Lexicography and cognitive linguistics

Lexicography and cognitive linguistics Zoltán Kövecses and Szilvia Csábi Eötvös Loránd University

The lexicon of a language is not an unstructured list of words. In this paper, we exemplify some of the basic conceptual structures that cognitive linguists work with and we discuss their potential applications to lexicographic work. Specifically, we focus on the possible advantages of using cognitive linguistics as a theoretical background in the structuring of entries, meanings, and idioms in dictionaries. In connection with these organizational issues, we discuss the knowledge-based organization of the mental lexicon (known as conceptual frames), and a type of organization of the mental lexicon that seems to be much more characteristic of Hungarian than of English: organization according to certain “root morphemes.” We also deal with the conceptualization of an element within a topic area through another element within the same topic area (known as conceptual metonymy), the conceptualization of a topic area in terms of another topic area (known as conceptual metaphor); and the internal organization of the various senses of a word-concept (known as polysemy). We devote a section to idioms and their role as well as possible arrangement in the dictionary. Such thematic structures have, on the whole, remained outside the focus of everyday lexicographic practice. Here, we hope to demonstrate their importance and usefulness. Keywords: dictionaries, frames, roots, metonymy, metaphor

1. Introduction In this paper, we argue for employing cognitive linguistics as a possible theoretical basis in lexicography, dictionary making. The challenge for cognitive linguistics is whether it can say anything important about what the arrangement of entries, meanings, and idioms should be like in a dictionary if our aim is to provide an arrangement that reflects a presumed conceptual structuring, that is, a structuring that is more or less iconic with what we could possibly find in the conceptual system. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada 27:1 (2014), 118–139. doi 10.1075/resla.27.1.05kov issn 0213–2028 / e-issn 2254–6774 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

Lexicography and cognitive linguistics 119

As Rundell (2012, pp. 64–65) illustrates, the issue of whether linguists should be consulted by lexicographers in the process of dictionary making is a rather controversial one, with some extreme arguments against seeking linguists’ advice about how language works. As Rundell (2012, p. 66) notes, “[l]exicography involves an endless series of judgment calls, as one scans language data and tries to extract what is important. Good lexicographers instinctively make the ‘right’ calls most of the time — but that leaves too much to chance.” Hereby, we attempt to show the possible advantages that employing cognitive linguistic principles may have in the course of dictionary making by providing a systematic approach to language, as well as relevant information about specific words, meanings, and idioms, and how they are used as well as why they are used that way. Cognitive linguistics is, thus, claimed to be a good tool for “trying to find the underlying regularity, or rule, in a (sometimes only seeming) chaos or randomness” (Zgusta, 1992, p. 92). As Atkins and Bouillon (2006) claim, the lexicographic process consists in two distinct phases: (1) the initial stage, or analysis, of dictionary compiling, when (a) word behavior is studied by the lexicographer using the evidence coming from corpus data, their own notes, and other sources, (b) facts (meanings, constructions, collocates, participation in multiword expressions, register, language variety, style, etc.) are recorded about the headword, (c) provisional sense distinctions are established, (d) facts and exemplifying sentences are put in order, (e) finally all this results in a rich database entry; and (2) the formulation of the actual dictionary entry, or synthesis. The authors (Atkins & Bouillon, 2006, pp. 26–27) also note that without a solid theoretical basis for the analysis, “the collection of facts will be patchy and inconsistent, without any means of ensuring that no important aspect of the word’s behaviour has been overlooked,” and that during synthesis, “there is no means of ensuring that their approach to these tasks is consistent from A to Z of the dictionary.” In what follows, we will provide arguments and examples for the advantages of employing cognitive linguistics as a theoretical underpinning for lexicography. 2. Entries in the dictionary When creating a dictionary, be it a monolingual or bilingual one, lexicographers need to make significant decisions about entry organization, which essentially defines the type of dictionary they are working on. The inclusion criteria, i.e., the features that define what can go in the dictionary, may vary from dictionary to dictionary. It has to be noted that the previously strictly observable boundaries between different dictionary types, and reference work types in general, are

