Kathryn Allan

Date: November 25, 2022

Time: 16:30

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BIO

Kathryn Allan is Associate Professor in the History of English at the Department of English Language and Literature, UCL. Her main areas of research are historical semantics and lexicology, and she has worked particularly on the motivations for semantic change and specifically on metaphor and metonymy. Her publications include the monograph Metaphor and Metonymy: A Diachronic Approach, Historical Cognitive Semantics (with Margaret Winters and Heli Tissari) and English Historical Semantics (with Christian Kay). She is also a contributor to the Keywords Project, a collaborative research project which builds on Raymond Williams' work in exploring social/cultural 'keywords', and currently serves on the Council of the Philological Society.

Further information:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/english/people/kathryn-allan

A historical linguistic perspective on a metaphorical source: the vocabulary of Speed

The semantic field of Speed seems to be a rather problematic one for our understanding of metaphorical sources. speed is recognised as the source of several metaphors, including the generic-level conceptual metaphor intensity is speed (eg Kovecses 2010: 292), intelligence is speed (Allan 2008), and licentiousness is speed (Mapping Metaphor). Typically, metaphorical sources are thought to relate to concrete concepts grounded in physical experiences, with the source meaning of a linguistic metaphor assumed to be more ‘basic’ (e.g Knowles and Moon 2006: 16-17), ‘primary’ (e.g. Kovecses 2005: 139), and historically older (e.g. Steen et al. 2010: 35). However, almost all of the most central current terms relating to Speed have earlier meanings, and many of these do not seem to relate to typical source concepts: for example, slow is first attested with the meaning ‘stupid’; quick has the earliest meaning ‘alive’; and speedy probably meant something like ‘successful, prosperous’ before it was used of fast physical motion. Using data from the Historical Thesaurus of English and the Oxford English Dictionary, this paper considers the way that the semantic field of Speed changes through time, and what it might tell us about the nature of metaphorical sources.

References

Allan, Kathryn, 2008. Metaphor and Metonymy: A Diachronic Approach. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Historical Thesaurus of English, version 4.21 (2016). https://ht.ac.uk.

Knowles, Murray and Rosamund Moon. 2006. Introducing Metaphor. Abingdon: Routledge.

Kövecses, Zoltán. 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kövecses, Zoltán. 2010. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus. 2015. Metaphor Map of English. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. http://mappingmetaphor.arts.gla.ac.uk.

Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com.

Steen, Gerard, Aletta Dorst, J. Berenike Herrmann, Anna Kaal, Tina Krennmayr and Trijntje Pasma (2010). A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification: From MIP to MIPVU. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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Contact

linguistics.research.seminars@gmail.com