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Figurative Expressions with Verbs of Ingesting in Croatian

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Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology (EUROPHRAS 2022)

Abstract

This paper explores figurative expressions in Croatian which contain verbs of ingesting, more specifically eat verbs and gobble (manner of eating) verbs. The aim is to determine which aspects of the source domain serve as the basis for metaphorization and whether there is any difference between the two types of verbs with regard to their figurative potential. We conducted a study of seven verbs of ingesting in the Croatian web corpus hrWaC. The results show that metaphorical expressions with eat verbs profile ingestion with all its phases, e.g. pojesti živce komu (lit. eat up someone’s nerves) ‘drive someone up the wall’. In contrast, figurative uses of gobble verbs focus on drawing something down the throat (usually hastily), e.g. gutati samoglasnike ‘swallow syllables’, žderati resurse ‘devour resources’. The results also show that eat verbs are predominantly used literally, whereas the uses of gobble verbs are mostly figurative. Furthermore, figurative meanings of gobble verbs are associated with specific lexico-grammatical patterns. On a more general level, this study shows that metaphoricity is dependent on local factors such as lexical features of words from the source domain as well as grammatical constructions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Some studies of verbs of ingesting in English explore the relationship between figurative uses and grammatical constructions [4, 5].

  2. 2.

    The terms eat verbs and gobble verbs have been adopted from Levin [6].

  3. 3.

    Cf. also the entries for eat, drink and swallow in the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (https://pdev.org.uk/).

  4. 4.

    http://megahr.ffzg.unizg.hr/en/?page_id=609.

  5. 5.

    The verb gutati was included in this study because its English counterpart swallow is rated as highly concrete (547 on a scale from 100 to 700) in the MRC Psycholinguistic Database (https://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/school/mrcdatabase/uwa_mrc.htm).

  6. 6.

    Pojesti and popiti may be classified as what Janda [21] terms Natural Perfectives. Those are verbs which describe the completion of the corresponding imperfective activity, in this case jesti ‘eat’ and piti ‘drink’.

  7. 7.

    This may be due to the fact that žderati originally referred to animal behavior, as noted in the Dictionary of Croatian [22, p. 17]. Furthermore, in its literal uses žderati is similar to gutati ‘swallow’ in that it refers to eating greedily and in large amounts.

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Correspondence to Jelena Parizoska .

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Parizoska, J., Tušek, J. (2022). Figurative Expressions with Verbs of Ingesting in Croatian. In: Corpas Pastor, G., Mitkov, R. (eds) Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology. EUROPHRAS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13528. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15925-1_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15925-1_13

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