Conférence de J. BARDDAL, Université de Gand

Jóhanna Barðdal

In contrast to grammaticalization studies of lexical verbs changing into auxiliaries, semantic changes found with lexical verbs is an understudied area of historical semantics. One exception is Reznikova et al. (2012), who investigate the complex nature of this process, emphasizing the role of metaphor and metonymy. We concentrate on the emergence of verbs of success from more concrete verbs, uncovering six conceptual metaphors which all co-occur with non-canonical encoding of subjects in Indo-European. Careful scrutiny of the relevant data reveals a development most certainly of an Indo-European inheritance; hence, we reconstruct a DAT-‘succeeds’ construction at different levels of schematicity for Proto-Indo-European, including propounding a novel reconstruction of a conceptual metaphor, SUCCESS IS MOTION FORWARD, and the mapping between this metaphor and the verb-class-specific argument structure construction. This article offers a systematic analysis of regularity in semantic change, highlighting the importance of predicate and argument structure for such developments.

*Joint work with Cynthia A. Johnson, Peter Alexander Kerkhof, Leonid Kulikov & Esther Le Mair
Lieu(x)
Caen – campus 1