120 Zoltán Kövecses and Szilvia Csábi

becoming blurred these days:1 often, users are not even interested whether they are using a dictionary, a thesaurus, an encyclopedia, a lexicon, or even a translator software, they only care about getting some quick result from any of these ‘databases,’ primarily electronically, which they can put to use immediately. Many online dictionaries have already embraced features of thesauri and translationaids. As a matter of fact, the alphabetical arrangement of dictionaries, as well as grouping headwords into word bushes (previously done primarily for space-saving purposes) have almost completely lost their significance with the emergence of electronic dictionaries, where users search for specific keywords only, without actually leafing through the book. Let us now see some possible guiding principles for ordering dictionary entries in a systematic way in dictionaries. 2.1 Frames Much of our knowledge about the world comes from the categories we have. Categories are mentally represented as frames, schemas, or models (see, e.g., Fillmore, 1982; Lakoff, 1987; Langacker, 1987; Schank & Abelson, 1977). The terminology is varied (see Andor, 1985), but the idea behind it is roughly the same. We can use the following working definition of frames: a frame is a structured mental representation of a coherent organization of human experience. Perhaps the best known slogan for this idea is Fillmore’s (1977, p. 59) paradigm-setting statement: “[m]eanings are relativized to scenes” (i.e., frames). Additional characteristics of frames include that in most cases they are not defined by necessary and sufficient features and that they often consist of several entities related to particular actions or events. An early attempt to look at meaning in language in this light is Fillmore’s case grammar, which he later developed into his frame semantics. For instance, a cognitive structuring device such as the Commercial Transaction Frame includes a buyer/customer, a seller/vendor, goods, and payment, and characterizes the situation in which a buyer buys / a seller sells some goods in return of payment. This is independent of the linguistic realizations of the situation; nonetheless, there are certain words that are characteristic of certain parts of the frame. In a dictionary, these words can be grouped together as entries belonging to the same frame, or even the same part of the specific frame. Thus, a frame can in principle be a guiding principle of systematic entry ordering in a dictionary. Frames can also be metaphoric in their nature. Metaphor is a cognitive process in the course of which a more abstract concept (or frame) is conceived or 1. On the controversial issue of dictionary typology, see Magay (to appear).


conceptualized in terms of another, more physical concept (or frame) by means of finding or creating a set of conceptual correspondences between the elements of the two concepts (see Kövecses, 2010; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). As an example of such cognitive-cultural models, consider the hypothetical model below as proposed in Kövecses (1991, 2010) for what is called “happiness as an immediate response.” This form of happiness was also suggested to be most commonly accessed in everyday communication by means of the word joy. Cause of joy: You want to achieve something. You achieve it. There is an immediate emotional response to this on your part. Existence of joy: You are satisfied. You display a variety of expressive and behavioral responses including brightness of the eyes, smiling, laughing, jumping up and down. You feel energized. You also experience physiological responses, including body warmth and agitation/excitement. The context for the state is commonly a social one involving celebrations. You have a positive outlook on the world. You feel a need to communicate your feelings to others. The feeling you have may ‘spread’ to others. You experience your state as a pleasurable one. You feel that you are in harmony with the world. You can’t help what you feel; you are passive in relation to your feelings. The intensity of your feelings and experiences is high. Beyond a certain limit, an increase in intensity implies a social danger for you to become dysfunctional, that is, to lose control. It is not entirely acceptable for you to communicate and/or give free expression to what you feel (i.e., to lose control). Attempt at control: Because it is not entirely acceptable to communicate and/or give free expression of what you feel, you try to keep the emotion under control: you attempt not to engage in the behavioral responses and/or not to display the expressive responses and/or not communicate what you feel. Loss of control: You nevertheless lose control. Action: You engage in the behavioral responses and/or display expressive responses and/or communicate what you feel. You may, in addition, exhibit wild, uncontrolled behavior (often in the form of dancing, singing, and energetic behavior with a lot of movement).


We can think of the emergence of this model from the metaphors, metonymies, and related concepts in the following way: Take, for instance, the idea that when we are very happy, there is some loss of control involved. An indication of this idea is given in a number of conceptual metaphors, such as happiness is a natural force, happiness is an opponent, happiness is a captive animal, and happiness is insanity. The typical linguistic examples of these metaphors suggest that the person who is intensely happy is likely to undergo some loss of control (we are overwhelmed, we are seized, we go crazy, etc.). Thus, the language we use about happiness reveals the way we (at least assume to) think about happiness, and the way we think about it is given in a prototypical cognitive model. 2.2 Root structure as a new dimension in the lexicon In alphabetically arranged dictionaries of the Hungarian language, such as Dictionary of the Hungarian language, The historical-etymological dictionary of the Hungarian language, A Hungarian etymological dictionary, we find that more than one hundred headwords begin with the element es-, including the verb esik (‘fall’) and the noun esés (‘fall[ing]’). In reading through the list of such words, we intuitively assign the meaning ‘esés’ (‘fall[ing]’) to the element es- in most of these cases, given that the words esik and esés containing it have that meaning. This way, we intuitively and automatically identify a morpheme that has the sound shape es- and the meaning ‘esés’ (‘fall[ing]’). We can call this morpheme the root (or stem) es-, which provides a major part of the meaning of over one hundred words in Hungarian. Roots may have metaphoric aspects. Below, we discuss how the Hungarian word esemény (‘event,’ ‘occurrence,’ ‘happening’), one of the most immediate derivatives of es-, and hence a most basic word in this large family of words, may have come into existence through the application of a metaphorization process. The generic concept of esemény (‘event,’ ‘occurrence,’ ‘happening’) is commonly conceptualized in Hungarian as esés (‘fall[ing]’). Using the terminology of conceptual metaphor theory, esemény is the target domain and esés is the source domain, which yields the conceptual metaphor az esemény esés (‘an event is falling’). This conceptual metaphor is made manifest linguistically in a number of metaphorical expressions in the dictionaries consulted. Here are some examples (with the actual metaphorical expressions in italics) with word-for-word translations followed by approximate English equivalents: (1)

az esemény esés (‘an event is falling’) Már az régen esett. already the long-time-ago fall-3rd-person-singular-past It happened a long time ago.


