Polysemy In The Semantic Field Of Movement In The English Language, Детальна інформація

Importance/Status = Up rise, climb, come down CHANGE



Happy = Up fall, sink, lift FEELING



Activity/Process = Movement forward push, prod ACTION

Personification

Emotion = Sense expression shake, tremble, shiver shudder, quiver FEELING



Idea = Human slip, escape COGNITION



Body part = Human fall, sink FEELING

Following Goatly (1997), the metaphorization of abstract entities can obtain through a process of reification or personification. Reifying metaphors fall into three categories:

(i) Concretizing metaphors, which codify the representation of abstract entities as objects or cloth/clothes (first row).

(ii) Orientational metaphors, i.e. equations linked to the notion of place/space (second row).

(iii) Metaphors related to the notion of orientation. Abstract concepts such as health, pitch, happiness, amount and rank are seen as entities on a vertical axis (up/down)5.

The last set of equations codify the personification of abstract entities.

Note that some verbs codify several metaphors, e.g. rise, fall, sink, lower. In this regard, we may affirm that the intrafield membership correlates with the interfield double membership.

Movement and change

The projection of MOVEMENT onto CHANGE touches upon verbs denoting an increase or decrease in amount or degree, thus linking MOVEMENT to CHANGE, since the semantic parameters of amount and degree traverse the domain of CHANGE. The connection between both semantic fields obtains from a set of orientational metaphors (cf. above):

(24) He has risen to the position of manager.

(25) Share prices have plunged.

Movement and feeling

MOVEMENT verbs also extend to FEELING. This extension results from the codification of several metaphorical processes:

- the metaphorical representation of a feeling (happiness) on an up/down scale:

(26) Whenever I feel down, Martha lifts my spirits.

(27) Peter’s face fell when I broke the news to him.

- the personification of body parts. This metaphor interacts with the previous one (cf. example above).

- the metaphorical structuring of emotions as sense expressions. The verbs shake, tremble,shiver, shudder and quiver describe body movement as expression of an internal emotional state (anxiety, fear, disgust). This metaphorical process can be explained by the fact that emotions have corresponding physical effects on the experiencer, and these effects have come to represent the emotion that caused them:

(28) He trembled like a leaf at the sight of the tiger.

Movement and cognition