Prototype dynamics in the Restoration vernacular print: A diachronic onomastic study of Poor Robin’s Almanack

Contemporary cognitive-linguistic research often seeks to consolidate metaphorical expressions into systematic mappings between source and target domains. However, the formulation of such mappings in natural language remains insufficiently systematized, frequently relying on intuition or on lexical resources that are not available for all languages. In this study, we propose a systematic, semi-automatic approach to source domain identification that enhances transparency, objectivity, and replicability in metaphor analysis while reducing annotator reliance on intuition. We build on an established semantic ontology, bilingual lexical resources, and distributional semantic representations to assign semantic domains to words, which serve as proxies for conceptual source domains. We manually validate the data and quantitatively evaluate the method via automatic metrics. Furthermore, we perform a qualitative evaluation of annotation disagreements and a detailed error analysis. Results indicate that the approach provides a promising foundation for semantic tagging and metaphor analysis in Slovene. The qualitative analysis of disagreements demonstrates how individual linguistic variation and cognitive biases influence domain attribution, and often prevent reaching a complete consensus between annotators. The error analysis further identifies specific limitations of the proposed approach, which arise from gaps in lexical resources and from the inherent properties of distributional semantic modeling. Overall, the findings underscore both the methodological challenges of automatic domain attribution and the cognitive complexity of source domain mapping in metaphor analysis.

This study describes the quantitative aspects of metaphor in academic publications. In particular, we analyze the frequency of metaphor types and source domains in medical papers written by native and non-native speakers of English. The data have been collected from selected published articles on cancer and tissue engineering. The method combines a manual procedure with a semantic tagger and keyness statistics in Wmatrix software for metaphor identification. The results show that while the distribution of metaphor is relatively stable across tissue engineering and cancer articles written by native and non-native speakers, indirect metaphor is more often used than other types of metaphor. Moreover, the findings indicate that some metaphorical source domains are specifically used for a particular topic and that some are more frequently exploited by native speakers of English than by non-native speakers. This study has implications for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pedagogy and the development of metaphorical awareness activities as it may set the ground for future corpus studies that analyze metaphor properties in academic registers.

Time, as an abstract yet fundamental concept, has been extensively studied across disciplines. Within cognitive linguistics, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) suggests that people conceptualise time through source domains and mental mappings. However, cross-linguistic variations in these conceptualisations remain underexplored. This study employs a corpus-based semantic analysis to investigate the ‘TIME IS MONEY’ metaphor in British English and Mandarin Chinese, drawing data from the Freiburg-LOB Corpus (FLOB) and the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC). Through Metaphorical Pattern Analysis (MPA) and semantic tagging with Wmatrix, 219 English metaphors (15.38% of concordances) and 98 Chinese metaphors (19.37% of concordances) were identified. Statistical analyses revealed significant cross-linguistic differences, particularly in the semantic fields of Social Actions and Processes and Psychological Actions and Processes. The findings indicate that while the ‘TIME IS MONEY’ metaphor is more semantically diverse in Chinese, it is more systematically expressed in English. Culturally, English metaphors emphasise individual control over time, whereas Chinese metaphors underscore collective needs and responsibilities. These results highlight the cultural and linguistic nuances shaping metaphorical expressions of time, offering new insights into the interplay between language, cognition, and culture.

Framing metaphor use over time: ‘Free Economy’ metaphors in Hong Kong political discourse (1997–2017)

Media reports are often analyzed as a specialized variety of discourse that may reflect the social and cultural values of a nation, and metaphors always function to enhance the effectiveness of media discourse. Metaphors in news have long been explored by sociolinguistic researchers, but diachronic studies that examine how metaphor use changes over time are still limited. Following a corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this study examined the metaphorical characterizations of corruption-related concepts in three English-language news media of China (Global Times, China Daily, and People’s Daily) over 12 years from 2007 to 2018. The findings can be summarized into the following four aspects: (1) The types of source domains were largely stable over time, i.e., WAR, POISON and DISEASE, DIRT, PLANT, and ANIMAL; (2) The mapping within a source domain changed diachronically; (3) Increased use of creative metaphors and enriched metaphorical depictions were found in the more recent years; and (4) The metaphors appeared to evoke more Chinese cultural schemas across time, which in turn provided contexts for further understandings of these metaphors. It is thus argued that the news discourse in China has been experiencing an ongoing process to employ more creative metaphors to express Chinese worldviews and cultural beliefs. It has also shown that a qualitative discourse analysis combined with quantitative corpus-assisted methods can provide effective research framework for an in-depth diachronic understanding of the changes in metaphor use. This study may be of assistance to researchers who are interested in media studies, sociolinguistics, and news writing.

