Semantic Extension, Subjectification, and Verbalization

Book excerpt: Mika Shindo's Semantic Extension, Subjectification, and Verbalization focuses on semantic extensions of sensory adjectives originating in perception. The aims of this book are to provide systematic accounts of semantic extensions of sensory adjectives from a cognitive perspective, and to document the validity of an empirical approach, using panchronic and corpus-based methods. This cognitive and usage-based empirical study uncovers cognitive mechanisms underlying linguistic phenomena, since expressions related to perception originally describe the most fundamental human experiences that are frequently utilized for conceptualizing abstract entities, and adjectives especially reflect human construals of situations. This study reveals that each word's meanings extend in a manner peculiarly restricted by its original cognitive characteristics, firmly rooted in everyday bodily experiences, and that this crucially influences its syntactic structures as well. At the same time, it is a ground-breaking demonstration of the power of computerized corpus research.