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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 word 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 scientific study of word origin, while semantic change deals with the development of sense. In fact, semantic change is one of the factors that need to be taken under consideration, in order to evaluate a proposed etymology.
It is certain that semantic change has occurred since human language first arose. However, the ''study'' of semantic change only dates back to the 1900s.
The pioneering work was carried out by the French linguist Michel Bréal, who published his book ''Essai de sémantique'' in 1899 (Paris, 2nd ed.). Bréal was soon followed by most linguists, who defined mechanisms of semantic change in harmony with his findings. Accordingly, in 1921 the German linguist Hermann Hirt classified semantic changes under six categories: (a) narrowing (''Verengerung''), (b) pejoration (''Verschlechterung''), (c) amelioration (''Verbesserung''), (d) extension (''Erweiterung''), (e) metaphor (''Metapher''), and (f) metonymy (''Metonymie'').[1]
A few years later, Jost Trier, a German linguist, who presented his findings in 1934, was the first one to point out the importance of ''lexical / semantic fields''. In his studies, he showed how the structure of the German language had changed between 1200 and 1300.
In recent years semantic change has received a large amount of attention, especially within the framework of pragmatics and cognitive linguistics. Nevertheless, the quest for a standard taxonomy of semantic changes, which would adequately account for all attested mechanisms, is still in doubt. Many linguists (chiefly comparatists) would agree with R.S.P. Beekes' assertion, that "studies on change of meaning do not offer satisfactory results" and no-one has so far presented a full-scale method for interpretation and classification of the data.[2]
There are certain linguistic causes behind this deficiency, related to inherent limitations of historical semantics:
★ By contrast with the limited number of phonemes and morphemes in a linguistic system, the number of senses is unlimited. This bipolar position has been described as resulting from the co-existence of a ''closed phonetic/morphological system'' and an ''open semantic system''.[3]
★ There are no semantic rules or principles that may 'exclude' a certain change of meaning (according to Antoine Meillet's ascertainment[4]). Therefore, historical grammars and handbooks, after dealing with the development of phonetic and morphological system of the language, tend to proceed with the study of lexical change or origin (loanwords, lexical diffusion, dialectic split etc.), setting aside any need for a logical classification of semantic changes.
★ Information on the circumstances that contributed to an alteration are rare and scarce. A linguist cannot retrieve (or verify) valuable evidence concerning style, intonation (the suprasegmental parts of language) and the relevant position of synonyms in a lexical field. Accordingly, he is not able to define and evaluate the sociolinguistic background which may have favoured a certain change or a degree of intentionality that led to the entrenchment of the new meaning.
★ Polysemy, which constitutes a prerequisite for semantic change, is based upon the construction of a central (nuclear) meaning of a word and of marginal or peripheral senses, that form a radial network.[5] In fact, change of meaning has been sometimes defined as drift or shift of semantic load from a nuclear meaning to a peripheral one. Unfortunately, texts and inscriptions tend to be silent on the prototypicality[6] of the nuclear meaning and on the relevant semantic force of one synonym over another.
A major contribution to the theory of semantic change has been Antoine Meillet's 1905 article 'Comment les mots changent de sens'.[7] This article has influenced many later essays, as it addresses the most important aspects of meaning change. Meillet discusses the causes of semantic change:
★ 'Structural' (''structurelles''): This category refers to the linguistic structure of lexical items. The limited number of phonemes / morphemes reduces, as such, the possible contexts for these elements. By striking contrast with the morphophonemic part, there are no ''a priori'' context limits related to the meaning of a word, concerning its possible connotations and positions in a sentence. In addition, lexical fields allow for powerful semantic interaction among their members, though the results are usually visible only after the conclusion of the process.[8]
:Two noteworthy structural mechanisms that affect semantic change are grammaticalisation and reanalysis.
