A Mountain of Evidence? A Corpus Study of the Argument Structure of Transferred Senses of Nouns in English

Abstract

Based on an earlier observation, the study poses the question of whether the presence or absence of a valency complement of a noun relates to whether the noun is used literally or non-literally, in a transferred sense (typically based on metaphor). Two case studies are presented, one concerning 13 body part nouns (such as foot) and their transferred uses, and the other concerning two landscape nouns, mountain and flood. Both studies show that non-literal uses of nouns are much more likely to take an overt complement. This might relate in part to the type shift of sortal nouns into relational nouns and in part to the low degree of lexicalization of some transferred senses, which renders them more reliant on

contextual cues, such as the use of a complement, for adequate interpretation.