DefinePK

Abstract

The speakers of any language, even if at a small extent, concur to change the lexicon, which they have inherited as a whole. They are driven to do that by the necessity of naming something new or optimizing the onomasiological salience of already existing words, with a continuous changing in the way they express concepts. In order to avoid an overloading of the memory system, they are encouraged to recycle what is already existent in the lexicon. Through a small set of associative strategies, people relate a concept which has already been verbalized, with another one which has to be verbalized, producing lexical changes. Over time, however, the conceptual motivation which originated a particular designation becomes obscure to speakers. Large scale lexical surveys aid us in discovering recurrent schemas of designating a concept and recovering the relevant motivation for each designation, i.e. its ‘iconym’ (the Engl. term iconym has been currently utilized, e.g., by Joachim Grzega in his contributions to Onomasiology Online).