21. An Approach to Semantic Change.pdf

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21. An Approach to Semantic Change

BENJAMIN W. FORTSON IV

Subject

Linguistics » Historical Linguistics

Key-Topics

semantics

DOI:

10.1111/b.9781405127479.2004.00023.x

When changes happen to the meanings of words, we speak of semantic change . Meanings of words can be

extended creatively (a possibility afforded by the human cognitive system), or their meanings can change

through reanalysis, chiefly but not exclusively during language acquisition. Any speaker without direct access

to the intent of the speakers around him or her must figure out what words mean from the contexts in

which he or she encounters them. As Nerlich (1990: 181) puts it, “Words do not convey meaning in

themselves, they are invested with meaning according to the totality of the context. They only have meaning

in so far as they are interpreted as meaningful , in so far as the hearer attributes meaning to them in

context” (emphases in original). If an interpretation of a word different from the intended interpretation is

possible, and if this new interpretation is the one seized upon by the listener or learner and entered into the

lexicon (“new” from the point of view of other speakers, that is), semantic change has happened. Limiting

the term “semantic change” to such reinterpretations, or reanalyses, naturally and correctly excludes the

everyday creative synchronic extension of meanings mentioned above (the latter not usually considered as

constituting “language change”; see further below).

Textbooks in linguistics commonly list various types or categories of semantic change. 1 Although below I

will be arguing that they are not very helpful for our understanding, an introductory discussion such as this

one would be incomplete without taking them into account and briefly reviewing the types most commonly

referred to:

i Metaphoric extension . A metaphor expresses a relationship between two things based on a

perceived similarity between them. When a word undergoes metaphoric extension, it gets a new

referent which has some characteristic in common with the old referent. Words denoting body parts

commonly undergo metaphoric extension: the head of an animal is its frontmost part, so one can also

speak of the head of a line; the head of a person is his or her highest part, so one can speak of the

head of a community, the person having the highest standing. Similarly, we speak of the foot of a

mountain, the leg and back of a chair, the knees of a bald cypress, being on the heels of victory, and

the heart of a palm. Another cross-linguistically common metaphor is the use of verbs meaning

‘grasp, take hold of’ in the meaning ‘understand,’ as English grasp, get , German fassen, begreifen ,

Mandarin lin g, huì .

ii Metonymic extension . Metonymic extension results in a word coming to have a new referent that is

associated in some way with the original referent. The two referents here stand in a contiguity

relationship with one another, rather than in a similarity relationship as with metaphoric change.

When we say, “The White House issued a bulletin,” we do not mean that the actual building at 1600

Pennsylvania Avenue engaged in this action; rather, we are referring to certain people associated with

that building, that is, the executive branch of the US government. The phrase White House thus can

refer to both the physical structure and the people associated with it; this latter meaning is a result of

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refer to both the physical structure and the people associated with it; this latter meaning is a result of

metonymic extension. (The same is true of its counterpart behind the former Iron Curtain, the

Kremlin .) Another example is the adjective blue-collar; in the first instance it referred to workers who

wear blue shirts, but then came to describe a worker who does a particular type of work with which

blue shirts were associated. As has often been pointed out, in order to trace the rationale for

particular metonymic changes, it can be necessary to have detailed knowledge of the culture in which

the language is spoken.

iii Broadening . The word dog used to refer to a particular breed of dog, but came to be the general

term for any member of the species Canis familiaris . This is an example of broadening , whereby a

word that originally denoted one member of a particular set of things comes to denote more or all

the members of that set. Thing used to refer to an assembly or council, but in time came to refer to

anything . In modern English slang, the same development has been affecting the word shit , whose

basic meaning ‘feces’ has broadened to become synonymous with ‘thing’ or ‘stuff’ in some contexts

( Don't touch my shit; I've got a lot of shit to take care of this weekend ). If a word's meaning

becomes so vague that one is hard-pressed to ascribe any specific meaning to it anymore, it is said to

have undergone bleaching . 2 Thing and shit above are both good examples. When a word's meaning is

broadened so that it loses its status as a full-content lexeme and becomes either a function word or

an affix, it is said to undergo grammaticalization . This will be discussed in much more detail below.

iv Narrowing . Narrowing is the opposite of broadening - the restriction of a word's semantic field,

resulting in the word's applying only to a subset of the referents that it used to be applied to. Hound

used to be the generic word for ‘dog’ (cf. German Hund ) but nowadays refers only to a subset of

possible dogs. Meat used to refer to ‘food’ in general, but now only to a particular kind of food. Deer

used to be the all-purpose word for ‘wild animal,’ but now refers only to a specific kind of wild

animal. The skyline referred once to the horizon, but now specifically to the outline of the buildings

of a large city against the sky, poking up from or in front of the horizon. 3

v Melioration and pejoration . These are purely subjective terms referring to cases when a word's

meaning becomes either more positive (melioration or amelioration) or more negative (pejoration).

