Mario Brdar | Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek (original) (raw)

Papers by Mario Brdar

Research paper thumbnail of Metonymy in multimodal discourse, or

Figurative thought and language, Nov 15, 2022

Research paper thumbnail of How metonymy and grammar interact: Effects and constraints in a cross-linguistic perspective

Research paper thumbnail of Doing Tsukahara and the Epley in a cross-linguistic perspective

Research paper thumbnail of Manner-for-activity metonymy in a cross-linguistic perspective

Last decade has seen a number of insightful studies into metonymy, mostly dealing with English ma... more Last decade has seen a number of insightful studies into metonymy, mostly dealing with English material. Since both metonymy and metaphor are in the framework of cognitive linguistics taken to be basic and universally attested processes that help shape conceptual structures and linguistic expressions, the tacit assumption was that most high-level generalizations that have been established for English (or any other language that happened to provide the empirical confirmation of theoretical claims) should largely hold for other languages as well, discounting of course such language-specific factors as the availability of certain lexical items, some cultural factors, etc. In other words, one might expect that similar arrays of metonymically motivated constructions will be found to be fairly frequent in cross-linguistic terms. Regrettably, cross-linguistic studies checking this assumption explicitly have been too few. Their findings, however, make it clear that it is a worthwhile enterprise, to say the least, as borne out, for example, by Kalisz (1983) and Panther & Thornburg (1999a & b). With this goal in mind, we have shown in Brdar & Brdar-Szabo (2000) that Croatian and Hungarian, unlike English, appear reluctant to make use of the MANNER-FOR-ACTIVITY metonymy in the domain of linguistic action. In order to check whether the observed cross-linguistic differences are just incidental, because it is perhaps an idiosyncratic trait of Croatian and Hungarian that they fail to use this specific subtype of metonymic model, or whether they might be of a wider significance, we set out to extend our comparison in this paper by: i. systematically examining a more general type of metonymy in a number of different, more or less related domains, i.e. not only MANNER-FOR-LINGUISTIC-ACTION metonymy, but also related metonymies such as MANNER-FOR-COGNITIVE-ACTIVITY and MANNER-FOR-BEHAVIOUR metonymies, and by: (i) ii. broadening the range of languages examined for the presence of the above mentioned types of metonymy, specifically by including German and Russian, in addition to English, Croatian and Hungarian. A comparison of English with languages like German, Croatian, Russian and Hungarian has show that the latter languages regularly fail to tolerate polysemy based on metonymy in other constructions as well, e.g. neither of the four languages exhibits a productive use of raising constructions involving predicative adjectives, i.e. subject-to-subject-raising with certain or sure, and tough-construction. English again exhibits here fairly schematic elements specifying the active zone, i.e. non-finite clauses, or just infinitival particles (cf. Langacker 1995), which must be accommodated by the left-hand end of our continuum. There are other structural correlates of this contrast. English has been demonstrated to rely heavily on metonymic processes in rearranging predicate-argument-structures enabling different construals while at the same time keeping formally one and the same form of the predicative expression. The other languages involved tend to formally indicate different arrangements in predicate-argument-structure by using formally different predicative expressions, particularly Russian, Croatian and Hungarian.

Research paper thumbnail of Living metaphors and metonymies

Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association, May 24, 2022

Research paper thumbnail of Lexikalische Amalgamierung aus kontrastiv-typologischer Sicht

Research paper thumbnail of Rezension von: Gawlitzek-Maiwald, Ira (1997). Der monolinguale und bilinguale Erwerb von Infinitivkonstruktionen. Ein Vergleich von Deutsch und Englisch. (LA. Linguistische Arbeiten 370). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag

Suvremena lingvistika, 1999

Research paper thumbnail of Reguläre Polysemie und Wortbildung aus kontrastiv-typologischer Perspektive

Research paper thumbnail of Figuratively used product names: From ergonyms to eponyms and paragons

Research paper thumbnail of Figurative thought and language research in the 21st century

Figurative Thought and Language in Action

Research paper thumbnail of Targetting metonymic targets

Figurative Thought and Language in Action

Research paper thumbnail of O Rubnom Statusu Kontrakcija

In spite of a recent surge of interest in it, blending remains among the most poorly understood a... more In spite of a recent surge of interest in it, blending remains among the most poorly understood and elusive word formation processes. What almost everybody seems to be agreed on is that, although it appears to be attested in many languages, it is doubtlessly a marginal morphological process. However, a closer look at crosslinguistic data reveals that there are striking differences between individual languages concerning the degree of its marginality. The goal we set ourselves in the present paper is to motivate the observed cross-linguistic differences by discussing two clusters of factors that may play an important role in making blending more or less marginal, i.e. serve as functional prerequisites for the spread of blends. One of these are certain constructional traits of the languages involved. What we primarily have in mind here is the prominence of the constructional schemas for two other word formation processes – compounding and clipping. The other cluster of factors involve...

