Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

nimme

nemen

nehmen

The opposite of semantic broadening is semantic narrowing, with the word

taking on a more restricted meaning than before. In Middle English, a girl was a young person of either sex, a boy was a male person of any age and lust simply meant ‘pleasure’. A number of words with similar meanings have undergone

shifts in different directions of generality. For example, the word hound was once the generic word for a canine. This word’s meaning has narrowed and the generic canine term is now dog, which once referred to a particular breed of dog.

These changes in word meaning have often obscured the Germanic roots of

the English language, with many originally Germanic words either changing in meaning or dying out.

Table 19 shows the similarities between the Old English words and the equivalents in the modern-day varieties of the closest cousins of English. Words such as steorfan (Modern English: starve) and reek have been semantically narrowed

in the transition from Old English to Modern English, and many of the other

words have died out in the face of competition from other English words, or from words borrowed from other languages. For example, poor is a word borrowed

from Old French.

It is also common to contrast changes involving amelioration with those due to pejoration. Pejorations involve the development of a less favourable meaning or connotation for a particular word. Villains were formerly farm-dwellers but are now criminals; people who were crafty and cunning in medieval times were strong (see German Kraft) and wise but now are deceitful and evasive. Grotesque meant

‘resembling a grotto or cave’ but now means ‘distorted and ugly’. The word dunce is taken from the name of a thirteenth-century scholar, John Duns Scotus, whose thinking was discredited long after his death. Ameliorations, or the development of more favourable meanings for words, are fewer in number. Some of the more notable examples are constable, the meaning of which has shifted from ‘an

attendant at the stable’ to ‘a police officer’ and knight, which in Old English referred to a boy or servant but now has a much more prestigious meaning.

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We have now seen a number of examples of semantic changes. But what is it

about ‘meaning’ that allows such changes to take place? How is it possible for the meanings of words to alter so radically? April McMahon has suggested three

possible reasons:

1.

Most words are polysemous – they have a range of meanings – and

over time marginal meanings may take over from central meanings

(possibly because a borrowing has invaded the semantic space of the

central meaning). Note that polysemy must be distinguished from

ambiguity. An ambiguous word such as match or bank corresponds

to two (or more) distinct lexemes and normally has two (or more)

distinct entries in a conventional dictionary. A polysemous word has

only a single lexical entry with a range of closely related meanings. An

example is the word sloth, which once had a central meaning of

‘lacking in speed’. This central meaning was taken over by the word

slowness and so the central meaning of sloth shifted to what was

formerly a more peripheral meaning, namely ‘laziness’.

2.

Children do not receive a fully formed grammar and lexicon from their

parents, but, with help from Universal Grammar, have to figure it out

for themselves. The child may therefore acquire a slightly different

meaning for a word than that understood by its parents. Earlier we saw

that children, in the very early stages of language acquisition, some-

times seem to use certain words with broader meanings than the adults

around them, e.g. dog to mean ‘any hairy animal with four legs’ (see

section 13). As the child gets older, it gradually restricts the meaning of the word more and more. It is not too difficult, however, to imagine

that slight semantic shifts may emerge at the end of this restriction

process. We did, of course, express some reservations about the extent

of such overextended lexical use by small children in section 13, but these reservations need not rule out what we are contemplating here.

Consider, for instance, the broadening of Old English dogge, referring

to a specific breed of dog, to the current situation where dog is the

generic term for canines. We suggested in section 13 that children are

‘tuned in’ to the basic level of categorisation, and we can suppose that

for the case in question this is the level of Modern English dog. All we

need to suppose, then, is that for whatever reason, at some point a child

was exposed to examples of dogge and interpreted them as referring

to the basic-level generic category. For such a child at this point,

semantic broadening has occurred. Of course, it is still necessary to

understand how such a child’s ‘non-standard’ interpretation became

established and spread throughout the community, but we do at least

have a plausible account of the first important step in semantic change.

Overall, the suggestion that children are crucially involved in language

change is a very attractive one.

Lexical variation and change

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3.

The relationship between concepts and the words which convention-

ally refer to those concepts is arbitrary (see section 14), and so either can vary or change fairly freely through time and across space. Just as

different geographical areas may have different words to represent

different concepts (lexical variation), so also different words may,

through time, evolve so as to be associated with different concepts

( semantic change) (exercises 3, 4 and 5).

Variation and change in morphology

As mentioned in section 10, English verbs have few inflections, but one which is found is that which marks present tense and agreement with

the third person singular subject. This is not the case in all dialects of English, however, and in some dialects this suffix has been lost. Speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in the United States and the English of

East Anglia in the UK produce examples such as those in (216):

(216) a.

this dog chase rabbits

b.

this cat miaow all night

c.

he spend a lot

d.

she dance well

This contrasts with the situation in south-west England, where some people

would not only say he spends a lot, but also produce examples such as those

in (217):

(217) a.

they spends a lot

b.

I dances every night

In this area, the -s suffix does not mark present tense and agreement (with third person singular subjects) but only present tense. Around the English-speaking world, therefore, there is variation both in the presence or absence of the -s suffix and in its grammatical function (exercise 6).

Older versions of English and most other Germanic languages (apart from

Afrikaans) have far more extensive systems of inflection than present-day

Standard English. In Old English, there were four different present tense forms (as there still are today in German, although they are distributed differently), in comparison with two in Modern Standard English. This is illustrated for the verb help and its equivalents in table 20.

Similarly, Modern Standard English has lost the three noun genders of Old

English illustrated in (218):

(218)

tha stanas

the stones (masculine)

tha giefa

the gifts (feminine)

tha scipu

the ships (neuter)

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words

Table 20 The present tense forms of Modern English help and their