This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages, illustrated with numerous examples from different semantic domains and different languages. Part three is dedicated to detailed empirical studies of a large sample of languages in a limited set of semantic fields. It reveals possible universals of semantic association, as well as areal and cultural tendencies.

About fifty years ago, Stephen Ullmann wrote that polysemy is 'the pivot of semantic analysis'. Fifty years on, polysemy has become one of the hottest topics in linguistics and in the cognitive sciences at large. The book deals with the topic from a wide variety of viewpoints. The cognitive approach is supplemented and supported by diachronic, psycholinguistic, developmental, comparative, and computational perspectives. The chapters, written by some of the most eminent specialists in the field, are all underpinned by detailed discussions of methodology and theory.

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1, LMU Munich (Institut für Englische Philologie), course: Hauptseminar, language: English, abstract: “Semantic change deals with change in meaning, understood to be a change in the concepts associated with a word [...]” (Campbell 1998: 255). To some of you, Campbell’s definition may seem a bit simplistic. Some scholars, too (for example Blank whom we’ll be hearing of later on), argue that it’s not one meaning of word that changes, but with semantic change a new meaning is added to the already existing meaning or meanings of a word and then this new meaning is lexicalised, or one of the already lexicalised meanings is no longer used and becomes extinct. I think Campbell’s definition can suffice as a basis for our little “immersion” into semantic change. And what is more important than a theoretically watertight definition is a “practical insight” into semantic change. So let’s have quick look on what exactly changes when words change their meanings.

Contains revised papers from a September 1996 symposium which provided a forum for synchronically and diachronically oriented scholars to exchange ideas and for American and European cognitive linguists to confront representatives of different directions in European structural semantics. Papers are in sections on theories and models, descriptive categories, and case studies, and examine areas such as cognitive and structural semantics, diachronic prototype semantics, synecdoche as a cognitive and communicative strategy, and intensifiers as targets and sources of semantic change.

Anthropolinguistics is a core topic of the majority of books on linguistics today. Still there are different approaches to word study within this field. This book provides a comprehensive survey of historic semantic changes of English polysemous words. Anthropolinguistic Aspect of English Polysemy is a wide-ranging account not only of how words witness history, but also of how evolution change is reflected in word semantics and of links between our past and present. It is available to a large audience as it sheds light on problems of evolution of human cognition that remain at the centre of contemporary linguistics.

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Bamberg (Lehrstuhl für Englische Sprachwissenschaft ), course: English Etymology, language: English, abstract: “Nothing is perfectly static. Every word, every grammatical element, every locution, every sound and accent is a slowly changing configuration, molded by the invisible and impersonal drift that is the life of language.” (Sapir 1949: 171) Reading this quote, in which Edward Sapir describes the nature of language, there are two important points, which I would like to use as a starting point for this paper. The first point is that language undergoes a continuous change and is never “perfectly static”. This is especially true for semantics as Ullmann states: “Of all linguistic elements caught up in this drift, meaning is probably the least resistant to change.” (Ullmann 1977: 193) The meaning of words is in a constant process of alteration. The second point is that the change mentioned above is done by “the invisible and impersonal drift” or to put it in simple words: The change in language in general and in meaning in particular happens unconsciously to the speakers. This fact poses the following questions: Why do speakers change the meaning of a word if they are not aware of it? What are the forces behind this process, how does this process look like and what are the most relevant types of change? Or in general: What is semantic change? To give answers to exactly these major questions about semantic change, will be the aim of this paper. The basis for this paper will be the theories of Andreas Blank, who even though being a Romanist, developed a precise, extensive and still very comprehensive theoretical work on semantic change, which is “[...] recommendable for historical semanticists of all languages.” (Grzega 2000: 233)

This book, addressed primarily to students and researchers in semantics, cognitive linguistics, English, and Australian languages, is a comparative study of the polysemy patterns displayed by percussion/impact ('hitting') verbs in English and Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan, Central Australia). The opening chapters develop a novel theoretical orientation for the study of polysemy via a close examination of two theoretical traditions under the broader cognitivist umbrella: Langackerian and Lakovian Cognitive Semantics and Wierzbickian Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Arguments are offered which problematize attempts in these traditions to ground the analysis of meaning either in cognitive or neurological reality, or in the existence of universal synonymy relations within the lexicon. Instead, an interpretative rather than a scientific construal of linguistic theorizing is sketched, in the context of a close examination of certain key issues in the contemporary study of polysemy such as sense individuation, the role of reference in linguistic categorization, and the demarcation between metaphor and metonymy. The later chapters present a detailed typology of the polysemous senses of English and Warlpiri percussion/impact (or P/I) verbs based on a diachronically deep corpus of dictionary citations from Middle to contemporary English, and on a large corpus of Warlpiri citations. Limited to the operations of metaphor and of three categories of metonymy, this typology posits just four types of basic relation between extended and core meanings. As a result, the phenomenon of polysemy and semantic extension emerges as amenable to strikingly concise description.