A cognitive-figurative account of English light nouns

This study aims to explore the sensory domains of smell, taste, and touch in English binomial constructions of the type ‘a N1 of N2’, such as a whiff of racism, a taste of freedom, a touch of color. The aforementioned construction, recently investigated in multiple studies on Romance languages (Simone and Masini, 2009, 2014; Masini, 2016) and Basque (Zabala, 2017), has been named Light Noun construction, since the first nominal represents the syntactic Head of the pattern but not the semantic Head, and, therefore, undergoes a sort of nominal ‘bleaching’ (in parallel with the well-known concept of Verb Lightness). We adopt Schmid’s Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model (2020) to analyze data drawn from the enTenTen corpus in order to demonstrate how the semantics of the first and the second nominal are combined to license the meaning of the construction. We also demonstrate how usage shapes the linguistic realization of the sensory Light Noun constructions, and to what extent the syntagmatic association between N1 and N2 has become entrenched and conventionalized to meet communicative needs.