29 Changes in Meaning of Words

Ms. Raunak Roy

Learning outcome:

This module deals with the question what does a change in the meaning of words in a Language mean. It looks into the reasons why such a phenomenon takes place and apart from this details of semantic change will also be discussed. Typology and the observed tendencies have also been discussed on this module. The content of this module has been presented in a pedagogical manner in order to aid in understanding various aspects of the chapter.

Changes in the Meanings of Words

Did you know that the word pen originally meant ‘feather, quill’ (a loan from Old French penne ‘feather, writing quill’), but as times changed it refers to instruments for writing we use today. Similarly the word ‘bow’ (or ‘arrow’) shifted to mean ‘gun’ in many languages. In the 13th century Gay meant “lighthearted”, “joyous” or “bright and showy”, but gradually it acquired connotations of immorality. Awful originally meant “inspiring wonder (or fear)” but in contemporary usage the word usually has negative meaning. Above examples point towards the fact that words of a language change their meaning completely or partially over time. This is called semantic change which has been a topic of research in Anthropology, Philosophy and Psychology and Linguistics. Vocabulary change in language over time is the topic of this unit which will be discussed in detail.

What is Semantic change?

In historical linguistics, semantic change is a change in the meaning of a word. A word may develop a variety of senses and connotations, or meaning can be added, removed, or altered over time, across space and time. Campbell defines Semantic change being concerned with change in meaning, understood to be a change in the concepts associated with a word, and has nothing to do with change in the phonetic form of the word. Such change cannot be explained in isolation but also require co-ordination with Analogy, Syntax, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics etc. Several attempts have been made to explain the change in meaning, how it occurs, and the pathway it follows. The conventional explanation offered is that such a change is related to human thought. It is seen that onomatopoeic forms tend to resist both sound change and semantic change.

Attempts to explain semantic change

1. Words are typically polysemic: each has various meanings or covers a whole range of shades of meaning: this is necessary, for words are used in a wide variety of context. e.g., get, do, thing, bad, nice etc. Bloomfield explains that each word has one central meaning and various occasional marginal meanings. Semantic change occurs when speakers stop using the central meaning and reinterpret a marginal meaning as a central one. e.g. Sloth was related to slow as truth to true; today, slowness ousted earlier sloth (the name of the animal popularly thought to embody this characteristic).

Schematically this can be represented in three stages, beginning with form ‘a’ which has meaning ‘A’:

Stage 1: a ‘A’

Stage 2: a ‘A’, ‘B’ (‘A’ > ‘A’, ‘B’)

Stage 3: a ‘B’ (‘A’, ‘B’ > ‘B’)

Examples: (a) English write.

In Stage 1, write meant A ‘to cut’

In Stage 2, write A ‘to cut, scratch’ B ‘to write’

In Stage 3, write B ‘to write’ (Modern English)

(a=write; A=to cut; B=to write)

In the above example in Stage 1, write meant ‘to cut’. In Stage 2, the meaning was extended to include both ‘to cut, scratch’ and ‘to write’; the connection is through runic writing, which was carved or scratched on wood and stone. This stage is attested in Old English writan ‘to write’, ‘to cut’. Stage 3 is illustrated by modem English write meaning ‘to write’ only, where the sense of ‘to cut’ has been lost.

This view recognises an intervening stage of polysemy as necessary in semantic changes. Others do not emphasise this view so much; rather, they recognise that lexical items typically have a core meaning (or group of related core concepts) but also various less central, more peripheral senses when used in a variety of discourse contexts, and they see semantic change as a less central sense becoming more central and the original core concept receding to be more peripheral, often being lost altogether. Still others see meaning as a network or semantic map where items within a semantic domain and from other domains are related by various overlapping in the polysemous choice which each lexical item has. Semantic change in this view follows paths of connections in the network, selecting and emphasising different senses which the items have in different contexts. These are not really different approaches, but rather just more realistic versions of the view that holds that polysemy is a necessary intermediate step in semantic change.

2. Apart from structural (linguistic) and psychological factors being a primary cause of semantic change; however it is seen that historical factors outside of language have also been considered important causes of semantic change. Linguistic forces, Psychological forces, Sociocultural forces, Cultural forces, Changes in technology, society, politics, religion and in fact all spheres of human life can lead to semantic shifts. For example, in the wake of automobiles and aeroplanes, fly and drive have taken on new meanings.

