Introduction

[Chungmin Lee]

Dear Prof. Elizabeth Traugott,
Thank you for telling us your research interests. Your view of historical
changes seems reasonable. I am also interested in subjectification and so
on. My recent paper on (Korean) psych-predicates include some facts of
subjectification. I attach it in MS-Word rtf file but please tell me if your
system cannot open it. It will appear in Abraham and Kulikov (eds)
Transitivity and TAM: Festschrift for Vladimir Nedjalkov, John Benjamins.
Several years ago, I might have sent a paper on the Korean conditional,
after your volume appeared. I hope to go into your website. ---With regards,
---Chungmin (Lee)  

At 05:34 ¿ÀÈÄ 99-01-21 -0800, you wrote:
> I have just joined DISCOURS.
>
> Currently I am refining the Invited Inferencing Theory of
> Semantic Change (IITSC). This combines cognitive linguistics with
> communication-based historical discourse analysis and historical
> pragmatics. The basic claim is that semantic change arises through
> strategic negotiation by speakers/writers. Speakers/writers try out
> new uses exploiting available implicatures.  If the innovative use
> succeeds, the addressee/reader will interpret the intention correctly,
> and possibly experiment in similar ways, thus replicating and
> spreading the change. The most important mechanism in semantic
> change is subjectification, the process whereby meanings of individual
> lexemes come over time to encode or externalize the speaker/writer's
> perspective on what is being said; subjectification is an overarching
> mechanism, of which metonymic and metaphorical processes are
> sub-mechanisms. The data I use are corpora of historical materials,
> mainly in the history of English, and the domains of special
> current interest are modals, discourse markers, and speech act
> verbs.
>
> I also teach undergraduate courses on doctor-patient communication,
> and on language and law.
>
> I look forward to the discussion on this list.
>
> Elizabeth C. Traugott
> Department of Linguistics
> Stanford University
> http://www.stanford.edu/~traugott/traugott.html
>