walk. It is used
innovatively in the construction. Where does its innovative character come from?
It is used in place of a transitive action verb in the sentence (such as send, drive,
throw, or chase). However, it can only appear in the construction in a particular
cultural context; namely, it assumes a Christian world view with angels who sing,
heaven as our eternal resting place, and so on. Thus the example illustrates not
only that metaphors contribute to the esthetic pleasure we experience in reading
poetry but also that grammar can contribute to this pleasure and that culture is
very much a part of grammar.
I only mention these two examples in the teaching of English in general to
emphasize the point that it is not such relatively isolated instances of metaphoric
and idiomatic language that I try to explore in this paper. Rather, my goal, on the
one hand, is to identify large systems of conceptual metaphors and the idioms
based on them and to point out how such systems may motivate particular metaphor-based
idiomatic expressions. And second, I will make certain suggestions
concerning the potential use of such motivating conceptual and cultural systems
in the teaching of foreign languages.
1. How and to what degree are idioms motivated in one language?
In the traditional view, idioms are structures that consist of two or more words
whose overall meaning cannot be predicted from the meaning of the constitutive
parts. Thus, this same view holds that the overall meaning of idioms is arbitrary.
While the cognitive linguistic view agrees with the traditional view that the meaning
of idioms cannot be predicted in full, it also maintains that to a large extent it
can be motivated. There are at least three cognitive mechanisms that participate
in the motivation of idioms: metaphor, metonymy, and everyday knowledge (Lakoff
1987). In this paper, I will only be concerned with metaphor-based idioms.
Let us first take the following fire-related idioms (Kövecses 2002):
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