On Metonymically Motivated Delexicalization of Quantifying Nouns in English and Polish: A Corpus Investigation
On Metonymically Motivated Delexicalization of Quantifying Nouns in English and Polish: A Corpus Investigation

Summary/Abstract: Drawing on corpus data, this paper investigates the hypothesis that the delexicalization of the English nouns pile and stack as well as their Polish counterparts sterta ‘pile’ and stos ‘stack’, evidenced by collocational expansion, is to a considerable extent fuelled by the conceptual contiguity between their prototypical concrete N2-collocates and certain abstract notions which may be instantiated by means thereof. It is postulated that this metonymic relation leads to the items gradually loosening their original selectional requirements, thereby contributing to the schematization of their source semantics. The results of an empirical analysis show that the collocational broadening of all of the nouns under scrutiny indeed largely stems from metonymization, yet the tendency is more pronounced in the case of the Polish items, particularly stos ‘stack’. This finding can be accounted for in view of the fact that in contrast to their English equivalents, they have not yet established themselves as schematic quantifiers, as corroborated by their current dictionary definitions, and therefore still heavily rely on the aforementioned conceptual mechanism in their delexicalization.

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