Regularity in Semantic Change (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, Band 97)

This new and important study of semantic change examines the various ways in which new meanings arise through language use, especially the ways in which speakers and writers experiment with words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees. Drawing on extensive corpus data from over a thousand years of English and Japanese textual history, Traugott and Dasher show that most changes in meaning originate in and are motivated by the associative flow of speech and conceptual metonymy.