Universität Hannover, SoSe 2003
Englisches Seminar, Lexical Semantics

Historical Development of Word Meaning - Semantik Change

by: Anne-Marie Krupinski

Table of Contents

1. Introduction  1

2. Background on Semantic Change 1

3. The Basis for Semantic Change 4

4. Mechanisms and Causes for Semantic Change 5

5. Results of Semantic Change 9

6. Shifts in Semantic Fields 11

7. Conclusion 14

8. Bibliography 16

1. Introduction

Having dealt with the chapter on semantic change in Hans Henrich Hock’s book Principles of Historical Linguistics in my presentation in the seminar Lexical Semantics, I am now going to give additional information to his ideas on semantic change in this paper by not only using Hock’s work but also by referring to the chapter on semantic change in April McMahon’s book Understanding Language Change and by using information given in Manfred Görlach’s book The Linguistic History of English – An Introduction. All of these linguistic works have been a very good source of information especially when it comes to the well-explained examples in the English language. McMahon additionally quoted a number of linguists that have been useful to me for writing this paper.

In this paper, I want to give an overview on what semantic change is all about and how it can be shown in a number of examples in the English language: I subdivided the paper into five parts: After this introduction, information on the background on semantic change and the basis for semantic change will be given. As a next point, the mechanisms and causes for semantic change will be presented. Finally, results of semantic change and shifts in semantic fields will be presented. At the end of this paper I will sum up what I experienced during the research concerning semantic change. In addition to that I will give some information on what the three linguists I have mentioned above are working on currently and what their general fields of research are.

2. Background on Semantic Change

In his book Principles of Historical Linguistics, Hans Henrich Hock says that when one thinks of the number of meanings which can be conveyed through language – in this paper I will concentrate on the English language – one eventually comes to the conclusion that there is an infinite number. Yet the human brain can only process and understand a limited amount of linguistic symbols. That is why the infinite number of possible meanings is reduced already by the problem of encoding so much information (cf. Hock 1991: 280). In addition to that, the problem of the infinity of word meaning is remedied by a number of other phenomena:

• There is a finite set of conventional linguistic symbols present which is known as the lexical items.
• There is a finite set of rules (syntax) which makes it possible that symbols can be combined into a larger structure. The syntax assures that the meanings of larger structures not simply form a composite of the meanings of lexical items they are composed of.
• The lexical items themselves are in a way “constructed” out of smaller sets of building blocks (these blocks are called phonemes and morphemes). “[The phonemes and morphemes are again] governed by a finite set of rules” (Hock 1991: 280). These rules are known as phonology and morphology.

As a consequence, the meaning of a word can be conveyed in an economical way by using a limited set of speech sounds. These speech sounds range between approximately 25 and 125. Here, the lexicon and the rules of syntax come into play: These two make it possible that an infinity of possible sentences can be produced. So it is the economy and the conventional nature of the building blocks and their rules for combination that make it possible for humans to communicate. Yet at this point a problem arises: The economy and the conventional nature of the English language that have been praised before, are also responsible for the fact that the number of meanings that one wants to convey without having an ambiguous expression is indeed limited.

Thus, a single phonetic expression (which I will analyse in detail in the following example) can actually have a number of different meanings. They can either be quite close to each other concerning their meaning or they can have completely unrelated meanings. These different shades of meaning or the completely unrelated meanings depend on the linguistic, the social and on the cultural context. The following example is simply meant to be a lead-in to the great variety of phenomena the historical development of word meaning has caused. It illustrates in how far one single sentence can be understood in different ways. Starting from here, one will understand how much word meaning has developed.

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