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The English moral lexicon evolved from concrete experiences to abstract meanings, driven by metaphorical shifts. This study reveals how words gain moral significance over centuries.

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Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science
  • Psychology

Background:

  • Morality is fundamental to social interactions and cognition.
  • The moral lexicon facilitates communication of moral concepts.
  • The historical formation of the moral lexicon remains an open question.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the origins and evolution of the English moral lexicon.
  • To test the hypothesis that moral meanings emerge from concrete experiences.
  • To analyze semantic changes in moral vocabulary over time.

Main Methods:

  • Analysis of semantic change and word formation for over 800 words.
  • Utilized the English Moral Foundations Dictionary and Historical Thesaurus of English.
  • Examined historical text corpora and dictionaries spanning centuries.

Main Results:

  • Discovered concrete-to-abstract semantic shifts as words acquired moral meaning.
  • Observed that compound moral words often derive from concrete-to-abstract shifts in their constituents.
  • Found this derivational property to be more prominent in moral words than other compound words.

Conclusions:

  • The evolution of the moral lexicon is shaped by systematic metaphorical mappings from concrete to abstract domains.
  • Metaphor plays a significant role in the historical development of moral language.
  • Provides large-scale evidence for metaphor's influence on moral lexicon formation.