Research paper thumbnail of Raffaelli, Ida, Katunar, Daniela, Kerovec, Barbara, eds. 2019. Lexicalization Patterns in Color Naming: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Studies in Func-tional and Structural Linguistics 72). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benja-mins, pp. vi + 429. ISBN 9789027204035. https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.78

Research paper thumbnail of Collocational potential in language contact - English in the Modern World. Festschrift for Hartmut Breitkreuz on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday

Foreign Language Studies 5, 2000

Research paper thumbnail of Suptraktivni morfološki procesi i jezični varijeteti

Jezična norma i varijeteti, 1998

Research paper thumbnail of Kik lehettek és kik lehettnek Kazinczyék vagy Karinthyék?: A tulajdonnévi asszociatív többes -ék szerkezet értelmezésének útjai

A megismerés és az értelmezés konstrukciói: Tanulmányok Tolcsvai Nagy Gábor tiszteletére, 2013

Research paper thumbnail of Metaphor repositories and cross-linguistic comparison: Ontological eggs and chickens

Metaphor and Metonymy in the Digital Age: Theory and methods for building repositories of figurative language, 2019

Research paper thumbnail of Original scientific paper Received on 25.05. 2008. Accepted for publication 28.10. 2008

On the marginality of lexical blending In spite of a recent surge of interest in it, blending rem... more On the marginality of lexical blending In spite of a recent surge of interest in it, blending remains among the most poorly understood and elusive word formation processes. What almost everybody seems to be agreed on is that, although it appears to be attested in many languages, it is doubtlessly a marginal morphological process. However, a closer look at cross-linguistic data reveals that there are striking differences between individual lan-guages concerning the degree of its marginality. The goal we set ourselves in the present paper is to motivate the observed cross-linguistic differences by discuss-ing two clusters of factors that may play an important role in making blending more or less marginal, i.e. serve as functional prerequisites for the spread of blends. One of these are certain constructional traits of the languages involved. What we primarily have in mind here is the prominence of the constructional schemas for two other word formation processes – compounding and clip...

Research paper thumbnail of Hubert Cuyckens, Thomas Berg, René Dirven, Klaus-Uwe Panther, eds. 2003. Motivation in Language: Studies in Honor of Günter Radden. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Jezikoslovlje, 2007

The volume under review is a collection of seventeen papers to honour Professor Gunter Radden, on... more The volume under review is a collection of seventeen papers to honour Professor Gunter Radden, one of the founding fathers of cognitive linguistics, on the occasion of his 60 th birthday. The common thread running through all the contributions in this collection is the search for "conceptual factors underlying or motivating language use" (p. vii). The book is divided into four sections preceded by R. Dirven's warm but insightful appraisal of Günter Radden's research. Individual sections reflect the shift and growth of G. Radden's linguistic interests during his career, although taking an interesting perspective in retracing his intellectual path in a backward manner, as I will try to demonstrate in the rest of this review. In view of the fact that the thematic organization and the sequencing of the contents of the volume, Cognitive Grammar, and cognitive linguistics in general, are understandably the dominant though not the only theoretical framework employed in the book.

Research paper thumbnail of Zašto Modrić i Real prije nego Real i Modrić? O redoslijedu vlastitih imena u koordiniranim konstrukcijama

Jezikoslovlje, 2016

The order of the constituents within a coordinated NP construction is in theory open, i.e. either... more The order of the constituents within a coordinated NP construction is in theory open, i.e. either constituent can occupy either the initial or the final position. When it comes to specific realizations of the coordinate constructional template, the choice of the initial constituent need not be random at all. It is wellknown that in some phraseological units, i.e. in the so-called irreversible binomials, their order is as a rule quite fixed (e.g. duša i tijelo 'body and soul,' kruh i sol 'bread and salt,' život i smrt 'life and death,' iće i piće 'drinks and food,' muž i žena 'husband and wife') and seems to be dictated by a number of cognitive factors, among which iconic principles play an important role. Apart from such conventionalized phraseological pairs, the relative order of constituents seems to be guided by the speaker's communicative intentions, and therefore in principle be quite flexible. However, it appears that in cases of coordination of proper nouns denoting parts and wholes there is a clear preference for the construction in which the part precedes the whole (Osijek i Slavonija rather than Slavonija i Osijek, Modrić i Real rather than Real i Modrić, etc.). The differences between their distributions on the one hand, and the distributions found with comparable inanimate nouns and animate common nouns in coordination on the other, are explained in terms of the reference point construction (Langacker 1993). The proper noun denoting a person functions as a cognitive reference point facilitating the resolution of indeter-378 Mario Brdar: Why Modrić and Real rather than Real and Modrić? On the order of proper names under coordination minacy due to the fact that the second proper noun in coordination can have more than one metonymically related sense. Such coordinated constructions are shown to be functionally similar to associative plurals as they are also a means of referring to heterogeneous collectives that have a prominent, focal member.

