Languages & Linguistics
Semantic Change
Semantic change refers to the evolution of the meaning of words over time. It can occur through processes such as broadening, narrowing, amelioration, or pejoration. These changes can be influenced by cultural shifts, technological advancements, or social developments, leading to shifts in the connotations and denotations of words.
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10 Key excerpts on "Semantic Change"
eBook - PDF- Christian Kay, Kathryn Allan(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
Like other kinds of change, Semantic Change tends not to be observable in all speakers or writers at the same time or may not take place in all varieties of a language. In some cases, a new meaning may co-exist with an established meaning or meanings. In others, one or more meanings may be lost over time, and may or may not be replaced by new meanings. The process is rarely straightforward. 5.5 Categories of meaning change Although Semantic Change is not predictable or regular in the way that some sound change is regular, it is certainly not random, and there is convincing evidence that there are some common tendencies. An understanding of these tendencies can help us to make sense of the changes that affect a single word over time. Many attempts have been made to identify and classify common tendencies, with the inevita-ble result that you may find different definitions and names for them depending on what you read. An early and influential attempt was that of Ullman (1962), whose work is still followed to varying degrees in many histories of the English language. In this section, we’ll look at the kinds of change that are widely identified in the literature and sup-ported by extensive lexical evidence. 5.5.1 Widening (or broadening or generalisation) and narrowing (or specialisation) The tendency in Semantic Change referred to as widening , broadening or generalisation occurs when the meaning of a word (or of one of its senses) becomes more general, so that it can be used to refer to a broader, less specific concept. One often-cited example is the word bird , the reflex of OE brid . The earliest attestations are for the sense ‘young 76 ENGLISH HISTORICAL SEMANTICS bird, young of a bird’ ( OED noun 1a), which seems to have been the only meaning in OE. In later English, bird is not restricted to the young of the species, but applies to all feathered vertebrates ( OED noun 2).
eBook - PDFThe Development of Language
Functional Perspectives on Species and Individuals
- Geoff Williams, Annabelle Lukin(Authors)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
10 How our Meanings Change: School Contexts and Semantic Evolution David G. Butt 1 Introduction: semantic structure as 'cultural DNA' This discussion offers a closely worked demonstration of how human cognitive development can be construed as the convergence of cultural and linguistic opportunities. Such a construal contrasts with those approaches that give a predominantly mentalist account of human cognitive devel-opment. I offer this demonstration to encourage other investigations of the rhetorical resources which teachers (and others) use as they mentor children in the core mental tools of our cultures. Such resources are often latent patterns in that they fall outside the 'bandwidth' of any one analytical tradition. My emphasis is not meant to disparage the importance of different approaches, but rather to highlight the inseparability of cultural, semiotic and cognitive processes. Systemic functional linguistics enables me to treat this inseparability. Learning is viewed here as a change of 'meaning potential'. As such, there is no appeal to any a priori categories of mind. I am not claiming that a priori categories do not exist, nor that we must discount the view of natural transitions (viz. Piaget's 'genetic epistemology', 1971). What I am highlighting is the degree to which changing social and semiotic practices can supply an explanatory account of the complexity which underlies humans talking and thinking (Butt 1985 [1989]). Consequently, the task of this paper is to draw out one of the crucial Semantic Changes that occur within one crucial stage of the apprenticeship in my own culture: the crossing between primary and secondary education.
eBook - PDFWords: Structure, Meaning, Function
A Festschrift for Dieter Kastovsky
- Christiane Dalton-Puffer, Nikolaus Ritt, Christiane Dalton-Puffer, Nikolaus Ritt(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Conceptual and Semantic Change in the history of English 1 Manfred Görlach 1. Introduction Authors dealing with Semantic Change in various European languages in-cluding English have tended to describe the phenomenon with ill-defined and sometimes idiosyncratic categories. Others have relied on cultural history (that is, changes in objects or concepts) or on psychology rather than on a more narrowly defined linguistic categorisation. Allowing for the specific problems of reconstruction of linguistic items in early periods, I still believe that a method based on functional structuralist principles yields the best insights into the synchronic meaning of, say, lexical items in Old English, and for a quantificational diachronic description of changes in content through various periods of English. In a second step of analysis we may then try to account for such changes by identifying intralinguistic conditions (such as differentiations of former synonyms) and extralinguis-tic causes (such as cultural change or contact-induced developments). 2. Basic assumptions Various methods have been proposed in the course of the past three thou-sand years to account for the classification of meaning, for determining the relationship between concepts and things, and for explaining Semantic Change. It will therefore be good to start with some basic assumptions on how I wish to define the topic and how I describe semantic relations. This will be followed by a classification of reasons adduced to explain change of meaning and end with a few problem cases that might better be ex-cluded from my discussion. A topic like this is difficult to treat on a purely theoretical level; I will therefore illustrate my arguments with many exam-pies. Meaning, thus the general consent, is to be defined as the solidary and symmetric relationship of form and content, which together constitute the linguistic sign visualised in the universally used model, the semiotic trian-gle (form-content-referent).
