A Festschrift for Minoji Akimoto
This collection reflects Minoji Akimoto's concern with studies of change in English that are theoretically-informed, but founded on substantial bodies of data. Some of the contributors focus on individual texts and text-types, among them literature and journalism, others on specific periods, from Old English to the nineteenth century, but the majority trace a linguistic process - such as negation, passivisation, complementation or grammaticalisation - through the history of English. While several papers take a fresh look at manuscript evidence, the harnessing of wideranging electronic corpora is a recurring feature methodologically. The linguistic fields treated include word semantics, stylistics, orthography, word-order, pragmatics and lexicography. The volume also contains a bibliography of Professor Akimoto's writings and an index of linguistic terms.
Meiko Matsumoto Semantic Shifts in the Development of Color Terms in English
1. Introduction The color terms green and blue have undergone interesting
semantic shifts in the course of their development. In discussing the use of these
terms in the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga (1954 [1924]: 271) argues that "the
relative rarity of blue and of green must not be simply ascribed to an aesthetic
predilection. [. . .] They were the special colours of love. Blue signified fidelity;
green, amorous ...