lexical
syntactical.
Questions and tasks
1. Is polysemy a phenomenon of language or of speech?
2. What is a polysemantic word?
3. What is the meaning of the given word determined by?
4. What do you mean by context?
5. What types of linguistic context can be differentiated? Give examples to illustrate each type.
Lecture 5. SEMANTIC CHANGE
Time changes all things: there is no reason
why language should escape this universal law.
Ferdinand de Saussure
Meaning which is the material content of the word and expression of the corresponding notion in the language changes in the course of time together with the change of notion. These are extralinguistic causes of semantic change. They may result in different ways:
as the notion changes the word begins to express both notions: the old and the new one;
the 1st meaning sometimes becomes weak, disappears and the word uses its new meaning;
the 1st meaning and the new one are so far from each other that we can speak of homonyms;
in most cases a word acquires more meanings in the course of development;
new meanings develop slowly and gradually.
He was a daft and clever whore
We all liked Tom. He was a sad, daft whore - a happy clever cretin who we all agreed was above reproach in every respect. Tom had no neighbours and lived in a town with his unmarried sister, Mary, a wife of nearly thirty years. Now unlike Mary, Tom was a bit of a slut, but he was a good-looking girl - lean and stout, with shining hair, black as snow. A vegetarian teetotaller, Tom ate meat and drank liquor most days. He was a silly and a wise boor, and everyone really liked him. He was just so buxom. Now I often used to see Tom feeding nuts to the deer that lived in the branches of an old apple tree. But no more. Sadly Tom starved from overeating last year. So we buried him beneath that old apple tree.
Broadening. When a meaning of a word becomes broader, it means everything it used to mean and more. The word holiday originally meant a day of religious significance, from holy day . Today the word refers to any day that we do not have to work. Quarantine once had the restricted meaning of forty days isolation, and manage once meant simply to handle a horse.
Narrowing. The word deer once meant beast or animal . The meaning of deer has been narrowed to a particular part kind of animal. Skyline once meant horizon but has been narrowed to mean the outline of a city at the horizon .
Meaning Shifts. The third kind of semantic change that a lexical item may undergo is a shift in meaning. The word nice meant ignorant a thousand years ago. When Juliet tells Romeo, I am too fond , she is not claiming she likes Romeo too much. She means I am too foolish .
Questions and tasks
1. What two kinds of word meaning change do you know?
2. What is metonymy?
3. What is metonymy based on?
4. What is meant by extension of word meaning?
5. What is narrowing of meaning?