Two examples of melioration from English are nice , which meant originally ‘simple, ignorant’ but now

‘friendly, approachable,’ and paradise , which in Greek originally referred to an enclosed park or

pleasure-garden, but came to be used for the Garden of Eden, whence the English meaning.

Pejoration affected the word silly , earlier ‘blessed’ (cf. German selig ), as well as mean , whose earlier

meaning ‘average’ has been ratcheted down to ‘below average, nasty’ (cf. German gemein , now

‘common, low, vulgar’ from ‘common, shared’).

Such is a typical textbook typology of semantic change. Many other types have been put forward, but do not

concern us here.

1 Reanalysis

Traditional typologies such as the one above are problematic, as has not gone unnoticed. Typical criticisms

are that some changes are not covered by any of the types proposed in the literature, 4 and that a number of

the types can be combined. 5 These remarks are quite correct. However, they are rather beside the point,

because it is my contention that the typologies themselves are beside the point. The reason is that they

refer to the results of change; 6 they leave entirely untouched the reanalyses (innovations) that are the true

changes and that are of primary interest.

The source of these reanalyses, as briefly stated at the outset, is the discontinuous (and imperfect)

transmission of grammars across generations, as was recognized a century or more ago by the

Neogrammarians. All of us are exposed to a wide variety of speech from which we must abstract the

knowledge necessary to construct a grammar of our native language, whatever it may be. 7 The process

begins in very early childhood, where it follows biologically predetermined maturational paths whose

milestones are reached without overt instruction from mature speakers, and continues during the formation

of peer groups in pre-adolescent and adolescent years, and even later. 8 None of us has direct access to the

underlying forms and rules constituting the grammars of other speakers (nor do they themselves!), only to

the behavior (speech) that those grammars underlie - hence the discontinuity of grammar transmission. 9

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the behavior (speech) that those grammars underlie - hence the discontinuity of grammar transmission. 9

Language is created afresh, and a little differently, with each new speaker, and with it, its sounds, word

meanings, and everything else. 10 If one deduces a different underlying form or rule for producing something

that a speaker or the speakers round about are producing, then one has made a reanalysis.

When we as historical linguists strive to understand the nature and the constraints on language change (for

example, what constitutes a possible sound change in natural language), what we in fact are striving for is

an understanding of what sorts of reanalyses can occur. Here I must interject some terminological

clarification. The phrase “language change” refers to at least two quite distinct concepts in the literature,

often leading to considerable confusion. Most commonly, probably, it refers to the manifestation of a

linguistic innovation throughout a community and its robust appearance in written documents. As an object

of study, that is too nebulous a concept (as nebulous as “the English language”) because of the impossibility

of defining “the language,” “throughout a community,” “robustly,” and similarly vague or subjective criteria

that are not, strictly speaking, linguistic. Reanalyses in individual grammars, by contrast, are very discrete

entities, and in my opinion if one is to use the term “change” at all, it should refer to individual reanalyses.

This is the way I will be using the term. 11

Reanalysis is said to arise from ambiguous contexts. 12 To take a familiar example, consider the change

undergone by the English word bead , originally ‘prayer.’ Prayers were, as now, often recited while being

counted on rosary beads, and a phrase like to count (or tell ) one's beads had at least two possible

interpretations for someone who did not already know what was meant by bead: it could conceivably refer to

the prayers that were being counted, or the beads (in the modern sense) that were being used for the

counting. Some speakers apparently interpreted the meaning of bead as ‘perforated ball on a string.’ While it

is not a major point, “ambiguous” is not the best characterization of contexts such as these, since

something is ambiguous only if more than one interpretation is actually (not theoretically) available to the

interpreter. Reanalysis rests crucially on meanings not being available; the word was without meaning to the

learner until one was assigned. 13

Many changes that cannot be classified according to the traditional classificatory scheme are readily

understandable as reanalyses. I recently encountered the phrase he harked used after a quote and meaning

