Why Distancing Is No Longer Social: Blending Analysis of the Compound’s Meaning Construal
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Shtok, Nina [1]
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[1] Warsaw School of Applied Linguistics
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- Localización: Concepts, Discourses, and Translations / Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (ed. lit.), Marcin Trojszczak (ed. lit.), 2022, ISBN 9783030960988, págs. 51-66
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
The present study focuses on the cognitive processing of the semantic shifts (Coulson, 2001) in the “social distancing” compound in light of the Theory of Conceptual Integration (Fauconnier & Turner, 1994, 1996, 2002). Semantic shift is viewed as reconsideration of the existing knowledge structure and its re-organization into a new frame under the influence of discourse. The study traces the semantic re-organizations in the meaning construal of “social distancing”: from the moment of its emergence, through usage to denote inter-racial relations, then to a current usage in the context of COVID-19 as the name of a pandemic measure, and to the most recent shift in the meaning, which has led to the displacement of the “social” component, giving way to a new compound: “physical distancing”. The theoretical background of the study is the Theory of Conceptual Integration which describes a mechanism of a dynamic and context-dependent meaning modelling. The paper offers a discussion of the semantic shift in “social distancing” in terms of conceptual integration networks. In fact, compounds—specifically two-element nominal compounds—present one of the most obvious case studies for a conceptual blending analysis. The given Adj+Ving compound is placed under scrutiny here as a blend, which develops its emergent structure in conceptual integration of two mental spaces evoked by input words. This process involves composition, completion, and elaboration. Moreover, the article explores the analysability of the structure from the perspective of the components’ relations and their contribution to the resultant blend, which questions the traditional head-and-modifier relations for synthetic compounds.