Research paper thumbnail of Metonymy in multimodal discourse, or

Figurative thought and language, Nov 15, 2022

Research paper thumbnail of How metonymy and grammar interact: Effects and constraints in a cross-linguistic perspective

Research paper thumbnail of Doing Tsukahara and the Epley in a cross-linguistic perspective

Research paper thumbnail of Manner-for-activity metonymy in a cross-linguistic perspective

Last decade has seen a number of insightful studies into metonymy, mostly dealing with English ma... more Last decade has seen a number of insightful studies into metonymy, mostly dealing with English material. Since both metonymy and metaphor are in the framework of cognitive linguistics taken to be basic and universally attested processes that help shape conceptual structures and linguistic expressions, the tacit assumption was that most high-level generalizations that have been established for English (or any other language that happened to provide the empirical confirmation of theoretical claims) should largely hold for other languages as well, discounting of course such language-specific factors as the availability of certain lexical items, some cultural factors, etc. In other words, one might expect that similar arrays of metonymically motivated constructions will be found to be fairly frequent in cross-linguistic terms. Regrettably, cross-linguistic studies checking this assumption explicitly have been too few. Their findings, however, make it clear that it is a worthwhile enterprise, to say the least, as borne out, for example, by Kalisz (1983) and Panther & Thornburg (1999a & b). With this goal in mind, we have shown in Brdar & Brdar-Szabo (2000) that Croatian and Hungarian, unlike English, appear reluctant to make use of the MANNER-FOR-ACTIVITY metonymy in the domain of linguistic action. In order to check whether the observed cross-linguistic differences are just incidental, because it is perhaps an idiosyncratic trait of Croatian and Hungarian that they fail to use this specific subtype of metonymic model, or whether they might be of a wider significance, we set out to extend our comparison in this paper by: i. systematically examining a more general type of metonymy in a number of different, more or less related domains, i.e. not only MANNER-FOR-LINGUISTIC-ACTION metonymy, but also related metonymies such as MANNER-FOR-COGNITIVE-ACTIVITY and MANNER-FOR-BEHAVIOUR metonymies, and by: (i) ii. broadening the range of languages examined for the presence of the above mentioned types of metonymy, specifically by including German and Russian, in addition to English, Croatian and Hungarian. A comparison of English with languages like German, Croatian, Russian and Hungarian has show that the latter languages regularly fail to tolerate polysemy based on metonymy in other constructions as well, e.g. neither of the four languages exhibits a productive use of raising constructions involving predicative adjectives, i.e. subject-to-subject-raising with certain or sure, and tough-construction. English again exhibits here fairly schematic elements specifying the active zone, i.e. non-finite clauses, or just infinitival particles (cf. Langacker 1995), which must be accommodated by the left-hand end of our continuum. There are other structural correlates of this contrast. English has been demonstrated to rely heavily on metonymic processes in rearranging predicate-argument-structures enabling different construals while at the same time keeping formally one and the same form of the predicative expression. The other languages involved tend to formally indicate different arrangements in predicate-argument-structure by using formally different predicative expressions, particularly Russian, Croatian and Hungarian.

Research paper thumbnail of Living metaphors and metonymies

Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association, May 24, 2022

Research paper thumbnail of Lexikalische Amalgamierung aus kontrastiv-typologischer Sicht

Research paper thumbnail of Rezension von: Gawlitzek-Maiwald, Ira (1997). Der monolinguale und bilinguale Erwerb von Infinitivkonstruktionen. Ein Vergleich von Deutsch und Englisch. (LA. Linguistische Arbeiten 370). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag

Suvremena lingvistika, 1999

Research paper thumbnail of Reguläre Polysemie und Wortbildung aus kontrastiv-typologischer Perspektive

Research paper thumbnail of Figuratively used product names: From ergonyms to eponyms and paragons

Research paper thumbnail of Figurative thought and language research in the 21st century