3 Arbitrariness allows us to regard to signifier and the signified as independent, thus either might change in time. e.g., the word hierarchy in English first was used for the medieval classification of angels (cherubim, seraphim etc.). In the 17th century, hierarchy was extended to the ranking of clergymen, and thereafter to any system of grading. 1976: “Soviet Communist Hierarchy” (Daily Telegraph)

4. Semantic change resulting from borrowing: The most important effect on the semantic component of language is brought about by the influence of other languages or dialects, a process termed borrowing. It is common for one language to take words from another language i.e. loanwords. Loanwords are lexical items which have been “borrowed” from another language; it was not part of the vocabulary of the recipient language. For example: OE did not have a word for pork; it was borrowed from French porc ‘pig, pork’ in the ME period.

Types of Semantic Change

Widening/Extension

In semantic changes involving widening, the range of meanings of a word increases so that the word can be used in more contexts than were appropriate for it before the change.

Examples:

• Dog. English dog first appeared with the more specific meaning of ‘a (specific) powerful breed of dog’, which generalised to include all breeds or races of dogs.
•  Salary. Latin saliirium was a soldier’s allotment of salt (based on Latin sal ‘salt’), which then came to mean a soldier’s wages in general, and then finally, as in English, wages in general, not just a soldier’s pay.
• Cupboard. In Middle English times, cupboard meant ‘a table (“board”) upon which cups and other vessels were placed, a piece of furniture to display plates, a sideboard’, whose meaning then became ‘a closet or cabinet with shelves for keeping cups and dishes’, and finally in America it changed to mean any ‘small storage cabinet’.
• Spanish caballero, originally ‘rider, horseman’, expanded to include also ‘gentleman, man of upper society’ (since only men of means could afford to be riders of horses).
• Spanish estar ‘to be’ (especially ‘to be in a location’) < Latin stare ‘to stand’.
• Spanish pajaro ‘bird’ < Latin passer ‘sparrow’.

Narrowing (Specialization, Restriction)

In semantic narrowing, the range of meanings is decreased so that a word can be used appropriately only in fewer contexts than it could before the change.

• Meat originally meant ‘food’ in general (as in the King James translation of the Bible) and later narrowed its meaning to ‘meat’ (‘food of flesh’); this original meaning is behind compounds such as sweetmeat ‘candy’. (Compare the Swedish cognate mat ‘food’.)
• Hound ‘a species of dog (long-eared hunting dog which follows its prey by scent)’ comes from Old English hund ‘dog’ in general.
• Wife meant ‘woman’ in Old English times (as in the original sense of midwife, literally a ‘with-woman’). It narrowed to mean ‘woman of humble rank or of low employment, especially one selling commodities of various sorts’. Finally it shifted to ‘married woman, spouse’.
• Deer narrowed its sense from Old English deor ‘animal’; Fowl ‘bird (especially edible or domestic)’ has narrowed its sense from Old English fugol which meant ‘bird’ in general.
• Girl, which meant ‘child or young person of either sex’ in Middle English times, narrowed its referent in Modem English to ‘a female child, young woman’.
• Starve ‘to suffer or perish from hunger’ is from Old English steorfan ‘to die’.
• French soldat ‘soldier’ comes from solder ‘to pay’ and thus meant ‘a paid person’, a narrowing from ‘any paid person’ to ‘someone in the military’ .
• French drapeau ‘flag’ meant first ‘the piece of cloth fastened to a staff’.
• Spanish rezar ‘to pray’ < Old Spanish rezar ‘to recite, say aloud’ (from Latin recitiire ‘to recite, say aloud’, the source from which recite in English is borrowed).