eBook - PDFThe First Glot International State-of-the-Article Book
The Latest in Linguistics
- Lisa Cheng, Rint Sybesma, Lisa Cheng, Rint Sybesma(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Semantic Change An overview Elizabeth Closs Traugott 1. Introduction To many people meaning change is an amusing game. Only the most unimaginative would fail to be interested in the apparent arbitrariness of a change such as Latin musculus 'diminutive of mus 'mouse > muscle; Old Japanese fazu 'tip ends of an archery bow where the string is attached' > Modern Japanese hazu 'expectation', and the often brilliant step by step accounts that show that the change is in fact fully motivated. The details of such changes have been taken to show that meaning change is particular to individual words and that there are few generalities to be made. This opinion is no doubt bolstered by such major studies of Semantic Change such as Breal (1964 [1900]), Bloomfield (1984 [1933], Chapter 24), Stern (1968 [1931]), Ullmann (1957, 1962) which attempted to develop taxonomies of Semantic Change, and which classified the major Semantic Changes in terms of disparate pairs like: I. i. PEJORATION: the tendency to semanticize the more negative connotations of a word, e.g. terms for primates {ape, baboon, gorilla) > brutishness; birds (goose, cuckoo, pigeon, coot, turkey) > foolishness; scavenger birds ( buzzard, vulture) > greed; early ME seely blessed, innocent' > late ME silly 'deserving of pity, feeble' > EModE 'igno-rant, foolish'; OE stincan 'to smell (Vi)' > ME 'smell obnoxious', early ME 'to smell (Vi)' > later ME 'smell obnoxious', ii. AMELIORATION: the tendency to semanticize more positive connota-tions: Lat. nescius 'ignorant' > Old French ni(s)ce 'stupid'; borrowed into ME as 'stupid' > 'shy, bashful' > 'fastidious, refined' > 'pleasant, appealing'. 386 Elizabeth Closs Traugott II. i. RESTRICTION/NARROWING OF MEANING: OE deor 'animal' > 'deer', voyage 'journey' > 'journey by sea'. ii. EXPANSION/GENERALIZATION OF MEANING: Latin armare 'to cover one's shoulders' > arm, target 'small round shield' > 'mark to be shot at, goal'.
eBook - PDFLanguage History, Language Change, and Language Relationship
An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics
- Hans Henrich Hock, Brian D. Joseph(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
To support this view they can point out that other languages often employ different onomatopoetic means to express the same animal sound. Compare for instance (17´). Similarly, lan-guages – or their speakers – may disagree over what is taboo. While there is a great tendency for words for excrement, sexual activities, or the name of the divinity to be taboo, in some societies it is the name of one’s elder sister, the names of deceased persons and everything which sounds like these names, or yet other words. Even so, the belief of linguistically naive speakers that the sound-meaning relationship in such words is not arbitrary is suffi-ciently powerful to bring about linguistic change. 5. Factors responsible for Semantic Change In large measure, Semantic Change results from the same factors that are re-sponsible for the fuzziness of meaning, namely the semantic relation between words, and the relationship that we perceive between meaning and form. The effects of these, as well as other factors, are discussed in the following sections. (18) a. (May) God punish them by sending them to hell b. (May) God damn them c. dang , darn , gosh darn , doggone , dad burn(ed) … (17´) German French Hindi rooster: kikeriki cocorico kuk(a)r · u ˜ku ˜ dog: wauwau tou-tou bhõ-bhõ 218 Semantic Change 5.1. Metaphor The major vehicle through which words acquire new or broader meanings is metaphor. Metaphoric language comes in many different shapes, which in traditional rhetorical theory have been classified in various subtypes. One of these is synecdoche , the designation of a thing or person by means of its most salient part, as in (19). The extended meaning in (19a) results from the fact that in a traditional setting, employers would consider the hands to be the most important part of laborers. (Their minds, obviously, are of little concern.) Similarly, the meaning in (19b) reflects the fact that the most important part of a table is the board on top.
