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13th International Conference
on Functional Grammar
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| Meaning construction in context: the case of
verbal eponyms |
Daniel García Velasco,
Universidad de Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain
Lyons (1977: 219) notes that the standard view on the
semantics of proper names is that “they may have reference,
but no sense, and that they cannot be used predicatively
purely as names”. If that is the case, the meaning of, say,
the name David Beckham
is the reference to that particular individual, whereas the
rest of information speakers may have about the football
player and celebrity David Beckham belongs to general or
encyclopaedic knowledge and is not part of linguistic
competence. This received view is called into question
whenever one encounters expressions such as (1):
(1) Oh my, he’s Beckhamed it!
Expression
(1) is to be understood within the context of a football
match. The example seems to have originated after David
Beckham’s miss of a crucial penalty kick at the 2004
European Football Cup. According to several Internet sources,
a TV sports commentator coined the phrase on a subsequent
match in the tournament, in which another played also missed a
penalty kick. Hence, within this restricted setting, the
verbal nonce formation to
Beckham is to be interpreted as “to miss a penalty kick
in the game of soccer”.
Studies
on nonce formations and neologisms agree that most innovative
coinages die quickly and very few get the status of neologisms
in the language or conventional lexical units. Although that
is undoubtedly true, and certainly the future of the form to
Beckham may be rather gloomy, the study of these units is
relevant for at least two reasons. Firstly, some
verbs in Modern English have their origin in the name of
famous individuals, entities or places, even though this
origin may now be opaque to many native speakers (e.g.
boycott, lynch, charleston, xerox, Clark and Clark 1979).
Obviously, when those items entered the language they probably
did so as nonce formations in a restricted context (just like
(1)). Secondly,
as I will show in my presentation, the predicative use of
proper nouns is very much alive in the English language, and
illustrates the speakers’ ability to instantly create new
items as the need arises as well as the addressees’ capacity
to interpret units whose meaning cannot be assumed to be
stored in their mental dictionary.
In
this paper I will defend the view that
the innovative use of eponyms in verbal function is a clear example of
the category of contextuals,
as defined in the work of Clark and Clark (1979). Contextuals
have, as a defining feature, the fact that their meaning needs
to be constructed on line by the addressee as it cannot be
assumed to be part of the lexical stock of the language.
Unlike conventional units, contextuals have an indefinite
number of potential senses and their interpretation depends on
the context in which they appear and the cooperation between
speaker and addressee.
The
use of eponyms in predicative function raises the following
questions for FDG which will also be addressed in this paper:
1. F(D)G has traditionally analysed proper names as basic terms (i.e.
ready-made referential items), but how can the theory account
for their predicative use? Two solutions will be evaluated: (i)
morphological zero-derivation in the lexicon, or (ii) since
FDG now splits lexemes from the frames in which they occur,
proper nouns could be allowed to be inserted in eventive
frames.
2. Regardless of the technical option chosen, the theory should explain
how listeners arrive at the intended interpretation when an
innovative verbal eponym is used, given the fact that proper
nouns are not listed in the lexicon together with a dictionary
definition. As I will show, information stemming from both the
contextual and conceptual components in FDG will be crucial to
account for the interpretation of proper nouns in predicative
function.
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| References: |
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Clark, Eve and Clark, Herbert H. 1979. When nouns surface as verbs. Language
55: 767-811.
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Lyon, John. 1977. Semantics.
II vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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