Poster presentato al convegno internazionale Corpus Linguistics 2011, Birmingham (Inghilterra) 20-22 luglio 201

Philip, G.

PHILIP, GILLIAN SUSAN

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Contexts of situation in text, in experience, and in the mindGill Philip – University of MacerataFirth’s context of situationAlthough Firth’s context of situation (1957: 181) isconsidered to be one of the basic tenets of corpuslinguistics, its connection with the more ubiquitousconcepts of collocation and colligation is rarely, if ever,made explicit. Yet thecollocates and colligateswhich are found in textallow us to identify theUnits of meaning & metaphoremesIt is possible to identify the persons, personalities and objects relevant to the meaning of a node by examining concordances. The unit of meaning maps out the linguistic environ-ment of a node in ever-increasing abstraction. Re-curring collocates provide concrete evidence of co-occurrence, while colligation is the co-occurrenceof grammatical categories, themselves abstract ca-tegories, realised by a range of different word forms.Semantic preference, the third level in Sinclair’smodel, does not in fact operate at a higher level of abstr-participants and objects,their relevant features,and the presence of anyverbal and/ or non-verbal action accompanying the nodebeing examined.The purpose of this poster is to show how theprincipal components of Firth’s context of situation maponto the collocates, colligates, semantic preferences andsemantic prosodies which together form Sinclair’s (1996)unit of meaning. It also introduces a less-familiar frameof reference for linguistic analysis, the metaphoreme(Cameron & Deignan, 2006), which outlines howmetaphorical meanings are represented in text andelaborated in the mind.It is important to remember that meaning does notexist only in instantiation: language users accumulatewithin their memories all sorts of previous encounterswith words and phrases. Remembered meanings interactwith instantiated meanings, allowing creative forms totake flight and meaning to be enriched as rememberedaction – it merely deals with semantics rather than grammar. Howeverit is worth noting that the semantic sets which emerge through corpusanalysis do not always conform to the traditional taxonomies discussedin theoretical semantics. The final level in Sinclair’s model semantic pro-sody, one of the most intensely-debated categories in linguistics, whichdescribes the pragmatic and affective aspects of the language understudy. The link with the “effect of the verbal action” should be evident.Metaphoremes “combine specific lexical and grammatical form withspecific conceptual content and with specific affective value and prag-matics” (Cameron & Deignan 2006:674). Although a relatively recentaddition to the descriptive inventory, and likely to be unfamiliar to mostcorpus linguists, the basis of metaphoremes lies in corpus-based meta-phor analysis. It is unsurprising, therefore, that parallels can be drawnbetween “specific lexical and grammatical form” and collocation/ collig-ation. Similar too is the recognition that metaphoremes have “specificaffective value and pragmatics”, i.e. the effect of the verbal action /sem-antic prosody: this aspect of figurative language has been documentedin corpus linguistics since the beginning of the COBUILD era (c.f. Hanks1987, Moon 1992). But what is interesting and importantto note is the introduction of “conceptual content” intothis model. Concepts are activated in the mind, andtheir elaboration has a role in both in comprehen-sion and production of metaphor, especially whenunfamiliar.   Exploiting  standard  concepts  allowscommunicatively-successful creativity to happen.Red tape: unit of meaning and metaphoreme(s) referencesCameron, L. & A. Deignan. 2006. The emergenceof metaphor in discourse. Applied Linguistics 27, 671-690.Firth, J.R. 1957. Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951.  London: Oxford University Press.Hanks, P.  1987. Definitions and explanations. In Sinclair (ed.) Looking Up, 116-137. London: Collins.Lakoff, G. 1987. Image metaphors.  Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 1 (3), 215-225.Moon, R. 1992. There is reason in the roasting of eggs. In Tommola et al. (eds) Euralex ’92Proceedings, 493-502. Tampere: University ofTampere.Philip. G. 2011. Colouring Meaning:  collocation and connotation in figurative language.   