Chapter Eleven
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On the other hand, the foregoing reservations may not actually impair
the universality of the COMPUTER HARDWARE/SOFTWARE IS A WORKER
metaphor, as long as one follows Blank’s (2003: 44–45) somewhat
unorthodox conviction that “universally recurrent conceptualization does
not mean that it has to be found in every language of the world and even
not in most of them”, given that, inter alia, “there are always some speech
communities that, for some reason or other, prefer a cognitively
unprivileged way of conceptualizing a given concept”.^63
Secondly, contrastive research into the interlingual applicability of the
above-postulated onomasiological path would have to take into
consideration another significant aspect of the relevant extralinguistic
reality, namely globalization, which frequently promotes terminological
standardization. Besides the straightforward cases of borrowing,^64 there
would also be problematic interpretations as either indigenous
conceptualization or loan-translations (calques). A case in point is, for
example, driver, as in printer driver, as well as Ger. Treiber, as in
Druckertreiber (literally: ‘a drover, animal driver’^65 – which conceptually
coincides with Eng. driver), and Fr. pilote, as in pilote d’imprimante
(literally: ‘a pilot’ or ‘a driver, e.g. of a car, a tank, etc.’^66 – which is also
conceptually convergent with its English counterpart). Such lexical items
might be interpreted as either products of indigenous – though recurrent
across different cultures and languages – conceptualizations, or calques,
i.e. loan-translations.
Consequently, to confirm the universal occurrence of the PROFESSION/
OCCUPATION Æ COMPUTER HARDWARE/SOFTWARE pattern of diachronic
lexical semantic change in the languages other than English, further in-
depth contrastive investigations would be indispensable.
(^63) Another argument in support of his restricted understanding of universality of
conceptualization is also that “several cognitively salient ways of conceptualization
may parallelly exist and compete with each other” (Blank 2003: 45).
(^64) For example, Dan. computer, Du. computer, Ger. Computer, It. computer, Pol.
komputer, Russ. ɤɨɦɩɶɸɬɟɪ, etc. – see the multilingual Collins Free Online
Dictionary (the COLLINS).
(^65) See Gleis und Richter’s dictionary (the BEOLINGUS). Another job-related
literal sense of Treiber is ‘a beater, man employed in rousing and driving game’,
which is not distant from the conceptualizations of Eng. driver – see Scholze-
Stubenrecht and Sykes’s dictionary (the DUDEN).
(^66) See the COLLINS.