Yarmouk university

Department of English language and literature

Historical linguistics

Lexical semantic change and semantic reconstruction

Matthias Urban

Presented by: Maha Al-Smadi

Supervised by: Professor Lutfi Abulhaija

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 Content

1. What is semantics and pragmatics in general.

2. What is the definition of lexical semantic change.

3. Types of lexical semantic change.

4. Modern approaches of semantic change.

5. What causes semantic change.

6. Semantic reconstruction.

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 In General

semantics: the study of meaning in terms of words, sentences ,

and phrases, it looks at denotation rather than connotation ( it
focuses on what something means rather on how it is used in a
context (pragmatics))

● Lexical semantics: the study words.

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 Lexical Semantic Change

● It is the change of the meaning of languages’ lexical items

through time.
EX:
the basic meaning of Old High German (bein) was ‘bone’ (the
original meaning) , while in Modern German, it is ‘leg’ (the target
meaning).

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 ‫‪Examples from Arabic‬‬

‫‪Word‬‬ ‫‪Old Arabic meaning‬‬ ‫‪Modern Arabic‬‬

‫‪meaning‬‬

‫قطار‬ ‫قطار اإلبل التي تش ّد على نسق‬ ‫قطار السّكة الحديديّة‬

‫واحد خلف بعضهم‬ ‫مجموعة ع'رباتت'''قطرها ق''اطرة(‬
‫)ب'''خارية‬
‫األيِّم‬ ‫المرأة التي ال زوج لها‬ ‫المرأة التي ال زوج لها والرجل‬
‫الذي ال زوجة له‬
‫الصالة‬ ‫الدعاء‬ ‫الفريضة في الشريعة اإلسالمية‬

‫‪5‬‬
 Types of lexical semantic changes

● Types that form the ‘classic’ and most commonly

recognised types of semantic change related to
denotation and coded meaning:

1. Broadening (generalisation).
2. Narrowing (specialisation).
3. Metaphorical change.
4. Metonymic change. 6
 Broadening (generalisation)

● When the range of meanings of a word increases, so that

the word can be used in more contexts than were
appropriate before the change.
● Example:
Dog in English => specific powerful breed of dog => all
breeds or races of dog.
Cupboard => table upon which cups or vessels were placed, a
piece of furniture to display plates => closet with shelves
for the keeping cups and dishes / small storage cabinet.

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‫‪Examples of broadening in Arabic:‬‬
‫‪Word‬‬ ‫‪Old Arabic meaning‬‬ ‫‪Modern Arabic‬‬
‫‪meaning‬‬
‫البأس‬ ‫الشدة في الحرب‬ ‫كل شدة بشكل عام‬

‫الغاب‬ ‫القصب‪ ,‬شجر ذو أنابيب‬ ‫كل شجر ملتف‬

‫االستحمام‬ ‫االغتسال بالماء الساخن‬ ‫االغتسال بالماء بشكل عام‬

‫‪8‬‬
 Narrowing (specialisation)

● range of meaning is decreased so that a word can be used

appropriately only in fewer contexts than before the change.

● Example:
- wife => Old English 'woman' => 'woman of humble rank or low
employment' => 'married woman'.
- girl => 'child or young person of either sex' => 'female child,
young woman'
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‫‪Examples of narrowing from Arabic :‬‬
‫‪Word‬‬ ‫‪Old Arabic‬‬ ‫‪Modern Arabic‬‬
‫‪meaning‬‬ ‫‪meaning‬‬
‫مأتم‬ ‫اجتماع‬ ‫اجتماع للعزاء‬

‫السبت‬ ‫الدهر‬ ‫يوم خاص من أيام األسبوع‬

‫)‪(saturday‬‬
‫حرامي‬ ‫من كان من عادته ارتكاب‬ ‫)‪ (thief‬السارق‬
‫الحرام‬
‫الحج‬ ‫المسافر بشكل عام‬ ‫من يذهب لزيارة الكعبة‬
‫‪traveller‬‬ ‫‪Visit al kaaba‬‬
‫‪10‬‬
 Metaphorical change

● the source and target meaning stand in a relationship of similarity to one

another.
● Example:
German bein denotes the ‘leg: part of the body’, and the ‘leg of a table’.
- The two denotats are similar along several dimensions:
1. they are similar in shape.
2. they are attached at the bottom of a larger structure.
3. they fulfil a similar function in supporting that larger structure.

