Pour une archéologie du sens figuré [Towards an archaeology of figurative meaning] Article - 1997

Cognitive semantics postulates that specific mental mechanisms belonging to the human imagination, namely metaphorical and metonymical mappings, are involved in semantic changes. Nevertheless, a thorough examination reveals the weakness of this theory. I therefore advocate a radically different analysis which allows us to do without these postulated cognitive mechanisms. Systematizing Meillet’ s observations about the role of “discontinuity in transmission” in semantic change, I propose, for each case studied, to look for what circumstances in collective experience can make the discrepancy between the new and the former meaning imperceptible to the speakers themselves. I argue that a semantic change at its decisive moment must most often perform in a covert way, without its investigators’ knowledge. The efficiency and heuristic fruitfulness of this method is illustrated in this paper by the study of certain Latin polysemous words expressing not only a physical bond but also a juridical obligation (‘obligare’, ‘obligatio’, ‘nectere’, ‘obstingere’, ’solvere’, ‘absolvere’).