名詞メタファーにおける関係名詞への転換の可能性: 「バイブル」を対象としたコーパス調査を通して

Abstract

メタファー研究と文法研究の融合を図る先行研究において、メタフォリカルな解釈は概念的に依存的な要素と強く結びつくという傾向が指摘されてきた (e.g. Croft 1993, Sullivan 2013, 2016, Lederer 2019)。彼らに従えば、概念的に自律した要素とされる名詞はメタフォリカルな解釈を受けにくいということになりかねないが、実際の言語使用を見ると名詞メタファーは多々見受けられる。そこで、本研究はこの矛盾を解消する一つの説明としてメタフォリカルな解釈を受ける名詞は関係名詞へと転換することで自律性を下げているという仮説を立て、ケーススタディとして「バイブル」を対象としたコーパス調査を行い、その検証を行う。

Sullivan (2013: 135), who attempts to fuse the studies of metaphor and those of grammar, claims that “every source-domain item must be conceptually dependent relative to at least one autonomous target-domain item.” This constraint, however, is often hard to apply to the analysis of nominal metaphors because most nouns, which are defined as profiling things in Cognitive Grammar, are supposed to be intrinsically autonomous. To resolve the contradiction, this study hypothesizes that nouns, especially sortal ones, might undergo a conversion into relational ones to facilitate metaphorical interpretation by increasing their dependency, and conducts a corpus-based case study of baiburu (“Bible”). As a result, it is discovered that baiburu more often appears in the possessive construction (i.e. N-no-baiburu) when metaphorically used than when literally used, which suggests that the sortal noun in question turns into a relational one. A close analysis of the data shows that the additional element which baiburu requires plays a role in identifying target domains in which it is metaphorically interpreted. It is also found that instances of baiburu which do not occur in possessive constructions increase their dependency by other means such as N-ni-totte (“for N”), N-teki (“N-ish”) and N-baiburu (N-N compounds).