Semantic change

“Semantic change”

By Asadbek Turdialiyev 18.99 Group

Semantic Change.

Language deals with concepts strongly connected with experience, and as experience fluctuates according to many facts in time and space, words referring to such concepts fluctuate too. Although language changes are self-evident and very frequent, they are, at least synchronically, imperceptible and difficult to explain. G. Hudson argues: “[…] it is rarely noticeable within one generation, but we are often aware those generations before and after ours speak differently, preferring forms and rules different from those we prefer and even having some different ones. Whenever a language at some point in time is compared with its descendant language even a few hundred years later, the change is obvious.” (G. Hudson, 2000:392) A linguist may describe a linguistic change case in great details, but may as well fail to construct a systemic frame for this change, especially in cases of semantic change. Unlike other types of linguistic change, like sound or spelling changes, semantic change is strongly linked to arbitrary cultural and social changes, thus making it very strenuous to predict the direction or depth of this change. Moreover, semantic change has no physiological restriction as, for example, sound change does. Yet, some relatively recent research shows some regularity in this linguistic phenomenon. Since the 1980’s, Elizabeth Traugott has been trying to prove some regularity of semantic change, in which she partially succeeded, but these regularities fundamentally fall under the term ‘subjectification1 ’ where egocentric tendencies of human cognition seem to be the drive for phenomenon. Still, as we shall see, most of cases are irregular and hard to predict. There is a considerable dissent among linguists regarding categorization and terminology of semantic change. It is unpractical to discuss these differences here since they are not the essence of this paper, and they would take a great space. I will simply mention some of these terms in passing to show that they refer to the same thing. We will concentrate in this paper on ‘lexical’ or ‘lexemic’ semantic change rather than grammatical /functional/syntactic change; that is the change in meaning of a word, understood to be a change in the concepts associated with a word. The study of semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression or semantic drift) can be seen as a part of etymology, onomasiology2 , semasiology3 , and semantics. We will discuss here with detailed examples two aspects of semantic change: change in denotation in which the meaning of a lexeme is ‘extended’ or ‘restricted’; and change in connotation in which a word may be ‘ameliorated’ or ‘pejorated’. We will also discuss change in the stylistic meaning of words where the meaning of words may be changed radically according to their context. There are other types of semantic change like metaphor and metonymy, but we cannot cover them all in this limited essay. Further definitions will be provided in respective parts of this paper. Change in denotation: Humans naturally tend to generalize, and this affects their use of language. This is one of the causes of the semantic phenomenon known as semantic broadening (also termed extension, widening, and generalization). In this process, a specific feature of the word is dropped or the word is used outside its original specific context to refer to a more generalized concept or object. Take the word acquit, in the early thirteenth century, this word originally meant 'to quiet' or 'appease a claim', hence to satisfy a claimant and discharge the debtor (OED). Then by the end of the fourteenth century it started to suggest that no debt is found against someone to begin with (Hayes, 2012). This term was mainly connected with debts and claims until the seventeenth century; it was used in a broader meaning in some contexts though, mostly figuratively. Looking at the synonyms of acquit like exonerate and exculpate, we can see that acquit is oldest word used in courts in official 'clearing' context; and this is probably the reason behind adopting it in its wider sense in courts. Moron was first adopted and used by the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-minded in 1910 with a very specific meaning 'an adult person having a mental age of between eight and twelve (OED); a moron was more developed mentally than an imbecile (IQ of 26 to 50) or an idiot (IQ of 0 to 25) (Hayes, 2012). All these terms were popularized by the above-mentioned association. Since most people are not aware of these technicalities, they started using them in a broader sense as an insult. Insulting is categorized by some scholars, like Grzega (2004), as one of the motives for semantic change. Enthusiasm came from French in the seventeenth century and its ultimate origin is Greek as the root theos 'god' indicates (OALD). Its original denotation was strictly connected with divine or supernatural possession or excitement. It gained a rather pejorative connotation with the coming of Puritans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they found people indulging themselves in excessive emotional fantasies (Hayes, 2012). After Restoration in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity4 1662, the Puritans lost their grip over church and authority. It was not until the early eighteenth century that enthusiasm lost its religious denotation and pejorative connotation, and had its generalized current meaning due to the common use of the term outside its religious context. In the case of magazine, the polysemic range is broadened. Magazine comes ultimately from Arabic makhazin which is the plural form of makhzan which means 'warehouse' or 'storehouse'. It came into English through French (OED). This word is a good example of how strange and unexpected the direction of the semantic change can be. In the seventeenth century, it started to be used in the titles of books with the sense 'storehouse of information' on a specified subject or for a particular class of persons; so we had, for example, a Militarie Magazine or The Mariners Magazine (OED). Later in the eighteenth century it was used more generally to refer to these periodical publications themselves. In the nineteenth century, radio and television producers gave magazine another sense when they used it for their periodical programmes. Although magazine