The semantic profiles of Old Preterite-present verbs of cognition: witan and cunnan

Authors:

• Agnieszka Elżbieta Wawrzyniak

Abstract

The present paper offers a historical account of the semantic profiles of Old English verbs of cognition, namely of witan and of cunnan with a particular attention paid to the emergence of the epistemic senses in witan and the lack of epistemicity in cunnan. The contexts for the analysis of the OE verbs were taken from The Toronto Corpus. Moreover, the paper attempts to analyse the variety of concepts evolving on the path to epistemicity in witan and to account for the factors which precluded the emergence of such senses in cunnan. The present study aims to show that by relying solely on metaphor itself, the process of the emergence of epistemicity would be distorted. Instead, the paper offers the approach of a gradual shift via metonymy and metaphor in the light of the grammaticalization process.