Ez tavaly esett. this last-year fall-3rd-person-singular-past This happened last year. Az utolsó háborúkor esett. the last war-at fall-3rd-person-singular-past It happened during the last war. Úgy eshetik, hogy el nem megyünk. so fall-may-3rd-person-singular-present, that away not go-1st-personplural-present It may so happen that we are not going.

The examples above come from the dictionaries used and may sound somewhat archaic, but they are still perfectly understandable to native speakers of Hungarian. However, other, more current examples can be found in the more recent Dictionary of the Hungarian language: (2) Ahogy esik, úgy puffan. the-way fall-3rd-person-singular-present, so thud-3rd-person-singularpresent As it happens, so it thuds. / It happens as it happens. / Let the chips fall where they may. Ilyen eset még nem esett magyar ember házán. Such case yet not fall-3rd-person-singular-past Hungarian person housepossessive-on No such case has yet happened to a Hungarian person’s house. Baja esik. trouble-possessive-3rd-person fall-3rd-person-singular-present Is hurt. Csoda esik. Miracle fall-3rd-person-singular-present Miracle happens. Hogy esett a dolog? how fall-3rd-person-singular-past the thing How did it happen? Hogy esett,mint esett, mind elpanaszolta. how fall-3rd-person-singular-past, how fall-3rd-person-singular-past, all away-complain-3rd-person-singular-past How it happened, in what way it happened, he/she complained all of it.


Finally, let us take another example which demonstrates the possibility of adding the prefix meg- (indicating perfective aspect) to the verb esik (‘fall’) when used metaphorically (this example is not taken from the dictionaries): (3) Néha megesik, hogy nem tud jönni. sometimes perfective-fall-3rd-person-singular-present, that not can come-to Sometimes it happens that he/she can’t come.

All of the examples above indicate the clear presence of the conceptualization of events in terms of falling in Hungarian. But, as the dictionaries testify, in addition to falling the concept of events can also be conceptualized metaphorically as (horizontal) motion. We find the following examples for this conceptual metaphor in the Dictionary of the Hungarian language: (4)

az esemény (horizontális) mozgás (‘events are (horizontal) motion’) Az események menete. The event-plural-possessive going The going of events. / The way events go/happen.

Az események sodra. the event-plural-possessive current The current of events. Rohannak az események. rush-3rd-person-plural-present the event-plural Events rush. / Events move fast. Minden figyelmével a bekövetkező események felé fordult. all attention-3rd-person-possessive-instrumental the in-following events toward turn-3rd-person-singular-past With all his/her attention he/she turned to the events to follow / to the upcoming events.

As can be noticed, in the latter set of examples above it is not falling but horizontal movement that serves as the source domain of the metaphor for the conceptualization of events. The resulting conceptual metaphor can be stated as events are horizontal motion. The basic (minimal or skeletal) structure of the events are falling and events are horizontal motion metaphors is as follows: events are falling the entity falling → the person/object to whom/which something happens the process of falling → the process of happening


events are horizontal motion the entity moving → the person/object to whom/which something happens the process of moving → the process of happening

The arrows connect corresponding elements in the source and target domains, going from the source to the target. Such conceptual structures are called correspondences, or mappings, in conceptual metaphor theory. Jointly, they define a particular conceptual metaphor. The horizontal motion metaphor is part of Lakoff ’s (1993) Event Structure metaphor system, which primarily structures events according to location, force, and movement. The target domains of the Event Structure metaphor are events and their various aspects such as changes, changing states, causes that produce changes, actions and their purposes, and others. The aspects are understood metaphorically in terms of physical concepts such as location, force, and motion, acting as source domains (Kövecses, 2010; Lakoff, 1991), and resulting in examples and metaphors such as They are in love. (states are locations), We’ve taken the first step. (action is self-propelled motion), He went crazy. (changes are movements), The flow of history. (external events are large, moving objects),You should move on with your life. (long-term, purposeful activities are journeys), etc. The role of roots in Hungarian bilingual dictionaries is very important. A future thorough analysis of the root structure of Hungarian words and their possible motivations may open up the possibility of rearranging headwords according to roots and their motivations, and thus creating revolutionary conceptually-based dictionaries in the future. 3. Meanings in the dictionary For each headword in the dictionary, both grammatical information and contextual features are lexicographically relevant pieces of information for lexicographers. As apparent from the grammatical information and the context(s) in which a headword is used, usually several different senses of a headword can be determined — variants on the part-of-speech (POS) level as well as variants on the actual sense level. For instance, the word cut can have nominal and verbal, as well as adjectival uses, and it can also be used as an interjection (when film directing). In addition, these, especially the nominal and the verbal, uses have several different senses such as ‘damage from something sharp,’ ‘reduction in something,’ ‘act/ process of cutting,’ ‘way something is cut,’ just to name some nominal senses (cf. Macmillan online dictionary).