★ 'Referential' (''referentielles''): This category includes changes affecting the referent, i.e. the object or thing that a linguistic unit stands for. Normally, progress in technology and culture goes along with changes in items, materials, tools and concepts. Nevertheless, since language abides to the principle of economy (old means - new usages), a certain delay in following that progress is certainly expectable. The system of any given language will most likely extend the semantic field of an existing word in order to cover the new usage rather than create ''ex nihilo'' a new lexeme. The importance of the simultaneous function of lexical items and referents had been the object of a linguistic and ethnographic field back in 1910, which was named ''Wörter und Sachen'' ("Words and Things"). Though not reflecting mature linguistic analysis, this field focused on producing a descriptive pattern to account for both the word and its cultural background or, briefly, to connect the history of a word to the history of its referent.[9]
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': 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. ''Navigator'' once applied only to ships but the development of planes and cars extended this term to apply to multiple forms of travel. ''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.[10] Meanings can be borrowed from other languages (semantic loans). One popular form of extension is metonymy or synecdoche wherein a part of an object is used to refer to the whole. For example, in many languages, the word for head can be used as a substitute for the word for person. In English, the phrase "a head", resembles the Latin phrase "per capita." 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.
; 'Narrowing': 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.[10]
; 'Amelioration': the loss of negative connotations or gain of positive ones. For example, ''mischievous'' used to mean "disastrous", where it now only means "playfully annoying". This is often a result of semantic bleaching.
; 'Pejoration': the development of negative connotations or loss of 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". ''Awful'' originally had a meaning closer to the modern meaning of ''awesome'', yet it now means the opposite. A famous example is of the word ''gay'', which can mean ''happy'' or ''colorful'' and was used commonly until it became a reference to homosexuals.[12] 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' or 'semantic drift': the movement from applying to one set of circumstances to another. This is seen across languages when cognates have different meanings. 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." 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 within a single register, 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 change in reference to one word is often associated with a shift of meaning in other words. 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". Another example of multiple words shifting meaning comes from Old English: ''meat'', (or rather ''mete'') 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.[10] There are also examples of continual semantic change. The Latin word ''nescius'' ('ignorant') became Old French ''nice'' ('silly' or 'foolish') before it was borrowed into Middle English. Its meaning subsequently changed multiple times: "silly" → "timid" → "fussy" → "dainty" → "careful" → "agreeable" → "kind" or "thoughtful." This last meaning is the current one in English.[14]
:English offers another interesting example of semantic shift in which the word ''black'' 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.[10]
; 'Metaphor': the change in meaning 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': the development of function words and grammatical affixes 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: ''ma voiture a un toit ouvrant, la leur 'pas''' ("my car is convertible, theirs isn't").
; Euphemism: Although not technically a form of semantic change in itself, the use of a substitute word or phrase in an attempt to eliminate or mask the negative connotations of a referent typically causes the substitute word (when it isn't newly coined) to undergo 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. More recently, efforts to make language politically correct provide a number of examples wherein language is deliberately altered to forms deemed more acceptable or appropriate. For example, in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s the term "blackboard" became perceived by some as being "politically incorrect", and so some schools instructed teachers to refer to it as a "chalkboard" instead.[16]
Many words go through more than one process. In addition to examples cited above, the word ''punk'' initially meant "a young boy" but was then pejorated 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.
1. H. Hirt, ''Etymologie der neuhochdeutschen Sprache'', München 1921, 2nd. ed.
2. R.S.P. Beekes, ''Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. An introduction'', Amsterdam 1995, p. 140.
3. A. McMahon, ''Understanding language change'', Cambridge 1994, p. 185.
4. ''"La difference de sens entre les mots rapprochés doit être expliquée par des raisons précises, autant que possible par des raisons tirées de faits positivement attestés, car il n’existe pas de régles sémantiques permettant de dire que tel out el développement de sens est exclu"'' (A. Meillet, ''Linguistique historique et linguistique générale,'' Paris 1921, p. 31).
5. D. Geeraerts, St. Grondelaers, P. Bakema, ''The Structure of Lexical Variation. Meaning, Wording and Context'', Berlin 1994.
6. A lexical meaning is called ''prototypical'' if it recalls the conceptual structure that best represents the mental space of the term. Prototypical meaning allows for more sufficient comprehension of marginal senses and offers a wider frame for reinterpretation.
7. ''Année sociologique'' 9:1-38; reprinted in Meillet (1921) ''Linguistique historique et linguistique générale''.
8. It is with reason that Hans Krahe supports the inclusive treatment of semantic change: ''«Man muß ein solches Wort nämlich nicht isoliert betrachten, sondern muß es inmitten einer ganzen Gruppe von sachlich zugehörigen Wörtern sehen»'' (''Einleitung in das vergleichende Sprachstudium,'' Innsbruck 1970, p. 87). Harry Meier adds that an etymological solution is not firmly established if the whole semantic field has not been taken into consideration. (''Prinzipien der etymologischen Forschung,'' Heidelberg 1986, p. 109).
