Suffixation and what else?

A cognitive linguistic analysis of the Hungarian deverbal suffix -Ó

Abstract

Unlike other areas of grammar, the category of affixes is a yet unexplored area of the cognitive linguistic description of Hungarian grammar. The present study intends to start to fill this gap and provides a cognitively plausible account of the Hungarian deverbal suffix -Ó. By adopting a combined approach of corpus and cognitive linguistics, the paper attempts to answer the following questions. 1. In exactly which ways do -Ó constructions reflect cognitive construals? 2. How is the semantic structure of the suffix -Ó structured by meaning extensions? 3. What is and what is not metonymical in this semantic structure? And finally, 4. On which levels of constructional organisation can metonymic patterns of meaning construal be identified? After a thorough corpus and cognitive linguistic analysis of data extracted from the Hungarian Gigaword Corpus (Oravecz–Váradi–Sass 2014), the paper comes to the general conclusion that the semantic map of -Ó is structured by metonymic meaning extensions of different sorts. While the functions of -Ó resulting from these meaning extensions proved to be straightforward cases of word-formation metonymies (ACTION FOR AGENT , ACTION FOR LOCATION , ACTION FOR OBJECT INVOLVED IN tHE ACTION , AND ACTION FOR CHARACTERISTICS ), the core meaning of the present participial -Ó constructions was interpreted as 1. as a secondary action in a multiple action scenario as well as 2. a reference-point helping in the identification of the agent. Furthermore, the metonymic extensions are represented in all three levels of meaning construal: 1. on the level of individual constructions 2. on the level of constructional schemas, and 3. also in the semantic structure of the affix itself. Bearing all this in mind, the author argues for the flexibility of coding and construal contrary to the perceived arbitrariness of grammar.