idiomatic proclivity and literality of meaning in body-part nouns corpus studies of english, german, swedish, russian and finnish精选.pdfVIP

Idiomatic proclivity and literality of meaning in body-part nouns: Corpus studies of English, German, Swedish, Russian and Finnish1 J. Niemi, J. Mulli, M. Nenonen, S. Niemi, A. Nikolaev E. Penttilä Department of Foreign Languages and Translation Studies University of Eastern Finland at Joensuu Study 1, a dictionary analysis of English, German, Swedish, Russian and Finnish VP idioms, shows that there is a general trend for these idioms to pick their nouns from among the most frequent body-part nouns. Thus, the same overall cogni- tive domains tend to be favored in the lexical resources for idiomatic and non- idiomatic language. In Study 2 we used corpora to test the degree of literal versus non-literal use, in terms of textual frequency, of the three most idiom-prone nouns in the five languages, viz., ‘hand’, ‘head’ and ‘eye’. Moreover, as text genres are expected to differ in their use of literal versus non-literal senses of words, two text types were pitted against each other, viz., fiction and newspaper language, entertaining the hypothesis that fiction would be more non-literal than newspaper texts. The reverse turned out to be the case. We explain the higher degree of non- literal (mostly metaphorical) use of ‘hand’, ‘head’ and ‘eye’ with the notion that in fiction the authors describe a world constructed in situ, while newspaper writers interpret the world already shared by them and their readers. Keywords: body-part nouns, idioms, lexical frequency, literality of meaning, fic- tion, newspaper language 1 An oral version of the main aspects of the present study was presented at the 24th Scan- dinavian Conference of Linguistics held at the University of Eastern Finland at Joensuu (formerly: University of Joensuu) in August 2010. We thank the commentators of our talk and the two anonymous reviewers of FoL for their insightful and constructive remarks. Folia Linguistica 47/1 (2013), 237–252.