`Are you in the club?’ or should I say `Have you got a bun in the oven’? Different metaphors conveying pregnancy

Abstract

This paper is aimed at analyzing sorne of the different expressions available in English to refer to · pregnancy· and the metaphoric nature present in many of them. As Lakoff and Johnson (20032: 244) suggest, "Because we reason in terms of metaphor, the metaphors we use determine a great deal about how we live our lives·. From the point of view of form, most of them are preposilional phrases whose structure is "preposition" + "the" + "monosyllabic noun". Such is the case of "up the duff' in "She has no cravings like girls usually have when they're up the duff' (Simpson, 2010). However, it is also possible to find other instances whose structure is simpler (the phrase "in trouble" lacks a determiner in "She said she consented to come to London to be married to the prisoner as she believed she was in trouble" [Simpson, 2010) or more complex ("in the pudding club"). Syntactically speaking most of them function as subject complement, that is to say, they express a quality, condition, state, or feature which is attached to the subject in an intensive relationship by means of a copular verb. That is the reason why the above mentioned examples can be replaced by the adjective "pregnant" in the sentences in which they occur. Nevertheless, from the semantic viewpoint both predicative prepositional and adjective phrases are not completely interchangeable since there are different nuances which are conveyed by the prepositional structures which cannot be found in the word "pregnant". More often than not these semantic nuances are of a pragmatic nature. These features are closely connected with the notions of economy of language, genre, and register. Thus, there seems to be a conflict between the first one and the fact that the structures under study are morphologically and syntactically heavier than the adjective "pregnant". The reason for this is that in sorne cases the examples could be classified as euphemisms. Moreover, it goes without saying that certain instances are classified, among others, as "impolite" ("up the duff" [Rundell, 2007: 4581), "informal" ("in the family way" [Crowther, 1995: 419]), "old-fashioned" ("up the spout" [Rundell, 2007: 1443]), or "slang" ("in the (pudding) club" [Simpson, 2010]) in advanced learners' dictionaries, although these labels do not always coincide in the different lexicographic works.