Semasiology: Change of meaning

1. Causes of semantic change.

2. Nature of semantic change.

3. Results of semantic change.

1.Read the following extracts and explain the semantic processes (nature) by which the italicized words acquired their meaning.

a) “Bureau”, a desk, was borrowed from French in the 17^th c. In modern French it means not only the desk but also the office itself & the authority exercised by the office. Hence the familiar bureaucracy is likely to become increasingly familiar. The desk was called so because covered with bureau, a thick coarse cloth of a brown russet.

(The Romance of Words by E. Weekley.)

b) An Earl of Spencer made a short overcoat fashionable for same time. An Earl of Sandwich invented a form of Light refreshment which enabled him to take a meal without leaving the card-table. Hence we have such words as spencer & sandwich in English.

(The romance of Words. By E. Weekley)

b) A common name for overalls & trousers is jeans. In singular jean is also a term for a durable twilled cotton & is short for the phrase Jean fustian which first appeared in texts of 16^th c. Fustian is a cotton or a cotton& linen fabric, & jean is the modern spelling of Middle English Jene or Genes, The Middle English name of the Italian city Genoa, where it was made & shipped abroad.

2. Define the type of transference which has taken place.

a) the wing of a bird – the wing of a building; the eye of a man – the eye of a needle; the hand of a child – the hand of a clock; the heart of a man – the heart of a matter; the bridge across a river – the bridge of a nose.

b) Green grass – green years; black shoes – black despair; glass – a glass; Ford – a Ford.

3. Analyse the process of development of new meanings in italicized words.

1.I put the letter well into the mouth of the box & let it go & it fell over & over like an autumn leaf.2. Those who had been the head of the line paused momentarily on entry & looked around curiously. 3. A cheerful-looking girl in blue jeans came up to the stairs whistling. 4. He inspired universal confidence & had an iron nerve. 5. Oh, Steven I read Dickens the other day. It was awfully funny.

4 .In the examples given below identify the results of semantic change

1.While the others waited the elderly executive filled his pipe & lit it. 1. Finn was watching the birds. 3. The two girls took hold of one another, one acting gentleman, the other lady; three or more pairs immediately join them & began waltz. Smokey had followed a dictum all his life: If you want a woman to stick beside you, pick an ugly one. Ugly one stayed to slice meat & stir the gravy.

5. Read the following passage from “Regularity in Semantic Change”, make a plan and comment on it.

In English there has been considerable fluctuation in the preterite and past participle ending after sonorants for weak verbs: either a voiced /-d/ or a voiceless /-t/. This has resulted in the exploitation of the two options for semantic purposes. The situation for most varieties of English today is that the ending -ed stresses the process of the verb and the ending -t emphasises the result as seen in the following examples.

POLYSEMOUS WORDS These are words which have a basic and a related figurative meaning, e.g. foot and foot of the mountain. Characteristic for the figurative meaning is that it occurs in a phrase in which its metaphorical use is clear. But with time the secondary use may occur without any specifying information. This is the first step towards a shift from basic to figurative meaning as the unmarked member of a pair. For instance decimate formerly meant to reduce to one tenth in size (from Latin decem) but now the secondary meaning ‘to waste, destroy’ has become the primary meaning and the original basic one is lost. An example of a word which has both meanings in equilibrium would be headache which means both ‘pain in the head’ and ‘unwanted problem’ (also true of German, cf. Das bereitet mir grosse Kopfschmerzen).

DOES A LANGUAGE LOSE WORDS? The answer to this question is not simple. The clearest instance is where a word is borrowed from another language and the original word is then lost. This has happened with Old English niman (cf. German nehmen) which was replaced in Middle English by take from Norse taka. However, most loans do not lead to the replacement of native words with similar meanings. Rather they attain connotations which the native words do not possess.

