Recent Developments in Spanish (and Romance) Historical Semantics

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 relationships of lexical categories. Diachronic cognitive semantics focuses particularly on universal causes of semantic change brought about by mechanisms related to human cognition and perception. Although workers in diachronic cognitive semantics have also paid considerable attention to the semantic processes involved in grammaticalization (cf. from the Romance perspective Lang & Neumann-Holzschuh 1999), I shall limit this paper to lexical semantics. Strictly speaking, words do not acquire new meanings or lose older meanings; speakers simply end up using them in different ways. Nerlich and Clarke (1988) make a useful distinction between micro-dynamic or short-term semantic change, related to the actual speech event, and macro-dynamic semantic change with long-term consequences. It is this latter category that historical linguistics studies. Certainly the adage traditionally attributed to Jules Gilliéron, ‘Each word has its own history,’ originally formulated as a reaction to the Neogrammarian concept of sound-laws, seems applicable to traditional diachronic semantics. In historical Romance linguistics most relevant studies, until recently, have dealt with the specific details of the semantic evolution of individual words, lexical fields or concepts (‘Begriffsgeschichte’), without paying attention systematically to broader issues concerning the causes and the nature of semantic change. Such a state of affairs results from the size of the lexicon and its seeming heterogeneity. Whereas phonologists and students of morphology deal at any given moment with a finite and manageable number of phonemes or morphemes, the lexicologist is dealing with a very large and open-ended number of elements. The authors of the great Romance etymological dictionaries, Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke (1935), Walther von Wartburg (1928-), and Juan Corominas (1954-57; also Corominas & Pascual 1980-91), were all products of the period of Neogrammarian dominance. They placed greater emphasis on justifying the formal evolution of a word from its etymon than on its semantic history. A typical dictionary entry may have identified and illustrated the different stages in a word’s semantic evolution, but rarely did the reader find discussion of the causes and mechanisms of the relevant meaning shifts. The same is true of more recent etymological ventures, such as Max Pfister’s ongoing Lessico etimologico italiano (1979-). At best Romance etymological dictionaries have contributed raw data for the study of diachronic semantics. Even such a prolific scholar in the field of diachronic Romance lexicology as Yakov Malkiel, concerned as he was in his