COGNITIVE BASES OF VERBAL METONYMY IN THE REPRESENTATION OF SPEECH ACTS
Authors: Чаплин Е.В. , Сулейманова О.А. 
Published: July 2024

В статье представлен обзор существующих подходов к пониманию глагольной метонимии в рамках когнитивной лингвистики. Особое внимание уделяется рассмотрению метонимии как когнитивно-семантической структуры, механизма языка и мышления, позволяющего описывать фрагменты действительности, связанные со сферой речевых действий. Авторы анализируют исследования ведущих ученых и функционирование метонимичных глаголов, репрезентирующих акт говорения в естественном языке. Полученные сведения применяются для описания семантики метонимичных глаголов говорения и создания классификации моделей метонимических переносов, которые характеризуют различные особенности речемыслительной деятельности.

Verbs of speaking represent a complex linguistic entity, characterizing external substantial aspects of the utterance, communicative side of speech, interaction between the speaker and the listener, emotional state and attitude of the speaker, etc. The core of this class of predicates are the verbs to speak/to say, which are the prototypical speech activity verbs and the general designation of a speech act. Besides, there are a number of metonymic verbs of speaking that contain “additional” information in their meaning and represent various characteristics of a speech act accompanying the speech act, the additional accompanying feature representing the whole speech act. These are the following verbs mumble, gnaw, mutter, babble, spatter, bark, lisp, etc. The paper provides an overview of approaches to verb metonymy in cognitive linguistics. The authors analyze the current state of affairs in linguistic interpretation of metonymic verbs of speaking in a natural language. What makes the research relevant is that it focuses on the verb as the primary sentence element which organizes the sentence. The research shows that the interest in the study of metonymic transfers of both nouns and verbs is steadily increasing. The metonymy is getting related to the mental processes and overall human cognitive activity that underlie metonymic transfers and explain how metonymy works when conceptualizing the reality. The verbal metonymy, following the principle of linguistic economy, demonstrates a tendency to the economy of the speaker’s efforts, e.g.: metonymical representation of a speech act by the verb mumble versus speak languidly and slurredly. The reviewed approaches to the classification of a metonymic transfer in the meaning of the verb, built on the division of metonymy into collegiate, causal, circumstantial, make it possible to identify the main metonymic transfer patterns in the meaning of speech verbs, the patterns being determined by the features of the speech act they represent. As the basic type of verbal metonymy, the study distinguishes circumstantial metonymy, formed by the relationship between the action and the accompanying acoustic, visual, behavioral and other characteristics, where the accompanying sign represents the whole action. The article introduces a comprehensive research procedure based on a hypothesis-deductive method, with semantic experiment as its integral part, and the research results verification using search engines. The study of the meanings of the verbs lepetat’ and lopotat’ allowed the author to put forward a hypothesis about the differential features that distinguish the meanings of the verbs of speaking. The result of the study is a more strict and complete semantic description of the verbs under study.