Galina I. Kustova (Moscow State Pedagogical University)

Metaphor, metonymy and their interaction in semantic-derivational models of adjectives (Evidence from the lexical databases for the Russian National Corpus) The talk reports on the project which is intended to provide a corpus-based description of regular semantic-derivational models for Russian adjectives. The research deals with high-frequency adjectives in the attributive use denoting the quality of a person or thing. The study is based on the data from the Russian National Corpus and relies on the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar (cf. Fillmore et al. 1987, Goldberg 1995). According to this theory, a meaning shift occurring within a certain construction is always motivated by the change of construction specifications. Since the construction under examination (А+S) is syntactically quite simple, the meaning shift of an adjective can be conditioned only by the variation of semantic properties of nouns. In view of this, our research goals include identifying the taxonomic classes of nouns relevant to semantic change in adjectives as well as determining which switches between classes lead to metonymical shifts (cf. Radden/Kövecses 1999, Paducheva 2003) and which ones result in metaphors (Lakoff 1987). Relying on the semantic analysis of more than 200 adjectives, we have catalogued basic metonymical (cf. PHYSIOLOGICAL CONDITION – TIME PERIOD ASSOCIATED WITH THIS CONDITION: golodnyj čelovek ‘hungry person ’ – golodnyj den ΄ ‘hungry day’) an