earticle

영어

Through the examination of incident(/accident) headline names of Korean and American newspapers, ‘the principles of metonymic vehicle selection’ that Langacker (1993) suggests have been supported in Choi (2020) and Choi (2021). Incidents are named with one or two elements among various elements of an event, such as PLACE, TIME, AGENT, PATIENT, CAUSE, and INSTRUMENT. The studies reveal that AGENT is one of the most frequent metonymic vehicles since agents are, in many cases, humans, confirming the human over non-human principle. Furthermore PLACE is much more frequently used than TIME, confirming the concrete over abstract principle. Based on the previous studies, this paper aims to reveal how cultural and contextual salience interact with the principles of metonymic vehicle selection. Two sets of questionnaires, one for Koreans and the other for Americans, are constructed to see how different headline names are selected based on cultures and on event elements. The result shows that cultural salience heavily influences the choice of event names, overriding the general principle of metonymic vehicle selection.