Figurative Thought and Language in Action

Research paper thumbnail of Targetting metonymic targets

Figurative Thought and Language in Action

Research paper thumbnail of O Rubnom Statusu Kontrakcija

In spite of a recent surge of interest in it, blending remains among the most poorly understood a... more In spite of a recent surge of interest in it, blending remains among the most poorly understood and elusive word formation processes. What almost everybody seems to be agreed on is that, although it appears to be attested in many languages, it is doubtlessly a marginal morphological process. However, a closer look at crosslinguistic data reveals that there are striking differences between individual languages concerning the degree of its marginality. The goal we set ourselves in the present paper is to motivate the observed cross-linguistic differences by discussing two clusters of factors that may play an important role in making blending more or less marginal, i.e. serve as functional prerequisites for the spread of blends. One of these are certain constructional traits of the languages involved. What we primarily have in mind here is the prominence of the constructional schemas for two other word formation processes – compounding and clipping. The other cluster of factors involve...

Research paper thumbnail of Raffaelli, Ida, Katunar, Daniela, Kerovec, Barbara, eds. 2019. Lexicalization Patterns in Color Naming: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Studies in Func-tional and Structural Linguistics 72). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benja-mins, pp. vi + 429. ISBN 9789027204035. https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.78

Research paper thumbnail of Collocational potential in language contact - English in the Modern World. Festschrift for Hartmut Breitkreuz on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday

Foreign Language Studies 5, 2000

Research paper thumbnail of Suptraktivni morfološki procesi i jezični varijeteti

Jezična norma i varijeteti, 1998

Research paper thumbnail of Kik lehettek és kik lehettnek Kazinczyék vagy Karinthyék?: A tulajdonnévi asszociatív többes -ék szerkezet értelmezésének útjai

A megismerés és az értelmezés konstrukciói: Tanulmányok Tolcsvai Nagy Gábor tiszteletére, 2013

Research paper thumbnail of Metaphor repositories and cross-linguistic comparison: Ontological eggs and chickens

Metaphor and Metonymy in the Digital Age: Theory and methods for building repositories of figurative language, 2019

Research paper thumbnail of Original scientific paper Received on 25.05. 2008. Accepted for publication 28.10. 2008

On the marginality of lexical blending In spite of a recent surge of interest in it, blending rem... more On the marginality of lexical blending In spite of a recent surge of interest in it, blending remains among the most poorly understood and elusive word formation processes. What almost everybody seems to be agreed on is that, although it appears to be attested in many languages, it is doubtlessly a marginal morphological process. However, a closer look at cross-linguistic data reveals that there are striking differences between individual lan-guages concerning the degree of its marginality. The goal we set ourselves in the present paper is to motivate the observed cross-linguistic differences by discuss-ing two clusters of factors that may play an important role in making blending more or less marginal, i.e. serve as functional prerequisites for the spread of blends. One of these are certain constructional traits of the languages involved. What we primarily have in mind here is the prominence of the constructional schemas for two other word formation processes – compounding and clip...

Research paper thumbnail of Hubert Cuyckens, Thomas Berg, René Dirven, Klaus-Uwe Panther, eds. 2003. Motivation in Language: Studies in Honor of Günter Radden. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Jezikoslovlje, 2007

The volume under review is a collection of seventeen papers to honour Professor Gunter Radden, on... more The volume under review is a collection of seventeen papers to honour Professor Gunter Radden, one of the founding fathers of cognitive linguistics, on the occasion of his 60 th birthday. The common thread running through all the contributions in this collection is the search for "conceptual factors underlying or motivating language use" (p. vii). The book is divided into four sections preceded by R. Dirven's warm but insightful appraisal of Günter Radden's research. Individual sections reflect the shift and growth of G. Radden's linguistic interests during his career, although taking an interesting perspective in retracing his intellectual path in a backward manner, as I will try to demonstrate in the rest of this review. In view of the fact that the thematic organization and the sequencing of the contents of the volume, Cognitive Grammar, and cognitive linguistics in general, are understandably the dominant though not the only theoretical framework employed in the book.

Research paper thumbnail of Zašto Modrić i Real prije nego Real i Modrić? O redoslijedu vlastitih imena u koordiniranim konstrukcijama

