Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What forces have shaped the evolution of the lexicon? Lan-guages evolve under the pressure of having to communicatean unbounded set of ideas using a finite set of linguistic struc-tures. This suggests why the transmission of ideas should becompressed such that one word will develop multiple senses.Previous theory also suggests how a word might develop newsenses: Abstract concepts may be construed in terms of moreconcrete concepts. Here, we bring these two perspectives to-gether to examine metaphorical extensions of English wordmeanings over the past millennium, analyzing how sensesfrom a source domain are extended to new ones in a target do-main. Using empirical and computational methods, we foundthat metaphorical mappings are highly systematic and can beexplained in terms of a compact set of variables. Our workshows how metaphor can provide a cognitive device for com-pressing emerging ideas into an existing lexicon.