Degeneration or Pejoration

In degeneration (often called pejoration), the sense of a word takes on a less positive, more negative evaluation in the minds of the users of the language – an increasingly negative value judgement. A famous, oft cited example is English knave ‘a rogue’, from Old English cnafa ‘a youth, child’, which was extended to mean ‘servant’ and then ultimately to the modem sense of knave ‘rogue, disreputable fellow’ (compare the German cognate Knabe ‘boy, lad’). Examples of the degeneration of terms for women are well known and are often cited as examples in works dealing with social issues. For example, in colloquial German, Weib means ‘ill-tempered woman’ though in Standard German it just means ‘woman’ (contrast the English cognate wife, which formerly meant ‘woman’). A great many of the terms for women which initially were neutral (or at least not so negative) degenerated so that today they are quite negative in connotation: spinster ‘unmarried older woman’ < ‘one who spins’; mistress < originally from a borrowing from Old French maistresse ‘a woman who rules or has control’; earlier in English it meant ‘a woman who employs others in her service, a woman who has the care of or authority over servants or attendants’. madam ‘the female head of a house of prostitution’ < ‘a polite form of address to women’; Italian putta and Spanish puta ‘whore’ earlier meant just ‘girl’ (compare Old Italian putta ‘girl’, putto ‘boy’; Latin putus ‘boy’, puta ‘girl’); Spanish ramera ‘prostitute’ earlier meant ‘innkeeper’s wife, female innkeeper’ .

Elevation/Amelioration

Semantic changes of elevation involve shifts in the sense of a word in the direction towards a more positive value in the minds of the users of the language – an increasingly positive value judgement.

• Fond < past participle of Middle English fonnen ‘to be foolish, silly.’
• Spanish caballo ‘horse’ < Latin caballus ‘nag, workhorse’.
• English knight ‘mounted warrior serving a king’, ‘lesser nobility (below baronet)’ comes from Old English cniht ‘boy, servant’, which shifted to ‘servant’, then ‘military servant’, and finally to the modem senses of ‘warrior in service of the king’ and ‘lesser nobility’.
• Spanish calle ‘street’ < Latin calle ‘(cattle-) path’. Spanish casa ‘house’ < Latin casa ‘hut, cottage’.
• Spanish corte court’ < Latin cohortem, cortem ‘farmyard, enclosure’, which came to mean ‘division of a Roman military camp’, which was extended to include ‘body of troops (belonging to that division)’ to ‘imperial guard’ and then further to ‘palace’ (see English court, a loan from Old French court, Modem French cour ‘court (legal, royal), courtship’ with the same Latin origin as the Spanish fonns).
• The villa of the Middle Ages meant ‘fann, homestead’, but was elevated in French ville to ‘city, town’, Spanish villa ‘village, town, country house’ (compare Italian villa ‘country house’).
• English dude ‘guy, person’ (slang in origin) was in 1883 a word of ridicule for ‘a man who affects an exaggerated fastidiousness in dress, speech and deportment, concerned with what is aesthetically considered “good form”, a dandy’.

Hyperbole

Hyperbole (exaggeration, from Greek hyperbole ‘excess’) involves shifts in meaning due to exaggeration by overstatement.

• (a) English terribly, horribly, awfully and other similar words today mean little more than ‘very’ (a generic intensifier of the adjective which they modify); by overstatement they have come to have no real connection with their origins, terror, horror, awe and so on.
• (b) German sehr ‘very’ < ‘sorely’.
• (c) German qualen ‘to torment, torture’ < Proto-Germanic *kwaljan ‘to kill’ (compare the English cognate quell, from Old English cwellan ‘to kill, slay’).
• (d) English slang lame ‘stupid, awkward, socially inept’, from the original meaning ‘crippled, having an impaired limb’.

Litotes

Litotes (understatement, from Greek litotes ‘smoothness, plainness’) is exaggeration by understatement (such as ‘of no small importance’ when ‘very important’ is meant). In many languages, examples of litotes are found involving verbs meaning ‘to kill’. For example, English kill originally meant ‘to strike, beat, hit, knock’. If you were to say hit but intend it to mean ‘kill’, this would be an understatement. (a) French meurtre ‘murder, homicide’ comes via litotes from ‘bruise’, still seen in the etymologically related verb meurtrir ‘to bruise’ (compare the Spanish cognate moret6n ‘bruise, black-and-blue spot’). (b) French poison ‘poison’ originally meant ‘potion, draught’ (English poison was borrowed from French after this semantic shift). (c) English bereaved, bereft ‘deprived by death’ < ‘robbed’ (Old English be- + reafian ‘to rob, plunder, spoil’). (d) English slang inhale ‘to eat something fast’ < ‘to breathe in, draw in by breathing’.

