In one form or another, the phenomena associated with "meaning transfer" have become central issues in a lot of recent work on semantics. Speaking very roughly, we can partition approaches to the phenomenon along two dimensions, which yield four basic points of departure. In the first two, people have considered transfer in basically semantic or linguistic terms. Some have concentrated on what we might call the paradigmatic aspects of transfer, focusing on the productive lexical processes that map semantic features into features - - for example, the "grinding" rule that applies to turn the names of animals into mass.