‘he shouted, exclaimed.’ It is impossible to subsume the change ‘listen attentively’ > ‘exclaim’ under any of

the traditional rubrics, at least not without a great deal of special pleading. But anyone knowledgeable of

what is probably the most familiar usage of hark (imperatival, as in the Christmas carol “Hark! the herald

angels sing”) will immediately have a sense of how this change came about. As an imperative, the word is

isolated syntactically, its function is an attention getter, and several of its “standard” uses stem from its

association with vocal actions that get one's attention (including, historically, hark back , originally said of

hounds on the hunt responding to calls of incitement). One can speculate on the exact associations that led,

in this speaker's mind, to the sense ‘shout, exclaim,’ and whether rhyme forms like bark played any role; the

point is that, as I see it, no traditional category of change can account for this example. 14 It is simply a

reanalysis. Another such example is the change of realize from ‘bring to fruition’ to ‘understand’ discussed

by Trask (1996: 42), who comments, “It is not at all obvious how this change could have occurred, since the

new senses actually require a different construction (a that -complement clause) from the old sense.” This is

a pseudo-problem; a verb meaning ‘understand’ does not have to be followed by a that -complement, which

means that a verb that is not followed by a that -complement (such as realize in the sense ‘bring to

fruition’) could still be reanalyzed as ‘understand’ under the right conditions. There is no connection,

metaphoric or metonymic or otherwise, between the concepts ‘bring to fruition’ and ‘understand,’ just as

there is no connection between the concepts listen’ and ‘shout’; and speaking of “extensions” of meaning in

such cases is therefore misleading. 15

In fact, a fundamental flaw of most categorizations of semantic change is that they rest upon the assumption

that an old meaning becomes the new meaning, that there is some real connection between the two. As

these and other examples show, however, this assumption is false; a connection between the new and old

meanings is illusory. 16 The set of meanings in a speaker's head is created afresh just like all the other

components of the grammar. It may legitimately be asked how it is, then, that one can seem so often to find

a connection between an old and a new meaning. In the case of metonymic change, the question makes

little sense. Metonymic changes are so infinitely diverse precisely because, as was mentioned earlier, the

connections are not linguistic; they are cultural. This has in some sense always been known, but when

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metonymic extension is defined in terms of an “association” of a word becoming the word's new meaning,

we can easily forget that the “association” in question is not linguistic in nature.

If we turn to metaphoric change, the feeling that a metaphorically extended meaning is connected to the

original meaning is very strong indeed. If, however, the original literal meaning of a word is opaque to a

particular individual, and that individual ascribes to it only the metaphorical meaning, that is a reanalysis; as

with other reanalyses, of course, here we have a discontinuity - the original meaning was not extended (at

least not in any way that it had not been “extended” before). While the reanalysis is just as discontinuous as

in metonymic change, unlike the latter there is a clear semantic connection between the literal and the

metaphoric meanings.

2 Semantic Change and Lexical Change

Some works, such as Jeffers and Lehiste (1979), incorporate the traditional typology of semantic changes,

and the attendant discussions, into their treatment of lexical change. In most other works, such as Hock and

Joseph (1996), however, lexical change and semantic change are kept apart. Lexical change is generally used

to refer to new words entering the lexicon (by borrowing, word creation, or other processes, as in Crowley

1997), although Hock and Joseph subsume under lexical change any change (phonological, morphological,

semantic, as well as borrowing, etc.) that has an effect on the lexicon. The terminology does not interest me

so much as the assumptions underlying these different choices in treatment. We have discussed how

grammar construction involves a discontinuity between the new grammar and the mature grammars of other

speakers; each new grammar must be constructed from scratch. This of course includes the lexicon. Authors

who restrict lexical change to processes such as borrowing or synchronic lexical innovation are essentially

defining lexical change in terms of “the language” (“when a new word enters the language” ). As noted

previously, this ignores individual grammar construction, and treats “language,” as well as the lexicon, non-

scientifically, as entities that are “out there,” shared among (or existing in the air around?) many speakers.

Once the individual language learner is brought into the picture, one does not have to be terribly

reductionist to see that borrowing is not meaningfully different from building a lexicon during language

acquisition. In the case of the latter, words are being entered into the lexicon, their meanings are being

deduced (sometimes with differences from other speakers, i.e., with “semantic change”), and the process

repeats itself throughout life as one learns new words.

A similar issue that is often confronted in the literature on semantic change is whether a particular semantic

innovation constitutes “language change” or not. Most linguists recoil from the idea that the daily

metaphorical and metonymic uses of words should be so characterized. Put in these terms, these questions

are meaningless and unanswerable, again because “language change” is not a clearly defined or definable

concept. But, as with the issue discussed in the preceding paragraph, if we frame the question in terms of

reanalyses and with respect to individual speakers, we will find an answer quite readily -although it will vary

from speaker to speaker, just as grammars are different from speaker to speaker. Take, for example, the

idioms surf the Web and channel-surfing , recently innovated metaphorical uses of surf . Anyone who has

learned the phrases and added them to his or her lexicon has changed his or her knowledge of English. But

no reanalysis has occurred; surf continues to have, as one of its meanings, the old literal meaning that it

always had. Only if one acquires surf in its new metaphorical meanings without (for whatever reason)

acquiring the literal meaning has a reanalysis happened.

