Specialist Vocabulary
245Probing into the above-mentioned field of PROFESSIONS/OCCUPATIONS
(and its counterpart conceptual category) in English, one may indeed
observe that – in historical terms – many of the vocabulary items essential
to the specialist language of computer technology originally used to refer
to the people performing a certain job or profession. To be more precise,
an onomasiological path of semantic change can be identified, leading
from PROFESSIONS/OCCUPATIONS to COMPUTER HARDWARE/SOFTWARE, as
seen from the linguistic data (taken from the CTDG and/or the DPCI
specialist dictionaries – unless stated otherwise) presented below.
To illustrate the onomasiological directionality postulated here, let us
start with the simple case of an English word which acquired a
professional/occupational sense as early as the Old English period. In
chronological terms, the more general senses of O.E. reader, namely ‘one
who reads aloud’ and ‘one who reads or peruses’, coincide with a slightly
more specific sense of ‘one who is appointed to read to others, especially
one who reads the lessons or other parts of the service in a place of
worship’. The narrowing of the sense was definitely motivated by the
period-specific extralinguistic facts related to READING, as seen from the
following quotations from the Oxford English Dictionary (the OED):
c.961 “Þæt nanes mannes stefn [...] ehyred ne sy, butan þæs ræderes
anes.”
c.1000 “Lector is rædere, þe ræd on Godes cyrcan, and bið þærto ehadod
þæt he bodie Godes word.”Subsequently, through a metonymic shift involving contiguous
concepts, reader acquired its early-16th-century professional sense of ‘one
who reads (and expounds) to pupils or students, a teacher, lecturer,
especially in universities’ (as well as ‘a lecturer on law in the Inns of
Court’). Further senses related to the conceptual category of PROFESSIONS/
OCCUPATIONS include other specializations (which appeared in the early
19 th century), namely ‘a proof-reader’ and the twin senses of ‘one
employed by a publisher to read the works intended for publication and
report on their merits’, as well as ‘one employed by a theatre to read the
plays offered for production’ (both motivated by very similar
extralinguistic circumstances). Also, in the 19th century, a figurative
profession-related sense of reader appeared, namely ‘one who reads
designs in weaving’ (see the OED).
Returning to the main argument (which leaves out many other senses
of reader that are irrelevant to this discussion), it is easily noticeable that
the formation of the computer-specific metaphorical sense of reader
depends on the cognitively salient (Geeraerts 2010) conceptual domains