{"pk":26435,"title":"Evolution of polysemous word senses from metaphorical mappings","subtitle":null,"abstract":"What forces have shaped the evolution of the lexicon? Lan-guages evolve under the pressure of having to communicatean unbounded set of ideas using a finite set of linguistic struc-tures. This suggests why the transmission of ideas should becompressed such that one word will develop multiple senses.Previous theory also suggests how a word might develop newsenses: Abstract concepts may be construed in terms of moreconcrete concepts. Here, we bring these two perspectives to-gether to examine metaphorical extensions of English wordmeanings over the past millennium, analyzing how sensesfrom a source domain are extended to new ones in a target do-main. Using empirical and computational methods, we foundthat metaphorical mappings are highly systematic and can beexplained in terms of a compact set of variables. Our workshows how metaphor can provide a cognitive device for com-pressing emerging ideas into an existing lexicon.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Word meaning; semantic change; polysemy;metaphorical mapping; systematicity"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1h29n757","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Yang","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xu","name_suffix":"","institution":"UC Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Barbara","middle_name":"C.","last_name":"Malt","name_suffix":"","institution":"Lehigh University","department":""},{"first_name":"Mahesh","middle_name":"","last_name":"Srinivasan","name_suffix":"","institution":"UC Berkeley","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26435/galley/16071/download/"}]}