초록 열기/닫기 버튼
The objectives of this paper are to investigate the lexical strength of visual terms with respect to their extent of semantic extension, token frequency, extension via idiomaticization, and frequency of the idioms derived from such visual terms through diverse data sources. It also aims to explore the conceptual motivations and semantic change mechanisms that enabled the extension of the lexical meanings. The analysis reveals a number of points of theoretical import. First, the visual terms extend their lexical meanings via metonymization. Second, the lexical uses far exceed the idiom usage. Third, the perception references outweigh the body-part references. Fourth, the extension patterns in English are largely consonant with the developmental patterns that have been presented in the literature on crosslinguistic and individual-language phenomena.
