Der Schrank seufzt : Metaphern im Bereich des Verbs und ihre übersetzung"

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis work is a study of metaphors involving verbs. Apart from theoreticalconsiderations, it comprises a comparative translation study, within theframework of contrastive linguistics, focusing on verb metaphors such as "DerSchrank seufzt" (literally, "The cupboard sighs"). The theoretical part deals with the metaphorical process with regard toverbs, criteria for determining metaphoricalness and a number of traditionalmetaphor models. The most important aspect of this discussion concerns theintroduction of a new trinary model of verb metaphor (consisting of the twoconstituents in the syntagm expressing the verb metaphor ["Schrank" = NP /"seufzt" = V] and the "interpretative metapheme neutralizer" as the thirdcomponent). This model proved equally adequate both for monolingual analysisof metaphor and in the empirical part of this work, i.e. in the comparativetranslation study undertaken. The source material consists of 11 prose works from German post-warliterature (authors: Bienek, Böll, Frisch, Grass, Handke, Lenz, Nossack andWalser) and 6 works from Swedish post-war literature (authors: Andersson,Bergman, Delblanc, Gustafsson and Lagerkvist). The empirical investigationbuilds on a corpus where, for the first time, all the metaphors of a certaintype in literary works have been excerpted and treated statistically, theinvestigation thus being based on a examination of well over 2800 instances ofmetaphor. Up to now there has been no study in the field of verb metaphors(and their translation into Swedish) based on a material of a comparable size.The entire corpus material was stored in a large computer at the Faculty ofArts, University of Gothenburg, being readily accessible. The detailedclassification of the target-language instances was based on two speciallydefined conditions (formal correspondence and semantic-lexical equivalence). One obvious result of this investigation is that novel verb metaphorsconstitute a very important and frequent stylistic device in German andSwedish post-war prose. Further, the investigation provides answers to anumber of quantitative issues which might be of interest in the fields ofliterary analysis, translation theory and linguistics. For example, the view thatverb metaphors can never, or only in extremely rare cases, be translated is confronted with the finding that, in actual translation practice, this is done in 67 cases out of a hundred. The comparative translation study was supplemented with an "invertedanalysis", revcaling certain tendencies with regard to compensatory mechanisms. Finally, a method is sketched for making a structural distinction betweenmetaphor and metonymy by means of the new concept of "neutralizer".