engleski

Topic-continuity, metonymy and locative adverbials: A cognitive-functional account

The goal of the present paper is to show how functional and cognitive linguistic approaches can complement each other in providing external motivation for lin-guistic facts. Specifically, I claim that cognitive linguistics, if it does not want to doom itself to the status of a partial model, should in this search for motivation take clue from functional linguistics and go beyond its traditional pet topics, human embodiment and socio-cultural environment, and also consider the role of the exist-ing linguistic system. I examine the interplay of metonymic processes and topicali-zation as a case in point. Much recent research indicates that referential metony-mies are relatively unconstrained. However, a corpus-based study on the exploita-tion of metonymically-used names of capitals in the language of media shows that this type of metonymy is ubiquitous in English and German, but not in Hungarian and Croatian. A detailed analysis reveals that the contrasts can in part be attributed to the fact that English and German metonymically-used locative NPs that function as subjects often find their counterparts in Croatian and Hungarian in locative ad-verbials (realized as prepositional phrases and noun phrases with locative adposi-tions, respectively). It is claimed that these locatives, which are also shown to be full-blown referential metonymies, are optimal structural solutions in such pro-drop languages with a rich system of impersonal constructions as far as the complex task of maintaining nominal metonymic topic-continuity while switching between mul-tiple metonymic targets.

functionalism; cognitive linguistics; motivation; topic; metonymy; metaphor; locative adverbial

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