Semantic change Semantic differentiation

Means for extending word stock
As the lexicon of a language is an open class it is constantly expanding. The direct goal is gaining words for new phenomena, concepts, etc. in the society which uses the language in question. The side-effect is an increase in the size of the lexicon. There are various means of extending a language’s word stock which can be broken down into two basic groups. The first creates compounds out of material from the language itself and the second resorts to borrowing material, integrating it into the system (phonology, morphology, semantics) of the language as it does so.

1a) UTILISATION OF NATIVE RESOURCES This primarily refers to the twin processes of compounding and derivation. The former involves two or more elements which are combined to form a single word, e.g. hatchback from hatch and back. Derivation consists of adding a productive ending to a lexical stem in order to create a new word, e.g. more + ish > morish ‘tasty, enticing’, job + wise > jobwise.

1b) LOAN TRANSLATIONS, CALQUES These were common in Old English but have been recessive since. Examples are gospel consisting of good + spell and taken from Latin evangelium, itself from Greek. In German instances are to be seen in Vorsehung from Latin providentia. In Modern German a good example is Wolkenkratzer from skyscraper.

2) BORROWING WORDS FROM A FURTHER LANGUAGE This is a very common process which is attested for all periods of the history of English or any other language for that matter. The reasons for borrowing are basically twofold. On the one hand there may be a necessity for a foreign word, to fill a gap so to speak. This is the case with many adjectival formations in the Early Modern English period which were coined on the basis of classical stems and which provided a form either not available in English at the time or not appropriate, e.g. marine as an adjective to sea; pedestrian to walk : walker; equestrian to horse (horsy means ‘like a horse in manner or gait'); aquatic to water, etc.

The second reason for borrowing is because of the relative prestige (social standing) of the speakers using the donor language. This was the case with many French loans in European languages in the 18th century and is often the reason with loans from English in German today. However, loans made for this reason will only survive in the language if there is a semantic justification for them, i.e. if the loanword is separate from the corresponding native word in some aspect of its meaning. This is the case with German Behälter and English Container, for instance. It is embryonically the case with German Lied, Chanson (French) and Song (English) or German Gefühl and Feeling (English) or German kämpfen and fighten (English).

Note that the cases of semantically differentiated loans in German show that the broadest general meaning is retained for the native word (e.g. Sakko, Blazer, Blouson but the widest meaning is shown by Jacke). Now this is not always so. For instance the Scandinavian loans in English show a situation where the native English word is later the more restricted in meaning, e.g. die (from Scandinavian) and steorfan (Modern English starve) which was narrowed semantically to ‘die of hunger’. Here a comparison with the later French loans is illuminating. These do not usually replace the native English words but complement them by being located on a higher register, i.e. they are stylistically more elevated. Hence the word decease means ‘die’ but is used in a more solemn or ceremonious context much as German uses versterben.

One should also mention externally motivated borrowings. These are typical of overseas varieties of English. In the new environments into which English was introduced there were many phenomena for which there were no terms in English. These are often called collectively ‘flora and fauna’ terms, for instance with the native words in Australian and New Zealand English such as kangaroo, kiwi, koala bear, etc.

LOANWORDS AFTER BORROWING The treatment of loans in a language depends on the structure of the lexicon in the borrowing language. For instance German has a transparent vocabulary based on the principle of productive compounding, for instance in German Speiseröhre means ‘a pipe through which food reaches the stomach’ whereas English oesophagous is a Greek loanword the internal composition of which is opaque to the speaker of Modern English. One consequence of this situation is that German tends to be productive in its handling of loans from other languages. For instance the word Pullover is a normal loan from English but the word Pullunder is a German creation, which does not exist in English, based on the analysis of the original loan as pull + over and the replacement of the preposition over by under to indicate a sleeveless pullover. Another instance of this would be twens which was created analogically to teens in German but which does not exist in English. Furthermore German tends to be very liberal in its use of English formational elements, an example of this is the word Dressman which is obviously reached by combining the verb to dress and the noun man. However the word does not exist in English (the nearest equivalent is dandy).

PARTICIPATION IN MORPHOLOGY A reliable yardstick for measuring the degree to which a word is integrated into a language is the extent to which it partakes in productive word formational processes. Here one can distinguish between compounding and derivation (see above), the latter being the greater indicator of integration into the new language. For instance in German, Romance and English loans are commonly used in derivation as seen in examples like Etappensieg (with a formational /-n/ in the middle) and Managergehalt but the instances of German inflection on a foreign base are few and far between. What may happen is that a word-class ending is added because the foreign element is felt to lack this as in softig from soft + -ig (particularly in glatt und softig). But this is not quite the same as the integration into the native morphological system. Hence there are no English loans which show umlaut plurals nor are there any English verbs which are declined with ablaut (i.e. as ‘strong’ verbs).

REASONS FOR BORROWING The cases discussed above are instances of internally motivated or prestige borrowings. Words can be adopted into a language because a lexical gap in the language exists, e.g. marine as the adjective to sea. Other times words may be borrowed for prestige reasons, English in present-day German, (Central) French in the Middle English period. There is a generalisation that if loans co-exist with native words and are not semantically or stylistically differentiated then they fall away in the course of time. However if they attain a specific meaning or are typical of a recognisable register then they remain (older English loans and French borrowings in Middle English).