THE DYNAMICS OF MEANING: EXPLORATIONS IN THE CONCEPTUAL DOMAIN OF EARTH.

Since the earliest attempts to describe language in works such as Plato's "Cratylus", the study of words as basic units of linguistic expression has occupied an important position in linguistic inquiry. The great number and diversity of descriptive models of lexical semantics is the result of disagreements on how to explicate the meanings of words, how to describe the relationships between them and, indeed, disagreements as to what constitutes a word. The present work is a contribution to this discussion in that it proposes an account of the conceptual domain associated with the English lexeme 'earth'. The author addresses the methodological and epistemological issues underlying the compiex nature of the semantics of a word as a dynamic unit. In doing so, he makes use of the insights of cognitive linguistics and especially Cognitive Grammar as developed by Ronald Langacker. The analysis developed in this volume is based on two types of contemporary British prose: literary (the novels of Martin Amis) and journalistic (the 1995 collection of The Times and The Sunday Times). Although the material is restricted to British written language, it appears to be sufficiently rich to reveal the dynamicity of lexical meaning. The study is divided into two parts: a theoretical part, consisting of chapters I and II, and an analytic part, consisting of chapters III to V; the Appendix presents further observations.