Aims of this book

In this book we show that there are predictable paths for semantic change across different conceptual structures and domains of language function. Most especially we will show that, despite century-old taxonomies that suggest that meaning changes are bidirectional, e.g. generalization and narrowing, metaphor and metonymy, when we trace the histories of lexemes cross-linguistically we in fact repeatedly find evidence for unidirectional changes. These changes are of a different sort from those cited in the taxonomies. The taxonomies focus on mechanisms, the kinds of cognitive and communicative processes speakers and hearers bring to the task of learning and using a language. The regularities are, however, shifts from one linguistically coded meaning to another, for example, from obligation to do something to conclusion that something is the case. Such regularities are prototypical types of changes that are replicated across times and languages. They are possible, indeed probable, tendencies, not changes that are replicated across every possible meaningful item at a specific point in time in a specific language, such as the Neogrammarians postulated for sound change. That they recur so often and across totally unrelated languages is, we argue, intrinsically bound up with the cognitive and communicative processes by which pragmatic meanings come to be conventionalized and reanalyzed as semantic polysemies. In particular, they are bound up with the mechanisms that we call “invited inferencing” and “subjectification.” This book, therefore, is a contribution to historical pragmatics as well as semantics.