Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

JEZIK U UPOTREBI / LANGUAGE IN USE
2. How and to what degree are idioms motivated in relation to two
languages?
The type of motivation discussed above would be especially useful for applied
linguistic purposes if we found it not only in one language (in this case, English)
but across several languages. To see whether this kind of motivation applies
cross-linguistically, I conducted a simple survey on the internet.
I took the abstract complex systems metaphor, as I worked it out on the
basis of Alice Deignan’s (1995) English metaphor dictionary (see Kövecses
2002/2010), and asked members of the cogling list to offer some feedback on
whether such conceptual metaphors as theories are buildings, relationships are
buildings, a company is a building, economic systems are buildings, a career is
a building, life is a building, etc., can be found in languages other than English. I
received detailed enough feedback from several colleagues, which I report more
fully in Kövecses (2005).
According to Kazuko Shinohara (e-mail message sent in October, 2001),
all the major metaphors that exist in English also exist in Japanese. In Japanese,
one also ‘constructs a theory’, ‘relationships are built and ruined’, ‘economic
systems may be built’, ‘one’s life may have a foundation’, etc. In other words, it
seems that the scope of the source domain of building in Japanese is very similar
to that of building in English. (On the notion of the scope of source domains, see
Kövecses 2002/2010.)
In general, the same seems to hold for Brazilian Portugese. Maity Siqueira
reported (e-mail message sent in October, 2001) that the abstract complex systems
metaphor is clearly present in Portugese. Theories, relations, life, etc. are all
conceptualized as building.
Zouhair Maalej found the same major metaphors in Tunisian Arabic (email
message sent in October, 2001). At the same time, however, he pointed out
some differences in the scope of the building metaphor between English and
Arabic.
In Hungarian, we find that the building source domain has a very similar
application to English, and thus to Japanese, Portugese, and Arabic.
This is a remarkable situation. Five very different languages, English, Japanese,
Portugese, Arabic, and Hungarian, have the same generic-level metaphor
abstract complex systems are buildings. But what about the specific meanings
of the metaphorically used expressions in the different languages? Do the expressions
have (at least roughly) the same meanings across the languages?
This question takes us back to the notion of mappings. As we have seen
above, mappings are crucial in determining the specific meanings that particular
expressions have that belong to the same conceptual metaphor. Let us consider
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