{"title":"What’s Dog Got to Do With It? Motivation Behind Denominal (Animal) Verbs","authors":"Alisa Egorova, Hans-Georg Wolf","doi":"10.18778/1731-7533.21.2.02","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates the motivation behind denominal conversion of animal nouns to verbs as well as their resultant senses. Upon critical consideration of previous accounts of animal verb senses and their possible sources, the argument is put forward that animal verbs are not uniform in their semantics and cannot therefore be considered a separate conceptual category or analysed as such. Previous findings are then reinterpreted from the point of view of frame-based accounts of denominal conversion. Animal verbs are shown to be generated by the same grammatical generalisations as other denominal verbs of English, with their metaphoricity appearing to be a concomitant rather than a driving factor in the grammatical act of their conversion.","PeriodicalId":38985,"journal":{"name":"Research in Language","volume":"6 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Research in Language","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.18778/1731-7533.21.2.02","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"Arts and Humanities","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper investigates the motivation behind denominal conversion of animal nouns to verbs as well as their resultant senses. Upon critical consideration of previous accounts of animal verb senses and their possible sources, the argument is put forward that animal verbs are not uniform in their semantics and cannot therefore be considered a separate conceptual category or analysed as such. Previous findings are then reinterpreted from the point of view of frame-based accounts of denominal conversion. Animal verbs are shown to be generated by the same grammatical generalisations as other denominal verbs of English, with their metaphoricity appearing to be a concomitant rather than a driving factor in the grammatical act of their conversion.
期刊介绍:
Research in Language (RiL) is an international journal committed to publishing excellent studies in the area of linguistics and related disciplines focused on human communication. Language studies, as other scholarly disciplines, undergo two seemingly counteracting processes: the process of diversification of the field into narrow specialized domains and the process of convergence, strengthened by interdisciplinarity. It is the latter perspective that RiL editors invite for the journal, whose aim is to present language in its entirety, meshing traditional modular compartments, such as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and offer a multidimensional perspective which exposes varied but relevant aspects of language, e.g. the cognitive, the psychological, the institutional aspect, as well as the social shaping of linguistic convention and creativity.