Semantic change

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The main topic of this issue of Catalan Journal of Linguistics, semantic change, is probably one of the areas of linguistic research gaining more prominence over the last years. This fact is possibly due to two circumstances. a) On the one hand, to the development of the meaning-oriented and usage-based approaches to lan- guage, which take place mainly (although not exclusively) within the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and Pragmatics. And, b) on the other, to the development of text corpora (representing both Old and Contemporary language in written or oral form), driven by the necessity to approach the communicative language usage.
The present issue of Catalan Journal of Linguistics gathers contributions on the main topics related to contemporary semantics: a) polysemy, polysemysation, synonymy, semantic and lexical lectal variation; b) metaphor and metonymy, subjectivation and intersubjectivation as mechanisms and factors of semantic change, respec- tively; c) pragmatic inference as a true trigger of semantic change; d) emergence, understanding, spreading and semantization of new meanings; e) grammaticalization, phraseologization and constructionalization as semantic changes; and, finally, f) inner (paradigmatic relations) and outer conditions (pragmatic, sociolinguistic and cultural factors) of semantic change. Grammaticalization, the Invited Inference Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC), Prototypicality Effects, pragmatic enrichment, the Theory of Conceptual Blending and image schemas constitute the theoreti- cal background of these ten papers, where concrete cases of semantic change in Catalan, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are analysed.

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