On extralinguistic motivation behind food-specific metaphorical transfers in the history of English

The aim of this paper is to throw some light on the nature of metaphorical transfers of En­glish food names that historically have been employed in reference to human beings, their features, theirbody parts, sexuality and other characteristics of human existence. As we will attempt to show, the motivation behind the rise of foodsemic metaphors is most frequently of purely extralinguistic nature. The combined synchronic and diachronic perspectives, often referred to as panchronic perspective, allow us to show that metaphorical shifts in lexical items from the macrocategory foodstuffs are not random but instead reflect the crucial influence of conceptual dimensions such as taste, colour, shape, and consistency. The given dimensions are a conceptual reflection of extralinguistic objects which are of certain colour or transparency, taste or its lack, as well as consistency. Our analysis draws on the model proposed by Kleparski and related studies that trace metaphorical shifts in the history of English across diverse social and regional contexts.