A conceptual integration approach to the property word nagy ‘big’

Papp, Kornélia (2010) A conceptual integration approach to the property word nagy ‘big’. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 57 (1). pp. 119-142. ISSN 1216-8076

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Abstract

This paper describes the various readings of the typically size-related Hungarian adjective nagy ‘big’ in combination with the corresponding noun readings in a corpus-based analysis. Adjective-noun combinations have not only attracted the attention of psychologists (Murphy 2002; Smith et al. 1988; Wisniewski 1997), but they are also in the focus of cognitive linguistics. This study is carried out chiefly in terms of two conceptual models of adjectival modification: the conceptual integration model (Fauconnier 2004; Turner 2007), and the lexical semantic model (Paradis 2005; 2008). The analysis proposed here is applied to corpus data compiled from the Hungarian National Corpus (HNC). 1038 occurrences of nagy -noun constructions have been evaluated for the appropriate adjective versus noun readings with the contextual environment at hand. The results suggest that even though nagy is typically associated with size-interpretations (e.g., nagy ablak ‘big window’ or nagy fa ‘big tree’), other associations such as nagy öröm ‘great joy’, nagy esemény ‘important occasion’ are in fact more frequent. This finding is in accordance with recent studies proposing that linguistic frequency does not always cooccur with cognitive salience (Gilquin 2006).

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