Chapter Eleven
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history of the vocabulary of a language cannot be studied independently of
the social, economic, and cultural history of the people” (Lyons 1977:
620).
Hence, extralinguistic reality must be taken into consideration: in real
life, people are healthy or ill, wary of bugs, hardly fond of tinned luncheon
meat, etc. – and this knowledge has indeed been lexicalized, through
figurative semantic change, in some of the computer terms presented
above. Likewise, the above-quoted figurative senses of doctor, handler,
newsreader or server reflect the conceptualizers’ awareness of the
extralinguistic social and economic context, which is usually marked by
the necessity to earn a living and the resulting ubiquity of various
professions and occupations. Consequently, terms denoting jobs and
occupations tend to be cognitively salient and thus expressive of certain
“prototypical” (as in Wierzbicka 1980, or Geeraerts 1997) senses.
As meanings are “coherent, meaningful, unified wholes within our
experience and cognition” (Johnson 1987: 41), such senses – whether
figurative, or not – may be fairly specialized and specific, because relevant
to the “semantic potential” (Allwood 2003) of such lexical items are often
intricately structured frames or scenarios, involving numerous conceptual
domains, grounded in the encyclopaedic (in Langacker’s 1987 sense)
knowledge of extralinguistic facts. This seems to be the reason why
PROFESSIONS/OCCUPATIONS may easily transform into specialist vocabulary
through figurative semantic change – whether expounded in terms of the
classic Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Cognitive Metaphor Theory,^41 or
more recent proposals (Szwedek 2008, Evans 2010,^42 Kövecses 2011),
including those focused on diachronic semantic change (Alan 2009,
Grygiel 2012).^43
Returning to the semantic innovation-based computer hardware and
software terminology in English, the lexical (semantic) field of
PROFESSIONS/OCCUPATIONS may become an interesting example of an
onomasiological source to consider. Not inconsequentially, onomasiological
research – in Geeraerts’s (2006: 80)^44 words – “investigates, basically, [not
only] which various words may express a given concept, [but also] what
the structural links between those words are”. Accordingly, research into
the relevant lexical fields proves conveniently instrumental in acquiring a
proper onomasiological perspective (ibid.).
(^41) See one of the latest assessment thereof in Gibbs (2011).
(^42) See also Evans (2013).
(^43) See also Grygiel (2008), who resorts to the conceptual blending theory by
Fauconnier and Turner (2002).
(^44) Also, see Geeraerts (2000: 82–83).