The Genitive Construction (’s) as a Signal of Potential Cross-domain Mapping

Abstract

The very potential of metaphor flags to aid analysts in the process of identifying and interpreting metaphor has led to the development of metaphor signaling as a new area of study within metaphor analysis (Skorczynska, Ahrens 2015; Herrmann 2013). This paper investigates metaphor signaling by focusing on a specific type of metaphor flag (MFlag) that has not been analyzed in a more targeted fashion, and that has been excluded from consideration in the MIPVU (Steen et al. 2010). Namely, it examines the signaling use of the genitive construction by means of ’s. This is done by observing (i) the frequency of occurrence of the’s-genitive with reference to its distribution across registers and (ii) the meaning and function of the ’s-genitive as a marker of metaphor. A corpus analysis is conducted by extracting examples from The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The occurrences are checked for classification as MFlags following the information about direct word use and signals of cross-domain mapping provided in the procedure (MIPVU). Our data set showed that there is a marked underuse of the ’s-genitive as an MFlag. The signaling potential of the genitive seemed less dependent on the meaning and function of the construction itself and more dependent on the role of the genitive noun as a necessary constituent element of the mapping. Future research should focus on other collocates and the cross-linguistic comparison of the signaling use of the’s-genitive in order to draw a more tenable conclusion regarding this construction.