The ordering of these POS-variants and senses is a major issue in lexicography, and there have been different lexicographical traditions approaching this issue in different periods of time. For instance, in the English/Hungarian dictionaries edited by László Országh in the 1950s, part-of-speech variants were listed according to the alphabetical order of the actual part-of-speech name in English, thus, adjectival variants always came first and verbal variants always came last. Senses within the POS-variants in these dictionaries were typically ordered according literal and figurative meanings, with literal meanings always coming first and figurative meanings always coming after (cf. the entry for cut as mentioned above). However, present-day dictionaries prefer the organization of POS-variants and senses according to frequency of use, as determined on the basis of corpora analyses. In this way, figurative meanings, which are now often used more frequently than literal meanings, appear before literal meanings. Traditional dictionaries such as the Országh-dictionaries mentioned above may better represent the evolving of new meanings in time within the arbitrary alphabetical POS-ordering, starting from literal meanings and moving on to evolving figurative meanings. In this sense, they may follow our developing conceptual structure more clearly. Today’s dictionaries, which foreground the role of frequency, shuffle this conceptual order and show them in a mixed-up way, in accordance with frequency of use. Alternatively, cognitive linguistic research suggests that the meaning structure of polysemous words is motivated and can be accounted for in a systematic way. Thus, meanings within polysemous entries in the dictionary can be organized with the help of conceptual mechanisms such as frames, metonymy, and metaphor. Let us see some examples of these below. 3.1 Frames Fillmore and Atkins have dealt with the importance of frames and the FrameNet project, where frames are used in computational linguistics, in the analytical stage of dictionary making in various publications including Fillmore and Atkins (1998) and Atkins, Fillmore and Johnson (2003). They primarily focus on the usefulness of analyzing “the semantico-syntactic valence of the keyword reflecting essentially the valence instantiated in the corpus” (Atkins & Bouillon, 2006, p. 28) in order to see the ways in which these words are “grammatically and lexically realized in the corpus” (Atkins & Bouillon, 2006, p. 28). In this approach, the frame, or conceptual background, is identified, to which the lexical unit belongs, then the frame elements are analyzed according to the corpus sentences, as, for instance, the analysis of argue in Atkins and Bouillon (2006) shows.


3.2 Metonymy Cognitive linguists do not think of metonymy as a superfluous linguistic device whose only function is to avoid literalism and to make the expression of meaning more varied. Kövecses and Radden (1998) define metonymy as “a cognitive process in which a conceptual element, or entity (thing, event, property), the vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity (thing, event, property), the target, within the same frame, or idealized cognitive model (icm).” Thus, for example, given the restaurant frame, or icm (i.e., structured conceptual representations of domains in terms of elements of these domains, cf. Lakoff (1987), such as production icm, event icm, institution icm, etc.), the speaker of the sentence “The ham sandwich spilled beer all over himself ” directs attention, or provides mental access, to the conceptual element person eating the ham sandwich (target) through the use of another conceptual element ham sandwich (vehicle) that belongs to the same frame. As we mentioned previously, our knowledge of the world comes in the form of structured frames, schemas, or icms. These can be construed as wholes with parts. Since frames are conceptualized as wholes that have parts, there are two general configurations of wholes and parts that give rise to metonymy-producing relationships: the “whole and its parts” configuration, and the “part and part” configuration. A variety of specific metonymy-producing relationships can be observed within both configurations (see Kövecses & Radden, 1998; Radden & Kövecses, 1999). We can think of categories as having a part-whole structure. One example of this is the category-and-property icm. In the case of categories, the most important part is the properties used to define the category. The category as a whole has properties as parts. In the sentence

(5) Boys will be boys.

the first boys indicates the category of boys as a whole, while the second indicates the typical qualities, or features, of boys, such as ‘being unruly’ (i.e., we have the metonymy category for property). That is to say, a quality, or property, of boys (‘being unruly’) is made reference to by the second use of boys that captures the category as a whole. Incidentally, this analysis shows that sentences like Boys will be boys do not represent empty tautologies, as would be the case in many other approaches to meaning. The reverse can also occur in the case of the category-and-property frame. A property can stand for the entire category. Consider a sentence like

(6) African Americans were once called blacks.


Here we have the metonymy property for the category. As a matter of fact, the metonymy applies twice in the sentence — both African American and blacks are instances of it. Euphemisms (as well as dysphemisms) are often based on this specific type of metonymy. As the example shows, the conceptual structure of the euphemism is the same in both cases (i.e., property for the category). What changes is the connotations that go together with the particular property that replaces the old one (African American does not, as yet, have the negative connotations of black). Another kind of metonymy involves a category and a member of the category. This works within the category-and-member icm. The category itself is viewed as a whole, while the members are the parts. The relationship between the whole category and a member is often reversible, as can be seen in the examples to follow: (7) She’s on the pill. (category for a member) Do you have an aspirin? (a member for the category)

In the first sentence, the whole category of pills stands for a particular member of the category, namely, contraceptive pills, whereas in the second sentence a particular member of a category (i.e., aspirin) stands for the entire category of painrelievers. Thus, metonymy as a cognitive mechanism has an obvious function in making dictionaries: it can systematically link the different senses of a word to each other (as in the case of black, for instance). The mechanism occurs over and over again in a large number of cases. 3.3 Metaphor Beginning with Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) seminal book, Metaphors We Live By, cognitive linguistics opened up a new front in the study of language and the mind. This is perhaps the best known chapter in the history of cognitive linguistics (for an overview, see Kövecses, 2010). In essence, the theory maintains that metaphor is a cognitive process in which one domain of experience (a) is understood in terms of another domain of experience (b). Metaphor consists of a source (b) and target domain (a) such that the source is a more physical and the target a more abstract kind of domain. Examples of source and target domains include the following: warmth, building, war, journey as source domains; affection, theory, argument, and life as target domains. Thus we get conceptual metaphors like affection is warmth, theories are buildings, argument is war, and life is a journey. What this means is that the concepts of affection, theory, argument, and life are comprehended via the concepts of warmth, building, war, and journey, respectively.


