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In:The Linguistics of Temperature
Edited by Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm
[Typological Studies in Language 107] 2015
► pp. 254–299

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What’s hot and what’s not in English and Serbian

A contrastive view on the polysemy of temperature adjectives

Published online: 11 February 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.107.09ras
This paper explores the polysemy of English and Serbian temperature adjectives from a cognitive linguistic perspective. After a global overview of the adjectival categorisation of the temperature domain in the two languages, the pertinent semantic extensions are analysed and compared with regard to their underlying conceptual motivations. English and Serbian are found to display a high degree of similarity in their overall metaphorical conceptualisation based on the temperature domain, but also significant intra- and cross-linguistic variation and dynamism in the semantic extensions along the temperature continuum. The paper discusses multifaceted aspects of temperature-based metaphorical conceptualisation (qualitative and quantitative aspects, energy transfer, transitive cross-domain mappings etc.) and ways in which the extended meanings of temperature adjectives bear on their overall semantics in the two languages.
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