Re: A small discovery...

Padraic Brown to Christophe:
>Semantic shift can be quite hard. I think you have to know a
>lot about the culture of a language before this comes easy.>
Two interesting refs. for Christophe in this regard:  the "Que sais-je"
series had a volume on Semantique, perhaps still in print.  And a quite
exhaustive though somewhat old-fashioned treatment (hence readable), Stephen
Ullmann "Meaning and Change of Meaning".  Both these date from the 60s.
It's quite possible there's a French trans. of Ullmann's book, originally
written IIRC in German.