Why do particular target concepts go together with particular source concepts? The traditional answer to this question is that there is some kind of similarity between the two concepts; that is, concept a is similar to concept b in some respect. While cognitive linguists accept this kind of motivation for certain metaphors, they also take into account another kind of motivation for many other metaphors. The choice of a particular source to go with a particular target can also be motivated by some embodied experience. For example, the bodily correlation between the increase in the intensity of an activity or a state, on the one hand, and the production of body heat, on the other, is inevitable for the kinds of bodies that we have. This correlation forms the basis of a linguistic and conceptual metaphor intensity is heat. Since intensity is an aspect of many concepts, the source domain of heat will apply to many concepts, such as anger, love, lust, work, argument, etc. In general, we suggest that many conceptual metaphors (i.e., source and target pairings) are motivated by such bodily correlations in experience. As was mentioned, in the traditional view of metaphor similarity is the main motivation for bringing together two concepts in a metaphorical relationship. One frequently mentioned example in the literature to justify the view that metaphors are based on similarity is: Achilles was a lion. It is proposed that Achilles and lions share a property, namely, that of being brave. This similarity gives rise to the metaphor. In summary, we can think of embodiment and similarity as different kinds of constraint on the creation of metaphor. Embodiment seems to be a stronger kind of constraint, in that it works automatically and unconsciously. Some ways of making use of conceptual metaphor theory in lexicography are mentioned by Rundell (2012), who claims that Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Metaphors we live by is a consciousness-raising text for lexicographers, some ideas of which have already been directly applied in some dictionaries. For instance, Macmillan English dictionary includes ca. 60 ‘metaphor boxes’ with contextualized examples of metaphor sets relating to particular concepts, as well as explanations of the metaphorical mappings, to raise language learners’ awareness of the metaphorical nature of the language (Moon, 2004; Rundell, 2012). For instance, the metaphor box at the entry for time says that “Time is like money or like something that you buy and use.” It then gives some example sentences that illustrate the mappings, such as “I’ve spent a lot of time on this project. / We are running out of time. / You have used up all the time you had left. / Stop wasting time.” As Rundell (2012, p. 70) also notes, in the Macmillan Phrasal verbs plus dictionary (2005), “a [partially successful] attempt was made to identify the semantic characteristics of the 12 most common particles used in phrasal verbs,” in order to represent “an effort to replace apparent randomness (English phrasal verbs are notoriously difficult for learners) with something approaching a learnable system.”


Picture dictionaries, such as Kövecses et al.’s (1998) A picture dictionary of English idioms (Kövecses, Tóth, & Babarci, 1998), are especially handy when employing conceptual metaphor (and metonymy) theory in a dictionary. Pictures are able to quickly and clearly express the motivation of word and idiom meanings, thus facilitating vocabulary learning with the help visual images. Using visual images can provide connections to meanings to be stored in memory and provide meaningful links between expressions and their meanings, thus promoting the storage and recovery of items that belong together (i.e., a form and the corresponding meaning) and producing better retention than simple repetition. 3.4 Polysemy: Case studies In this section, we wish to provide additional support for the idea that, besides memorization of word forms and meanings, awareness and acquisition of the cognitive structure of meanings aids vocabulary teaching and learning. That is, we suggest that learners who know how certain conceptual metaphors and metonymies structure the meanings of certain polysemous words and idioms will acquire the meanings of these words and idioms more easily than learners who are not aware of (familiar with) these mechanisms. Given this claim, it is suggested that the motivations of word meanings should be made clear to students in the language classroom to achieve better results in vocabulary acquisition. Classroom research on teaching polysemous words such as hold and keep and idioms including them appears to support the validity of the claim that applying cognitive linguistic principles in language teaching and learning aids vocabulary acquisition (see Csábi 2004 for a detailed description). In addition, further experiments also show that the recognition of the motivation of vocabulary items can facilitate comprehension, in-depth comprehension, and retention (see Beréndi, Csábi, & Kövecses, 2008). Thus, we suggest that a certain degree of metaphor awareness can be developed in foreign language learners, which can be the basis of conscious learning strategies. These experiments involved various ways of presentation and consciousness-raising of metaphorically motivated idioms, and compared the consequences for comprehension and learning, and, as a result, showed that explicit awareness-raising is beneficial to the understanding, short-term and long-term retention and recall of L2 idiomatic language, and for the creation of a more elaborate conceptual structure of a target domain. The claim proposed here is that teachers’ and learners’ awareness of the motivation of senses and learners’ acquisition of the cognitive structure of word meanings aid teaching and learning. In the experiments mentioned above, we examined whether the explicit knowledge of conceptual metaphors, metonymies, and conventional knowledge present as motivational factors in the target language


