Koch Andreas, Blank Peter (Editors). Historical Semantics and Cognition

Mouton de Gruyter, 1999. — viii, 312 pages. — (Cognitive Linguistics Research). — ISBN: 3-11-016614-3.The papers collected in this volwne evolved from a symposiwn that was held September 19-21, 1996, at the "Clubhaus" of the Freie Universitat Berlin. The symposium was organized with the double intention of providing a forum in which synchronically and diachronically oriented scholars would have to exchange their ideas and where American and European cognitive linguists would be confronted with representatives of different directions in European structural semantics. While the confrontation indeed happened as planned, the expected synergetic effects were perhaps not as intensive as we had hoped. However, we are convinced that some of the discussions we had will bring long-term results, thanks to the opponents' modified perception of each other generated by this encounter.Introduction: historical semantics and cognition
Theories and Models
Cognitive semantics and structural semantics
Diachronic semantics: towards a unified theory of language change?
Why do new meanings occur? A cognitive typology of the motivations for lexical semantic change
Diachronic prototype semantics. A digest
Cognitive semantics and diachronic semantics: the values and evolution of classes
Descriptive categories
Losing control: grammaticization, subjectification, and transparency
The rhetoric of counter-expectation in semantic change: a study in subjectification
Synecdoche as a cognitive and communicative strategy
Laws of thought, knowledge and lexical change
Case studies Intensifiers as targets and sources of semantic change
Cognitive ease and lexical borrowing: the recategorization of body parts in Romance
Cognitive aspects ofsemantic change and polysemy: the semantic space HAVE/BE