Abstract
Our article examines the metaphorical uses of the noun ‘rain’ in French and Russian. The metaphorical use of the French noun pluie necessarily contains a nominal expansion, while its Russian equivalent dozdj’ can take both nominal and adjectival expansions. Our corpus-based study distinguished three productive conceptual spheres for the metaphorical expansion of the noun ‘rain’, namely the natural, military and economical spheres. In both languages, the weather noun ‘rain’ loses some of its atmospheric meaning and is used in metaphors to insist on abundancy of elements in a given context, often in movement and coming from a not clearly identified source. These elements may be associated to destructive events (such as ‘a rain of bullets’) but they can also be involved in beneficial episodes (such as ‘a rain of money’) or in neutral incidents (such as ‘a rain of flowers’). However, the material nature of the elements is less important in French, where nominal expansions can include abstract nouns. In French, the noun pluie can function both as a semantic head of the NP and as a quantifier comparable with complex modifiers such as un tas de (‘loads of’), while in Russian the noun dožd’ necessarily functions as a semantic head.
Published Version
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