Recent Developments in Spanish (and Romance) Historical Semantics

Abstract

Diachronic semantics has long been the stepchild of Spanish (and Romance) historical linguistics. Although many studies have examined (often in searching detail) the semantic evolution of individual lexical items, Hispanists have ignored broader patterns of semantic change and the relevant theoretical and methodological issues posed by this phenomenon. Working within the framework of cognitive semantics, an approach which perforce requires a comparative perspective, a team of Romanists at the University of Tübingen headed by Peter Koch has offered over the last ten years new insights into questions of diachronic Spanish (and Romance) semantics, with emphasis on the causes of semantic change (see the essays in Blank & Koch 1999, 2003, Mihatsch & Steinberg 2004). I wish to survey here some of this recent German work in diachronic Spanish (and Romance) semantics and to discuss the insights provided by cognitive semantics into the nature of semantic change, especially with regard to cross-linguistic instances of metaphorical and metonymic changes in certain semantic categories (e.g., the designation of body parts, spatial and temporal adjectives and adverbials). Cognitive semantics has been concerned with the polysemous nature of lexical items and the cognitive principles that motivate the relations between their different senses. These same mechanisms can also account for diachronic changes in these relationships and in the internal

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