The ups and downs of the Great Chain of Being: the case of canine zoosemy in the history of English

Cognitive semanticists argue that since language is systematically grounded in human cognition, the phenomenon of semantic change is to be viewed as a cognitively motivated process explicable in terms of metaphor, metonymy and other figurative language use. Indeed, such cognitive mechanisms as analogy and association are proved to be playing a crucial role in the emergence of novel meanings in that speakers tend to modify conventional meanings by resorting to various cognitive processes in order to meet changing communicative and cognitive demands.