lost its original broad meaning as a 'storehouse', it regained some of it in the eighteenth century but in a specific context, that is in some shooting weapons, where it refers to 'the place where bullets are kept before being fired'. It is interesting to mention here that this regain effected Arabic itself. The standard Arabic word for this part of rifles or pistols is 'makhzan' simply because we received it as magazine from English, as it is the French cartouche in some regional spoken dialects in western Syria where French colonization once existed. Many writers use examples like arm, head, foot, etc. (as in arm of the chair, head of cabbage …etc) when talking about metaphorical extension, and I think this is not accurate since these are not actually metaphors, they are in fact dead metaphors. However, dead metaphors do broaden the polysemous range of words. Take the word hand for instance, if you look at its entry in any non-concise dictionary you will see how huge and cross-linked it is. It is used in dead metaphors as in hour hand or minute hand, and it is also used in real metaphorical sense as authority or control, which has been a common use since King James Version. Hand is a very old word in English and it is natural to gain more meanings since we, humans, tend to scale everything according to ourselves. Hence the use of body parts in dead and living metaphors is very common, if not the commonest. Semantic restriction (also termed narrowing, reduction, and specialization) is the opposite of broadening. In this process, the meaning of a word is narrowed to refer only to a specific or limited part of its original denotation. For example, the word Safari come originally from the Arabic word safar which means ‘travelling’ generally. It comes from the verb saafara ‘to travel’, and it is used when talking about someone travelling regardless of the distance, it has to be relatively long though. Whether you are travelling from Cairo to Alexandria or to Paris; by foot, animals, or ships; we call it safar in Arabic. Then this word was adopted by East African countries to refer to hunting expeditions. When it entered English in the nineteenth century, it was still used mostly with this hunting denotation. With the accumulation of animal rights and similar pacifist organizations and the ban on hunting in most targeted areas, the ‘travelling’ and ‘animals’ senses are still borne in the word but mostly for sightseeing and scientific investigation rather than hunting. The OED does not trace back the older original meaning of Arabic word Suffah, from which sofa comes. It comes from the word Saf which means ‘row’ or ‘line’. The commonest term in Arabic which includes this word is ahluS Suffah which refers to a group of very poor new Muslims who went to Madinah (city of the Muslim Prophet) and they had to stay in the ‘shaded area’ of Nabawi Masjid ‘the Prophet’s Mosque’ (Ibn Manzoor: 9, 194). Later when Muslims became prosperous, these simply shaded areas went to palaces and had some comfortable furniture in them. When sofas began to be made in the eighteenth century, the designers seemed to have purposely made it look like the oriental Suffah so to give it a luxurious touch. The formal history of acorn has been much perverted by ‘popular etymology.’ From the Old English and well into the Middle English period, acorn was a generic word given to the ‘fruits’ of the forest trees, especially ‘mast of oak’ or ‘beech’, etc., from which farm animals gained sustenance. In Gothic it extended to ‘fruit’ generally (OED). By the sixteenth century, acorn came to be associated exclusively with the oak tree because the mighty oak was the main source for feeding swine (Hayes, 2012). It is comparable to the way some modern trademarks have become synonyms for various products For example, here, in the Middle East, Arabs call any clothes powder detergent Tide. The various root spellings of acorn were akarn or akran, but since the Old English word for ‘oak’ was ‘ac’ and the object was used like ‘corn’ to feed the animals, the spelling of the word shifted to the present-day acorn. (Hayes, 2012) Art had several senses since it first came into English in the thirteenth century from Old French. It denoted ‘skill’ in many different ways; in display, in application, abstractly, as a result of knowledge and experience …etc. It was also used to refer to trivium and quadrivium sciences. Shakespeare used it with a different sense, and so did Pope and many others. In the seventeenth century, it started to be used to refer to the “application of skill to the arts of imitation and design, painting, engraving, sculpture, architecture; the cultivation of these in its principles, practice, and results; the skilful production of the beautiful in visible forms” (OED). According to the OED, “This is the most usual modern sense of art, when used without any qualification. It does not occur in any English Dictionary before 1880, and seems to have been chiefly used by painters and writers on painting, until the present century.” It seems that art lost most of its polysemic range because this current sense is the only main sense that was meant to be sublimated. In other words, words derived from its general meaning were mostly pejorated; words like artifice which meant ‘skilful workmanship’ became ‘trickery’, and artificial, which was a neutral word used to differentiate goods made humans from goods created by nature, now means ‘superficial’ or ‘shallow’. The first use of undertaker was in the late fourteenth century in religious contexts with two main meanings: ‘the one who helps or assists’ (OED), especially to refer to Christian Lords, and, in early quotes, ‘susceptor or godfather’ (OED). In the following century it was used in a more generalized way ‘the one who undertakes an enterprise or task’ (OED). Then it took multiple meanings in several contexts. For example, Shakespeare used it to mean ‘the one who takes up another’s quarrel’. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the current meaning of ‘mortician’ rose. It seems that ‘undertakers’ of other businesses were not as busy as ‘funeral undertakers’ due to the short life spans of the period because of plagues, diseases, wars, etc., thus the term ‘undertaker’ was associated mostly with those in the ‘mortal business’. Nowadays the only known ‘undertaker’ who does not arrange funerals is the wrestler Mark Calaway. (Hayes, 2012)