DOI: 10.1075/rcl.00267.ego ISSN: 1877-9751

All bark or all bite?

Alisa Egorova
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Abstract

The article presents a contrastive analysis of two metaphorical “animal verbs” in English versus Russian, focusing specifically on the diverging semantics of the English to dog ‘to follow with a malicious intent’ and its Russian counterpart собачиться [ sobachitsya , lit. ‘to dog oneself/each other’] ‘to quarrel loudly, to rant’. Historical corpus data as well as lexicographical data paired with semantic field analysis are employed to selectively reconstruct the respective cultural models of

dog
around the attested time of N→V conversion in each language. This reconstruction points to a link between chronologically dominant cultural conceptualisations and the resulting differences in the lexical meanings of both denominal verbs.

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