Linguistic Expression of the Conceptual Metaphor WORD IS X ... in 16th-Century Texts

Abstract

Protestantism's key role in the development of Standard Slovenian is unquestionable and confirmed by many linguistic anayses. The paper discusses the field of language communication which the aforementioned movement brought to Slovenian lands in the 16th century and how that is reflected in the texts of the period. The target domain in a conduit metaphor, the main metaphor of the field, is named as the WORD comprising of the polysemy of the lexeme "word" as defined by the Dictionary of Standard Slovenian as also expressed in 16th-century texts. Material for analysis rrepresents the collocation patterns of this lexeme in selected Slovenian Protestant texts, on which basis a conceptual-metaphorical analysis as understood by cognitive semantics was conducted.