Adjectival metaphor: semantic, derivational, and grammatical aspects

Abstract

The paper studies the interaction of word-building and semantic derivation’s mechanisms in the process of the adjectives’ metaphorical meaning formation. The following methods are employed: word-building and morphological analysis of the derived adjectives, semantic analysis of the polysemantic words, contextual analysis, comparative analysis. The research data were collected from the dictionaries, the modern mass-media, the Russian National Corpus. The metaphorical shift of the qualitative adjective doesn’t lead to the change of its lexico-grammatical category. The metaphorical shift of the relative adjective due to its derivation is accompanied with the word-building processes and leads to the formation of two types of meanings. 1. The secondary qualitative meaning which is formed in different ways: metaphorical motivation (peshchernaya rusofobiya, poverkhnostnye suzhdeniya); reflected figurative motivation (rezonansnoe sobytie, atmosfernyj spektakl'). 2. The secondary relative meaning which is also formed with the help of metaphorical motivation (pal'chikovye batarejki) and reflected figurative motivation (gusenichnyj ehkskavator). The metaphorization serves as one of the ways of enriching the language with the semantic coinages. The category of the derived adjective is determined by the type of the word-building motivator: the figurative metaphor correlates with the qualitative meaning, the non-figurative metaphor correlates with the relative meaning. The metaphorical relative meaning is functionally equal to the direct meaning as it is used as part of the word combinations “adjective + noun” and denotes the sub-class of objects.