Chapter Eleven
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concept, and investigates by which different expressions the concept can
be designated, or named” (Grondelaers and Geeraerts 2003: 69).
Certainly enough, when the need for a new – whether specialist, or not
- term is answered by resorting to lexical semantic change, “the
motivation behind [such] speaker-induced innovation is to express
something and not to give an expression a different interpretation” (Koch
2008: 110),^11 and language users “use innovating tropes to designate a
particular concept, not to change the meaning of a word” (Koch 2008:
109-110). This (somewhat paradoxical) situation has been commented on
by Koch (1999):
“If speakers affect semantic change (and they do), they affect it not by
providing existing words with novel meanings (semasiological
perspective), but instead [they do it] indirectly by expressing things
through other and/or new words (onomasiological perspective)” (Koch
1999: 296).Motivated by onomasiological needs, semantic innovation is thus
likely to occur especially as long as the lexical meaning of the already
existing source vocabulary makes use of the conceptual elements which
are so “cognitively salient” (Geeraerts 2010) that they may be easily
transferred onto figurative applications. Nerlich and Clarke (1992: 137)
put it in a more straightforward manner, stating that “the trick of being
innovative and at the same time understandable is to use words in a novel
way the meaning of which is self-evident”.
In order to produce such semantic change, that is to “inject the
available old signs and their meanings with new life” (Nerlich and Clarke
2001: 6), there are two main options available (ibid.), namely “using
words for the near neighbours of the things you mean (metonymy) or
using words for the look-alikes (resemblars) of what you mean
(metaphor)”^12 – in the words of Nerlich and Clarke (1992: 137). This
postulate may be further qualified by recognizing synecdoche as a sub-
type of metonymy – see, for example, Warren (2006) and Panther and
Thornburg (2007).^13 Certainly, despite the traditional literary associations,
each of these cases should be perceived from a cognitive linguistic
perspective and “seen not merely as figures of speech, but as a
(^11) For the sake of the clarity of the argument, the emphases present in the source
text have been removed both from this and the previous quotation from Koch
(2008).
(^12) Emphases mine.
(^13) This observation has also been made by Nerlich and Clarke (2001: 6).