There may be an instance or two where a word almost dissolves phonologically. Old English æa from an earlier *ahu (cognate with Latin aqua and represented in German by Aue) was [æ:], and would have raised to [ɛ:, e:, i:] if it had continued, but it was replaced by the more substantial stream (itself from Old English) and river (a French loan in Middle English).

The more usual situation is for a language to differentiate two words semantically and for both to survive. For instance Old English fōda and mete co-existed with the meaning of what people eat. After the Middle English period the second word occurs only in the sense of ‘flesh of animals’ and the word flesh (< flesc) is itself restricted to ‘human flesh’. The original meaning of mete is found in mincemeat ‘minced food’ which does not contain any meat.

THE WORDS FOR ‘MAN' In Old English there were at least three words for ‘man': guma, wer and mann. Only the last of these survived into Modern English. Guma ‘man’ was lost in the course of Middle English. It was formerly an independent noun and also occurred in compounds. One of these was brydguma which consisted of the words for ‘bride’ and ‘man’. With the loss of the independent form guma, it was reinterpreted in this compound as being groom, a form which still existed in English for instance with the meaning ‘someone who looks after, minds horses’. The second word wer disappeared unobtrusively and is today only found in the compound werewolf ‘man-wolf’.

ETYMOLOGY AND THE LEXICON The development of different meanings for words automatically raises the question of whether there is an original meaning. Lay speakers tend to think there is. By ‘original’ they mean ‘oldest’. This conception of meaning is termed the etymological fallacy and states that there is an original meaning to a word if one could only go back far enough in time. But this is obviously not true. No matter how far back you trace a word there will always have been a stage before that with a probably different meaning.

LOSS OF LEXICAL TRANSPARENCY If in the course of its development a word or part of a word becomes opaque to a later generation then its meaning may be re-interpreted in an incorrect way. Such a reinterpretation is called a folketymology and occurs on the basis of another word or words which are similar in sound and meaning. A simple example is the German word Friedhof which was reinterpreted as ‘the place where one obtains one’s final peace’, ‘Ort des letzten Friedens’ but in fact it originally meant ‘an enclosed plot of land’, ‘der umfriedete Hof’.

Three examples from the history of English illustrate this process clearly. The Modern English word sandblind derives from Old English sam-blind which contains the element sam ‘half’ (cf. Latin semi). Whensam was lost as a word in English the compound came to be reinterpreted as meaning ‘blind from sand’.

The Modern English word shamefaced comes from Middle English schamfast with the meaning ‘firm in modesty’. When the adverb fast altered its meaning to ‘quick’ it was reinterpreted in this compound asface and the compound came to mean ‘with a face full of shame’.

A key to the phenomenon of folk etymology is that words which are similar phonetically can develop similar meanings. The example this time is a Latin loan obnoxious which originally meant ‘liable to injury’ but came to mean ‘very objectionable’, probably under the influence of the related word noxious.”

Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Richard

Seminar 3

Synonyms and antonyms

1. In the following groups of synonyms, find the synonymic dominant. Give reasons for your choice.

1. exact, precise, accurate.

2. savage, uncivilised, barbarous.

3. hide, conceal, disguise.

4. agree, approve, consent.

5. recall, recollect.

6. cry, weep, scream, shriek.

7. lazy, indolent, idle, vain.

8. clever, able, intelligent, keen, sharp.

9. ignorant, illiterate, uneducated, misinformed.

10. agile, nimble, alert, quick, brisk, active.

2. State whether the marked word is a synonymic dominant or a general term.

1. victory, triumph, conquest.

2. complain, grumble, mutter.

3. sound,clatter, creak, bang, cluck.

4. fragrance, scent, perfume, odour, smell.

5. olive, pink, brown, colour, pea-green, rose.

6. scarlet, crimson, cherry, red, purple.

7. mathematics, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry.

8. footwear, shoes, rubbers, slippers, felt-boots.

9. hound, borzoi,dog,colly.

10. courage, bravery, valour, fortitude.

