Краткий курс лекций по лексикологии английского языка для студентов неязыковых вузов. Москалёва Е.В. - 70 стр.

                   To transfer from a concrete meaning to an abstract one is
            most frequent, e.g. ‘ready’ (a derivative from the verb ‘ridan’-
            ‘ride’) meant ‘prepared for a ride’, now its meaning is ‘prepared
            for anything’. ‘Journey’ was borrowed from French with the
            meaning ‘one day trip’, now it means ‘a trip of any duration’.
                   All auxiliary verbs are cases of generalization of their
            lexical meaning, because they developed a grammatical meaning:
            ‘have’, ‘be’, ‘do’, ‘shall’, ‘will’ when used as auxiliary verbs are
            devoid of their lexical meaning which they have when used as
            notional verbs or modal verbs, e.g. cf. ‘I have several books by
            this writer’ and ‘I have read some books by this author’. In the
            first sentence the verb ‘have’ has the meaning ‘possess’, in the
            second sentence it has no lexical meaning, its grammatical
            meaning is to form Present Perfect.
                   Metaphor is a transfer of meaning on the basis of
            comparison. Herman Paul points out that metaphor can be based
            on different types of similarity:
                   1) similarity of shape, e.g. head (of a cabbage),
            bottleneck, teeth (of a saw, a comb);
                   2) similarity of position, e.g. foot ( of a page, of a
            mountain), head ( of a procession);
                   3) similarity of function, behaviour e.g. a whip (an
            official in the British Parliament whose duty is to see that
            members were present at the voting);
                   4) similarity of colour, e.g. orange, hazel, chestnut etc.
                   In some cases we have a complex similarity, e.g. the leg of a
            table has a similarity to human leg in its shape, position and
            function.
                   Many metaphors are based on parts of human body, e.g. an
            eye of a needle, arms and mouth of a river, head of an army.
                   A special type of metaphor is when Proper names become
            common nouns, e.g. philistine – a mercenary person, vandals –
            destructive people, a Don Juan – a lover of many women etc.
                   Metonymy is a transfer of the meaning on the basis of
            contiguity. There are different types of metonymy:



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