Comparaciones explícitas con "wie" en Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften de Robert Musil. Una aproximación cognitiva

Abstract

Robert Musil's novel, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities) is characterized, among other things, by the constant presence of figurative language expressions, which have been the subject of many scholarly studies. The present paper focuses on a small number of explicit comparisons with wie, which may be defined as similes, and analyzes their use with the tools and theoretical principles of Cognitive Linguistics. A comparison with previous studies on Musil, on the one hand, and on Simile vs. Metaphor, on the other, allows us to partially confirm, through the analysis of our corpus, some existing views such as those pointing to the restrictive character of the source domain and the profiling of the goal domain in the simile. At the same time, our results seem to disconfirm some non cognitive, traditional approaches, since the similes, as used in Musil's novel, have a far stronger "force" than metaphor. Finally, some similes are found to be metonymic in character, and the possibility is put forward to study Musil's similes as possible metonymies. This paper is the first in a number of articles which will analyze the similes in the above-mentioned novel.