Прецедентное имя как средство концептуализации события в современном английском языке (экспериментальное исследование)

Вопросы психолингвистики. 2017. № 2 (32). С. 109–123.

Nagornaya A.

The paper analyzes the tendency to use the so-called precedent names in combination with the noun moment to conceptualize events in contemporary English. Relying on the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the author reveals the main types of precedent names used in this function. The paper looks into the semantics of collocations, reveals the circumstances of their coinage and defines the degree of their conventionalization in speech practice. The author goes on to describe an experiment conducted on SurveyMonkey, whose aim was to reveal the mechanisms of metaphorization of precedent names, on the one hand, and to diagnose the spread of this type of collocation in real speech practice, on the other hand. The author reveals factors that contribute to the correct metaphorical interpretation of the collocations, analyzes the possibility of alternative metaphorical readings on the basis of subjective associations, as well as the possibility of using other interpretational models (mainly metonymy and literal interpretations), and assesses the degree of awareness in building metaphorical mappings. The paper comes up with the conclusion that the lexico-syntactic model under study possesses considerable productivity and has good prospects for further development in the English language.  

Keywords: словосочетание, метафоризация, metaphorization, collocation, precedent name, semantics of eventfulness, событийная семантика, прецедентное имя