3. Find in the following list of words synonymic series and classify them into three groups: a) synonyms which display an obvious semantic difference (ideographic synonyms); b) synonyms which display an obvious stylistic difference (stylistic synonyms); c) synonyms more or less equally displaying both differences.

ailing, arrogant, battle, begin, behold, bicker, brawl, bright, callous, clever, commence, conflict, conquest, con­sume, cruel, defeat, devour, diseased, dispiteous, dumb, easy, eat, engorge, facile, fatuous, fight, food, grub, hard-boiled, haughty, high-hat, hoity-toity, horse, ill, inept, ingest, intelligent, light, mandicate, obdurate, pace, proud, quarrel, sagacious, see, shrewd, snobbish, snooty, squabble, steed, stride, stroll, stupid, supercilious, tiff, walk

3. Analyse the following synonyms.

The Cataract of Lodore

(fragments)

by Robert Southey

Seminar 4

Homonyms

1. The following words are homographs. How are they pronounced and what do they mean?

bow, bow; desert, desert; lead, lead; minute, minute; row, row

2.Give the main nominative meanings of the following homonyms.

lap, lap; lark, lark; league, league; light, light; means, means; mint, mint; quid, quid; racket, racket; roe, roe; ward, ward

3.Read the passage given below and answer questions following it.

A speaker speaks a word; a hearer hears it. If he under­stands the word he has stepped into the same area of sense as the speaker. The meaning of a word, then, may be thought of as this common area of meeting. But the sense, it goes without saying, depends on the referent, and the nature of the referent has to be defined by the context. Thus, the 'cat' of 'The cat sat on the mat' is different from the 'cat' of 'Bring back the cat for thugs and rapists'. We cannot say that 'cat' is a single word possessing two distinct mean­ings; there are two words phonemically identical but semantically different: we call these homonyms. The 'cat' of the second sentence refers back etymologically — by the grim fancy of 'cat o'nine tails' — to the cat of the hearthrug, but word-origin can never be invoked, as we have already pointed out, in the examination of meanings.

But what makes words less precise than mathematical symbols is their tendency to suggest meanings other than the ones intended in particular limited contexts. The def­inition of context is often not enough; many words tremble at various frontiers of sense; ambiguity is a vice of words. Ambiguity comes about not merely through homonymity, but through metaphorical extension (which may or may not lie behind homonymity, as with 'cat'), and through the fact that words attempt two opposing jobs — particularization and generalization. 'Cat* will describe a new-born kitten and a fully-grown tiger, so that opposite notions (weakness, strength; tame, wild; tiny, huge) are contained in the same word. 'I love fish' can have opposed meanings; Shakespeare makes Henry V say that he loves France so well that he will not part with a single province of it. It is, indeed, only with the poet or imaginative prose-writer that language functions smoothly. Ambiguity ceases to be a vice; its deliberate exploitation is reveled in. There are layers of meaning, all relevant to the context. Homo­nyms become deliberate puns — not necessarily comic. Lady Macbeth will gild the faces of the grooms with blood, 'for it must seem their guilt'.

Anthony Burgess. Words

Questions

1. How do we distinguish between homonymy and polysemy? 2. Is the author positive on whether in the case of cat he is dealing with homonymy? 3. Explain the pun in the last sentence.

4.Give your own examples to illustrate the author's points.