facilitates learning L2 word meanings, and we proved our hypothesis according to which explicating the motivations for the senses of polysemous words and the idioms in which they occur leads to better learner performance. Thus, adopting Lakoff ’s (1987) view of motivation, we can assume that language learners will learn, remember, and use both polysemous words and idioms in which they appear more easily whenever they come to understand their semantic motivation. Consequently, teachers are advised to attempt to facilitate students’ metaphorical competence. This may be a challenging and intellectually demanding task both for the teacher and the learner but the advantages are clear. The experiment concerning the teaching of polysemous words such as hold and keep and idioms including them focused on (a) hold and keep as polysemous items; (b) phrasal verbs including hold and keep; (c) other idioms containing hold and keep. Students in every group were familiar with the most frequently used (i.e., the central) meanings of hold and keep, as illustrated in He was holding a knife in one hand and a fork in the other., She held her daughter’s hand as they crossed the road., I held the baby in my arms, or in Here’s a five-pound note — you can keep the change, and I keep all her letters. Nevertheless, examples of these meanings were also included in the teaching and testing process since further, figurative meanings and idiomatic meanings largely depend upon these meanings.2 The phrasal verbs and idioms included in the study were previously unknown to the students (hold one’s tongue, hold one’s temper, and hold one’s head up; keep one’s fingers crossed, keep somebody at arm’s length, and keep something under one’s hat). During the experiment, within the framework of a 45-minute lesson, firstly, some senses of hold and keep were presented to the groups, which students were instructed to memorize. Secondly, phrasal verbs containing hold and keep were presented to the classes, whose meanings students had to memorize (hold back, hold down, and hold up; keep in, and keep out [of ]). Thirdly, multiword idioms containing hold and keep were presented to students, who memorized their meanings. After each part, students had to fill in a short test and place either hold or keep, or the relevant phrasal verbs or idiomsin the gaps. The taught items, which were to be inserted in the gaps, were not written on the test sheet, so students had to retrieve them from memory. Shortly after the teaching and testing procedure described above, a post-test was administered to each group, that is, students were required to complete the same test as they had to fill in on the day of the treatment. The only difference between the experimental and the control groups was in the presentation of the material to be taught. The control groups were only taught 2. The language used during the explanations was Hungarian for practical reasons, in order not to create an uncontrollable factor to use English words in the explanations that were not previously known to the students.


the English words and their Hungarian equivalents, and they relied only on this information when memorizing the expressions and their meanings. In contrast, the experimental groups were taught in accordance with the cognitive linguistic approach to meaning, so instead of teaching them the English expressions together with their Hungarian equivalents, only the most important motivating factors were explained to them (see Csábi, 2004), and they memorized the items on the basis of their knowledge of sense motivations. The statistically significant, and consistently large, differences between the experimental groups and the control groups in the experiment clearly showed that students in the experimental groups outperformed those in the control groups; specifically, the learned items seem to have been better recalled by them from short-term memory. These differences seem to support the hypothesis that the explicit knowledge of motivated meanings in the target language helps learners to better learn, remember, and use polysemous words such as hold and keep than other learners who only memorize the words and their Hungarian equivalents. Thus, it is argued that memorization can be further improved by employing insights from cognitive semantics. 4. Idioms in the dictionary In the traditional view, idioms are structures that consist of two or more words whose overall meaning cannot be predicted from the meaning of the constitutive parts: the overall meaning of idioms is arbitrary. While the cognitive linguistic view agrees with the traditional view that the meaning of idioms cannot be predicted in full, it also maintains that to a large extent it can be motivated. There are at least three cognitive mechanisms that participate in the motivation of idioms: metaphor, metonymy, and everyday knowledge (Lakoff, 1987). Here, we will only be concerned with metaphor-based idioms. Some examples of metaphor-based idioms, such as fire-related idioms, are the following (see Kövecses, 2010): (8)

He was spitting fire. The fire between them finally went out. The painting set fire to the composer’s imagination. The killing sparked off riots in the major cities. He was burning the candle at both ends. The bank robber snuffed out Sam’s life. The speaker fanned the flames of the crowd’s enthusiasm.


