Metalinguistica – serie

Text is a linguistic unit of communication in which linguistically expressed conceptual units are connected in different conceptual structures. The conceptual construal of things, events and relations is structured on the basis of a variety of cognitive and communicational options. These choices form discourse schemas, partly in a culturespecific way. There is a dynamic relationship between schema and instantiation. The volume approaches these questions from a functional perspective, where the processual nature of discourse is as important as its structural character. The volume has two parts: the first one presents theoretical papers, the second deals with certain discourse types, and some linguistic features that characterize specific discourse types.

The volume investigates various approaches to mood distribution and mood variation in lexically selected complement clauses with special reference to Hungarian data. Its primary aim is to show that semantic factors play a crucial role in mood choice. The analysis focuses on the indicative/non-indicative opposition, the latter category includes the subjunctive, the imperative and the conditional. Critical discussion, revision and elaboration of previous semantic approaches pertaining to mood choice are presented, with particular emphasis on the applicability of the various analyses to mood phenomena in Hungarian. The author proposes two novel hypotheses about mood choice in Hungarian complement clauses.

This collection of papers focuses on cognitive metaphor research (CMR) from the perspective of the current debate on linguistic data and evidence. The peculiarity of the book is that it reveals the causes that trigger the methodological problems of data handling in CMR. These problems include the identifiability of metaphors in discourse and the reliability of the methods of gathering metaphors such as linguistic intuition, discourse analysis, corpus analysis, and psycholinguistic experiments. In order to overcome their weaknesses and to enhance their reliance, the papers argue, on the one hand, for the combination of different methods of gathering and evaluating data in CMR. On the other hand, the papers also point out that converging evidence cannot be obtained without constraining the combinability of data stemming from different sources.

Over the past few decades, cognitive linguistic research has turned metonymy from the "poor sister" of metaphor into a ubiquitous conceptual phenomenon. However, this broad notion of metonymy might run the risk of becoming too unrestricted and vacuous. In order to come to grips with the problem, the author proposes a narrower definition of metonymy, according to which linguistic metonymies co-activate the source, the target, and the relation between them so that only the target is expressed linguistically. Furthermore, he argues for a typology of metonymies based on the mental contents they involve. These results may not only prevent that the category of metonymy will become unlimited but may also take us a step closer to enhancing the empirical study of metonymic phenomena.