Beyond Philology

BEYOND PHILOLOGY AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS, LITERARY STUDIES AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING 7 WYDAWNICTWO UNIWERSYTETU GDAŃSKIEGO GDAŃSK 2010 EDITORS Joanna Burzyńska-Sylwestrzak Danuta Stanulewicz EDITORIAL BOARD Roman Kalisz David Malcolm Ryszard Wenzel Tadeusz Z. Wolański ASSOCIATE EDITORIAL BOARD Janusz Arabski (Katowice) Marta Bogdanowicz (Gdańsk) Desmond Graham (Newcastle) Aleksandra Kędzierska (Lublin) Zoltán Kövecses (Budapest) Wojciech Kubiński (Gdańsk) Ronald W. Langacker (San Diego) Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (Łódź) Jerzy Limon (Gdańsk) Irene Gilsenan Nordin (Falun) Elżbieta H. Oleksy (Łódź) Adam Pasicki (Kraków) Piotr Ruszkiewicz (Kraków) Anna Siewierska (Lancaster) Krystyna Stamirowska (Kraków) Bogdan Szymanek (Lublin) Marta Wiszniowska (Toruń) COVER DESIGN Andrzej Taranek PROOFREADING Tadeusz Z. Wolański COMPUTER-AIDED COMPOSITION Danuta Stanulewicz Izabela Żochowska ISSN 1732-1220 © Copyright by Uniwersytet Gdański, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego Beyond Philology is published with subsidies from Rektor Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego Fundacja Rozwoju Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego Dziekan Wydziału Filologicznego, Uniwersytet Gdański Instytut Anglistyki, Uniwersytet Gdański Contact address Institute of English, University of Gdańsk ul. Wita Stwosza 55, 80-952 Gdańsk, Poland Phone/Fax: (+48) 58 523 25 13, Email: [email protected] BEYOND PHILOLOGY 7 CONTENTS LINGUISTICS Polysemy of mother – a linguistic overview of the concept KAMILA CEMPA 9 Canonical syllable structures proposed for English and Spanish: A contrastive overview MAŁGORZATA HAŁADEWICZ-GRZELAK 35 Figurative language in Business English: The natural world metaphors ANNA ŁUCZAK 67 Colour terms and emotions in English and Polish ANNA MOZOLEWSKA 77 Metaphors in the language of music: Classical string music in focus PAULINA REJNIEWICZ 103 LITERARY STUDIES “Two modes of existence”: Fowles’ views on Englishness in “On being English but not British” ANNA KALICKA 131 Dimensions of the time-space continuum of The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch ADRIANA RUTA 149 Myth regained: The postmodern depiction of myths in John Barth’s Chimera ZOFIA SZACHNOWSKA-OLESIEJUK 175 The poetics of driftwood: Sarah Orne Jewett on the course of New England’s history MAREK WILCZYŃSKI 201 4 Beyond Philology 7 On the pleasures of reading James’s Hawthorne BEATA WILLIAMSON 213 Do literary studies need psychoanalysis? OLGA WROŃSKA 239 TRANSLATION STUDIES Is humour an ethnically conditioned phenomenon? GRZEGORZ GRZEGORCZYK 263 CULTURE The scholars’ dilemma prior to the royal divorce MAREK SMOLUK 287 LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Awareness, responsibility and control as prerequisites of autonomy in second language acquisition ADRIANA BIEDROŃ 305 Expressing emotions in English and Polish in the SLA perspective ANNA MALEWSKA 327 Beyond C1: Focus on advanced listening MAŁGORZATA SMENTEK 351 REVIEWS Polyphony of voices – a “must-read”: Modes of Censorship and Translation: National Contexts and Diverse Media edited by Francesca Billiani URSZULA ELIAS 367 Semantic Leaps: Frame-shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction by Seana Coulson AGNIESZKA PIWOWARCZYK 375 REPORTS The Annual Conference of the Modern Language Association of Poland, Wrocław 2007 OLGA ALEKSANDROWSKA 387 Beyond Philology 7 5 The Annual Conference of the Modern Language Association of Poland, Kalisz 2008 OLGA ALEKSANDROWSKA 395 The Seventh International Conference “East – West: A Dialogue between Languages and Cultures” ANNA CISŁO 403 The First International Conference “The Word as a Manifestation of Human Spirituality: Concepts in Regional and European Philological Education” PIOTR CZAJKA 407 13th Annual International Conference of the Bulgarian Society for British Studies: “Discourses of Globalisation” MACIEJ RATAJ 413 The 43rd Linguistics Colloquium “Pragmantax II: The present state of linguistics and its branch disciplines”, Magdeburg 2008 DANUTA STANULEWICZ and ANDRZEJ M. SKRZYPIEC 419 INTERVIEWS Interview with Chicano playwright Carlos Morton GRZEGORZ WELIZAROWICZ 427 INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS 443 LINGUISTICS Beyond Philology No. 7, 2010 ISSN 1732-1220 Polysemy of mother – a linguistic overview of the concept KAMILA CEMPA Abstract The author of the article provides a linguistic overview of the word mother, indicating the polysemy of the term. The examination of the prototypical meaning of mother and the network of its non- prototypical usages is followed by the presentation of metonymies and metaphors expressed in phraseological expressions, proverbs and sayings incorporating mother. The latter constitute a compara- tive analysis of Polish and English expressions. The discussion sup- ports the cognitive approach towards language. Key words: English, metaphor, metonymy, mother, phraseology, Polish, polysemy, prototype 1. The prototypical meaning of mother and the nework of its non-prototypical cases The word mother has an Indo-European root etymology. It is ultimately based on the