Specialised language varieties: When a cognitive framework can explain semantic changes

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the role of semantic change in the creation and development of scientific, and the interaction between this and common everyday language. To this end, the theoretical tenets of Dik Geraeerts’s Diachronic Prototype Semantics plus ideas on the influence of cognitive linguistics (George Lakoff) on semantic change as developed by Gyori Gabor have been taken into account. The analysis of terms found in astronomy and history texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveals that metaphor is the fundamental cognitive mechanism involved in meaning shifts from scientific to common core vocabulary use.