Kathryn Allan

Historical cognitive linguistics

This volume addresses aspects of language change using the semantics-based theory of Cognitive Linguistics, and primarily focuses on the lexicon and metaphor, the semantics of syntax, and language evolution.

Current methods in historical semantics

Innovative, data-driven methods provide more rigorous and systematic evidence for the description and explanation of diachronic semantic processes. The volume systematises, reviews, and promotes a range of empirical research techniques and theoretical perspectives that currently inform work across the discipline of historical semantics. In addition to emphasising the use of new technology, the potential of current theoretical models (e.g. within variationist, sociolinguistic or cognitive frameworks) is explored along the way.

Conceptual networking theory in metaphor evolution: Diachronic variation in models of love

Description of a hypothesis on a model of conceptual networking theory in diachric metaphor. The corpus involved is literary metaphors of love. The data attempts to prove that there are regular diachronic trends in the evolution of figurative language.

Where do beneficiaries come from and how do they come about? Sources for beneficiary expressions in Classical Greek and the typology of beneficiary

In this paper, I analyze different ways of coding beneficiary in Ancient Greek: through the plain dative and through prepositional phrases. The coding of beneficiary through the dative case is attested throughout the history of the Greek language, 1 and appears to be inherited from Proto-Indo-European. Prepositional phrases, on the other hand, are a more recent means of expression. Greek prepositions originate from spatial adverbs; the extension of their meaning from space to more abstract relations is often documented in texts from different periods. 2

An Inquest into Metaphor Death: Exploring the Loss of Literal Senses of Conceptual Metaphors

Abstract In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson famously recast the notion of ‘dead’ metaphor. Rather than accepting conventionality as a criterion for ‘deadness’, they argued that only metaphors which ‘play no particularly interesting role in our conceptual system, and hence are not metaphors we live by... deserve to be called “dead”’ (1980: 55). In later work, Lakoff revisited this definition, suggesting that ‘dead’ was most accurately reserved for cases such as pedigree, a ‘one-shot’ metaphor that is not transparent for English speakers because no ‘literal’ sense exists. This paper examines a number of ‘dead’ or ‘historical’ linguistic metaphors for which no ‘literal’ sense exists in present day English, and considers how and why these ‘died’. Some, like pedigree, do not appear to reflect any system-wide mapping, and it is perhaps unsurprising that their metaphoric nature has become opaque. Others, like ardent and comprehend, demonstrate conceptual mappings that must have been active when their metaphorical senses first emerged, and which are still live in other lexemes. To date, there has been little interrogation of the reasons for the loss of literal senses of metaphorically motivated lexemes. I hope to demonstrate that an examination of the historical evidence for the different stages in the ‘life’ of particular linguistic metaphors can shed light on the nature of metaphor death.