eBook - PDF- Hans Henrich Hock(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
12. Semantic Change 12.1. Background It is generally agreed that language conveys meaning. However, a difficulty arises from the fact that the number of meanings which might be conveyed through language — given 'world enough and time' — is without bounds, is in effect infinite. At the same time, human beings are capable of producing only a limited, clearly finite, set of speech sounds. More than that, even if there were no limitations on our production, there certainly are limits on our understanding and process-ing the infinity of mostly completely novel linguistic symbols which would be required to encode an infinity of possible meanings. To some degree this difficulty is remedied by the fact that meaning is conveyed not directly, through separate speech sounds for each meaning, but indirectly, through an open-ended, but in effect finite, set of conventional linguistic symbols (lexical items). (The conventionality and 'arbitrariness' of these symbols becomes clear if we consider the word for 'dog' in various languages. As example (1) shows, even closely related languages may 'choose' phonetically very different forms.) These are supplemented by a finite set of rules (syntax) which permit the combination of these symbols into larger structures and ensure that the meanings of these larger structures are not simply a composite of the meanings of the lexical items which they are composed of. Moreover, the lexical items themselves are 'constructed' out of even smaller sets of likewise conventional 'buildings blocks' (phonemes and morphemes) whose combination, again, is governed by a finite set of rules (phonol-ogy/morphology). As a consequence, meaning can be conveyed econ-omically, with a very limited set of speech sounds (somewhere between 25 and 125) which, thanks to the lexicon and the rules of syntax, combine into a virtual infinity of possible sentences.
- Jacek Fisiak(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Such circumstances motivate 1) deliberate, conscious activity of language users geared towards devising new or modifying established patterns, 2) total or partial borrowing from other codes, and 3) gradual filling of new or modified content into conventional word-forms and syntax. The shifts, however, can be signalled and spread only via verbal interactions among language users. Meaning of words and utter-ances in such situations has a starting point in the conventional given, but in the course of ongoing interaction meaning is nego-tiated, i. e., jointly and collaboratively constructed by sequential contributions of participants (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Machova, in press). This is the setting of semantic variability and change. Out of the available semantic theories, some are better —, some others — not so well-suited to account for language and meaning conceived of as above. A componential analysis, utilizing a con-junction of semantic markers as employed by Katz (1972), for On Semantic Change in a dynamic model of language 3 0 1 instance cannot account for the gradual shift in meaning that is observed in suknia, alternatywa, or in some novel lexical constructs of native or foreign origin. First of all, it appeared that denotational attributes of some objects are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for their categorial membership (Rosch 1973, Labov 1973). Objects of nat-ural kind are considered by language users to occupy a space either more towards the centre of a categorial domain, e. g., dog in ANIMALS, chair in FURNITURE, in the category of BIRDS -robin for English (Rosch 1973), and wrobel 'sparrow' — for Polish data (Miodunka 1980), thus being considered the most typical class representatives, and such category members which approach its peripheries (e. g. penguin and ostrich for BIRDS), the properties of which are not identical with those in the centre. Placement of abstract objects and their concepts may be even more diverse.
