In:À la recherche de la prédication: Autour des syntagmes prépositionnels
Sous la direction de Christiane Marque-Pucheu, Fryni Kakoyianni-Doa, Peter A. Machonis et Harald Ulland
[Lingvisticæ Investigationes Supplementa 32] 2016
► pp. 89–104
Metaphorical construction in Spanish pseudo-partitives and PP-adverbials
Published online: 24 November 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/lis.32.05mul
https://doi.org/10.1075/lis.32.05mul
This paper deals with the metaphorical exploitation of nouns like avalancha ‘avalanche’,
nube ‘cloud’ and ola ‘wave’ in Spanish pseudo-partitive constructions (PPCs)
of the type avalancha de información ‘avalanche of information’ and PP-adverbials,
such as la gente entró en avalancha ‘the people entered in avalanche’.1 Based on
an analysis of the structure and meaning of PPCs, including their possibilities of
restructuring, the paper argues that the conceptual blending processes which take
place at the NP and sentence levels are not isolated phenomena, but follow identical
semantic principles for the cognitive integration of concepts triggered by prepositions.
Although Spanish functions as the example language in this paper, the observations
and results presented here apply to many other languages.
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