Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

JEZIK U UPOTREBI / LANGUAGE IN USE
3. How do different languages express idiomatic meanings?
To answer the question in the section-title above, I conducted a simple experiment.
I asked 20 students in two of my seminars to translate into Hungarian all
the examples of one of the best-known conceptual metaphors, time is money (Lakoff
and Johnson 1980). Where there was disagreement between the students, we
tried to arrive at the most acceptable translation equivalent(s).
If we study the linguistic expression of a single conceptual metaphor in two
languages, we need to take into account the following four factors: the words used
for the expression of the conceptual metaphor, the literal meaning of the words
used, the figurative meaning of the words used, and the conceptual metaphor(s)
used (Kövecses 2005). Correspondingly, we need to ask four questions:
(1) Are the words used for the expression of the metaphor in the two languages
the same or different?
(2) Is the literal meaning of the words used in the two languages the same or
different?
(3) Is the figurative meaning of the words used in the two languages the same
or different?
(4) Do the words used in the two languages belong to the same or different
conceptual metaphor(s)?
As we will see shortly below, the answers provided to these questions may vary
from one linguistic example to another. The different answers fit different patterns.
Such patterns give us a way of characterizing the linguistic expression of a
single conceptual metaphor in two languages.
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) list 16 linguistic examples for the time is money
conceptual metaphor. The consensual opinion of the 20 Hungarian students yielded
three patterns with which the metaphor is expressed.
The first pattern can be exemplified with the following English linguistic
metaphor and its Hungarian equivalent:
You’re wasting my time.
Pazarlod az időmet.
[waste the time-my]
Here the metaphorically used word in English is waste. The Hungarian equivalent
is pazarol, which is a different word. However, the literal meaning of the two
words (waste and pazarol) is the same. Unsurprisingly, the figurative meaning to
be expressed is also the same, as we expect to be the case for any good translation.
The Hungarian word must have the same figurative meaning as the English
one. Finally, both the English word waste and the Hungarian word pazarol belong
to the same conceptual metaphor, in that they express whatever they express by
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