Semantic change (alsosemantic shift,semantic progression,semantic development, orsemantic drift) is a form oflanguage change regarding the evolution ofword usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage. Indiachronic (or historical) linguistics, semantic change is a change in one of the meanings of aword. Every word has a variety ofsenses andconnotations, which can be added, removed, or altered over time, often to the extent thatcognates across space and time have very different meanings. The study of semantic change can be seen as part ofetymology,onomasiology,semasiology, andsemantics.
Awful – Literally "full of awe", originally meant "inspiring wonder (or fear)", hence "impressive". In contemporary usage, the word means "extremely bad".
Awesome – Literally "awe-inducing", originally meant "inspiring wonder (or fear)", hence "impressive". In contemporary usage, the word means "extremely good".
Terrible – Originally meant "inspiring terror", shifted to indicate anything spectacular, then to something spectacularly bad.
Terrific – Originally meant "inspiring terror", shifted to indicate anything spectacular, then to something spectacularly good.[1]
Nice – Originally meant "foolish, ignorant, frivolous, senseless". from Old Frenchnice (12c.) meaning "careless, clumsy; weak; poor, needy; simple, stupid, silly, foolish", from Latinnescius ("ignorant or unaware"). Literally "not-knowing", fromne- "not" (from PIE root*ne- "not") + stem ofscire "to know" (compare with science). "The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adj". [Weekley] -- from "timid, faint-hearted" (pre-1300); to "fussy, fastidious" (late 14c.); to "dainty, delicate" (c. 1400); to "precise, careful" (1500s, preserved in such terms as a nice distinction and nice and early); to "agreeable, delightful" (1769); to "kind, thoughtful" (1830).
Naïf orNaïve – Initiallymeant "natural, primitive, or native" . FromFrenchnaïf,literally "native", the masculine form of the French word, but used in English without reference to gender. As a noun, "natural, artless, naive person", first attested 1893, from French, whereOld Frenchnaif also meant"native inhabitant; simpleton, natural fool".
Demagogue – Originally meant "a popular leader". It is from theGreekdēmagōgós "leader of the people", fromdēmos "people" +agōgós "leading, guiding". Now the word has strong connotations of apolitician who panders to emotions andprejudice.
Egregious – Originally described something that was remarkably good (as inTheorema Egregium). The word is from theLatinegregius "illustrious, select", literally, "standing out from the flock", which is fromex—"out of" +greg—(grex) "flock". Now it means something that is remarkably bad or flagrant.
Gay – Originally meant (13th century) "lighthearted", "joyous" or (14th century) "bright and showy", it also came to mean "happy"; it acquired connotations of immorality as early as 1637, either sexual e.g.,gay woman "prostitute",gay man "womaniser",gay house "brothel", or otherwise, e.g.,gay dog "over-indulgent man" andgay deceiver "deceitful and lecherous". In the United States by 1897 the expressiongay cat referred to a hobo, especially a younger hobo in the company of an older one; by 1935, it was used in prison slang for ahomosexual boy; and by 1951, and clipped togay, referred to homosexuals. George Chauncey, in his bookGay New York, would put this shift as early as the late 19th century among a certain "in crowd", knowledgeable of gay night-life. In the modern day, it is most often used to refer to homosexuals, at first among themselves and then in society at large, with a neutral connotation; or as a derogatory synonym for "silly", "dumb", or "boring".[2]
Guy –Guy Fawkes was the alleged leader of aplot to blow up the EnglishHouses of Parliament on 5 November 1605. The day was made a holiday, Guy Fawkes Day, commemorated by parading and burning a ragged manikin of Fawkes, known as aGuy. This led to the use of the wordguy as a term for any "person of grotesque appearance" and then by the late 1800s—especially in the United States—for "any man", as in, e.g., "Someguy called for you". Over the 20th century,guy has replacedfellow in the U.S., and, under the influence ofAmerican popular culture, has been gradually replacingfellow,bloke,chap and other such words throughout the rest of theEnglish-speaking world. In the plural, it can refer to a mixture of genders (e.g., "Come on, you guys!" could be directed to a group of mixed gender instead of only men).