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‫‪Examples of Metaphor from Arabic :‬‬

‫‪Word‬‬ ‫‪Old Arabic meaning‬‬ ‫‪Modern Arabic‬‬

‫‪meaning‬‬

‫عين‬ ‫عين االنسان‪ ,‬عين الماء‬ ‫الحسد‬

‫فاضي‬ ‫)‪ (empty‬فارغ‬ ‫ليس لديه عمل يقوم به‬

‫نور‬ ‫الضوء الذي ينير‬ ‫االيمان واالسالم‬

‫‪12‬‬
 Metonymic change

● It is the idea that you are referring to one thing based on some

close relationship to another thing.

Example:

-Tea => 'evening meal accompanied by drinking tea'.

-Cheek => 'fleshy side of the face below the eye' / OE: jaw, jawbone'.

-board 'table' > 'people sitting around a table, governing body.

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 aspect of the meaning of a linguistic sign is its
connotation. There are two directions of change related to
connotations:

1. Amelioration

2. pejoration

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 Amelioration

● the act of making something better; improvement in the

meaning.

Example:
The meaning of nice when it first appeared in Middle English
(about 1300) was '(of persons or their actions) foolish, silly,
simple; ignorant, senseless, absurd.
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 The words queen and knight formerly just meant
'woman' and 'boy', but today these terms are applied only
to people occupying certain exalted positions.

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‫‪● Examples on Amelioration from Arabic:‬‬

‫‪Word‬‬ ‫‪Old Arabic‬‬ ‫‪Modern Arabic‬‬

‫‪meaning‬‬ ‫‪meaning‬‬
‫الرسول‬ ‫المر َسل‬ ‫ش ُرف معناها لتدل على‬
‫‪.‬الواحد من رسل هللا‬
‫س ْفرة‬
‫ال ُّ‬ ‫طعام المسافر‬ ‫ما على المائدة مما ّلذ وطاب‬
‫من مأكل ومشرب‬
‫ال ِب ْذلة‬ ‫والـ ِم ْب َذلة من الثيـاب‪ :‬الثوب‬ ‫البَ ْدلة وهي أحسن ما عند‬
‫الخلَق الذي يُلبس ويُمتهن وال‬ ‫‪.‬الرجل من ثيابه‬
‫يُصان‬
‫ال َع ْفش‬ ‫رُذال المتاع‬ ‫نفيس من األثاث كالخزائن‬
‫واألسرة واألرائك وغيرها‬
‫‪17‬‬
 pejoration

● It is the opposite of amelioration, The process by which

a word acquires a more negative meaning over time.
● Example:
The shift in meaning of the word silly from meaning that
a person was happy and fortunate to meaning that they
are foolish and unsophisticated.

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● the word knave also once meant only 'boy', but then came to be
demoted to a term of abuse.

● All of the words villain, churl and boor once meant merely
'farm-worker' (and the last two had already dropped in rank
from the quite high status 'free farmer'), all three have likewise
become purely insults.

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‫‪● Examples on pejoration from Arabic:‬‬

‫‪Word‬‬ ‫‪Old Arabic‬‬ ‫‪Modern Arabic‬‬

‫‪meaning‬‬ ‫‪meaning‬‬
‫الغالم‬ ‫الصغير من الذكور‬ ‫العبد‬

‫الجارية‬ ‫الفتاة الصغيرة‬ ‫األمة المملوكة‬

‫الصبي‬ ‫الولد الصغير‬ ‫األجير‬

‫قتل‬ ‫الذبح‬ ‫الضرب‬

‫‪20‬‬
 Some authors attribute certain semantic changes to the
avoidance of homonymy, a situation which obtains when two
semantically unrelated words have the same form.
For instance,
English (light) in the sense of ‘bright’ experienced considerable
semantic narrowing after it became homonymous in Old English with
light ‘not heavy’, because some of its former senses (e.g. ‘clear, lucid’)
may have led to confusion with the latter in actual discourse.

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 Similarly, there are proposals to the effect that
synonymy, when two different words have the same
meaning, is a cause of change in meaning. Examples from
Arabic language: (‫ جلدة‬,'‫ك'حتوت ا'يده' ماسكه‬
, ,‫)ب'''خيل‬, (‫ جنبية‬,‫)ف'''رشة‬

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 There are claims that polysemy, when a word has several
distinguishable but related meanings, is avoided diachronically.

● an example of polysemy avoidance :

Finnish ‘kutsua’, generally meaning both ‘to call’ and ‘to
invite’. This polysemy has been resolved in the Värmland dialect
by borrowing kalloa ‘to call’ from Swedish, while kutsua retains
the meaning ‘to invite’ only.

