Nerina Bosman

The Semantics of Eating in Afrikaans and Northern Sotho: Cross-linguistic Variation in Metaphor

The abundant and systematic presence of metaphor in language has in particular been explored by departing from the embodied nature of many metaphors. In the current research we investigate the manner in which the concept EATING in two nonrelated languages, namely Afrikaans (a Germanic language) and Northern Sotho (a Bantu language) gives rise to metaphorical expressions in these two languages. The two notions of cultural model and metaphor form the cornerstones of our research. The basic question guiding our research is whether the metaphorical mappings originating from the same source domain (EATING) onto various target domains are the same in the two languages and secondly, whether there is any evidence that differences—if any—are culturally motivated. Our study is corpus-based. Lexical items belonging to the source domain of eating were used as search nodes in our corpus search. Our analysis indicates that the metaphorical source-domain–target-domain mappings in the two languages show a large amount of overlap. As far as the metaphors that we identified are concerned, remarkable similarities and very few—and these not significant—differences were found.

'Brood' en 'botter': figuurlike taalgebruik in Afrikaans en die motiveringsteorie

A certain type of multiword lexical item, namely a non-compositional string of words or idiom, is examined in this article. The motivation theory is used in an attempt to provide an explanation for those cases where the language user is able to make sense of an expression on the basis of the meanings of individual words in such an expression or idiom. A small group of idioms was examined, namely idioms in which the words butter or bread or both appear. From the results the following can be deduced: those idioms which are clearly well-known are recognised without a problem. The string of words is probably stored with its figurative meaning in the mental lexicon. Language users furthermore demonstrate a definite consciousness of the link between literal and figurative meanings of certain individual words in the idioms. It is not clear to which extent other motivational links (like encyclopaedic knowledge) contribute to the decoding of idioms that are less well-known or not known at all. For the moment the most that can be concluded is that the highest degree of motivation in this particular group of idioms can be discerned in those idioms which are also best known.

Eet en drink in Afrikaans – ’n leksikaal-semantiese ondersoek

EATING and DRINKING in Afrikaans - a lexical semantic study This article reports on a cognitive semantic, corpus-based investigation into the semantics of eating and drinking in Afrikaans. It is part of a bigger research project on these concepts and builds on research by Taljard and Bosman (2014) on cross-linguistic variation between Northern Sotho and Afrikaans metaphors for eating, by also including metaphors for drinking in the analysis. The current article has as its focus the semasiological network of verbs in the word fields of eating and drinking and involves more than metaphor identification, although it is undoubtedly the case that metaphor plays an important role in such a network of expanding meanings. The study can

Die hantering van neweskikkers en onderskikkers in Afrikaanse woordeboeke

The Treatment of Coordinating and Subordinating Conjunctions in Afrikaans Dictionaries. Prompted by the discrepancy between the needs for lexico- graphic assistance with regard to conjunctions and the relative indifference concerning this in lexi- cographic research and practice, this study attempts to indicate the unsatisfactory treatment of con- junctions in Afrikaans dictionaries and to offer some constructive lexicographic solutions to the treatment of this part of speech category. A first recommendation would be that the lemmata voegwoord (conjunction), verbindingswoord (connective), neweskikker (coordinating conjunction), onderskikker (subordinating conjunction) and voegende bywoord (conjunctional adverb) provide more in-depth syntactic information with enough examples (also across sentence boundaries). There should be cross-references from the specific con-