In this chapter, I argue that motivation is an indispensable theoretical tool for both the description and the explanation of language structure and use. Language-internal and/or language-external factors (motivational sources) may have an impact on the form, meaning, and/or pragmatic function of simple or complex linguistic signs (motivational target). It is important to note that the relationship between a motivational source and its target is nondeterministic, i.e. nonpredictable: a given source does not necessarily result in a predetermined target. Language-internal motivation manifests itself e.g. in the plural formation of loanwords. Language-external motivational sources include parameters such as experience, perception (e.g figure-ground organization), embodiment, and sociocultural models. The workings of these motivational forces on lexicogrammatical structure are illustrated with mostly English-language examples.

The chapter suggests that an onomasiological perspective on the explanation of changes of word meaning is more promising than the customary semasiological perspective. It identifies the restrictions on a semasiological point of view, explores the arguments in favor of an onomasiological turn, and systematically charts the various factors that could play an explanatory role in such a perspective. At the same time, it points out that an onomasiological take on diachronic semantic change is complicated by the number and the variety of the factors that interact as causes of or influences on onomasiological change.

This chapter details the many wonderful motivations for metaphor. I describe several constraints on why metaphor arises in specific forms in various communicative forums, many of which are rooted in nonlinguistic experience (e.g. embodied sensations, the desire to make sense of interruptions in our pursuit of various life goals). But these nonlinguistic motivations for metaphor are typically tied to people’s particular communicative needs (e.g. the desire to demonstrate, and not just describe, people’s thoughts). My argument is that there are multiple, interacting, motivations for the emergence of metaphor, in specific linguistic forms, all of which need to be explicitly acknowledged in a comprehensive theory of metaphorical thought, language, and experience.

Based on the observation that areas of the lexicon in English display different ‘degrees of lexicalization’ (Kay et al. 2009) which can change over time, this paper investigates asymmetries in the lexical variation shown by conceptual antonym pairs. Using data from the online Historical Thesaurus of English (HT), it takes an onomasiological approach, tracing how near-synonym sets expand, contract, and reorganize over time, and asks why one member of an antonym pair may show greater lexical variation than the other (e.g. fast vs slow, sharp vs blunt). In line with Geeraerts et al. (2024), the analysis considers formal and semantic factors, alongside conceptual differences and possible markedness effects, to identify possible motivations for these diachronic asymmetries.

The three major ‘happy’ adjectives in English are researched ( ēadig, (ge)sælig , happy) in terms of their historical developments having been motivated panchronically with specific cognitive inferences. It is assumed that language constitutes a record of the collective experience of linguistic communities, thus its history reflects changing states of social consciousness and attests to the cognitive tensions encoded in the relationship between linguistic form and linguistic content. It is concluded that the reason why the original Old English forms, i.e. ēadig and (ge)sælig , happened to be replaced with happy has to do with that they stopped corresponding to the conceptualization of being happy that they once matched up with, happiness embracing abundance brought about by a fortunate coincidence, an arising opportunity, a lucky chance.

Unlike most other Germanic languages, English lost the pluperfect construction with the auxiliary be + Past Participle. The occurrences of habban with intransitive verbs are found in Old English when some kind of accomplishment is expressed. In Early Middle English one can observe interesting manuscript variation here. From Late Middle English onwards ben was becoming recessive for all intransitives. The genetic motivation for this change might have been due to the following factors: formally perfect forms gradually marking aspect rather than tense, the heavy functional load of ben and the obligatory use of haven in perfect forms expressing counterfactuality. The study is based on the texts from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus and the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

This chapter investigates the motivation behind selected semantic extensions of the English noun craft that co-occur with shifts across four nominal categories: count, mass, zero plural, and plurale tantum. Drawing on diachronic lexicographic evidence, primarily from the Oxford English Dictionary, it reconstructs pathways of sense extension and the accompanying changes in grammatical properties. The analysis adopts the Cognitive Grammar approach to polysemy and Panther’s model of linguistic motivation. The chapter shows that these developments are not arbitrary; rather, they reflect interacting motivations rooted in historically situated cultural practices, perceptual experience, conceptualization, and language-internal tendencies.

The cognitive-oriented pluri-causal and trans-causal model of creole genesis (Corum, 2021: 198–199) accounts for the process in terms of the following three elements: (1) embodied universal patterns of human imaginative reasoning; (2) contact with diverse but typologically similar indigenous languages; (3) contact with diverse but typologically similar European languages. Building on this basis, the chapter analyzes forms of language-external motivation for semantic extensions of body part terms in Tok Pisin, a creole used in Papua New Guinea. It argues that the motivation for the extensions involves (1) the imaginative processes of metonymy, metaphor, and metaphor-metonymy interaction; (2) universal and culture-specific concepts present in the creole’s Melanesian substrate, the English superstrate, or the joint influence of both these inputs.