All the idioms above have to do with various aspects of fire: the initial stage of fire (set fire to), the final stage of fire (snuff out), the use of an energy source (burn the candle at both ends), the maintenance of the intensity of fire (fan the flames), the danger of the high intensity of fire (spit fire), etc. These idioms use several words from the domain of fire, so it is not the particular words but the entire conceptual domain of fire that participates in the creation of such idioms. The domain of fire can be used to understand several distinct abstract concepts, such as anger (He was spitting fire.), love (The fire between them finally went out.), imagination (The painting set fire to the composer’s imagination.), conflict (The killing sparked off riots in the major cities.), energy (He was burning the candle at both ends.), enthusiasm (The speaker fanned the flames of the crowd’s enthusiasm.). Fire-related idioms form parts of several conceptual metaphors such as anger is fire, love is fire, imagination is fire, conflict is fire, energy is fire, and enthusiasm is fire, just to name a few examples, so they are not single, distinct, and unrelated expressions. On the one hand, the existence of the cognitive mechanism of conceptual metaphor provides motivation for these idioms to exist. Metaphors help us to explain why words and phrases from the fire domain are used to talk about anger, love, imagination, and other abstract domains. On the other hand, the mechanism of conceptual metaphor helps us to further explain, and thus motivate, why the idioms and the metaphorically used words mean what they do — due to the metaphorical mappings that make up conceptual metaphors. Therefore, a set of mappings, such as ‘the thing burning is the angry person,’ ‘the fire is the process of anger,’ ‘the cause of fire is the cause of anger,’ and ‘the degree of heat is the intensity of anger,’ etc., can motivate the meanings of the words and phrases that are linguistic examples of the conceptual metaphors. Other conceptual metaphors may also be composed of the same mappings. For example, the thing burning can also be the person in love, the person imagining, or the entity undergoing a conflict, etc. In this way, some mappings can be generalized as generic-level metaphors, such as intensity is (degree of) heat, for instance (see Kövecses, 2010). In this metaphor, ‘the thing burning is the person in a state / process,’ ‘the fire is the state/process’ (like anger, love, imagination), ‘the cause of the fire is the cause of the state/process,’ ‘the degree of the heat of the fire is the intensity of the state/process,’ etc. Such mappings can explain why particular idioms (or, actually, also one-word metaphors) mean specifically what they do. For example, set fire to one’s imagination means what it does because it is based on the mapping ‘the beginning of the fire is the beginning of the state/process;’ or burn with excitement means what it does because it is based on the mapping ‘the degree of the heat of fire is the intensity of the state/process.’


The conceptual metaphors and their mappings provide strong motivation for the actual use of certain words and their meanings. Generalized mappings can systematically explain why idioms and words mean what they do outside their primary application. Knowledge of this kind of motivation may also contribute to the learning of idioms in a foreign language, as some studies indicate (see, e.g., Boers, 1997, 2000, 2004; Kövecses & Szabó, 1996). 4.1 Idioms in an ‘ideal’ idiom dictionary Cognitive linguistic principles have relevance concerning the possibly ideal arrangement of idioms in dictionaries which may thus reflect a presumed conceptual structuring. In the case of metaphor-based idioms, the presumed conceptual organization related to idioms would consist of a source domain and a target domain on which the idiomatic expressions are conceptually based, and, in the case of metonymy-based idioms, a single domain structured by an icm with a variety of elements. Given this presumed conceptual structure (for psychological evidence, see Gibbs, 1994), and considering this as the ideal arrangement structure, we can now evaluate attempts to arrange idioms in dictionaries to see which type of actual dictionary arrangement approximates this ideal most closely. In what follows, we will continue to use idiomatic expressions that are related to the phenomenon of fire. 4.1.1 Alphabetical listing of idiomatic expressions Several idiom dictionaries merely list idiomatic expressions in alphabetical order: burn the candle at both ends; catch fire; fire sb’s imagination; wet blanket; etc. (see The Oxford dictionary of current idiomatic English). Clearly, this kind of arrangement does not reflect conceptual structure, and there is no indication whatsoever that idioms are based on conceptual metaphors and metonymies that are structured by domains. 4.1.2 Keyword-based arrangement Idioms can be listed according to certain keywords of the idioms. Fire-related idioms can be grouped around keywords such as candle (for burn the candle at both ends), fire (for play with fire), flame (for an old flame), flames (for add fuel to the flames), etc. (see Longman Dictionary of English Idioms). This type of arrangement reflects very little about the presumed conceptual structure as well since it simply selects a word from each idiom, and these keywords are again placed in alphabetical order. However, by selecting keywords that have to do with fire (candle, fire, flame), this dictionary arrangement takes one step in the right direction: it foregrounds or brings into focus a source domain (fire) that motivates many idioms, although it does not make this source explicit.


4.1.3 Thesaurus-like arrangement Idioms are sometimes arranged in a thesaurus-like way. For instance, fire-related idioms such as slow burn, flare-up, blaze of temper, burning rage, breathe fire and fury, do a slow burn, in the heat of passion, etc.are arranged under the heading resentment, anger in Roget’s International Thesaurus. Here, the target domain of idioms (resentment, anger) is clearly foregrounded, which is more useful than simple alphabetical arrangement, but the source domains are not specified at all, either. So this arrangement is far from ideal, too. 4.1.4 Metaphor-based arrangement Linguistic expressions of conceptual metaphors, such as anger is fire, may not only be idioms but they may also consist of only one word (e.g., smolder, fume, kindle), which do not count as idioms given that idioms are multi-word expressions by definition. Thus, not all fire-related metaphors are idioms of anger. More generally, the number of metaphorical linguistic expressions generated by conceptual metaphors is larger than that of metaphorical idioms. The presentation of the anger is fire metaphor shows that, in it, the source and target domains come together, they are foregrounded and made explicit. Moreover, the idiomatic expressions are presented together with the source and target, indicating that they belong together, i.e., the idiomatic expressions are based on the conceptual metaphor. As we have seen above, the source domain of fire applies not just to anger but to several other target domains, such as love, imagination, conflict, energy, enthusiasm, etc. The so-called ‘scope of metaphor’ (cf. Kövecses, 1995, 2000, 2010) is the range of target domains to which a source domain can apply. Organizing idioms according to this kind of presumed conceptual organization would give us considerable economy and simplification in the way we can imagine the structure of our conceptual system. Thus, certain aspects of abstract concepts could be seen as directly representable as mapped versions of certain concrete source concepts, such as fire. This can be shown diagrammatically in Figure 1. anger