Jezikoslovlje, 2016

The order of the constituents within a coordinated NP construction is in theory open, i.e. either... more The order of the constituents within a coordinated NP construction is in theory open, i.e. either constituent can occupy either the initial or the final position. When it comes to specific realizations of the coordinate constructional template, the choice of the initial constituent need not be random at all. It is wellknown that in some phraseological units, i.e. in the so-called irreversible binomials, their order is as a rule quite fixed (e.g. duša i tijelo 'body and soul,' kruh i sol 'bread and salt,' život i smrt 'life and death,' iće i piće 'drinks and food,' muž i žena 'husband and wife') and seems to be dictated by a number of cognitive factors, among which iconic principles play an important role. Apart from such conventionalized phraseological pairs, the relative order of constituents seems to be guided by the speaker's communicative intentions, and therefore in principle be quite flexible. However, it appears that in cases of coordination of proper nouns denoting parts and wholes there is a clear preference for the construction in which the part precedes the whole (Osijek i Slavonija rather than Slavonija i Osijek, Modrić i Real rather than Real i Modrić, etc.). The differences between their distributions on the one hand, and the distributions found with comparable inanimate nouns and animate common nouns in coordination on the other, are explained in terms of the reference point construction (Langacker 1993). The proper noun denoting a person functions as a cognitive reference point facilitating the resolution of indeter-378 Mario Brdar: Why Modrić and Real rather than Real and Modrić? On the order of proper names under coordination minacy due to the fact that the second proper noun in coordination can have more than one metonymically related sense. Such coordinated constructions are shown to be functionally similar to associative plurals as they are also a means of referring to heterogeneous collectives that have a prominent, focal member.

Research paper thumbnail of Brdar_Metonymy_in_Grammar.pdf

It has often been claimed on the basis of discussions of referential or nominal metonymies that, ... more It has often been claimed on the basis of discussions of referential or nominal metonymies that, unlike metaphor, metonymy has hardly any impact on grammar. The purpose of the present volume has been twofold. On the one hand, I have attempted to offer evidence against the above tacit assumption, i.e. to deliver further evidence of the involvement of metonymy in an intricate network of grammatical subsystems, not only in the nominal system (which means that other word classes can be the locus of metonymyic mappings, too). The data adduced in the volume support the view expressed in Barcelona (2002) that metonymy is wide-spread, which is true in grammar, too. Not only lexical meaning is affected, but also grammatical one, i.e. the value of lexemes for certain grammatical categories is affected in the course of metonymic mappings. I have shown, for example, that an inherently mass, non-count noun is recategorized as a count one due to metonymy, it is not only that the relationships between nouns in the number system change— this often goes hand in hand with the change of the range of determiners that the noun or nouns in question will accept. Similarly, when a proper noun is recategorized as a common one due to a chain of metonymies and metaphors, it not only takes determiners it is otherwise not found with, but it also often becomes perfectly countable and can now be used in the plural. All such, more or less regular, alternations in the grammatical behaviour of such sets of nouns can then considered to be manifestations of grammatical polysemy.Because most recent cognitive linguistic research on metonymy has been concerned with uncovering inferential processes underlying it as well as with stressing its conceptual nature and thus refuting the classical view stipulating that it is just a matter of transfer of lexical meaning, the focus has always been mainly on its referential nature, many of its other aspects receiving hardly any attention. Among these overlooked aspects of metonymy, there are not only numerous significant grammatical phenomena but also pragmatic ones, often interwoven with each other and with metonymy’ s lexical aspects. A second, more specific, objective has been to demonstrate the interaction of conceptual metonymy interacts with metaphor and other cognitive operations in a number of ways in shaping the grammatical systems. The results of the case studies presented in the three central chapters of the volume (6-8) seem to indicate that metonymy often precedes metaphor. It is also clear from my data metonymy is different from metaphor in that it affects whole grammatical categories or constructions (or constructions types) rather than just individual items. What is more, I have demonstrated that metonymy can work in chains and tiers, i.e. that grammatical phenomena may be motivated by a series of metonymic mappings, occasionally interspersed with other cognitive processes. If we recognize, on the basis of evidence adduced in the present volume, that metonymy has an important regulating or motivating role in grammar, we might think that the relation between metonymy and grammar is a case of one-way traffix because the former has been shown to trigger certain phenomena in grammar in the sense of making them possible or sometimes even necessary, grammar being infinitely plastic and therefore easily formed by metonymic processes. This is, however, a grossly simplified way of looking at things. While I have indeed shown here that metonymy is a far more ubiquitous and pervasive cognitive process than is generally thought, and that it permeates not only the lexicon, but the grammatical system as well, it would be worthwhile in future research to go the opposite direction and probe the limits of metonymy in grammar. In other words, we should also try to establish whether grammatical factors play a role in constraining the application of various types of metonymy.

Research paper thumbnail of Brdar et al Konceptualna integracija

The paper is concerned with the process of grammaticalization of some predicative PPs following E... more The paper is concerned with the process of grammaticalization of some predicative PPs following English predicative adjectives. These are originally not arguments of adjectives but are rather adjunct-like elements introduced by certain copulas. Such frequent collocations may set in motion the process of conceptual and syntactic blending which ultimately results in their integration into the predicate-argument structure.