On conceptualizing excessive action through the Shower metaphor in English
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| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The goal of this paper is to explore how the aspectual meaning of an action quantity “greater than the norm” or excessive action is conceptualized metaphorically through the source concept of WATER in the English language. The focus is on the subversion of the “Too much action quantity is Water” metaphor into the “Too much action quantity is Shower” metaphor. This research is based on the main tenets of aspectology and the conceptual metaphor theory. The data under analysis consist of samples collected from modern English fiction by hand-searching and by using corpus techniques (British National Corpus). The data were subjected to bottom-up analysis of metaphors, and the functioning of the SHOWER metaphor was described in the levels of semantics, context and pragmatics. The research argues that WATER metaphors are a frequently used means for expressing excessive action in English. The usage of the concrete source of WATER helps the speaker to highlight such quantitative characteristics of action as 1) flowing in a strong current, 2) abundant (like flood or waterfall) and 3) powerful. All water bodies fall into three big groups: solid (ice, snow, glacier, hail, frost), liquid/fluid, and vapourous (clouds, mist, steam. The focus of this research is on the fluid form of water and in particular on those water bodies which possess such quantitative characteristics of action as fast movement and abundance/mass, because only they can function as a source for the “Too much action quantity is Water” metaphor and thus denote excessive action. SHOWER is one of such examples. “SHOWER” can be defined as an abundance of small drops that come out in a burst, starting and stopping suddenly and having a short duration. These drops fall down together (downward movement in a concentrated current) or move up in the air (upward and dispersed movement), and cover a small area. Hence, the SHOWER metaphor focuses on the following aspects of the concept of “shower”: 1) abundant, 2) bursting and sudden, 3) moving downwards or upwards, 4) short-term, 5) covering a certain area. In a context, not all of these semantic components may become salient. The source SHOWER can correspond to different targets that can be classified into two large groups according to the type of movement: 1) an abundance of heavy or light objects falling down, 2) an abundance of light objects flying in different directions. This paper gives a detailed description of the mappings between SHOWER and the abstract notion of excessive action, as well as presents the classification of the targets and outlines the regularities of the functioning of the SHOWER metaphor. |
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