9. The Italian linguist Carlo Tagliavini discussed emphatically the importance of ''Wörter und Sachen'' field and indicated that failure to scrutinise parallel histories could also misguide etymology: ''"Diese Richtung'' (i.e. Wörter und Sachen) ''setzt sich ein für das gleichzeitige Studium von Kultur- und Wortgeschichte und halt jegliche allein am sprachlichen Material ausgerichtete etymologische Forschung für sinnlos und gefährlich"'' (''Einführung in die romanische Philologie'', München 1973, p. 15).
10.
11.
12. According to reliable sources, the meaning "homosexual" arose from the expressive term ''gay cat / gey cat'', which originated by the 1930s as part of slang used in the community of inmates and unemployed. It referred to a younger ''hobo'' (a wandering unemployed) or inmate, who was under the protection of an older one. The ''Miriam-Webster's Word Histories Lexicon'' (Springfield MA, 1989) offers full record of sources for this etymology and makes an important notice: ''"[Α hobo] often needed to attach himself to a veteran of the road in order to survive. It was generally taken for granted that the relationship between the youth'' [sic] ''and the older man eventually turned into a sexual liaison"'' (p. 190). If such relationships were at some degree commonplace in those communities, it is visible why a 1935 handbook of prison slang included the following definition: ''Geycat... a homosexual boy''. The above mentioned reference seems to be the first attested instance of the pejorative meaning.
13.
14. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=nice&searchmode=none
15.
16. "PC or not PC ... that was 1993's burning question; Review of the Year 1993"
''The Sunday Times'' (London); Dec 26, 1993; Maurice Chittenden;
★ ''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language'' (1987) David Crystal.
★ ''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language'' (1995) David Crystal.
★ Principles and Methods for Historical Linguistics, Jeffers, Robert J. and Lehiste, Ilse, , , MIT press, 1979,
★ Language change
★ Q-based narrowing
Semantic change is not to be confused with etymology, another field in diachronic linguistics; etymology is the scientific study of word origin, while semantic change deals with the development of sense. In fact, semantic change is one of the factors that need to be taken under consideration, in order to evaluate a proposed etymology.
| Contents |
| History |
| Causes of semantic change |
| Types of change |
| Multiple processes |
| Notes and References |
| Bibliography |
| See also |
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 1900s.
The pioneering work was carried out by the French linguist Michel Bréal, who published his book ''Essai de sémantique'' in 1899 (Paris, 2nd ed.). Bréal was soon followed by most linguists, who defined mechanisms of semantic change in harmony with his findings. Accordingly, in 1921 the German linguist Hermann Hirt classified semantic changes under six categories: (a) narrowing (''Verengerung''), (b) pejoration (''Verschlechterung''), (c) amelioration (''Verbesserung''), (d) extension (''Erweiterung''), (e) metaphor (''Metapher''), and (f) metonymy (''Metonymie'').[1]
A few years later, Jost Trier, a German linguist, who presented his findings in 1934, was the first one to point out the importance of ''lexical / semantic fields''. In his studies, he showed how the structure of the German language had changed between 1200 and 1300.
In recent years semantic change has received a large amount of attention, especially within the framework of pragmatics and cognitive linguistics. Nevertheless, the quest for a standard taxonomy of semantic changes, which would adequately account for all attested mechanisms, is still in doubt. Many linguists (chiefly comparatists) would agree with R.S.P. Beekes' assertion, that "studies on change of meaning do not offer satisfactory results" and no-one has so far presented a full-scale method for interpretation and classification of the data.[2]
There are certain linguistic causes behind this deficiency, related to inherent limitations of historical semantics:
★ By contrast with the limited number of phonemes and morphemes in a linguistic system, the number of senses is unlimited. This bipolar position has been described as resulting from the co-existence of a ''closed phonetic/morphological system'' and an ''open semantic system''.[3]
★ There are no semantic rules or principles that may 'exclude' a certain change of meaning (according to Antoine Meillet's ascertainment[4]). Therefore, historical grammars and handbooks, after dealing with the development of phonetic and morphological system of the language, tend to proceed with the study of lexical change or origin (loanwords, lexical diffusion, dialectic split etc.), setting aside any need for a logical classification of semantic changes.
