VERBS OF DRINKING IN ENGLISH AND IN SERBIAN AS SOURCES OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS AND METONYMIES

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse verbs of drinking in English and in Serbian that are used to express various drinking processes, but that can also be used to express various other processes not related to drinking. In other words, the paper analyses the transferred meaning(s) that the analysed verbs express in both languages in order to identify the other processes expressed by the verbs of drinking. The corpus for the analysis was excerpted from the relevant monolingual dictionaries of English and Serbian and consists of ten verbs of drinking: five English verbs, to drink, to guzzle, to imbibe, to quench, to suck and five Serbian verbs, piti, ispiti, lokati, napiti se, opiti se. The dictionary definitions of the ten verbs were analysed in order to identify the transferred meanings of the verbs. The definitions were then subjected to conceptual analysis with the goal of identifying the conceptual mechanisms (conceptual metaphor or conceptual metonymy) that underly the transferred meanings. The identified meanings were also subjected to contrastive analysis that aimed at identifying the similarities and differences in transferred meanings among the analysed verbs and at identifying their formal correspondents or translation equivalents. The analysis shows that in both languages drinking verbs develop their transferred meanings primarily regarding the concepts of accepting or absorbing an entity and that in most cases such meanings and conceptual mechanisms underlying them show a high degree of equivalence, as the most frequent conceptual mechanism in both languages is conceptual metaphor. However, the differences are mostly observed at the semantic level.