Margaret E. Winters

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.

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.

Kuryłowicz, analogical change, and cognitive grammar

Within theframework of cognitive grammar, analogy is viewedas an aspect of ihe mental categorization of linguistic units, involving the recognition of similarity which emerges from the comparison of salient features of these units. Analogical change, then, is a process of recategorization based on evolving judgments about how such groupings should be arranged (both internal to a given category and between them). Thepresent arüde explores these notions and tests them in the context of the well-known (but perhaps less read) article by Kurylowicz in which are developed six formulas capturing directional tendencies in analogical change.

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

Grammatical Meaning and the Old French Subjunctive

The meaning of the French subjunctive and its relationship to the indicative have given rise to many proposals, those which addressed schematic descriptions, the breadth of specific uses, and, less frequently, the development over time. Harris (1978) provides a three-way typology of these proposals: (1) those that posit a range of meanings, (2) those suggesting one meaning overall, and (3) those which insist on its purely formal status or meaninglessness. The majority of the studies of all three sorts are based on Modern French data. Relatively few look at uses in Old French or, diachronically, an inventory of Latin, Old French, and Modern French triggers. There is, overall, little attention to broad questions of the evolution of meaning. The present chapter has as its goal to examine a number of proposals for the meaning(s) of the subjunctive, testing them on the data of Old French and theories of change.

On choosing a theory: a diachronic case study

Abstract The present paper examines the history of a construction from later Old English by comparing two approaches to its analysis, one functional and one formal. Both analyses are internally consistent and, at the same time, vulnerable to criticism from both the inside and the outside. Finally a proposal is put forward on the way in which practicing linguists chose between competing theoretical stances.