A corpus-based analysis of semantic change of lexemes and expressions from the domain of photography and film

The invention of photography and film necessitated the coining of new lexemes and expressions which over time gradually took on new meanings and spread to other domains. Many of these semantic changes were motivated by conceptual metaphors, as proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), and as the expressions became more entrenched, they started to be used in understanding other concepts. The advantages of the new technologies began to influence the way people perceived and conceptualized the world, which was in turn reflected in the innovative ways they spoke about it. Based on semantic and syntactic data retrieved from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the paper first presents the four common conceptual metaphors which gave rise to six new ones that underlie the novel uses of 14 lexemes and expressions from the domain of photography and film technology. Through semantic change these lexemes and expressions all acquired metaphorical meanings; some became part of collocations while others became idioms. The chronology of these changes corresponds to the order of semantic change motivated by conceptual metaphors as described by Traugott (1982, 1985), Traugott and Dasher (1987, 2001), and Sweetser (1983, 1984, 1990), namely, the shift from the physical domain to mental states, from mental states to speech acts, and sometimes to discourse markers. The newly acquired meanings of the 14 expressions at hand may thus be viewed as the result of new conceptual metaphors that have photography and film as their source domains, thus providing further empirical evidence for the already established types of shifts typical of semantic change. Curiously enough and despite their prevalence, many of these senses are not listed in online versions of some of the major contemporary dictionaries of the English language.