Killing Time

Metaphors and their implications in lexicon and

Résumé

Metaphors have recently acquired a fairly vindicated relevance in the field of linguistics, not as mere figures of speech but as important semantic processes pertinent to both psycholinguistic and lexicology. Metaphors in the broad sense may be viewed as a means of categorizing our world, through broad-range phenomena such as metaphors in the strict sense, metonymy, and the so called “metaphtonymy” (Goossens 1990). From the point of view of lexical productive processes in word and phrase formations, their role as meaning extension in the lexicon is incontrovertible. The latter raises the question about the very status of metaphors inside the lexicon. In order to discuss that issue, this paper will closely analyze from a cross-linguistic point of view the interaction of metaphors with morphology and syntax, illustrating the discussion with Dutch examples (Dirven 1985). In particular, we will argue around the problematic case of the metaphorical use of Spanish “matar el tiempo” (lit. killing time). It is intended to demonstrate how this expression, even implying both a selectional constraint violation and a syntactic anomaly (the absence of the preposition ‘a’), is strictly a “dead” metaphor and involves a lexicalization entry at the level of the lexicon. Therefore, in spite of our initial intuition, we will claim that there is no such interaction with respect to syntax level in this case.