The image of a country has a critical impact on the degree of its political, economic and cultural influence in the world. This indicates a need to understand various perceptions of a country that exist among other nations and mechanisms of their formation and change in an ever-shifting world. This qualitative case study seeks to examine the changing nature of wild animal metaphors employed to model the image of Russia in American media discourse in the XIX-XXI centuries. The study is limited by two source domains, namely, the beast and the bear. They were analyzed within particular contexts: American English, culture and media discourse. The research data were drawn from dictionaries and corpora. The dictionaries included etymological and explanatory entries, as well as those covering idioms, symbols, and metaphors. The corpora research data were collected from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and Chronicling America, a collection of historic digitalized texts. A total of 218 metaphors were selected from 4929 texts. The metaphors were studied through lexicographic, conceptual metaphor, culture-specific, corpus, discourse, and diachronic methods. The findings of this study suggest that the two metaphors “Russia is a beast” and “Russia is a bear” are frequently used in realizing the strategy of ‘othering’ in XXI century American media discourse. Still, their meanings allowed for variation and modification in the periods of the two countries’ amity and cooperation. In the XIX century and in the years of US-Soviet alliance in WWII the metaphors could evoke positive images of Russia, thus, realizing the strategy of ‘bridging’ or ‘belonging’. The contribution of this study has been to confirm that, whatever metaphorical projections exist in language and culture, historical factors determine choices in any sample of discourse. This could be important for understanding the mechanisms involved in modeling the image of modern Russia in foreign media discourses.

Although several works have addressed the role of data selection to improve transfer learning for various NLP tasks, there is no consensus about its real benefits and, more generally, there is a lack of shared practices on how it can be best applied. We propose a systematic approach aimed at evaluating data selection in scenarios of increasing complexity. Specifically, we compare the case in which source and target tasks are the same while source and target domains are different, against the more challenging scenario where both tasks and domains are different. We run a number of experiments on semantic sequence tagging tasks, which are relatively less investigated in data selection, and conclude that data selection has more benefit on the scenario when the tasks are the same, while in case of different (although related) tasks from distant domains, a combination of data selection and multi-task learning is ineffective for most cases.

Contact-induced linguistic change (CILC) is a dynamic force in synchronic and diachronic linguistics, and it plays a huge part in the external history of many languages. Socially driven, it affects all parts of a language’s structure and lexicon. Language contact is better seen as contact-induced linguistic change, when one language system transmits one of its features to another language system which previously lacked it. It has also been the driving force behind the creation of many new languages—pidgins, creoles, creoloids, mixed languages, and multiethnolects. CILC occurs when a feature from one language system is absorbed into another language system. The article discusses the major aspects of CILC, its informing theory, the linguistic levels at which it operates, and its contributions to English and other languages. It asserts the crucial importance of CILC for sociolinguistic and diachronic studies.

In this essay we summarize the status quaestionis of diachronic linguistic study of Biblical Hebrew as reflected principally in some major publications of the recent several years. We reflect critically on research objectives, perspectives on sources, documentation of variation and change, and periodization issues. We also include a detailed bibliography of relevant works published since our Historical Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew (November 2014).

Indefinites display a great functional variety and they give rise to different pragmatic effects. We focus on free choice indefinites and in particular on the Italian qualsiasi. Our aim is to reconstruct the grammaticalization path of this item and understand how diachronic data might shed some light on existing semantic theories of free choice. We employ corpus-based tools to build a database containing occurrences of qualsiasi from its origin and early forms to its current usage. We show that qualsiasi emerged from a particular unconditional construction and we outline the different stages which led to its grammaticalization. We analyze the compatibility of our diachronic study with formal accounts of free choice inferences, with a focus on Alternative Semantics analyses for indefinite pronouns and so-called grammatical theories of free choice. Our work shows that an integration between formal semantics and historical linguistics is fruitful and worth pursuing.

In the last few decades, researchers have grown much interest in analyzing the structure of the NP in various domains. Dwelling on Quirk et als (1985) framework on NP complexities, this study investigates the NP structure in editorials form the Daily Graphic. Being a diachronic study, nine editorials form 1988, 1998 and 2008 were analysed. The analysis and discussion point to two key findings. First, there has been a gradual increase in the use of Head + PP structures in Ghanaian newspaper editorials. Second, the Determiner+Head has been the most preferred structure of premodification in editorials. These findings have implications for print media discourse, Historical linguistics and for further research.