Substitution: Change related to the change of an object, of the knowledge referring to the object, of the attitude toward the object, e.g.,artillery "engines of war used to throw missiles" → "mounted guns",atom "inseparable smallest physical-chemical element" → "physical-chemical element consisting of electrons",scholasticism "philosophical system of the Middle Ages" → "servile adherence to the methods and teaching of schools"
Analogy: Change triggered by the change of an associated word, e.g.,fast adj. "fixed and rapid" ←fast adv. "fixedly, rapidly"
Shortening: e.g.,periodical ←periodical paper
Nomination: "the intentional naming of a referent, new or old, with a name that has not previously been used for it" (Stern 1931: 282), e.g.,lion "brave man" ← "lion"
Regular transfer: a subconscious Nomination
Permutation: non-intentional shift of one referent to another due to a reinterpretation of a situation, e.g.,bead "prayer" → "pearl in a rosary")
Adequation: Change in the attitude of a concept; distinction from substitution is unclear.
This classification does not neatly distinguish between processes and forces/causes of semantic change.
Narrowing: Change from superordinate level to subordinate level. For example,skyline formerly referred to anyhorizon, but now in the US it has narrowed to a horizon decorated by skyscrapers.[7]
Widening: There are many examples of specific brand names being used for the general product, such as withKleenex.[7] Such uses are known as generonyms: seegenericization.
Metaphor: Change based on similarity of thing. 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. Outside of agricultural circles, very few usebroadcast in the earlier sense.[7]
Metonymy: Change based on nearness in space or time, e.g.,jaw "cheek" → "mandible".
Synecdoche: Change based on whole-part relation. The convention of using capital cities to represent countries or their governments is an example of this.
Hyperbole: Change from weaker to stronger meaning, e.g.,kill "torment" → "slaughter"
Meiosis: Change from stronger to weaker meaning, e.g.,astound "strike with thunder" → "surprise strongly".
However, the categorization ofBlank (1999) has gained increasing acceptance:[8]
Metaphor: Change based on similarity between concepts, e.g.,mouse "rodent" → "computer device".
Metonymy: Change based on contiguity between concepts, e.g.,horn "animal horn" → "musical instrument".
Synecdoche: A type of metonymy involving a part to whole relationship, e.g. "hands" from "all hands on deck" → "bodies"
Specialization of meaning: Downward shift in a taxonomy, e.g.,corn "grain" → "wheat" (UK), → "maize" (US).
Generalization of meaning: Upward shift in a taxonomy, e.g.,hoover "Hoover vacuum cleaner" → "any type of vacuum cleaner".
Cohyponymic transfer: Horizontal shift in a taxonomy, e.g., the confusion ofmouse andrat in some dialects.
Antiphrasis: Change based on a contrastive aspect of the concepts, e.g.,perfect lady in the sense of "prostitute".
Auto-antonymy: Change of a word's sense and concept to the complementary opposite, e.g.,bad in the slang sense of "good".
Auto-converse: Lexical expression of a relationship by the two extremes of the respective relationship, e.g.,take in the dialectal use as "give".
Ellipsis: Semantic change based on the contiguity of names, e.g.,car "cart" → "automobile", due to the invention of the(motor) car.
Folk-etymology: Semantic change based on the similarity of names, e.g., Frenchcontredanse, orig. Englishcountry dance.
Blank considered it problematic to include amelioration and pejoration of meaning (as in Ullman) as well as strengthening and weakening of meaning (as in Bloomfield). According to Blank, these are not objectively classifiable phenomena; moreover, Blank has argued that all of the examples listed under these headings can be grouped under other phenomena, rendering the categories redundant.
