Construal operations in semantic change: the case of abstract nouns

Norwegian anledning – formed in accordance with German Anleitung ‘cause’
(orig. ‘guidance’) 9 – shows, cross-linguistically, the same “lexical intraference”
(with a term borrowed from Croft 2000) as tillfälle. In Modern Swedish the
central meaning is ‘reason’ whereas in Norwegian the central meaning is
‘opportunity’. Thus a possible explanation of this cross-linguistic polysemy is
that ‘opportunity’ is derived from ‘reason’ – which meaning is present also in
Norwegian – by way of interpreting the event-structure (presupposed by ‘cause’)
in a virtual setting. This derivation will thus be a parallel to the semantic
development of tillfälle.
2.2. Mening ‘opinion’
The noun mening is derived from the verb mena ‘(to) mean; think’, and one of
the salient synchronic meanings is ‘view, opinion’, as in:
(10) Enligt min mening …
according.to my view ….
According to my view …
The schematic structure underlying the more specific lexical meaning of the
noun presupposes an elaborated variant of the schematic model of an action
chain (Langacker 1991: 283). As the profiled entity – LM1, in Fig. 5 – is
interpreted within the event frame of a communication situation, the Trajector
(TR) matches the sender whereas LM2 corresponds to the addressee. LM1 is
equal to the “message” – here specified as the “opinion” of the TR – transferred
from TR to LM2.
9
Germ. Anleitung in turn is derived from the verb anleiten ‘(to) guide’ (composed of an ‘to’
and leiden ‘(to) lead’). The cause-sense – actually: “what has led to something” – thus
seems to be a natural extension of the concrete sense of the verb.
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