The processing of animal-related expressions

The aim of this study is to explore several animal-related expressions are both and understood in natural language. In order to do so, we draw on the PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS metaphor, which was first put forward by Lakoff & Johnson in 1980. More specifically, we at analyzing three different types of animal expressions, namely: (i) those that are based either on prototypical actions performed by animals (e.g. to leave with one's tails between one's legs) or on animal parts (e.g. to have hawk's eyes); (ii) those that derive from animal names and which originate actions that can be applied to people's behavior (Bad luck seems to have dogged me throughout my whole life, I called out to him but he hared off in the opposite direction); and (iii) those that stem from sounds which are typically emitted by animals and can be used to refer to speech verbs (bark, bellow, howl, snarl, roar). With this purpose in mind, we elaborate on some of the ideas in Ruiz de Mendoza & Diez (2002) where it is argued that conceptual interaction is fully regulated and constrained by a limited set of interactional patterns; and we analyzed certain speech verb that are liable to be analyzed on the basis of conceptual metaphor theory.Financial support for this research has been provided by the Government of La Rioja (grant FPI-2004)and by the DGI, Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (grants HUM2004-05947-C02-01/FILO and HUM2005-02870/FILO). The research has been co-financed through FEDER funds