As Cognitive Linguists, we consider language to be best studied and described with reference to its cognitive, experiential, and social contexts, as well as the pragmatic background of language-in-use (speech act theory). Moreover, we maintain that folk models, i.e. cultural models/cognitive schemas intersubjectively shared by a social group, impact and are reflected in grammatical structures and usages. Within the CL framework, our previous work on English nominals derived with the suffix –er, was able to account for their formal and semantic diversity, referent types, conceptual range and relative productivity, patterns found also in Korean nominals derived with the suffix –i.
Here we present our analysis of verbal expressions with give as based on the embodied activity of giving someone something (He gave her a book), but containing action nominals in their predicates. We demonstrate how a conceptual model of this verb together with speakers’ cognitive abilities of analogical and associative reasoning (conceptual metaphors and metonymies) interact within the confines of grammatical structures (transitive and ditransitive sentences) such that they are exploited for the purpose of communicating non-literal figurative meanings from He gave (her) a frown / kiss / his promise to He gave the lie to the claim that p.