Speaker
Description
POSTER
The lack of normative resources for the Croatian language has incited the development of a novel resource that would not only compile normative data for Croatian but also focus on an underrepresented group of linguistic units – figurative multi-word (MWE) expressions. Thus, the creation of a normative database for figurative MWEs in Croatian is a significant step in the right direction that will address the gap in the availability of such tools for the Croatian language.
There are currently several normative databases available for Croatian single words such as the Croatian Psycholinguistic Database (Peti Stantić et al., 2021), psycholinguistic databases of affective norms and emotions (Ćoso et al., 2019; 2023), and the database of norms for non-adapted English words ENGRI CROWD (Bogunović et al., 2024). Given that all of the above sources contain normative data for individual words, a need arises to create a similar tool that would showcase norms for multi-word units. There is currently only one such database available; COMETA database (Citron et al. 2020) of affective and psycholinguistic norms for German conceptual metaphors is an open-access database featuring norms for emotional valence and arousal, imageability, and metaphoricity for conventional metaphors in both sentence and story contexts.
This is why the DigiMet database has been planned for development as a tool that will systematically catalog affective and lexico-semantic norms for Croatian metaphors along six different dimensions – 1. valence, 2. arousal, 3. concreteness, 4. imageability, 5. metaphoricity i 6. familiarity. The collection of norms will be carried out on a minimum sample of 500 native Croatian speakers using online distribution platforms such as SurveyMonkey. For this purpose, a combination of contrastive corpus research and manual data checking was carried out in the initial research phase. Using the MetaNet.HR database and corpus search in SketchEngine (SkE) (hrWaC 2.2, MaCoCu, enTenTen21), metaphors detected in Croatian (J1) and English (J2) and related MWEs were selected (verb-noun collocations were chosen as representative form of MWEs due to proven productivity in different languages). Lexical-semantic data on metaphorical MWEs was also extracted.
The DigiMet database, in its final form, will represent the first openly accessible repository of metaphor norms for the Croatian language, which also represents the first database of affective and lexical-semantic data for Croatian multi-word expressions. This resource will enable further cross-linguistic comparisons and interdisciplinary experimental research.
