On Patterns of Conceptual Construal in Tok Pisin

As a creolized variety of Melanesian Pidgin English spoken in Papua New Guinea, Tok Pisin has a simplified grammar and a reduced lexicon. In spite of it, the conceptual processes that it employs are as varied and complex as in English—its lexifier and one of the major Western languages. Section 1 briefly introduces the symbolic nature of language. Section 2 describes the basic properties of pidgin and creole languages. Section 3 provides an overview of the insofar analyses of figurative patterns in contact languages. Section 4 presents in detail the methodological framework of the analysis, which is based on the theory of conceptual metaphor (Lakoff in Metaphor and thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 202–251, 1993; Lakoff & Johnson in Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980), theory of conceptual metonymy (Radden & Kovecses in Metonymy in language and thought. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 17–59, 1999), and forms of metaphor-metonymy interaction jointly called ‘metaphtonymy’ (Goossens in Cognitive Linguistics 1(3), pp. 323–340, 1990). Sections 5, 6, and 7 discuss numerous examples of Tok Pisin expressions based on the above-mentioned patterns of conceptual construal. Section 8 summarizes the results of the analysis.