This book offers a wide-ranging array of case studies on variation and change in Gallo-Romance grammar. Both standard and non-standard Gallo-Romance data have the potential to be of enormous value to studies of morphosyntactic variation and change, yet, as the volume demonstrates, non-standard and comparative Gallo-Romance data has often been lacking in both synchronic and diachronic studies. The introduction sets out the conceptual background to the volume. There follow chapters by leading scholars on a variety of topics in the domains of sentence structure, the verb complex, and word structure. The empirical foundation of the volume is exceptionally rich, drawing on standard and non-standard data from French, Occitan, Francoprovençal, Picard, Wallon, and Norman. This diversity is also reflected in the theoretical and conceptual approaches adopted, which span traditional philology, sociolinguistics, formal morphological and syntactic theory, semantics, and discourse-pragmatics. The volume will thus be an indispensable tool for French and (Gallo-)Romance linguistics as well as for readers interested in grammatical theory, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics.

The article considers the peculiarities of the development of the German language in the Middle Upper German period of the 16th century during the Reformation on the example of Martin Luther's translations of the Bible from Latin into the national German language, which later became the basis of the main characteristics of the modern German language. This scholarly legacy has reviewed Martin Luther's translations of the Bible from Latin into its modern German language and formulated a list of the main features of Luther's translations. The work is done in line with historical linguistics, allows for comparison of facts and papers, considering real documents and works, in this case - the translation of the Bible, as well as to predict the further development of modern German language, based on the experience of linguists. The tasks in this work have been formulated in such a way as to examine and describe the object of research as accurately as possible, namely to get acquainted with the texts of Martin Luther's translations of the Bible, to analyze the main linguistic features of his translations (phonetic/spelling, grammatical, lexical) and to formulate conclusions and further prospects of research provided this opportunity. The theoretical method of research provides this article with a comprehensive and substantiated view of the facts in their diachronic study. With the help of the comparative method in the study of Martin Luther's translations, characteristic features of the modern German language were established and recorded. As you know, Luther has greatly simplified the language and systematized it in his translations to successfully convey the essence of the Bible and its laws to every resident of those times. Comparative historical research has found that the most important changes in Luther's language are fixed in the pronunciation, examples of lexical units from the Middle Upper German language and the language in translations. It was found that these simplifications and features tend to become more relevant in the future and will simplify the German language. Besides language characteristics, the article describes facts from the life of Martin Luther, which cannot be bypassed from the historical point of view.

The Hellenic poetics of Michael Field — the pseudonymous identity of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper — mark something of a departure from the highly politicized lyrics of Webster, Levy and Pfeiffer. More subversive allegories than overt political commentaries, the Hellenic poetics of Bradley and Cooper reflect Michael Field’s interest in drama, rather than activism. Like many of their male contemporaries, Katharine and Edith drew upon the rich resources of Hellenism in order to explore issues of contemporary significance. In 1892, Edith Cooper completed a prose play entitled Old Wine in New Bottles. The play, which was never published, serves as a useful metaphor for Michael Field’s extensive appropriation of ancient Greek literature and myth. Their plays, poems and journal entries are saturated with classical allusions, ancient myths and Hellenic figures. For much of their early career, Michael Field celebrated and venerated the Greek gods with Bacchic enthusiasm. Hellenic subjects also feature heavily in much of their later work, including the volumes Sight and Song, Underneath the Bough, Wild Honey and Noontide Branches. Their identification with ancient Greece was, in fact, not only professional, but personal. The couple’s association with Hellenism was so extensive that Robert Browning, a personal friend and mentor, hailed Bradley and Cooper as ‘my two dear Greek women’.1 Katharine and Edith revelled in the ancient past, to the extent that they had altars to Dionysus built in the garden and the study of their home in Surrey. Yet, their obsession with the ancient past was, of course, conspicuously ‘modern’. One is in fact struck by the very interdisciplinary and intertextual nature of Michael Field’s Hellenism. But which particular Greece, which nineteenth-century vision of Greece, was theirs?

This paper combines Wmatrix with BNCweb to look at the grammar of linguistic metaphors formed by concrete nouns and their derivatives across word classes in order to shed light on learning of polysemous words. The methodology is to search different word classes of such a noun in BNCweb, use the concordances to construct corpus data and upload the data to Wmatrix for semantic domain tagging, choose the self-contained corpus in Wmatrix — British English 2006 — for a reference corpus to do the frequency comparison, then study the resultant key semantic tags as clues to identify the source domains of metaphor. The underlying idea of Cognitive Metaphor Theory, the Great Chain of Being and the semantic makeup of a concept will help with the identification of a metaphor. The case study on duck shows the detailed process and feasibility of the research method. The research results reveal how different meanings of a concrete noun are related by metaphor or metonymy, which facilitates the learning of polysemous words.