A Cognitive Linguistic Study of the Semantic Evolution of Salty in American English

Abstract

Taste words provide an important window into the interaction among embodied experience, cognitive mechanisms, and sociocultural factors in semantic change. From a cognitive linguistic perspective, this study investigates the major senses, diachronic relationships, and cognitive motivations of the adjective salty in American English. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) serves as the primary data source, supplemented by evidence from historical dictionaries. All instances of salty returned under the specified search conditions were collected and examined after proper names, duplicates, OCR errors, and contextually indeterminate cases had been excluded. The results show that the central meaning of salty is “containing salt” or “having a salty taste.” On this basis, the word has developed meanings associated with marine and coastal environments, sailors and maritime life, evaluations of speech and style, personal character and behavior, and emotional states such as annoyance, dissatisfaction, and resentment. These senses do not constitute a simple sequence in which one meaning replaces another; rather, they form a radial polysemy network in which older and newer senses coexist. The marine-environment sense is metonymically extended to sailors and their stereotypical characteristics, while the perceptual intensity of taste motivates metaphorical descriptions of vivid, pungent, blunt, or offensive language. Recurrent contextual inference from speech and behavioral evaluation further contributes to the conventionalization of the emotional sense. The semantic evolution of salty is therefore jointly motivated by embodied experience, conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, pragmatic inference, and sociocultural transmission.