★ Information on the circumstances that contributed to an alteration are rare and scarce. A linguist cannot retrieve (or verify) valuable evidence concerning style, intonation (the suprasegmental parts of language) and the relevant position of synonyms in a lexical field. Accordingly, he is not able to define and evaluate the sociolinguistic background which may have favoured a certain change or a degree of intentionality that led to the entrenchment of the new meaning.
★ Polysemy, which constitutes a prerequisite for semantic change, is based upon the construction of a central (nuclear) meaning of a word and of marginal or peripheral senses, that form a radial network.[5] In fact, change of meaning has been sometimes defined as drift or shift of semantic load from a nuclear meaning to a peripheral one. Unfortunately, texts and inscriptions tend to be silent on the prototypicality[6] of the nuclear meaning and on the relevant semantic force of one synonym over another.
Causes of semantic change
A major contribution to the theory of semantic change has been Antoine Meillet's 1905 article 'Comment les mots changent de sens'.[7] This article has influenced many later essays, as it addresses the most important aspects of meaning change. Meillet discusses the causes of semantic change:
★ 'Structural' (''structurelles''): This category refers to the linguistic structure of lexical items. The limited number of phonemes / morphemes reduces, as such, the possible contexts for these elements. By striking contrast with the morphophonemic part, there are no ''a priori'' context limits related to the meaning of a word, concerning its possible connotations and positions in a sentence. In addition, lexical fields allow for powerful semantic interaction among their members, though the results are usually visible only after the conclusion of the process.[8]
:Two noteworthy structural mechanisms that affect semantic change are grammaticalisation and reanalysis.
★ 'Referential' (''referentielles''): This category includes changes affecting the referent, i.e. the object or thing that a linguistic unit stands for. Normally, progress in technology and culture goes along with changes in items, materials, tools and concepts. Nevertheless, since language abides to the principle of economy (old means - new usages), a certain delay in following that progress is certainly expectable. The system of any given language will most likely extend the semantic field of an existing word in order to cover the new usage rather than create ''ex nihilo'' a new lexeme. The importance of the simultaneous function of lexical items and referents had been the object of a linguistic and ethnographic field back in 1910, which was named ''Wörter und Sachen'' ("Words and Things"). Though not reflecting mature linguistic analysis, this field focused on producing a descriptive pattern to account for both the word and its cultural background or, briefly, to connect the history of a word to the history of its referent.[9]
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': 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. ''Navigator'' once applied only to ships but the development of planes and cars extended this term to apply to multiple forms of travel. ''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.[10] Meanings can be borrowed from other languages (semantic loans). One popular form of extension is metonymy or synecdoche wherein a part of an object is used to refer to the whole. For example, in many languages, the word for head can be used as a substitute for the word for person. In English, the phrase "a head", resembles the Latin phrase "per capita." 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.
; 'Narrowing': 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.[10]
; 'Amelioration': the loss of negative connotations or gain of positive ones. For example, ''mischievous'' used to mean "disastrous", where it now only means "playfully annoying". This is often a result of semantic bleaching.
; 'Pejoration': the development of negative connotations or loss of 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". ''Awful'' originally had a meaning closer to the modern meaning of ''awesome'', yet it now means the opposite. A famous example is of the word ''gay'', which can mean ''happy'' or ''colorful'' and was used commonly until it became a reference to homosexuals.[12] 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' or 'semantic drift': the movement from applying to one set of circumstances to another. This is seen across languages when cognates have different meanings. 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." 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 within a single register, 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 change in reference to one word is often associated with a shift of meaning in other words. 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". Another example of multiple words shifting meaning comes from Old English: ''meat'', (or rather ''mete'') 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.[10] There are also examples of continual semantic change. The Latin word ''nescius'' ('ignorant') became Old French ''nice'' ('silly' or 'foolish') before it was borrowed into Middle English. Its meaning subsequently changed multiple times: "silly" → "timid" → "fussy" → "dainty" → "careful" → "agreeable" → "kind" or "thoughtful." This last meaning is the current one in English.[14]
:English offers another interesting example of semantic shift in which the word ''black'' 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.[10]
; 'Metaphor': the change in meaning 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': the development of function words and grammatical affixes 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: ''ma voiture a un toit ouvrant, la leur 'pas''' ("my car is convertible, theirs isn't").