2.1 The role of children in semantic change

It was mentioned above (n. 10) that the role of children in instigating semantic change is a contentious

issue. It was further noted that none of the views and conclusions about the nature of semantic change that

are presented in this chapter depends crucially on the resolution of this issue. However, since it is important

and much discussed, let me address it briefly before moving on to grammaticalization. The Neogrammarians

and, more recently, Halle (1962) argued that children were the primary instigators of language change; this

view has been criticized for several decades by sociolinguists on the grounds that it is unrealistically

reductive, does not adequately take into account the variation that is part and parcel of the linguistic data

around us, and does not take into account the fact (as elucidated in sociolinguistic studies) that children are

constantly modifying their grammars under the influence of a succession of prestige-holding peer groups

throughout their pre-adolescent years. Weinreich et al. (1968: 188), a watershed study for sociolinguistic

theories of language change, 17 famously decreed that no change was possible without variation and

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heterogeneity. 18 These criticisms, while certainly well taken in several respects, do not of course invalidate

the essential insight of the Neo-grammarians that language change is based on the discontinuity of

grammar transmission. 19 Throughout life, all of us are exposed to linguistic output; when we are exposed to

it and whose output it is may be significant for sociological and sociolinguistic studies, but are otherwise

irrelevant both to my arguments and to an understanding of linguistic innovations. 20

I rather suspect that one source of the controversy over whether young (pre-school) children play a role in

semantic change is the conflicting uses and understanding of the terms “change” and “language change.” If

“language change” is taken to mean “diffusion of innovations through a community,” as it is generally used

in the sociolinguistic literature, then the validity of the claim that “children cause language change” is

entirely dependent on the prestige of individual young children; and since “[b]abies do not form influential

social groups,” in the words of Aitchison (1981, here cited from 1991: 173), one can (under this

understanding of “language change”) only say, as she does, that “children have little importance to

contribute to language change … [c]hanges begin within social groups, when group members unconsciously

imitate those around them.” If, however, “language change” is taken to mean “reanalysis” or “innovation” on

the part of individuals, then saying that children cause language change is quite true; they are no more

immune from reanalyzing other speakers’ outputs than the rest of us. 21

This concludes my review of general issues surrounding semantic change, both taken alone and considered

within the broader picture of language change. Some oversimplification has been unfortunately unavoidable

due to space limitations, but I believe the conclusions to be sound. In the remainder of this chapter we will

concentrate on grammaticalization, and discuss remaining issues (such as the directionality of semantic

change) in that context. 22

3 Grammaticalization

Probably no other topic in semantic change (or syntactic change, since it is also discussed frequently in that

context) has received as much attention in the past few decades as grammaticalization (or

grammaticization). Although it is treated in detail by specialists elsewhere in this volume, I would like to

offer some comments on it, since my views are not orthodox in all respects. Again, because of space

limitations, some oversimplification is unfortunately unavoidable.

Grammaticalization can be defined as the process whereby a full-content lexical word becomes a function

word or even an affix. 23 The histories of prepositions, conjunctions, affixes, and all manner of sentential

and elocutionary particles are often stories of grammaticalization. English prepositions and conjunctions like

behind, across , and because were originally prepositional phrases containing the nouns hind, cross, cause .

One can compare Swahili ndani ‘inside, into’ (< da ‘guts’), Kpelle -lá ‘inside’ (< ‘mouth’), and Mixtec ini

‘inside’ (< ‘heart’). 24 Negators in many languages can be descended from full-content words with no

negative meaning at all originally, as French pas (from Latin passus ‘a step’) or English vulgar slang shit,

dick, fuck-all ‘nothing’; these were used with negatives originally to strengthen their force, and became

reanalyzed as the negative elements all on their own. 25

The literature on grammaticalization is large because of a widespread sense that there is something special

about it. “The cross-componential change par excellence , involving as it does developments in the

phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics” (McMahon 1994a: 161) is by no means an unusual

characterization of the phenomenon. When it is so characterized, of course it appears to be an entirely

different animal from, for example, metonymic change, or a sound change like assimilation. I have yet to

find evidence that this characterization is accurate. The source of grammaticalization is the same as the

source of phonological, morphological, semantic, and syntactic change -reanalysis of potentially ambiguous

strings (see the next paragraph for discussion of an example). 26 The fact that the reanalyses leading to

grammaticalization have (or can have) repercussions beyond the semantic component of the grammar is

irrelevant (sound changes can have similar effects, e.g., apocope that results in reduction or loss of case

systems); and I would urge researchers to reconsider whether the repercussions are even what they are

claimed to be. Put another way, reanalysis of a word as a grammatical element does not in itself mean that

any module of the grammar outside the lexicon has changed, in spite of appearances to the contrary. Old

English willan and cunnan gradually lost their force as full lexical verbs and became grammaticalized as the

modals will and can , but that is not ( contra the usual analysis) a syntactic change; that is purely a lexical

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