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 Borrowing

● Is the process by which a word from one language is

adapted for use in another.
For example, Arabic speakers in Saudi Arabia borrowed the
word "cancel" from English language, and it becomes popular lexicon
items in the daily conversation. However, they do not use it with
the same format of English language. Instead, they apply the
grammatical aspects of Arabic language to say
for instance:

‫ كنسلها‬,‫ كنسلتها‬,‫[ يتكنسل‬kænsǝlha], [kænsǝlatha], or [yǝtkansɛl]

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25
● The previous categories of semantic change are well-known
and have become part and parcel of historical semantics
because they offer useful terminological distinctions to
describe individual cases of semantic change.

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Modern approaches

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 The notion of polysemy plays a key role in understanding
semantic change as a process, because a common way for semantic
change to take place is by an intermediate stage of polysemy .

A word does not change its meaning suddenly overnight across

an entire speech community . Rather, it acquires a novel
conventionalised sense, with the original one at least initially
remaining intact. Eventually the original meaning may, but need not,
be lost.

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 Drawing on earlier sources, a general framework for the
process of semantic change is developed in Traugott and Dasher
(2002). In the first step, there are so-called invited inferences
These arise (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 17) in the process of
communication. They may be based on general world knowledge or
the particular circumstances of the conversational setting, and
they may be either consciously exploited or emerge unconsciously.

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● some instances of semantic change are due to change in the
extra-linguistic world, such as socio-cultural circumstances
and technological innovations.

● there may be gaps in the available data to the effect that

not all possible meanings are recorded and that there may
be differences between dialects.
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 The available evidence for the semantic change from ‘bone’ to
‘leg’ in German is compatible with the polysemy-based model of
semantic change: in the eighth century, bein is only recorded with
the meaning ‘bone’ (Seebold 2001: 83), but in texts from the ninth
century from various dialects, the word is also used to translate
Latin tibia ‘shin bone’ specifically, but also already crus ‘leg’
(Seebold 2008: 153). Thus, bein acquired an additional sense which
would eventually exclude the original one after a long period in
which it still prevailed.
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Traugott’s work on semantic change has focused on the semantic
development of more grammatical items, and there are few detailed
empirical studies of semantic change via pragmatically-induced
polysemy in the lexical realm.
Hansen and Waltereit (2006: 244–245), for instance, suggest that
(mouse) must have acquired the coded meaning ‘input device for
computers’ directly from a particularised conversational implicature
without it becoming generalised first, questioning Traugott and
Dasher’s (2002) elaboration of the role of implicatures in semantic
change on this and other grounds.

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 A concept that has proven particularly fruitful is that of the prototype
structure of meaning, there are necessary and sufficient features
available to define a category, prototype theory suggests a degree of
membership of the category denoted by a lexical item( central member,
typical member), with blurry edges where membership is uncertain and
may vary across judgements by different individuals.

A prototype is the best or most central

*prototypes are different member of a category. Like canary in the
when it comes to different category bird, and chair in the category
cultures. furniture.

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 Geeraerts (1997: 32–47) contains case study showing how prototype
theory can be applied to describe semantic change. It deals with the semantic
development of Dutch "legging" and its synonyms "leggings"and caleçon.

When the respective garment and hence the English and French
loanwords denoting it appeared around 1987, they most commonly referred to
a long, tight-fitting, creaseless garment worn by women as a piece of
outerwear and made from elastic material.

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 Geeraerts hence identifies this cluster of features as characteristic of
the prototypical ‘legging’.

As time passes, the referential range of "legging" and its synonyms

becomes wider, but not completely randomly. Rather, after time the
application becomes more flexible with regard to the features.

Each of the innovative combinations of features is found on the periphery

and is least common, while the above mentioned dominant prototypical core
remains constant.

Geeraerts concludes that prototypical semantic areas are diachronically

more stable than peripheral ones.

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 What causes semantic change?

● On the one hand, the speaker is said to attempt to

communicate with the least possible effort on his behalf,
while on the other hand making sure that communication
is successful, that is, that he is understood by the
hearer. In a variety of guises, this tension is adduced as
a cause of semantic change as well.

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● Geeraerts (1999) sees the emergence of prototypicality as
functionally motivated in a speaker-oriented fashion: it improves
speech production by providing the necessary flexibility to adapt
to changes in the extra-linguistic world elegantly.

● An object can be described in terms of prototypicality, which

refers to the degree to which it is a good example of a category.