Seminar 5

Morphology

1. Retell the following in terms of lexical morphemes vs. grammatical morphemes.

Words as things uttered split up into phonemes, but phonemes do not take meaning into account. We do not play on the phonemes of a word as we play on the keys of a piano, content with mere sound; when we utter a word we are concerned with the transmission of meaning. We need an appropriate kind of fission, then — one that is semantic, not phonemic. Will division into syllables do? Obviously not, for syllables are mechanical and metrical, mere equal ticks of a click or beats in a bar. If I divide (as for children's reading primer) the word 'metrical' into “met-ri-саl”, I have learned nothing new about the word: these three syllables are not functional as neutrons, protons, electrons are functional. But if I divide the word as “metr-; -ic; -аl”; I have done something rather different. I have indicated that it is made of the root 'metr-', which refers to measurement and is found in 'metronome' and, in a different phonetic disguise, in 'metre', 'kilometre', and the rest; '-ic', which is an adjectival ending found also in 'toxic', 'psychic', etc., but can sometimes indicate a noun, so that 'metric' itself can be used in a phrase like 'Milton's metric' with full noun status; '-аl, which is an unambiguous adjectival ending, as in 'festal', 'vernal', 'partial'. I have split 'metrical' into three contributory forms which (remembering that Greek morph — means 'form') I can call morphemes.

Let us now take a phrase or sentence and attempt a more extended analysis. This will do: 'Jack's father was eating his dinner very quickly'. Here I would suggest the following fission: 1) Mack'; 2) '-'s'; 3) 'father'; 4) 'was'; 5) 'eat'; 6) '-ing'; 7) 'hi-'; 8) '-s'; 9) 'dinner'; 10) 'very'; 11) 'quick'; 12) '-ly' — making a total of twelve morphemes. 'Jack' can exist on its own, but the addition of '-'s' (a morpheme denoting possession) turns a proper noun into an adjective. 'Father' cannot be reduced to smaller elements, for, though '-er' is an ending common to four nouns of family relationship, 'fath-' on its own has no more meaning than 'moth-' or 'broth-' or 'sist-'. 'Eat' can be an infinitive or imperative, but the suffix '-ing' makes it into a present participle. 'Hi-' signals an aspect of the singular masculine personal pronoun, but it can have no real meaning until it is completed by the objective ending '-m' or, as here, the '-s' denoting possession. 'Dinner' is indivisible, for 'din' on its own belongs to a very different semantic area... Finally, 'quick' is an adjective; the morpheme '-ly' turns it into an adverb.

It will be seen from the above that morphemes fall into two classes. There are those which cannot stand on their own but require to be combined with another morpheme before they can mean anything — like '-'s', '-ing', 'hi-', '-ly'. We can call these bound forms, or helper morphemes. The other morphemes are those which can stand on their own, conveying a meaning and these can be called free forms or semantemes ('meaning forms').

Anthony Burgess. Words

2.Do you agree with what is said in the last paragraph? Discuss the concepts of free and bound forms.

3. Find in the text that follows words in which the root and the stem formally coincide.

For the moment — but only for the moment — it will be safe to assume that we all know what is meant by the word 'word'. I may even consider that my typing fingers know it, defining a word (in a whimsical conceit) as what comes between two spaces. The Greeks saw the word as the minimal unit of speech; to them, too, the atom was minimal unit of matter. Our own age has learnt to split the atom and also the word. If atoms are divisible into protons, electrons and neutrons, what are words divisible into?

(Ibid.)

4. Read the following passage and give your own examples of free and bound morphemes.

We may perhaps start with an attempt to define components of our words, separating them into free forms, which may occur in isolation, and bound forms, which never occur alone. For example, blackberry consists of two free forms compounded, as both black and berry are found in isolation. If we examine raspberry we may at first think it is the same type for we undoubtedly do have a word rasp, but although the forms are identical phonetically they are not identical in meaning, and rasp, in the sense in which it is used in raspberry, is not found in isolation, except in the shortened form of raspberry, for rasp is often used colloquially for both the bush and the fruit. In the case of bilberry we are on even safer ground, for the element bil — is not found in isolation in English, and is therefore quite definitely a bound form.

(J. A. Sheard. The Words We Use)

5. Group the following words according to the type of word-segmentability they may be referred to.

Budget, discuss, carefulness, proceed, unfriendly, hostage, mirror, feminist, overload, fraction, athlete, pretend, amoral, pioneer, contain, homeless.

Seminar 6

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