Semantic change
Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift) is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage. 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 cognates across space and time have very different meanings. The study of semantic change can be seen as part of etymology, onomasiology, semasiology, and semantics.
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 French nice (12c.) meaning "careless, clumsy; weak; poor, needy; simple, stupid, silly, foolish", from Latin nescius ("ignorant or unaware"). Literally "not-knowing", from ne- "not" (from PIE root *ne- "not") + stem of scire "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 or Naïve – Initially "natural, primitive, or native" . From French naïf, 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, where Old French naif also meant "native inhabitant; simpleton, natural fool".
meant
Demagogue – Originally meant "a popular leader". It is from the dēmagōgós "leader of the people", from dēmos "people" + agōgós "leading, guiding". Now the word has strong connotations of a politician who panders to emotions and prejudice.
Greek
Egregious – Originally described something that was remarkably good (as in ). The word is from the Latin egregius "illustrious, select", literally, "standing out from the flock", which is from ex—"out of" + greg—(grex) "flock". Now it means something that is remarkably bad or flagrant.
Theorema Egregium
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" and gay deceiver "deceitful and lecherous". In the United States by 1897 the expression gay 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 a boy; and by 1951, and clipped to gay, referred to homosexuals. George Chauncey, in his book Gay 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]
homosexual
Guy – was the alleged leader of a plot to blow up the English Houses 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 a Guy. This led to the use of the word guy 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., "Some guy called for you". Over the 20th century, guy has replaced fellow in the U.S., and, under the influence of American popular culture, has been gradually replacing fellow, bloke, chap and other such words throughout the rest of the English-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).
Guy Fawkes
Synecdoche: shifts between part and whole
Metonymy: shifts between cause and effect
Metaphor
Linguistic forces
Psychological forces
Sociocultural forces
Cultural/encyclopedic forces
Blank[9] has tried to create a complete list of motivations for semantic change. They can be summarized as:
This list has been revised and slightly enlarged by Grzega (2004):[10]
The case of reappropriation[edit]
A specific case of semantic change is reappropriation, 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 word queer. Other related processes include pejoration and amelioration.[11]
Practical studies[edit]
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]
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
(1933), Language, New York: Allen & Unwin
Bloomfield, Leonard
(1899), Essai de sémantique (2nd ed.), Paris: Hachette
Bréal, Michel
(1964), "Pour une sémantique diachronique structurale", Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature, 2: 139–186
Coseriu, Eugenio
Darmesteter, Arsène (1887), La vie des mots, Paris: Delagrave
Fritz, Gerd (1974), Bedeutungswandel im Deutschen, Tübingen: Niemeyer
(1983), "Reclassifying Semantic change", Quaderni di Semantica, 4: 217–240
Geeraerts, Dirk
(1997), Diachronic prototype Semantics: a contribution to historical lexicology, Oxford: Clarendon
Geeraerts, Dirk
Grzega, Joachim (2004), Bezeichnungswandel: Wie, Warum, Wozu? Ein Beitrag zur englischen und allgemeinen Onomasiologie, Heidelberg: Winter
Grzega, Joachim; Schöner, Marion (2007), (PDF), Eichstätt: Universität
English and general historical lexicology: materials for onomasiology seminars
Jeffers, Robert J.; Lehiste, Ilse (1979), Principles and methods for historical linguistics, MIT press, 0-262-60011-0
ISBN
(1880), Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, Tübingen: Niemeyer
Paul, Hermann
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
(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
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
(1931), Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes (dissertation)
Trier, Jost
(1957), Principles of Semantics (2nd ed.), Oxford: Blackwell
Ullmann, Stephen
(1962), Semantics: An introduction to the science of meaning, Oxford: Blackwell
Ullmann, Stephen
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
(2003), Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew Archived February 1, 2014, at the Wayback Machine. Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 1-4039-1723-X.
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad
AlBader, Yousuf B. (2015) ""
Semantic Innovation and Change in Kuwaiti Arabic: A Study of the Polysemy of Verbs
AlBader, Yousuf B. (2016) ""
From dašš l-ġōṣ to dašš twitar: Semantic Change in Kuwaiti Arabic
AlBader, Yousuf B. (2017) ""
Polysemy and Semantic Change in the Arabic Language and Dialects
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.
(internet platform by Joachim Grzega, Alfred Bammesberger and Marion Schöner, including a list of etymological dictionaries)
Onomasiology Online
.
Etymonline, Online Etymology Dictionary of the English language
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).