Lexical blending has attracted growing scholarly attention, particularly in English, with research addressing its definition, structural and semantic properties, degree of entrenchment, and role in prosodic morphology. Despite some cross-linguistic work, Romanian lexical blending remains relatively underexplored. Vasileanu and Niculescu-Gorpin (2022) provide the first fully corpus-based analysis of Romanian blends, focusing on their etymological, structural, phonological, semantic, and stylistic features. Building on but extending this work, the present study adopts both quantitative and qualitative approaches, analyzing a corpus of 120 contemporary Romanian blends drawn from literature and online sources. Drawing on cognitive modeling (Peña 2022), it explains the motivation behind blend formation and demonstrates their systematic nature through cognitive operations such as parametrization, contrast, reduction, and expansion.

The aim of this chapter is to compare animal death metaphors found in English and Polish online pet memorials. Pet loss can be a difficult experience for owners who have had a special relationship with the animal and treated it similarly to human relatives or friends (Lyons et al. 2022). To cope with death, we often use conceptual metaphors, which, on the one hand, allow us to address this taboo subject and, on the other, shape our conceptualization of the abstract reality of dying (Allan & Burridge 1991). This chapter investigates the types of source domains as well as the most and least common metaphorical mappings that motivate the conceptualization of pet death in English and Polish.

Music discourse is a complex form of discourse, largely due to its markedly metaphorical character. This chapter focuses on one recurrent type of such figurative language: the conceptualizations from the painting domain used to describe diverse facets in the musical domain. The study is corpus-assisted and draws on texts from websites addressed to musicians and others from the broadly defined music industry. Grounded in cognitive linguistics, the study aims to reconstruct the major types of painting-based conceptualizations to account for these people’s motivation to use that language. The analysis shows that these conceptualizations are shaped by a range of diverse motivational factors, including conceptual-pragmatic, as well as perceptual, embodied, affective, cultural, and community-specific communicative factors.

This chapter discusses motivatedness of visual representations in comics from the perspective of visual language theory (Cohn 2013a). In line with the theoretical orientation of the entire volume, the cognitive-linguistic approach to motivation in language (Panther 2013, 2021; Radden & Panther 2004; Panther & Radden 2011) was adopted as the theoretical perspective framing this discussion. Due to the chapter’s limited size, an exhaustive discussion of motivation in the visual language of comics is impossible. Instead, this chapter is meant to provide a general survey of how prominent visual representations used in comics are motivated.

In this chapter, I argue that motivation is an indispensable theoretical tool for both the description and the explanation of language structure and use. Language-internal and/or language-external factors (motivational sources) may have an impact on the form, meaning, and/or pragmatic function of simple or complex linguistic signs (motivational target). It is important to note that the relationship between a motivational source and its target is nondeterministic, i.e. nonpredictable: a given source does not necessarily result in a predetermined target. Language-internal motivation manifests itself e.g. in the plural formation of loanwords. Language-external motivational sources include parameters such as experience, perception (e.g figure-ground organization), embodiment, and sociocultural models. The workings of these motivational forces on lexicogrammatical structure are illustrated with mostly English-language examples.

The chapter suggests that an onomasiological perspective on the explanation of changes of word meaning is more promising than the customary semasiological perspective. It identifies the restrictions on a semasiological point of view, explores the arguments in favor of an onomasiological turn, and systematically charts the various factors that could play an explanatory role in such a perspective. At the same time, it points out that an onomasiological take on diachronic semantic change is complicated by the number and the variety of the factors that interact as causes of or influences on onomasiological change.

This chapter details the many wonderful motivations for metaphor. I describe several constraints on why metaphor arises in specific forms in various communicative forums, many of which are rooted in nonlinguistic experience (e.g. embodied sensations, the desire to make sense of interruptions in our pursuit of various life goals). But these nonlinguistic motivations for metaphor are typically tied to people’s particular communicative needs (e.g. the desire to demonstrate, and not just describe, people’s thoughts). My argument is that there are multiple, interacting, motivations for the emergence of metaphor, in specific linguistic forms, all of which need to be explicitly acknowledged in a comprehensive theory of metaphorical thought, language, and experience.

Based on the observation that areas of the lexicon in English display different ‘degrees of lexicalization’ (Kay et al. 2009) which can change over time, this paper investigates asymmetries in the lexical variation shown by conceptual antonym pairs. Using data from the online Historical Thesaurus of English (HT), it takes an onomasiological approach, tracing how near-synonym sets expand, contract, and reorganize over time, and asks why one member of an antonym pair may show greater lexical variation than the other (e.g. fast vs slow, sharp vs blunt). In line with Geeraerts et al. (2024), the analysis considers formal and semantic factors, alongside conceptual differences and possible markedness effects, to identify possible motivations for these diachronic asymmetries.

