On gifts and presents

This paper elaborates on the use of the nouns gift and present, and on the linguistic relationships linking them. It also expounds on the morphological and semantic relationships involving the noun present, the adjective present, and the homographic, but not homophonic verb present. The collocational profiles of the nouns gift and present, with reference to the different meanings of the latter, are also considered to identify the connotative aspects of their use and their sematic prosodies. The analysis is carried out on the basis of data from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, on-line) and from the WordBanks on-line English corpus (WB). These two totally different sources are used to identify the (etymological) linguistic features behind the creative wordplay which involves the words gift and present, as used in an advertisement, to compare their uses and to highlight how the exploitation of linguistic relationships makes manipulations possible and ultimately determines effective communication.