Phraseology and Culture in English

3.2.1.2. Predicative use of 
hot
The copular verbs linking the concept of 
HOT
to its “carrier” or “experiencer” 
mainly denote a change of state, with the resultant state being literally hot
(sense 1) or hot in senses 2 and 5 i.e. emotion and danger respectively. 
Table 2 gives a survey of the copular verbs co-occurring with hot which 
have been found with a frequency > 5. 
Table 2. Copular verbs associated with hot 
Verb 
Number of occurrences Sense 
be
1,046
literal; emotion; danger; sensation; quality; taste; goal 
get 
185 
literal: sth/sb is getting hot
emotion: 
sb is getting hot; sb is getting hot on sth
danger: 
things are getting hot
feel
77 
literal; 
emotion 
serve 73 
literal: 
serve sth hot
15
become 50 
literal; emotion 
keep
43 
literal: 
keep food hot (cf. note 15). 
look
20 
literal; emotion
run
12 
literal; 
emotion 
turn 6 
literal; 
emotion 
As can be seen from the table, no sense could be identified that has not 
already occurred in the attributive use of hot.
3.2.1.3. Abverbial use of 
hotly
It might be surprising to find the use of the adverb hotly included in a case 
study about the word hot. The reason why I also look at the formally dis-
tinct adverb is that of the comparability of the data, since both in German 
and Russian the adverb is not different from the adjective in its form 
(though, certainly, in usage). 
The English data present evidence for hotly being almost exclusively 
used in the sense of ‘intense emotion’ (i.e. sense 2 above) The only excep-
tion is the combination hotly tipped (as in hotly tipped buzz-pop group, or
hotly tipped newcomer) and hotly pursued (see him being so hotly pursued 
by a determined young woman), where we find a realization of the sense of 
‘being close to goal’ (i.e. sense 5 above). 

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Hot, heiß, and gorjachij
151
Table 3 gives a survey of the more frequent forms extracted from the cor-
pus.
Table 3. (Adverbial) use of hotly 
Function Position 
Modified 
words 
Verbal modifier preposition to modified verb contested, debated, denied,
disputed; say; pursued
Verbal modifier postposition to modified verb blush, flush; cry, protest, return, 
say; inform
Adj modifier 
preposition to adjective 
contested, debated, disputed; 
tipped °
° 
the use as quasi-adjectives (as in a hotly contested tournament, a hotly de-
bated topic, a hotly disputed penalty) is much rarer as compared with the 
verbal uses. 
The use of hot in idiomatic phrases of English, which are semantical- 
ly opaque to variable degrees, brings to light a number of frames in
addition to the metaphoric models already discussed. I will postpone
their analysis to the end of the data section, since it is most convenient
to do this in a direct comparison with the data from the other two lan-
guages.
3.2.2. Gorja
þ* / žark* in Russian usage 
The corpus used for the case study is the Russian Corpus of Tübingen Uni-
versity. It is much smaller than the BNC, and its composition is also much 
less representative of the Russian language in general, but it was the only 
corpus available to me. It contains 36.5 million words of running text from 
written texts (press and literary texts). 
The presentation of the data follows the sequence of the English data, 
the discussion will be pruned to those aspects that exhibit differences from 
what has already been revealed. 
Table 4 gives a survey of all occurrences of the search word. 

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152
Doris Schönefeld 
Table 4. Number of occurrences of gorja
þ* / žark* in the Tübingen Corpus
Function of adjective gorja
þ* nb of occurrences žark* nb of occurrence 
Total 
2,018
16
549 (cf. footnote 16) 
Attributive usage 
1,136 
305 (of a frequency of N > 3/2) 
Predicative usage 
112 
52 (of a frequency of V > 3/2) 
Function of adj/adverb gorja
þo nb of occurrences žarko nb of occurrences 
Total 
514 
347 
Predicative (adj) 
34 
295 
Adverbial (adv) 
480 
52