Semantic change

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In diachronic (or historical) linguistics, semantic change is a change in one of the meanings of a word. Every word has a variety of senses and connotations which can be added, removed, or altered over time, often to the extent that words of one time period mean quite different things to the same words as spoken in a previous time. Moreover, two words derived from the same original may develop in very distinct ways: cognates across languages often look very similar but mean entirely different things.

Semantic change is not to be confused with etymology, another field in diachronic linguistics; etymology is the study of the morphological roots of words, while semantic change deals with the development of sense.

Contents

1 Types of change

1.1 Multiple processes

2 History
3 References

Types of change

The four most widely recognised types of semantic change are extension, narrowing, amelioration, and pejoration. The first two represent changes in a word's scope, while the second pair can also cover changes in a word's individual meanings.

Extension: Extension is the widening of a word's range of meanings, often by analogy or simplification. For example, virtue was initially a quality that could only be applied to men, like our modern word manliness, but in contemporary society, it can equally be applied to women as well. Maverick used to be a rancher's term for an unbranded cow but can now mean a person who doesn't conform to the conventions of a group (Jeffers & Lehiste).

Narrowing: Narrowing is the reduction in a word's range of meanings, often limiting a generic word to a more specialised or technical use. For example, broadcast originally meant "to cast seeds out;" with the advent of radio and television, the word was extended to indicate the transmission of audio and video signals. Today, because of narrowing, very few people outside of agricultural circles use broadcast in the earlier sense (Jeffers & Lehiste).

Amelioration: Amelioration is where a word loses negative connotations or gains positive ones. For example, mischievous used to mean "disastrous", where it now only means "playfully annoying".

Pejoration: Pejoration is where a word develops negative connotations or loses positive ones. For example, notorious initially meant "widely known". Yet it has gone through the process of extension to now mean "widely and unfavourably known". A much more famous example is of the word gay, which can mean happy or colorful and was used commonly until it became a reference to homosexuals. While this may or may not have been a euphemisation in itself, the word in the original sense is avoided. Gay is also extended in certain slang vocabularies as a pejorative adjective. See also euphemism treadmill.

Semantic Shift: Semantic shift is where a word moves from one set of circumstances to another, resulting in an extension of the range of meanings. An example of this is navigator, which once applied only to ships but, with the development of planes and cars, now applies to multiple forms of travel. Another example is Old English, meat, (or rather mete), which referred to all forms of solid food while flesh (flæsc) referred to animal tissue, and food (foda) referred to animal fodder. Meat was eventually restricted to flesh of animals, then flesh restricted to the tissue of humans and food was generalized to refer to all forms of solid food (Jeffers & Lehiste).

Semantic Drift: Semantic drift is the movement of the entire meaning of a lexeme to a new meaning, and is particularly evidenced by semantic differences between cognates.

For instance, the English word to starve is cognate with the German sterben ("to die") and in some parts of England, the word can mean "be cold" (since it evolved through the meaning "to die of cold"). Though both words arose from a common West Germanic root *sterb-a- ("to die"), and their meanings are still somewhat related, semantic drift has caused their specific meanings to differ. The same may occur language-internally, especially when one form is specifically agglutinated. For example, English to hurdle is cognate to hard and is agglutinated with the -le frequentative suffix.

A more extreme example is with the English word black, which is cognate with Slavic words for white (Russian белый) the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root for both is *bhel. English black derives from Germanic *blakaz, a past participle of a verb meaning "to blaze." As an adjective, the word would indicate something that has burned and since what is burnt is generally black, the shift in meaning makes more sense.

Figurative use: Figurative use is a change in meaning that is based on an analogy or likeness between things. For example, a crane is a bird with a long neck, but the word can now also mean a piece of equipment for lifting weights. The earlier examples of maverick and broadcast are also examples of figurative use.

Grammaticalisation: Grammaticalisation is the development of function words and grammatical affices from content words. It often begins with extension of a word to include a grammatical function, and the subsequent narrowing of the word (usually after the word has suffered morphological changes) to a solely or predominantly grammatical use. An example of this is the French word pas, which literally means "step" but is also used with ne in forming negating statements like je ne pense pas ("I don't think so") as well as by itself

Metonymy: A type of extension, metonymy or synecdoche is the use of a part of an object to refer to a whole. In many languages, the word for head can be used as a substitute for the word for person. In English, we have the phrase "a head", resembling the Latin phrase "per capita", which we also use. The word "poll", originally meaning the top of the head, can refer to the whole head, and a "poll tax" is a fixed tax applied to each person. The convention of using capital cities to represent countries or their governments is another example of metonymy.

Euphemism: A euphemism is the use of a substitute word in an attempt to replace or mask the negative connotations of the normal word for a certain object or action. The substitute word undergoes an extension, while the word replaced may suffer pejoration by dissimilation. For example, snogging was once an alternative word for sex, though it has now been ameliorated in most registers to mean a french kiss.

Political correctness

Political correctness is a real or perceived attempt to refine or restrict language and terms used in public discussion to those deemed acceptable or appropriate. For example "blackboard" is now perceived by some as being "politically incorrect" in the United Kingdom, ^{[[Multiple processes
Many words go through more than one process. A good example of this is the word punk. It initially meant "a young boy". However it was then perjorated to mean "prostitute". In the 1970s, the word was then ameliorated to describe a music genre. In some areas, this change has gone even further and "punk" can mean someone who doesn't stand up for himself and thus is pushed around and disrespected.

History

It is certain that semantic change has occurred since human language first arose. However, the study of semantic change only dates back to the 1930s.

The pioneer in this field was Jost Trier, a German linguist, who presented his findings in 1934. In his studies, he showed how the structure of the German language had changed between 1200 and 1300.

In 1200, the German language had no separate word for cleverness. It only had Kunst for "courtly skills" and List for "non-courtly skills." The language also included the word Wîsheit for any kind of knowledge.

By 1300, however, things had changed. Wîsheit had been narrowed to just mean "religious experience", kunst was beginning to take on the meaning of "art" or "skill", and List had been removed from the language entirely (it had begun to gain pejorative connotations). List has returned to Modern German, where it now means "cunning" or "trick".

References

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987) David Crystal.
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995) David Crystal.

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