baby-talk form m-2 in Indo-European roots, with the kinship (affinity) term suffix -ter. Mother is found in many of the world’s languages, often in reduplicated form, e.g. mamma, mammal, mammilla, from Latin mamma = breast. It is probably from this root that the Greek Maia is derived, “good mother” – a respectful form of address to old women (www.yourdictionary.com). The American Heritage Dic- tionary of the English Language provides several meanings of 10 Kamila Cempa mother. The prototypical meaning encompassed in an assort- ment of references is: (a) a woman who conceives, gives birth to, or raises and nurtures a child. This collates with the analogous: (b) a female ancestor. Other meanings of mother that are not the focus of the present work should not be neglected since they derive from the same source domain. Note, for instance, (c) and (d): (c) a female parent of an animal, (d) in the Roman Catholic Church, mother is a woman who holds a position of authority or responsibility similar to that of a mother: a den mother = a mother superior, used as a form of address for such a woman. Creation in other domains leads to the following senses of the term. Note the following in (e) – (j). (e) a woman who creates, originates or founds something, e.g. the discovery of radium, which made Marie Curie mother to the Atomic Age; (f) a creative source, an origin: Philosophy is the mother of the sciences; (g) used as a title for a woman respected for her wisdom and age; (h) maternal love and tenderness: brought out the mother in her. (i) the biggest or most significant example of its kind: the mother of all battles; Polysemy of mother 11 (j) in vulgar slang mother means something considered extraordi- nary, as in disagreeableness, size or intensity. Mother functions also as an adjective, meaning: relating to or being mother, characteristic of a mother: mother love, is the source or origin of love: the mother church, derived from or as if from one’s mother; native: one’s mother language, or as a tran- sitive verb with its forms: mothered, mothering, mothers, meaning respectfully: give birth to, create and produce, watch over, nourish and protect maternally. The essence of the above meanings circulates around an en- tity capable of creation, constituting an origin to other entities. The very sense of mother that language users are able to rec- ognise is the one closest to (a) and (b) and yet accompanied by convention, culturally defined, the one of mother who has al- ways been female, who gave birth to the child, supplied her half of the genes, nurtured the child, is married to the father, is one generation older than the child and is the child’s legal guardian (Lakoff 1987: 83). Mother defined as above generates variations (Figure 1). The illustration depicts the radial structure, where mother is a central case, and the other cases constitute the conventionalised variations, which cannot be pre- dicted by general rules. Figure 1 Radial structure of mother (based on Lakoff’s suggestion of mother’s subcategories) 12 Kamila Cempa Lakoff explains the sense of each subcategory in detail. Both natural and birth mother are used in contrast with adoptive mother, but the term natural has been given up because of the questionable implication that adoptive mothers were, by contrast ‘unnatural’. Thus birth mother gives birth and puts the child up for adoption and adoptive mother did not give birth or supply the genes but she is a legal guardian and has the obli- gation to provide nurturance. The biological mother gave birth to the child but she does not raise it. A genetic mother is an egg donor and only supplies an egg that is later planted in an- other woman’s womb. A foster mother also did not give birth to the child. She is being paid by the state for the child’s upbring- ing. A surrogate mother has contracted to give birth. She may or may not have provided the genes and she is not married to the father and is not obliged to raise the child. By signing the contract, she resigns from being a parent (legal guardian). An unwed mother is not married at the time she gives birth and stepmother did not give birth or supply the genes but she is currently married to the father. These subcategories are perceived in terms of deviations (turning aside from the accepted norm, standard, principle) from the central case. However, not all possible variations on the central case exist as categories, e.g. there is no category of mothers who are legal guardians but who do not personally supply nurturance but hire someone else to do it. There is no a category of transsexuals who gave birth only since they had a sex change operation. Moreover, some of the above categories did not exist before and have been invented in recent dec- ades. It turns out that the central case does not productively generate all these subcategories. They are defined by convention as variations on the central case. In accordance, there is no rule for generating kinds of mothers. In fact they are defined and have to be learned. Nevertheless, they are dissimilar in all cultures. In the Trobriands, a woman who gives birth often gives her child to an old woman to raise.

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