The three major ‘happy’ adjectives in English are researched ( ēadig, (ge)sælig , happy) in terms of their historical developments having been motivated panchronically with specific cognitive inferences. It is assumed that language constitutes a record of the collective experience of linguistic communities, thus its history reflects changing states of social consciousness and attests to the cognitive tensions encoded in the relationship between linguistic form and linguistic content. It is concluded that the reason why the original Old English forms, i.e. ēadig and (ge)sælig , happened to be replaced with happy has to do with that they stopped corresponding to the conceptualization of being happy that they once matched up with, happiness embracing abundance brought about by a fortunate coincidence, an arising opportunity, a lucky chance.

Unlike most other Germanic languages, English lost the pluperfect construction with the auxiliary be + Past Participle. The occurrences of habban with intransitive verbs are found in Old English when some kind of accomplishment is expressed. In Early Middle English one can observe interesting manuscript variation here. From Late Middle English onwards ben was becoming recessive for all intransitives. The genetic motivation for this change might have been due to the following factors: formally perfect forms gradually marking aspect rather than tense, the heavy functional load of ben and the obligatory use of haven in perfect forms expressing counterfactuality. The study is based on the texts from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus and the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

This chapter investigates the motivation behind selected semantic extensions of the English noun craft that co-occur with shifts across four nominal categories: count, mass, zero plural, and plurale tantum. Drawing on diachronic lexicographic evidence, primarily from the Oxford English Dictionary, it reconstructs pathways of sense extension and the accompanying changes in grammatical properties. The analysis adopts the Cognitive Grammar approach to polysemy and Panther’s model of linguistic motivation. The chapter shows that these developments are not arbitrary; rather, they reflect interacting motivations rooted in historically situated cultural practices, perceptual experience, conceptualization, and language-internal tendencies.

The cognitive-oriented pluri-causal and trans-causal model of creole genesis (Corum, 2021: 198–199) accounts for the process in terms of the following three elements: (1) embodied universal patterns of human imaginative reasoning; (2) contact with diverse but typologically similar indigenous languages; (3) contact with diverse but typologically similar European languages. Building on this basis, the chapter analyzes forms of language-external motivation for semantic extensions of body part terms in Tok Pisin, a creole used in Papua New Guinea. It argues that the motivation for the extensions involves (1) the imaginative processes of metonymy, metaphor, and metaphor-metonymy interaction; (2) universal and culture-specific concepts present in the creole’s Melanesian substrate, the English superstrate, or the joint influence of both these inputs.

Lexical blending has attracted growing scholarly attention, particularly in English, with research addressing its definition, structural and semantic properties, degree of entrenchment, and role in prosodic morphology. Despite some cross-linguistic work, Romanian lexical blending remains relatively underexplored. Vasileanu and Niculescu-Gorpin (2022) provide the first fully corpus-based analysis of Romanian blends, focusing on their etymological, structural, phonological, semantic, and stylistic features. Building on but extending this work, the present study adopts both quantitative and qualitative approaches, analyzing a corpus of 120 contemporary Romanian blends drawn from literature and online sources. Drawing on cognitive modeling (Peña 2022), it explains the motivation behind blend formation and demonstrates their systematic nature through cognitive operations such as parametrization, contrast, reduction, and expansion.

The aim of this chapter is to compare animal death metaphors found in English and Polish online pet memorials. Pet loss can be a difficult experience for owners who have had a special relationship with the animal and treated it similarly to human relatives or friends (Lyons et al. 2022). To cope with death, we often use conceptual metaphors, which, on the one hand, allow us to address this taboo subject and, on the other, shape our conceptualization of the abstract reality of dying (Allan & Burridge 1991). This chapter investigates the types of source domains as well as the most and least common metaphorical mappings that motivate the conceptualization of pet death in English and Polish.

Music discourse is a complex form of discourse, largely due to its markedly metaphorical character. This chapter focuses on one recurrent type of such figurative language: the conceptualizations from the painting domain used to describe diverse facets in the musical domain. The study is corpus-assisted and draws on texts from websites addressed to musicians and others from the broadly defined music industry. Grounded in cognitive linguistics, the study aims to reconstruct the major types of painting-based conceptualizations to account for these people’s motivation to use that language. The analysis shows that these conceptualizations are shaped by a range of diverse motivational factors, including conceptual-pragmatic, as well as perceptual, embodied, affective, cultural, and community-specific communicative factors.

This chapter discusses motivatedness of visual representations in comics from the perspective of visual language theory (Cohn 2013a). In line with the theoretical orientation of the entire volume, the cognitive-linguistic approach to motivation in language (Panther 2013, 2021; Radden & Panther 2004; Panther & Radden 2011) was adopted as the theoretical perspective framing this discussion. Due to the chapter’s limited size, an exhaustive discussion of motivation in the visual language of comics is impossible. Instead, this chapter is meant to provide a general survey of how prominent visual representations used in comics are motivated.