Lexemes and Collocations Relating to Photography and Film Technology : A Diachronic Corpus-based Analysis

The invention of photography and film necessitated the coining of lexemes and phrases to describe various aspects of these new phenomena which gradually took on new meanings and became polysemous: for example, the film term flashback came to be used in the context of PTSD and hallucinogenic drugs. As this thesis argues, many of these semantic changes were motivated by conceptual metaphors as first described by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), meaning that, as these expressions became more entrenched, they started being used to understand other concepts. That is, the affordances of these new technologies begin to shape the way people perceive and conceptualize the world, which comes to the surface in the innovative ways they speak 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), this thesis suggests and groups six common conceptual metaphors behind novel uses of 14 lexemes and phrases and proposes a set of mappings encompassing them all. The chronology of these changes corresponds to the order of semantic change motivated by conceptual metaphors described by Traugott (1982, 1985), Traugott and Dasher (1987, 2001), and Sweetser (1983, 1984, 1990), namely, shifts from physical domain verbs to mental state verbs, and from mental state to speech act meanings. Furthermore, as some lexemes take on the function of discourse markers, their meaning traces the path from the propositional to the discourse-structuring domain, and finally to the expressive domain, as proposed by Traugott (1982). The polysemy found in the 14 expressions at hand may thus be explained as a result of new conceptual metaphors using photography and film as their source domains, and of the types of shifts typical of semantic change. However, despite their prevalence, many of these senses are not listed by Cambridge English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster.