Kathryn Allan: A historical linguistic perspective on a metaphorical source: The vocabulary of Speed

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The semantic field of Speed seems to be a rather problematic one for our understanding of metaphorical sources. speed is recognised as the source of several metaphors, including the generic-level conceptual metaphor INTENSITY IS SPEED (e.g. Kovecses 2010: 292), INTELLIGENCE IS SPEED (Allan 2008), and LICENTIOUSNESS IS SPEED (Mapping Metaphor). Typically, metaphorical sources are thought to relate to concrete concepts grounded in physical experiences, with the source meaning of a linguistic metaphor assumed to be more ‘basic’ (e.g Knowles and Moon 2006: 16-17), ‘primary’ (e.g. Kovecses 2005: 139), and historically older (e.g. Steen et al. 2010: 35). However, almost all of the most central current terms relating to Speed have earlier meanings, and many of these do not seem to relate to typical source concepts: for example, slow is first attested with the meaning ‘stupid’; quick has the earliest meaning ‘alive’; and speedy probably meant something like ‘successful, prosperous’ before it was used of fast physical motion. Using data from the Historical Thesaurus of English and the Oxford English Dictionary, this paper considers the way that the semantic field of Speed changes through time, and what it might tell us about the nature of metaphorical sources.