; Euphemism: Although not technically a form of semantic change in itself, the use of a substitute word or phrase in an attempt to eliminate or mask the negative connotations of a referent typically causes the substitute word (when it isn't newly coined) to undergo 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. More recently, efforts to make language politically correct provide a number of examples wherein language is deliberately altered to forms deemed more acceptable or appropriate. For example, in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s the term "blackboard" became perceived by some as being "politically incorrect", and so some schools instructed teachers to refer to it as a "chalkboard" instead.[16]
Multiple processes
Many words go through more than one process. In addition to examples cited above, the word ''punk'' initially meant "a young boy" but was then pejorated 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.
Notes and References
1. H. Hirt, ''Etymologie der neuhochdeutschen Sprache'', München 1921, 2nd. ed.
2. R.S.P. Beekes, ''Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. An introduction'', Amsterdam 1995, p. 140.
3. A. McMahon, ''Understanding language change'', Cambridge 1994, p. 185.
4. ''"La difference de sens entre les mots rapprochés doit être expliquée par des raisons précises, autant que possible par des raisons tirées de faits positivement attestés, car il n’existe pas de régles sémantiques permettant de dire que tel out el développement de sens est exclu"'' (A. Meillet, ''Linguistique historique et linguistique générale,'' Paris 1921, p. 31).
5. D. Geeraerts, St. Grondelaers, P. Bakema, ''The Structure of Lexical Variation. Meaning, Wording and Context'', Berlin 1994.
6. A lexical meaning is called ''prototypical'' if it recalls the conceptual structure that best represents the mental space of the term. Prototypical meaning allows for more sufficient comprehension of marginal senses and offers a wider frame for reinterpretation.
7. ''Année sociologique'' 9:1-38; reprinted in Meillet (1921) ''Linguistique historique et linguistique générale''.
8. It is with reason that Hans Krahe supports the inclusive treatment of semantic change: ''«Man muß ein solches Wort nämlich nicht isoliert betrachten, sondern muß es inmitten einer ganzen Gruppe von sachlich zugehörigen Wörtern sehen»'' (''Einleitung in das vergleichende Sprachstudium,'' Innsbruck 1970, p. 87). Harry Meier adds that an etymological solution is not firmly established if the whole semantic field has not been taken into consideration. (''Prinzipien der etymologischen Forschung,'' Heidelberg 1986, p. 109).
9. The Italian linguist Carlo Tagliavini discussed emphatically the importance of ''Wörter und Sachen'' field and indicated that failure to scrutinise parallel histories could also misguide etymology: ''"Diese Richtung'' (i.e. Wörter und Sachen) ''setzt sich ein für das gleichzeitige Studium von Kultur- und Wortgeschichte und halt jegliche allein am sprachlichen Material ausgerichtete etymologische Forschung für sinnlos und gefährlich"'' (''Einführung in die romanische Philologie'', München 1973, p. 15).
10.
11.
12. According to reliable sources, the meaning "homosexual" arose from the expressive term ''gay cat / gey cat'', which originated by the 1930s as part of slang used in the community of inmates and unemployed. It referred to a younger ''hobo'' (a wandering unemployed) or inmate, who was under the protection of an older one. The ''Miriam-Webster's Word Histories Lexicon'' (Springfield MA, 1989) offers full record of sources for this etymology and makes an important notice: ''"[Α hobo] often needed to attach himself to a veteran of the road in order to survive. It was generally taken for granted that the relationship between the youth'' [sic] ''and the older man eventually turned into a sexual liaison"'' (p. 190). If such relationships were at some degree commonplace in those communities, it is visible why a 1935 handbook of prison slang included the following definition: ''Geycat... a homosexual boy''. The above mentioned reference seems to be the first attested instance of the pejorative meaning.
13.
14. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=nice&searchmode=none
15.
16. "PC or not PC ... that was 1993's burning question; Review of the Year 1993"
''The Sunday Times'' (London); Dec 26, 1993; Maurice Chittenden;
Bibliography
★ ''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language'' (1987) David Crystal.
★ ''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language'' (1995) David Crystal.
★ Principles and Methods for Historical Linguistics, Jeffers, Robert J. and Lehiste, Ilse, , , MIT press, 1979,
See also
★ Language change
★ Q-based narrowing
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