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● Conversely, he views certain types of
semantic change, such as that due to
avoidance of homophony, as hearer-oriented
because, by removing ambiguities, they help to
process the message.
Homophony: each of two or more
words having the same the same
pronunciation but different
meanings,origins,or spilling,for
example new and knew

● Another elaboration concerning the influence

of the general tension between the
conversational needs of the speaker and
hearer in the rise of semantic change.

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Causes for semantic change are also discussed by Blank (1999),

with the general overarching motivation for semantic change

also seen as the drive to increase efficiency and expressivity

in communication.

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Blank also recognises six more specific motivations:

● First, the need for a new name for some newly encountered referent which
can efficiently be handled by semantic extension and change.

● Second, the need to make accessible abstract concepts that are hard to
verbalise otherwise. (and semantic change is seen as an efficient means of
doing so).

● Third, there may be changes in social organisation, structure, or (material)

culture .
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● Further, change may occur by referential indeterminacy in actual discourse,
but yet with a “close conceptual or factual relation” between the relevant
meanings the semantic change will happen.

● Blank says that semantic change may also be instantiated in order to reduce
complexity and irregularity in the lexicon on behalf of the speaker in order to
communicate successfully with minimal effort.

● Finally, semantic change may be due to tabooing or emotional load.

Loaded language: is a type of language that uses loaded words or phrases
to create a strong emotional response. For example, “I'm sorry” can be a
loaded word if used in a personal attack, but it's not loaded if used as an
apology

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 Regularity and irregularity in semantic change

● Haspelmath is in a century-old line of lamenting the lack of a

systematic empirically-based investigation of semantic change

● A catalogue of general tendencies in semantic change that such an

investigation might allow us to establish, would be of great practical
value as a guide for etymologists in the search for cognates, and in
reconstructing meaning.

● there are some suggestions about likely directions in semantic change or

even claims as to unidirectional developments for individual meanings or
semantic domains. 42
● Generalisations from grammaticalization research are in
principle also relevant, because typically, in grammaticalization
the input of the change bears lexical meaning and undergoes
semantic bleaching or other semantic alteration.

● Heine and Kuteva (2002) is a summary of grammaticalization

processes in the languages of the world. For empirical data on
meaning change in grammaticalization, the reader is referred
to their ample data and to Traugott and König (1991) and
Eckardt (2006) for theoretical perspectives.
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 on a more general level of description. Lehrer (1985: 286) argues on the
basis of data from the history of English that “semantically related words
are more likely to undergo parallel semantic changes than semantically
unrelated ones precisely because of their semantic relationships.

Semantic relationships tend to remain constant, so that if one word

changes meaning, it will drag along other words in the domain.

● For instance, metaphorical use of English gorilla with the sense ‘brute,
brutish person’ caused ape and baboon to acquire this extension as well,
even though ape at an earlier time already had the metaphorical reading
‘fool’ (Lehrer 1985: 288)

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● Traugott’s work has led to generalisations about semantic change.
The most important generalisation is subjectification.

● Subjectification is a language change process in which a linguistic

expression acquires meanings that convey the speaker's attitude or
viewpoint.
● An English example is the word ‘while’, which, in Middle English, had
only the sense of 'at the same time that'. It later acquired the
meaning of 'although', indicating a concession on the part of the
speaker .

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 general principles of semantic change can be identified regularity in
semantic change, it may depend on part of speech, with change in closed-
class grammatical items and in the verbal domain more regular than in
nominals.

However, even if one chooses to not accept the existence of laws

or even the weaker notion of directional tendencies in semantic change, it
is arguably never the case that semantic change is literally random.

even if we are unable to predict semantic developments that may

happen in the future, any semantic change that is going to occur is
necessarily based on and constrained by the general cognitive
mechanisms by which meanings may be related to one another
diachronically, or by relations that arise from cultural facts.
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 Semantic reconstruction

● It is a topic which has not received much attention and is in need of

methodological founding.

A related problem is that the methodology of semantic reconstruction, and

to some degree also the search for cognates, is contingent on knowledge about
naturalness in semantic change.

● The formal (phonetic-phonological) and the semantic, historical linguists

have paid more attention to the more accessible formal shape of a
linguistic item at the expense of its semantics
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 semantic reconstruction, one can be interested in a particular
semantic field in a particular language or language family only.
Research of language family, which is often interested not only in
semantics , but also in inferences about the culture, society and
environment of speakers of the proto-language.

48
 Pawley (2011) attempts to determine the range of meaning of higher-level
terms for aquatic creatures in Proto-Oceanic.

