Onomasiology - State of The Art

State of The Art

Onomasiology was initiated already in the late 19th century, but it didn’t receive its name until 1902, when the Austrian linguist Adolf Zauner published his study on the body-part terminology in Romance languages. And it was in Romance linguistics that the most important onomasiological works were written. Early linguists were basically interested in the etymology (i.e. the word-history) of the various expressions for a concept which was mostly a clearly defined, unchangeable concrete object or action. Later the Austrian linguists Rudolf Meringer and Hugo Schuchardt started the “Wörter und Sachen” movement, which emphasized that every study of a word needed to include the study of the object it denotes. It was also Schuchardt who underlined that the etymologist/onomasiologist, when tracing back the history of a word, needs to respect both the “dame phonétique” (prove the regularity of sound changes or explain irregularities) and the “dame sémantique” (justify semantic changes). Another branch that developed from onomasiology and, at the same time, enriched it in turn was linguistic geography (areal linguistics), since it provided onomasiologists with valuable linguistic atlases. The first ones are the ALF (Atlas Linguistique de la France) by Jules Gilliéron (1902–20), the AIS (Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz) by Karl Jaberg and Jakob Jud (1928–1940), the DSA (Deutscher Sprachatlas) by Ferdinand Wrede et al. (1927–1956). These atlases include maps that show the corresponding names for a concept in different regions as they were gathered in interviews with dialect speakers (mostly old rural males) by means of a questionnaire. Concerning English linguistics, onomasiology as well as linguistic geography has been playing only a minor role (the first linguistic atlas for the US was initiated by Hans Kurath, the first one for the UK by Eugen Dieth. ). In 1931 the German linguist Jost Trier introduced a new method in his book Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes which is known as the lexical field theory. According to Trier, lexical changes must always be seen, apart from the traditional aspects, in connection with the changes within a given word-field. After World War II only few studies on onomasiological theory have been carried out (e.g. by Cecil H. Brown, Stanley R. Witkowski, Brent Berlin). But onomasiology has recently seen new light with the works of Dirk Geeraerts, Andreas Blank, Peter Koch and the periodical Onomasiology Online, which is published at the Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt by Joachim Grzega, Alfred Bammesberger and Marion Schöner. A recent representative of synchronic onomasiology (with a focus on word-formation processes) is Pavol Stekauer.