Semantics of verbs of food consumption with the help of teeth in comparison of figurative system of English, Russian and French languages
This article is devoted to the study of semantics and usage of metaphorically motivated verbs to bite off, откусывать and grignoter denoting an action associated with the absorption of food by means of teeth. The aim of the study is to clarify the areas of the secondary nomination of verbs that is connected with the category of possessiveness. The scientific novelty of the study lies in a complex approach to solving the problem of representing meanings of verbs in lexicographic sources: 1) for the first time the verbs to bite off, откусывать and grignoter are analyzed as possessive verbs united by the invariant meaning “to GET”; 2) for the first time a text-centric approach was applied to the study of the cognitive mechanism of coercion in the context of verbs based on the material of three languages. The methods of cognitive linguistics, such as the functional-semiological and text-centric approach, are applied to interpret human perception. The results of the study of dictionaries together with the study of national corpora proved that the verbs of receiving are underdefined in various aspects in different languages. There is still a large layer of words not prototypically associated with the possessive category but verbalizing the meaning of receiving and alienating due to cognitive mechanisms of metaphor, metonymy and coercion. The category of possessiveness is universal and can manifest itself in the semantics of verbs to bite off, откусывать and grignoter that are not originally classified as receiving or alienating verbs as a result of personal thoughtful tactics.