For instance, reflexes of *ikan (Indonesian) in daughter languages are

commonly glossed as ‘fish’ in lexical sources, but, depending on the language,
may also denote other aquatic creatures.

The obvious question is, where the cut-off point of Proto-Oceanic *ikan
itself was distribution of the semantic range of reflexes?

Pawley concludes that *ikan had a narrow sense ‘typical fish’, but more
broadly could at least refer to sharks, rays, whales, dolphins, eels, turtles, and
crocodiles (the situation seems to be describable well in a prototype theory
framework, though Pawley himself does not do so)
49
● There are some observations that may be useful when
reconstructing semantics in a particular language or
language family. Not all of them are specific to semantic
reconstruction itself, but can also be applied to other
areas of reconstruction.

50
 6.1 Argumentation by sheer mass of examples and
parsimony in external reconstruction
The introductory example showed that German bein underwent semantic
change from the original basic meaning ‘bone’ to ‘leg’.
In the older stages of other West and North Germanic languages, ‘bone’ is
uniformly found as the general meaning of bein’s cognates (Orel 2003: 32).
If this is true, positing an original meaning ‘leg’ requires the assumption of a
change at many nodes of the family tree, while positing an original meaning
‘bone’ necessitates only change at a low node of the tree.
By the principle of parsimony, then, reconstructing ‘bone’ would be preferred
on methodological grounds. Therefore, if we did not already know from the
available internal evidence regarding the development of German that ‘bone’ is the
likely original meaning, the comparative evidence would direct us towards the same
conclusion.
51
 6.2 Archaisms (very old) and peculiarities within the
language/internal reconstruction

The original meaning of a lexical item may sometimes be

preserved in conventionalised figures of speech or fixed phrases.
Likewise, it can be useful to look for the lexical item one is interested
in as parts of compounds, derivatives, and other kinds of more
complex constructions.

52
 For instance, the German name for the ‘human coccyx’ is steißbein,
consisting of bein and steiß ‘rump’ as the other constituent. Further,
there is the collective derivative gebeine ‘bones, mortal remains’, and
other complex terms in which bein is (historically) a constituent.

In all these terms, assuming the meaning ‘bone’ for bein at the time
of their coinage leads to intuitively natural semantic associations,
whereas positing ‘leg’ does not make too much sense.

if we did not already know the original meaning to be ‘bone’ by the

available textual evidence, the internal evidence would provide a hint
towards the correct analysis.

53
 6.3 Dialectal variation

Most languages are dialectally diverse, and this diversity can appear
itself on all levels of linguistic structure, including semantics.

Several surveys of dialect geography have shown that often the

dialects spoken on the geographic or sociolinguistic periphery are more
likely to preserve archaic features than those spoken at the centre.
This generalisation can be potentially useful for reconstructing semantic
change as well.
54
● For instance, in Dyirbal (North Queensland, Australia), dialects on the
northern and southern periphery have the term juja for ‘back,
dorsum’, while more central dialects have mambu.

● Since in some northern dialects mambu occurs with the meaning ‘loins’,
Dixon (1982: 66–67) infers that ‘loins’ is the likely original meaning of
mambu, having shifted in the central dialects to ‘back, dorsum’,

55
 6.4 Argumentation by parallels

A frequently employed technique for consolidating a posited original

meaning is to point to similar developments in other unrelated languages.

● For instance, one might attempt to unify the original meaning ‘bone’
for German bein by pointing out that in Nzebi (Bantu), the word for
‘bone’ has the same specialised sense ‘shinbone’ that was an
intermediate stage in the development from ‘bone’ to ‘leg’ in German.

56
 6.5 Size of word families

Benveniste (1954: 252) notes that in French, voler means both ‘to fly’
and ‘to steal’. In the former sense, the verb is surrounded by a large word
family derived from the root, including (voleter, s’envoler, survoler, volée,
volatile, volaille, and volière), but in the latter sense, there is only voleur
‘thief’ derived from it.

This suggests to Benveniste that one should look at contexts which

may have conditioned a semantic split from ‘to fly’ to ‘to steal’, which
implies that ‘to fly’ is the original sense
57
 6.6 Semantics of derivatives and syntactic differences

Anttila (1989: 366–368) supplies methodological help that is akin to

Benveniste’s: if there are two sets of cognates for what appear to be

identical or highly similar meanings, it is worthwhile to study carefully

the differences of occurrence of the two roots in attested daughter

languages and derivatives to find out rather subtle semantic nuances.

58
59