 On the methodological side, the key features of the approach to word meaning introduced by historical-philological semantics can be summarized as follows. First, it had a diachronic and pragmatic orientation. That is, it was primarily concerned with the historical evolution of word meaning rather than with word meaning statically understood, and attributed great importance to the contextual flexibility of word meaning. Witness Paul’s (1920 [1880]) distinction between usuelle Bedeutung and okkasionelle Bedeutung, or Bréal’s (1924 [1897]) account of polysemy as a byproduct of semantic change. Second, it looked at word meaning primarily as a psychological phenomenon. It assumed that the semantic properties of words should be defined in mentalistic terms (i.e., words signify “concepts” or “ideas” in a broad sense), and that the dynamics of sense modulation, extension, and contraction that underlie lexical change correspond to broader patterns of conceptual activity in the human mind. Interestingly, while the classical rhetorical tradition had conceived of tropes as marginal linguistic phenomena whose investigation, albeit important, was primarily motivated by stylistic concerns, for historical-philological semantics the psychological mechanisms underlying the production and the comprehension of figures of speech were part of the ordinary life of languages, and engines of the evolution of all aspects of lexical systems (Nerlich 1992).