Lecture V Changes in word meaning.pptVIP

Lead-in remarks Consider: Horatio: Season your admiration for a while … (from Romeo and Juliet) What does it mean? It means “to moderate your astonishment for a while”. When a word loses its old meaning and comes to refer to something altogether different, the result is a change of word meaning. Change of meaning is a commonplace, and indeed it would appear to be fundamental in living language. Almost every word we use today has a slightly different meaning from the one it had a century ago; and a century ago it had a slightly different meaning from the one it had a century before that. -- Quirk (1963) Broadly speaking, change of meaning refers to the alteration of the meaning of existing words, as well as the addition of new meaning to established words. Polysemy Generalization (extension of meaning) Specialization (restriction of meaning) Amelioration (elevation of meaning) Pejoration (degeneration of meaning) From concrete to abstract or vice versa From proper names to common words or vice versa Transference of meaning Polysemy Consider iron and leaf. Polysemy refers to a lexical item which has a range of different meanings. One-meaning words (monosemic words) are very rare. They are very often scientific terms, e.g. oxygen, moonwalk, earthrise. It may be said that polysemy is the rule and monosemy is the exception. Polysemy is also an essential feature of a language’s economy and efficiency. The greatest number of meanings registered in the OED for one word is 126 (the verb to set); besides, the verb to set has 26 combinations with an adverb, of which the last, set up has 67 senses. Two approaches to polysemy Diachronically, we study the growth or change in the semantic structure of a word, or how the semantic structure of a word has developed from a primary meaning to the present polysemic state, i.e. with derived meanings springing from the original meaning. For example, the word harvest originally meant “autumn”, but now it means “act or