Amsterdam:  John Benjamins.Sinclair, J.M.  1996. The search for units of mean-ing. Textus 9, 75-106. Reprinted in J.M. Sinclair, 2004, Trust the Text: language, corpus and dis-course.  London: Routledge, 24-48meanings resonate through to the present.Red tape has interesting meaning potential which isoften realised in corpus data. Red tape is effectively asynonym for bureaucracy, and it is therefore inextricablylinked with officialdom. Since red tape is typicallyperceived as excessive, it is typically mentioned when ithas to be reduced, with cut appearing once in every 10occurrences. Red tape also has a marked semanticpreference for quantity.Red tape is a classic example of a dead metaphor:after all, how often are stacks of official papers seenbound up in their pinkish-red ribbon?The origin of the phrase, along with itsmental picture, has largely disappeared.All dead metaphors have the potentialto be resuscitated. What sets red tape apart is thedegree to which it is subjected to semanticelaboration. Its component words are polysemous,and more than one of the meanings of both are salient.Thus, if red tape is cut (bureaucracy red-uced), then an image of actual tape be-ing cut with a sharp instrument is not farbehind. This is an initial image schema(Lakoff 1987) for the expression (a cognitive repre-sentation of language in the mind), and one from whichstems a colourful array of variants. In the corpus we canfind not only cut but also chop, hack, slash, synonymswhich add nuanced meaning: indelicate and imprecisemethods of cutting performed with large tools, sugges-tive of particularly tough, strong or otherwise resistantthings being cut.These variants start the creative ball rolling. Althoughthey may occur in isolation (as the only change from thetypical lexicogrammatical pattern), they frequently com-bine with expressions of quantity, these too deviatingfrom the basic pattern to add particular facets ofmeaning. As a result we can find:Mr Lamont slashed through heaps of red tape.There is a maze of red tape to hack down.…hacking back the jungle of red tape.When conceptual schemata interact, the result is rich-er and more complex meaning, which also has a moreaesthetically pleasing effect. The examplesabove demonstrate how QUANTITY can bemapped onto hostile environments. Theeffect this has is to stimulate re-elaborationof the image schema, making it more detailedand, importantly, reviving its metaphorical potential.Metaphor is not linear, and the directions it takes cansometimes be surprising. Red tape does not have justone conceptualisation, as the variants found in thecorpus attest. Apart from quantity expressed as mass,red tape is also associated with length. The morebureaucracy there is, the more paperwork accompaniesit and the more red tape is required to bind it alltogether. But it is not just paper which is tied in red tapebut people too. Long cords tangle, making itdifficult to ‘find the thread’ – reflecting theoften confusing nature of bureaucratic regula-tions. And from finding oneself ‘caught in a tangle’ of red tape to being ‘snared’, ‘trussed’, ‘hogtied’ or‘shackled’ becomes simply a matter of degree.So far two of the metaphoremes associated with redtape have been described: the reduction of a mass, andentrapment. But metaphors build on other metaphors.In the data studied, the entrapment metaphoreme isseen to be re-elaborated in turn into a ‘kidnap’ theme,which connects entrapment with suffocation (anotherminor metaphoreme present in the red tape data) andother perceived threats to one’s life:Red tape strangles teddies.    Deregulation chokes on red tape.The image schemas and conceptualisations discussedhere are the more prominent of those found in the redtape data. Metaphorical processing is a very personalmatter, but there is clear evidence that some concept-ualisations are shared by the language community: themetaphoremes discussed come from a range of sourceswithin the Bank of English corpus, were coined bydifferent authors and offered to different audiences. Yetin spite of their creativity, all conform to the patternsidentified for the unit of meaning, and express the samepragmatic and affective values. Although the features ofthe participants and objects are ‘stretched’ metaphor-ically, they remain in place, together with the effectof the verbal action in red tape’s context of situation.

Contexts of situation in text, in experience, and in the mind

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