Entrenchment as onomasiological salience
Dirk Geeraerts, KU Leuven
The notion of onomasiological salience specifies entrenchment as the relative frequency of competing expressions. This talks argues that such an onomasiological definition of entrenchment is necessary to avoid some of the problems inherent in Langacker's initial definition of entrenchment ( 1987: 59-60 ). The talk introduces the main types of onomasiological salience: formal, conceptual, and typological. It offers an overview of the (predominantly lexical) research in these three areas, and explores how an onomasiological perspective contributes to the study of entrenchment at large.