Eckhard Bick - VISL

that make one projection direction more probable than another. Thus, it is my
impression that - in general - there is a +HUM-bias in metaphoric transfer, i.e. the
human part of a semantic mismatch “wins” over the non-human part, irrespective of
which one of the two syntactically functions as head or dependent, respectively.
Another regularity seems to be that concrete-to-abstract metaphorical transfer in nouns
is more common than the inverse:
um monte de possibilidades (‘a mountain of possibilities’, ‘et hav af muligheder’)
exauriu as suas finanças (‘he exhausted his funding’, ‘han udtømte sine midler’)
Finally, let’s return to the trade-off between disambiguation and metaphorically
interpretable semantic mismatches. Both are the results of the CG interaction between
lexical assumptions (hand crafted or corpus derived lexical tags) and CG matching
(SELECT) or mismatching (REMOVE) rules. The difference is that polysemy resolving
disambiguation is the active product of a semantic CG, whereas surviving
lexical/valency mismatches are a passive by-product, to be interpreted (as metaphorical)
a posteriori. The interesting thing is, that - in a CG framework - semantic selection
restrictions can be exploited whether they work or not: If they work, polysemy is
resolved, if they don’t, we get metaphor. This is radically different from traditional
generative grammar implemented in a declarative programming language, where a
mismatch of selection restrictions conventionally is interpreted, in “all-or-nothing”
terms, as a “no-parse” situation meaning that the sentence in question is not part of the
language system described by the grammar. Creative, new metaphors are not easy to
capture in classical generative systems with semantic selection restrictions, since every
possible combination has to be provided for already in the lexicon part of the system.
The English sentence ‘The sea ate the coast’, for instance, would fail the rewriting rules,
since there is no edible match (, ‘food’) for the eating verb (V-EAT). In a CG
system, on the other hand, the analysis is first successfully assembled at the syntactic
level (working on verbal transitivity and word order), and then fails gracefully at the
semantic level - only to produce a metaphoric reading exactly by doing so. Thus,
contrary to a commonly held view regarding the existence of metaphor as a reason for
not using selection restrictions, they do work quite well in a CG framework. In the
example, the eating verb projects “foodhood” () onto its direct object (‘coast’
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