Blank[9] has tried to create a complete list of motivations for semantic change. They can be summarized as:
Linguistic forces
Psychological forces
Sociocultural forces
Cultural/encyclopedic forces
This list has been revised and slightly enlarged byGrzega (2004):[10]
Fuzziness (i.e., difficulties in classifying the referent or attributing the right word to the referent, thus mixing up designations)
Dominance of the prototype (i.e., fuzzy difference between superordinate and subordinate term due to the monopoly of the prototypical member of a category in the real world)
Social reasons (i.e., contact situation with "undemarcation" effects)
Institutional and non-institutional linguistic pre- and proscriptivism (i.e., legal and peer-group linguistic pre- and proscriptivism, aiming at "demarcation")
Flattery
Insult
Disguising language (i.e., "misnomers")
Taboo (i.e., taboo concepts)
Aesthetic-formal reasons (i.e., avoidance of words that are phonetically similar or identical to negatively associated words)
Communicative-formal reasons (i.e., abolition of the ambiguity of forms in context, keyword: "homonymic conflict and polysemic conflict")
Wordplay/punning
Excessive length of words
Morphological misinterpretation (keyword: "folk-etymology", creation of transparency by changes within a word)
Logical-formal reasons (keyword: "lexical regularization", creation of consociation)
Desire for plasticity (creation of a salient motivation of a name)
Anthropological salience of a concept (i.e., anthropologically given emotionality of a concept, "natural salience")
Culture-induced salience of a concept ("cultural importance")
Changes in the referents (i.e., changes in the world)
Worldview change (i.e., changes in the categorization of the world)
Prestige/fashion (based on the prestige of another language or variety, of certain word-formation patterns, or of certain semasiological centers of expansion)
A specific case of semantic change isreappropriation, a cultural process by which a group reclaims words or artifacts that were previously used in a way disparaging of that group, for example like with the wordqueer. Other related processes include pejoration and amelioration.[11]
Apart from many individual studies,etymological dictionaries are prominent reference books for finding out about semantic changes. A recent survey lists practical tools and online systems for investigating semantic change of words over time.[12] WordEvolutionStudy is an academic platform that takes arbitrary words as input to generate summary views of their evolution based on Google Books ngram dataset and the Corpus of Historical American English.[13]
^An example of this comes fromOld English:meat (or rathermete) referred to all forms of solid food whileflesh (flæsc) referred to animal tissue andfood (foda) referred to animal fodder;meat was eventually restricted toflesh of animals, thenflesh restricted to the tissue of humans andfood was generalized to refer to all forms of solid foodJeffers & Lehiste (1979:130)
^Grzega (2004) paraphrases these categories (except ellipses and folk etymology) as "similar-to" relation, "neighbor-of" relation, "part-of" relation, "kind-of" relation (for both specialization and generalization), "sibling-of" relation, and "contrast-to" relation (for antiphrasis, auto-antonymy, and auto-converse), respectively
Blank, Andreas (1997),Prinzipien des lexikalischen Bedeutungswandels am Beispiel der romanischen Sprachen (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 285), Tübingen: Niemeyer
Blank, Andreas (1999), "Why do new meanings occur? A cognitive typology of the motivations for lexical Semantic change", in Blank, Andreas; Koch, Peter (eds.),Historical Semantics and Cognition, Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 61–90
Blank, Andreas; Koch, Peter (1999), "Introduction: Historical Semantics and Cognition", in Blank, Andreas; Koch, Peter (eds.),Historical Semantics and Cognition, Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1–16
Jeffers, Robert J.; Lehiste, Ilse (1979),Principles and methods for historical linguistics, MIT press,ISBN0-262-60011-0
Paul, Hermann (1880),Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, Tübingen: Niemeyer
Reisig, Karl (1839), "Semasiologie oder Bedeutungslehre", in Haase, Friedrich (ed.),Professor Karl Reisigs Vorlesungen über lateinische Sprachwissenschaft, Leipzig: Lehnhold
Stern, Gustaf (1931),Meaning and change of meaning with special reference to the English language, Göteborg: Elander
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (1990), "From less to more situated in language: the unidirectionality of Semantic change", in Adamson, Silvia; Law, Vivian A.; Vincent, Nigel; Wright, Susan (eds.),Papers from the Fifth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 496–517
Trier, Jost (1931),Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes (dissertation)
Ullmann, Stephen (1957),Principles of Semantics (2nd ed.), Oxford: Blackwell
Ullmann, Stephen (1962),Semantics: An introduction to the science of meaning, Oxford: Blackwell
Vanhove, Martine (2008),From Polysemy to Semantic change: Towards a Typology of Lexical Semantic Associations, Studies in Language Companion Series 106, Amsterdam, New York: Benjamins.
Warren, Beatrice (1992),Sense Developments: A contrastive study of the development of slang senses and novel standard senses in English, [Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis 80], Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell
Grzega, Joachim (2000), "Historical Semantics in the Light of Cognitive Linguistics: Aspects of a new reference book reviewed",Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 25: 233–244.
Koch, Peter (2002), "Lexical typology from a cognitive and linguistic point of view", in: Cruse, D. Alan et al. (eds.),Lexicology: An international handbook on the nature and structure of words and vocabularies/lexikologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wörtern und Wortschätzen, [Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 21], Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, vol. 1, 1142–1178.
Wundt, Wilhelm (1912),Völkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte, vol. 2,2:Die Sprache, Leipzig: Engelmann.
Exploring Word Evolution An online analysis tool for studying evolution of any input words based on Google Books n-gram dataset and the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA).