eBook - PDFEnglish Words
History and Structure
- Donka Minkova, Robert Stockwell(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Traditionally, the results of Semantic Change are described and classified in terms of two properties: (1) scope, and (2) status. Other categories of traditional classification, like relation to culture and technology, have been considered above, because they are part of the causes of change. 3.1 Scope change ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How broad is the range which the meaning of a word covers – how much does it include? A familiar example will illustrate this property: meat used to mean ‘any kind of solid food,’ as in the familiar expression ‘meat and drink,’ and now it means only a particular kind of food, namely the flesh of animals. The scope of the word has been narrowed. The scope of a word’ s meaning can, of course, change in the opposite direction: originally the word escape meant ‘to get out of one’ s clothing, lose one’ s cape while fleeing’ (ex ‘out of ’+ Medieval Latin cappa ‘cloak, cape’). Today we could escape and keep our cape on, if we wore capes any more. Moreover, we can escape our daily worries by sitting on the couch and watching a movie at home. The scope of the word has been widened. 174 semantic relations and Semantic Change Another type of scope change is semantic bleaching, where the original meaning of the word has been eroded away and generalized by heavy usage, as in words like very (originally ‘true’), awful (‘full of awe’), terrible (‘able to cause terror ’). The ultimate examples of bleaching are the words thing, do, nice, and okay , and of course the more a word is bleached the further left it moves on a scale of hyponymy. Thing originally referred to a sort of parliamentary town-hall meeting, hence affair, act, any kind of business. The bleaching of this word is so complete that people have come up with variations such as thingum(a)bob, thingummy , thingamajig, possibly in the desire to restore some of the “lost color” of thing.
eBook - PDFLanguage History, Language Change, and Language Relationship
An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics
- Hans Henrich Hock, Brian D. Joseph(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613285-007 Chapter 7: Semantic Change “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass .) 1 Introduction The preceding three chapters have been devoted to changes in linguistic struc-ture – the topic which probably interests linguists most. The majority of speak-ers, however, are not linguists, and linguistic structure is something they hardly ever think about. There is a good reason for this. In order to use linguistic struc-ture effectively we have to place its knowledge safely below the level of conscious-ness. We can see this when we first learn a new language and are still consciously trying to get the grammar and pronunciation right. Uttering even a single, simple sentence can be agony. But our difficulties extend beyond grammar and pronunciation. We also need to make sure that the utterances we create have meaning and, moreover, that they mean what we want them to mean. For instance, a German learning English will have to know that public viewing – a made-up, pseudo-English expression in German – does not mean ‘a public watching of an event on a large screen’ in real English, but rather ‘the display of a deceased person before the funeral’. That is, we need to pay attention to semantics, the meanings associated with mor-phemes, words, and collocations of words. For non-linguists such semantic oddities are highly fascinating. Linguists, by contrast, find lexical semantics extremely elusive and therefore difficult to deal with, because meaning is inherently fuzzy and non-systematic. They greatly prefer to deal with the much more “orderly” structure of language. At the same time, the very fuzziness and lack of systematicity of semantics is an essential component of language, if we consider that through language we
eBook - PDF- Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, Paul Portner(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Another problem lies in the fact that a concept-based semantic analysis usually fails to represent the functional structure of words, structure that subsequently has to be rele-gated to constructions (e.g. Traugott 2008). Practically all literature on language change shares this feature. Hence, the terminological frameworks in use simply do not allow to represent many changes at the compositional level, changes that can severely alter the meaning of an item even on the basis of more or less the same conceptual ingredients (see the case study on fast in section 4). Isolated articles like von Fintel (1995), Kempson & Cann (2007), Merin (1996), or Zeevat & Karagjosova (2009) pose exceptions to this gen-eralization. Generally, changes that yield functional words need to be described in terms of a semantic framework that can express the meaning of functional words. Concept-based semantic frameworks are notoriously vague at this point, supporting the misconception that Semantic Changes can not be discrete. 2682 XX. Diachronic semantics The present article aims at defining and defending the notion of semantic reanalysis. In the next section, I will characterize this process and point out differences to the modes of Semantic Change that were proposed in the literature, including 1. generalization or bleaching, going back to Paul (1880) and von der Gabelentz (1901) 2. metaphor (most prominently proposed by Heine, Claudi & Hünnemeyer 1991; Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca 1994; and Sweetser 1990) 3. metonymy (e.g. in Hopper & Traugott 1993), soon made precise as 4. shift from implicature to literal content (with the side effect of strengthening, not pre-dicted by the first two approaches) 5. semantic rearrangement of atoms of meaning, Langacker (1977) 6. subjectification, proposed by Traugott (1989), Traugott & Dasher (2002) These earlier proposals can be criticised more succinctly once we know what an alterna-tive proposal could look like.
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