Coming to terms with success

Hunston, Susan 2024. Coming to terms with success. Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies 7 , pp. 63-76. 10.18573/jcads.114

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Abstract

Corpus studies have taught us that many lexical items regularly co-occur with specific evaluative meanings, to the extent that those items themselves can imply attitude. Examples can be obvious, such as ‘recover from + something bad’, or less obvious, such as ‘cause + something bad’. When such an item co-occurs with an opposite meaning, it has been argued that the reader may draw the conclusion that the speaker is being insincere or ironic. Phrases such as ‘come to terms with’ are interesting in this regard. The Cobuild dictionary asserts that ‘come to terms with’ co-occurs with negative meaning (as in ‘come to terms with failure’). In at least half the cases found, however, and even in the example quoted in that dictionary, ‘come to terms with’ is used with an item that appears to be positive, such as ‘success’. In this paper it is argued that this cannot be interpreted as insincerity or irony, but that it forces a reinterpretation of the positive term, along the lines of ‘success may seem to be a good thing but it necessitates considerable life adjustment’. In more interesting cases, the item following ‘come to terms with’ relates to another individual and thus an interpretation of conflicting points of view is required. An invented example would be ‘Joe has to come to terms with Mary’s success’, where ‘success’ may be positive for Mary but negative for Joe. A genuine example, from a White House press conference, is ‘The US must come to terms with China’s industrial development’, where a divergence in viewpoint is imposed on the US and China. This paper develops this argument, discusses how similar phrases might be found, and illustrates how the imposition of conflicting points of view is used in discourse.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Cardiff University Press
ISSN:	2515-0251
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	10 June 2024
Date of Acceptance:	15 November 2023
Last Modified:	26 Jul 2024 09:40
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/169646

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