love

imagination

conflict

fire

Figure 1. Several targets with a single shared source

energy

enthusiasm


In this source-dependent kind of organization of conceptual metaphors, shared source domains across targets would appear only once, with all the targets to which they apply. Fire-metaphors appear to have a wide scope and apply to a wide variety of situations, many kinds of events and states, such as anger, love, imagination, conflict, and many others like life, pain, argument, economic activity that have not been demonstrated above. This wide scope of the fire-source calls for a very general metaphor: a situation is fire, where the term situation refers to all the events and states mentioned above. What this metaphor tells us is that we conceptualize certain aspects of situations in terms of fire. In sum, there are alternative ways of organizing the material of dictionaries — we can break with the traditional alphabetical arrangement, which randomly lists idioms, and move step-by-step to a motivated, systematic organization, which makes sense for dictionary users as well, and which may make their process of learning idioms more systematic, and hopefully easier, as a result. 5. Conclusions When compiling a dictionary, a lexicographer has to make several important choices in advance, before doing the actual work. Not only about the final product, the target audience, and practical issues related to the production of the dictionary, but also about the inner structure of the dictionaries, how the entries follow each other, how the meanings are arranged, and how idioms are represented within the dictionary in a way that best suits the user’s needs. As Atkins and Bouillon (2006, p. 25) note, “[g]one are the days when you looked at a blank sheet of paper, consulted a meager card index and a plethora of other dictionaries, and wished for more information,” as there are a growing number of national corpora, which offer “far more material than anyone can hope to handle in the context of a commercial dictionary — or, indeed, in a lifetime.” We hope to have demonstrated that cognitive linguistics provides a fruitful theoretical background, a strong organizational force for user-friendly dictionaries that reflect the conceptual structures of our mind and language. We now live in the age of electronic dictionaries, where space is no more a limiting factor for dictionaries, which may also further exploit cognitive linguistic principles describing language use. Electronically, the arrangement of entries as well as meanings may soon be done according to the user’s specific needs. In this way, a simply alphabetically arranged dictionary may become a systematically arranged group of entries at a click, if it is made possible that, for instance, we can select words and expressions that describe anger or love, in order to see


what source domains these use, or words and expressions that contain the word fire in order to see what target domains there may be. Cross-referencing between entries in this way may also enhance vocabulary learning and finding out more about the systematicity of language. As Rundell (2012, p. 79) says, “[t]he idea that an electronic dictionary should be a flexible object, allowing for customization to the needs of particular groups of users or of one specific user, has been around for some time (de Schryver, 2003, pp. 183–185). … ‘[A]n online dictionary can be adapted to the needs of each dictionary user’ (Kwary, 2012, p. 35). To do this, ‘the systems can adaptively select and prioritize the items which are most relevant to their users’ (ibid). The key word is ‘adaptively’ because, as a user’s needs and knowledge change, the dictionary continually alters and updates the way its content is configured.” Wierzbicka (1985, p. 5) once observed that “lexicography has no theoretical foundations, and even the best lexicographers, when pressed, can never explain what they are doing and why.” In our paper, we hope to have demonstrated that cognitive linguistics is able to offer a useful framework for lexicographers and provide essential background information about language and language use, which in turn may help the creation of systematic and well-founded dictionaries, with rich knowledge about specific words, meanings, and idioms (see Csábi, 2002). As Lew (2007) notes, “Let us hope that lexicographers will keep an open mind to developments in linguistics, and that linguists will continue to exhibit a healthy fascination with dictionaries.”

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Authors’ addresses Zoltán Kövecses Department of American Studies ELTE Rákóczi út 5 1088 Budapest (Hungary)

Szilvia Csábi [email protected]

[email protected]

About the authors Zoltán Kövecses is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. His main research interests include the theory of metaphor and metonymy, the conceptualization of emotions, and the relationship between cognition and culture. His most recent books include Metaphor. A Practical Introduction (Second edition, OUP, 2010), Language, Mind, and Culture. A Practical Introduction (OUP, 2006), Metaphor in Culture. Universality and Variation (CUP, 2005), and Metaphor and Emotion (CUP, 2000). Szilvia Csábi received her doctorate in cognitive linguistics at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, where she focused on applying conceptual metaphor, metonymy and blend theory to cultural similarities and differences in conceptualization. Her interests also include lexicography and stylistics, especially from a cognitive linguistic point of view. She has co-authored three edited volumes and published several articles in these fields. She has worked at the Publisher of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences & Wolters Kluwer as managing editor of mono- and bilingual dictionaries.