Specialist Vocabulary
239conceptualization^14 phenomenon” (Cymbalista 2009: 23), grounded in the
extralinguistic cognitive mechanisms applied to the business of making
sense of and referring to extralinguistic reality (through generalization,
categorization, association, figurative extension, etc.).
The above-mentioned manifestations of lexical semantic creativity –
which, at the same time, “should be considered not as merely linguistic
manifestations of [the] mechanisms of human cognition, but as
fundamental mechanisms of semantic change” (Cymbalista and Kleparski
2013: 75) – are often found not only in general registers of language, but
also in specialized ones. A case in point is the language of computer
technology.
Semantic innovation applied for the purpose of explaining and naming
numerous notions is evident in computerese, whose vocabulary –
according to Lam (2001: 32) – is characterized by “its highly figurative,
and especially metaphorical, nature”. Johnson (1994) explains the reasons
for such a status quo as follows:
“Because they deal with highly abstract and arbitrary realities [...]
computer scientists are called on to name a very large number of things
that may not have obvious designations. Those with simple analogies to
natural phenomena are [hence] often designated metaphorically” (Johnson
1994: 97).Therefore, it is fairly understandable why virus has acquired a
computer-specific metaphorical sense of ‘a program which adds itself to
an executable file and copies (or spreads) itself to other executable files
each time an infected file is run’,^15 whereas infected (as in infected
computer or infected file) means ‘carrying a virus program’. Likewise,
system crash is the computer term denoting ‘a situation when the operating
system stops working and has to be restarted’, and Trojan horse refers to
‘a program inserted into a system by a hacker, so that he/she can then
access the system without the authorized user knowing’ (which is possibly
a case of metaphtonymy, as in Goossens 1990,^16 due to a metaphor-
metonymy overlap).^17 Spam^18 denotes ‘articles posted to more than one
(^14) In the sense of Langacker (1987).
(^15) For the computer-specific senses presented in this paragraph, see Collin’s (1998)
specialist dictionary (the DPCI) and the Oxford Dictionaries Online (ODO).
(^16) See also his subsequent publications on the subject, e.g. Goossens (1999).
(^17) For the recent developments on the borderline between metaphor and
metonymy, see Barcelona (2000), Dirven (2002), Peirsman and Geeraerts (2006)
and Szwedek (2011).