Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

indicated in figure 43, she found that while some ‘British’ English words were being retained, many Americanisms were being borrowed, a finding which reflects the increase in sociocultural contact between the United States and New Zealand.

A number of studies have suggested that people are able to acquire new lexical items rather more quickly than they can acquire new phonological features. For instance, Jack Chambers has compared the rate at which a group of Canadian

children whose parents had moved to southern England adopted British English Figure 43 Reported use of lexical pairs in New Zealand English (based on

Meyerhoff 1993)

228

words

Figure 44 The adoption of British English by Canadian children (from Chambers 1992: 678). Adapted from two original graphs with permission of the author.

lexical and phonological features. He selected twenty-five British/Canadian lexical pairs (including nappy/diaper, pushchair/stroller and boot/trunk) and five pronunciation pairs (including [bənɑnə]/[bənænə] and [təmɑtʌʊ]/[təmeɪdʌʊ]) and analysed the extent to which the Canadian youngsters adopted the British forms. The graph in figure 44 presents the findings for three of the children he studied. Each child had acquired more of the lexical items than of the pronunciation features.

We have now seen two examples of dialect contact leading to change in lexical choice: sociocultural contact with North America has led to the adoption of

American English words in other English dialects, and contact with British

English has led a number of Canadian children to shift away from their indigenous lexical patterns to those of their new home. This dialect contact also has a considerable effect on lexical variation within individual English-speaking countries. In England, the urbanisation of rural areas has had a devastating effect on the survival of traditional rural dialects. Urban varieties are increasingly being diffused into the surrounding rural areas, with effects which are particularly visible in the lexicon.

Traditional dialect words are losing ground in competition from words from urban or standard dialects. An example of such lexical attrition is presented in the map (p.

229). A century ago, the word dwile (meaning ‘floorcloth’) was widely used in the eastern counties of England. Today, it is restricted largely to the adult populations of Norfolk and parts of Suffolk. In a recent study, as indicated in figure 45, the word dwile was barely recognised by any of the children surveyed, which strongly

suggests that it is unlikely to survive long into the twenty-first century (exercise 2).

Same word – new meaning

A ‘nice’ example to begin our discussion of the way word meanings

change is presented by the word nice itself. This word entered the English

Lexical variation and change

229

Map 1 The lexical attrition of the word dwile in East Anglia (from Britain

forthcoming)

100

tlyc

90

orre

ile

80

cd w

n

f d

70

ad o

e

gin 60

isn n

og

ea

50

c

e mh 40

o reh t

w

30

le

tified

op

en

e

20

id

p

of

10

%

0

adults

children

Age group

Figure 45 The lexical attrition of dwile in East Anglia (based on Britain

forthcoming)

language around the thirteenth century from Old French, a descendant of the Latin word nescius meaning ‘ignorant’. By the fourteenth century, its meaning had

already changed to mean ‘silly’ or ‘wanton’: a nice person was one from whom favours might easily be obtained. In the fifteenth century, nice came to mean

‘coy’ or ‘shy’, by the sixteenth it meant ‘subtle’, and only in the eighteenth century

230

words

did it reach its present meaning of ‘agreeable’ or ‘good’. Nowadays, the meaning of nice appears to be weakening: it has such a bland, general, quality of ‘goodness’ that in some contexts, such as that illustrated in (215), it means little more than ‘OK’:

(215)

[conversation between father and daughter]

heidi:

Hey, dad, I’ve just bought a new Golf GTi convertible. What do

you reckon?

albert: Mm. It’s nice.

For a more contemporary example of semantic change, consider the word gay.

Originally, gay meant ‘full of joy and mirth, light-hearted’. In the middle of the twentieth century, however, it also came to mean ‘homosexual’, and this

later meaning is now the dominant one. In the UK at least, even this meaning is beginning to change. ‘Gay’ is now sometimes used to mean ‘lame’, ‘second-rate’

or ‘feeble’. Just like linguistic change in phonology, which we discussed earlier

(section 4), semantic change is always preceded by semantic variation – in other words, at some stage in the shift from meaning A to meaning B, both meanings will be current within a community. At one time, therefore, both ‘joyful’ and

‘homosexual’ were meanings of the word gay. Gradually, over time, one meaning has begun to be used much more than the other to such an extent that the older meaning is dying out. And now a new meaning is appearing, which is beginning to compete with the currently dominant one. For example, in the million-word Wellington Corpus of New Zealand English there are sixty examples of the word

‘gay’. Fifty-four refer to its meaning of ‘homosexual’, three are in the expression

‘gay abandon’ and three are mentions of the word itself in a discussion about how its meaning has changed!

If we look back into the history of English, many thousands of words have

changed their meaning in the same way that the word gay is changing today. In an attempt to establish regularities of semantic change, historical linguists tend to classify meaning changes according to the nature of the semantic shift.

Some changes are due to semantic broadening: here the word takes on a wider, more general meaning than it had previously. The word thing is a classic example of such broadening. In Old English and Old Norse, this word meant ‘a public

assembly’. In present-day Icelandic, a language with similar Germanic roots to English, it still does. In Modern English, however, it has now been extended so much that it simply means ‘an entity of any kind’. The word companion

provides another example. It used to mean ‘someone who eats bread with

you’ (see Italian con ‘with’ + pane ‘bread’); now it means ‘someone who is

with you’. The word broadcast, which only a couple of centuries ago meant ‘to sow seeds’, has now, in this technological age, been extended to include the spreading of information on television and radio. Pudding, which today is

usually sweet and eaten for dessert, comes from the French word boudin,

meaning a sausage made with animal intestines, a meaning retained in English black pudding.

Lexical variation and change

231

Table 19 Equivalences between Old and Modern English and other

Germanic languages

Modern English

Old English

Frisian

Dutch

German

meat

flesh

fleis

vlees

Fleisch

animal

deer

dier

dier

Tier

dog

hound

houn

hond

Hund

cloud

wolcen

wolk

wolk

Wolke

die

steorfan

stjerre

sterven

sterben

bird

fugol

fûgel

vogel

Vogel

smoke

reek

rikje

roken

rauchen

poor

earm

earm

arm

arm

air

lyft

lucht

lucht

Luft

take

niman