Metaphors in German Baroque Prose. Metaphor-Innovation and Conventional Metaphors against the Background of European cultures

The study is based on a corpus of letters, novels, and newspapers taken from the Baroque period around the end of the 17th century. All different text types show German-French interferences with respect to the linguistic and cultural level. The article investigates how polylexic inflections, that is phrasemes, functional verbal complexes, and collocations, which have frequently metaphorical meanings in French, are integrated into the German language system. It is shown that metaphors are either adopted and conventionalized, or new metaphorical uses arise on the basis of borrowings. A systematic development cannot be ascertained, probably caused by the heterogeneity of the investigated texts with diatopic, diastatic and diaphasic variations. However, the cultural background must also be taken into account. New developments in the field of diplomacy, for instance, can be interpreted as a result of a cultural hegemony of France in this area, whereas in the word field of emotions semantic shifts within the German language system without borrowings are sufficient to cover the cognitive needs.