Euphemism

Euphemism involves the replacement of words regarded as unpleasant. Terms for ‘toilet’ frequently come to be considered indelicate, and substitutions lacking the distressing sentiments are made. The room where indoor toilets were installed was called water closet in Britain; this was soon replaced by toilet, originally a loan from French toilette ‘small cloth’ (diminutive of toile ‘cloth, towel’) which in English originally meant ‘a wrapper for clothes, a night-dress bag’, then ‘a cloth or towel thrown over the shoulders during hairdressing’, then ‘a cloth cover for a dressing table’, then ‘articles used in dressing’, ‘furniture of the toilet’ ‘toilet- table’, ‘toilet service’, and then ‘the table upon which these articles are placed’, ‘the action or process of dressing’, ‘a dressing room with bathing facilities’, and finally ‘toilet/bathroom’. Other euphemistic replacements include lavatory, bathroom, restroom, commode, and many others.

Spanish embarazada ‘pregnant’ (originally meaning ‘encumbered’) has essentially replaced earlier prenada ‘pregnant’. (English embarrass also earlier meant ‘to encumber, impede, hamper [movements. actions]” a borrowing from French embarrasser ‘to block, to obstruct’.) Not only can words be replaced or lost due to avoidance of obscenities and taboo, but also they are often changed phonetically to give more euphemistic outcomes, one source of new vocabulary. Varieties of Spanish have pucha, puchis, puchica, juta and the like as euphemistic replacements for puta ‘whore’ (very obscene); chin in Mexican Spanish replaces the very obscene chingar ‘to have sexual intercourse (crudely)’. Examples of this sort are found in many languages.

Taboo

Some words are not used and are seen as a taboo. This is generally due to sociocultural reasons. For example words such as bitch, prostitute etc.

Reanalysis

Analysing a lexeme with a different structure from its original, often by misunderstanding is called Reanalysis. For example, hamburger, which was originally Hamburg + -er, was reanalyzed as ham + -burger. Analogically words like cheeseburger were created. The Latin morpheme min- ‘little’ is seen in minor and minus but the words minimum and miniature led to the analysis of mini- as the morpheme meaning ‘small’ which has become general in English (and German) as a borrowed morpheme, cf. minibar, minicomputer, miniskirt.

Other classifications exist but most of them are quite similar and overlapping. One of the types of classification is by Bloomfield (1933) who classified semantic change into Narrowing, Widening, Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, Hyperbole, Meiosis, Degeneration and Elevation. Ullman classifies semantic change into change based on a similarity of senses (Metaphor), change based on a contiguity of senses (Metonymy), change based on a similarity of names (Folk-etymology), and change based on a contiguity of names (Ellipsis).

Results of semantic change

Broadening and Narrowing of meaning:

A word increases its range of meaning over time resulting in an expansion of meaning. The term Dog is a good example of semantic broadening. English dog first appeared with the more specific meaning of ‘a (specific) powerful breed of dog’, which generalised to include all breeds or races of dogs. For instance in Middle English bridde was a term for ‘small bird’, later the term bird came to be used in a general sense and the word fowl, formally the more general word was restricted to the sense of ‘farmyard birds bred especially for consumption’. Narrowing is the opposite of expansion. For example the word meat which derives from Middle English mete with the general meaning of ‘food’ and now restricted to processed animal flesh. In turn the word flesh was narrowed in its range to ‘human flesh’

Amelioration and Pejoration:

Ameliorization involves a shift to more positive connotation whereas Pejorization involves shifting to a more negative connotation. The word nice has achieved its modern meaning by amelioration from the earlier sense foolish, silly. Pejoration is more usual than amelioration, i.e. there are more instances of words developing a negative meaning than the opposite case. Two good examples related to terms for people. The word churl stems from a Germanic root meaning ‘man’ and came to mean ‘a peasant, someone of low birth’ and later still ‘an ill-bred person’. The root is still to be seen in the adjective churlish ‘mean, despicable’. The word knave (now somewhat antiquated) has the negative meaning ‘scoundrel’. But it comes from the more neutral word cnafa ‘boy, servant’ in Old English (cf. German Knabe to which it is related).These are interesting examples in literature illustrating that the value judgments attached to particular words can change: as a result of semantic change, the connotations of words may become more positive (amelioration) or more negative (pejoration).

