Chapter Eleven
252
maintains records and can access and process them’) or, similarly, text
manager.
The COMPUTER HARDWARE/SOFTWARE IS A WORKER metaphor is also
applicable to the vocabulary that has entered the lexical (semantic) field of
PROFESSIONS/OCCUPATIONS relatively recently. In the 19th century, Mod.E.
linker denoted ‘a worker who links or joins, employed in coal mining or
hosiery manufacturing’ (see the OED), but in today’s computer
terminology it refers to ‘a computer program that takes one or more object
files generated by a compiler and combines them into one, executable
program’.^58 Likewise, coder (originally – in the 1920s – denoting ‘one
who puts a message, set of information, etc., into a code’) and encoder
(‘one that encodes’) may refer to ‘a device which encodes a signal’, i.e. ‘a
part of a computer that converts data under specific conditions’, whereas
mid-20th-century logger (or data logger) may also convey the sense of ‘a
device which keeps a record of a series of actions’, as in keylogger (or
keystroke logger), i.e. ‘a software program or hardware device that is used
to monitor and log each of the keys a user types into a computer
keyboard’. A self-explanatory example is processor (whose original sense
was ‘a person who performs a process’).
Last, but not least, to conclude this – by no means exhaustive – list, let
us return to the E.Mod.E. period and the mid-17th-century professional/
occupational sense ‘one who computes, a person employed to make
calculations (in an observatory, in surveying, etc. – see the OED)’ to be
found in the semantic history of the very term computer.
Conclusions
In conclusion of the foregoing comments and observations on the
onomasiological mechanisms behind computer hardware and software
terminology in English, it may be stated that – besides the other major
phenomena applicable to the development of English specialist
vocabulary, such as, particularly, borrowing (including the creation of
calques and hybrid forms, especially neoclassical compounds), as well as
word-formation – it is lexical semantic change that may be considered the
most interesting. This is particularly true considering the fact that the
newly emergent lexical senses are usually remarkably illustrative of the
cognitive motivation at play.
On the basis of the analyses conducted, as well as the findings of such
authors as Lam (2001), it may be pointed out that the semantic paths
(^58) See the CTDG and the PWNO.