Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although language is critical to supporting morality within society, it is not clear how moral language itself evolved. We investigate the evolution of moral semantics, hypothesizing that words evolved to take on moral meanings from concrete experiences through metaphorization. We test this hypothesis by analyzing moral semantic change in words from the Moral Foundations Dictionary and the Historical Thesaurus of English over the past hundreds of years. In contrast with the observation that words become concrete over time, we demonstrate that moral words in the English lexicon undergo concrete-to-abstract shifts, reflecting systematic metaphorical mappings to the moral domain. Our results provide large-scale evidence for the role of metaphor in the historical development of the English moral lexicon.