General Tendencies of Semantic Change

1. Semantically related words often undergo parallel semantic shifts. For example, various words which meant ‘rapidly’ in Old English and Middle English shifted their meaning to ‘immediately’.
2. Meaning is also loss through homophony as in Old English had two verbs lætan ‘allow’ and lettan ‘obstruct, hinder’. These became homophonous and only the meaning ‘allow’ survived
3.  Spatiollocative words may develop temporal senses: before, after, behind. Also, spatial terms often develop from body-part terms, as in ahead of, in the back of, at the foot of.
4. Some common semantic shifts typically, though not absolutely always go in one direction and not the other; cases which recur and are found in numerous languages include the following.

• Words having to do with the sense of touch may typically develop meanings involving the sense of taste: sharp, crisp.
• Words involving the sense of taste may develop extended senses involving emotions in general: bitter, sour, sweet.
• Physical-action verbs (especially with hands) develop meanings of mental-state verbs, speech-act verbs. For example, verbs such as ‘grasp’, ‘capture’, ‘get a hold on’, ‘get’, ‘catch on to’ very commonly come to mean ‘understand’; thus, feel goes from ‘touch, feel with hands’ to ‘feel, think, have sympathy or pity for’;
• Mental-state verbs develops meanings of speech-act verbs (observe ‘to perceive, witness’ > ‘to state, remark’).
• The term ‘Man’ develops sense of ‘husband’ (German Mann ‘man, husband’ < ‘man’) and similarly ‘Woman’ comes to stand for ‘wife’.
• The term ‘Body’ comes to develop the sense of ‘person’ (for example somebody).

5. Semantic shifts typically go from more concrete to more abstract. For example, there are many semantic changes which extend body-part notions to more abstract meanings, but not the other way around, as with German Haupt once meaning only ‘head’ (body part, concrete), but now limited mostly to the meaning ‘main’ or ‘principal’, as in Hauptstadt ‘capital’ (Haupt ‘head’ + Stadt ‘town, city’), Hauptbahnhof ‘central station’ (Haupt ‘head’ + Bahnhof ‘railway station’).

Conclusion

E.B. White wrote ‘The language is perpetually in flux: it is a living stream, shifting, changing, receiving new strength from a thousand tributaries, losing old forms in the backwaters of time.’ It is observed that words change or develop under the influence of various factors. There seems to be a logical route from meaning X to meaning Y and sociolinguists have forwarded theories attempting to explain it. When one gives a sufficient amount of thought it is noticed that many meaning changes which, at first, seem baffling can be sourced quite easily and understood very logically. The passage of time, socio-cultural conventions, and technological developments provides plenty of opportunity for the semantic change to take place, both consciously and unconsciously. The above module attempted to explain this phenomenon of changes in meanings of words along with an overview of its types and causes and its consequent outcomes.

References

• Millar, Robert McColl. 2015. Trask’s historical linguistics. 3d ed. London: Hodder Education.
• Ringe, Don, and Joseph F. Eska. 2013. Historical linguistics: Toward a twenty-first century reintegration. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
• Theodora Bynon, Historical Linguistics: Cambridge University Press, 1977
• Campbell, Lyle (2004) Historical linguistics: An introduction. 2d ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
• Crowley, Terry, and Claire Bowern (2010). An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
• Hock, Hans Henrich, and Brian D. Joseph. 2009 Language history, language change, and language relationship: An introduction to historical and comparative linguistics. 2d ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Theodora Bynon (1977), Historical Linguistics: Cambridge University Press.
• Winfred P. Lehmann (1973), Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (Second Edition): Holt
• Millar, Robert McColl (2015) Trask’s historical linguistics. 3d ed. London: Hodder Education.
• Ringe, Don, and Joseph F. Eska (2013) Historical linguistics: Toward a twenty-first century reintegration. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.