Psychological factors are factors that affect how people view a word and its meaning. 6. salary It is caused by extralinguistic factors typically. In Old English, the adjective was used to describe someone or something that was 'cunning, skillful, artful, wily, astute.' The word 'terrific' comes from the Latin word _________. A Grammar of Makalero: A Papuan Language of East Timor. Table 4. However, since we know that other elevational terms such as ABOVE or BELOW can, in principle, be employed within intrinsic and relative frames of reference, it is desirable in future research on elevational demonstratives to systematically test if there are any elevational demonstratives that can also be used in that way. How does the environment shape spatial language? The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication. Following Schapper (2014), I distinguish four basic concepts for verticality values and will employ them in the glosses of examples in order to facilitate understanding and comparison (6) (even though individual authors may use alternative terms, e.g., higher, upward, or above instead of UP).8 The term LEVEL includes a more specific term ACROSS: I further adopt and simplify the classification of Burenhult (2008) and differentiate between two basic types of elevational systems: (i) General elevational demonstrative systems: The location is determined according to an imagined vertical (longitudinal) axis that runs through the ground (e.g., human body). Nungon makes formal distinctions between the first three syntactic contexts (Sarvasy, 2014, pp. Let's learn about the causes of semantic change, the different types of semantic change, and look at some examples. Broadening is the opposite. A phrase such as 'he has a bad attitude' can become shortened to 'he has an attitude', showing that the word has gained a negative meaning. 11:1712. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01712. This is because when used as slang, they gain a new, positive, meaning and are associated with the word, 'cool'. Moreover, Ma Manda speakers gesture upward and downward in accordance with the meaning of the demonstratives when they refer to future and past, respectively. Another fruitful direction of research are various experimental approaches. As stated in the introduction, I focus on adnominal, spatial adverbial, and pronominal elevational demonstratives. In many other languages there are some restrictions. Structure of Manambu demonstratives (Aikhenvald, 2015). Create and find flashcards in record time. Structures and Their Functions in Usan: A Papuan Language of Papua New Guinea. Semantic narrowing is a type of semantic changeby which the meaningof a word becomes less general or inclusive than its earlier meaning. Narrowing takes place over a short period of time. 1 - An example of semantic narrowing is 'hound.'. With respect to the languages of this paper, this claim is only partially confirmed. Only when the referent is potentially visible (i.e., within the minimal local and larger local domain) the relevant items encode elevational and riverine meanings. Because it shows us how societal perceptions have changed over time. Stop procrastinating with our study reminders. Deixis in Nlmwa, in Deixis and Demonstratives in Oceanic Languages, ed. Demonstratives in Space and Discourse: A Synchronic and Diachronic Analysis. EXTERIOR). There are two types of semantics: logical and lexical. There are 5 main types of semantic change. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Ebert, K. (1994). Consider these two examples that reveal the two different meanings we associate the word 'lady' with: Of course she only drinks champagne and wears silk - she is a proper lady! https://www.thoughtco.com/amelioration-word-meanings-1689082 (accessed May 1, 2023). In Manambu, the noun phrases a-da-wur du (DEM.DST-M.SG-UP man) (Aikhenvald, 2008, p. 53) and a-na-wur numa-d du (DEM.DST-CURR.REL-UP big-M.SG man) (Aikhenvald, 2015) are used to refer to God (in addition to their literary sense (big) man up there., Demonstrative systems that encode elevation are, in general, already larger than the more common systems that express only (person-based) distance. . For instance, the speaker who uttered (19) is located in a village at around 100 m above sea level and Itanagar, where he would like to go, is situated at around 440 m and thus higher, and to the south but not visible from his village. Which word is a slang term that has been ameliorated over time? Fig. Have all your study materials in one place. doi: 10.1353/anl.2015.0003. Levinson (2018, pp. Nez, R., Cooperrider, K., Doan, D., and Wassmann, J. It is thus possible to suggest some generalizations concerning the areal distribution of elevational demonstratives. Spot two examples of semantic broadening! The other American languages in my sample that have elevational demonstratives are spoken in rather flat areas (Movima in the Bolivian plains, Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Den languages in Alaska and Greenland). It also goes beyond more specific surveys such as Post (2011, 2017) and Schapper (2014), which devote considerable space to elevationals, but focus on particular linguistic areas/languages families. Furthermore, a number of languages spoken on volcanic islands of Southeast Asia have elevational demonstratives. The vertical axis is special in comparison to the other two axes of the body (frontal and sagittal) (Figure 1) for one major reason: gravity normally determines what counts as up and down. The publication of this article was supported by the Thringer Universitts- und Landesbibliothek Jena. On the expression of spatio-temporal relations in language, in Universals of Human Language, Vol. Heeschen, V. (1998). Figure 3. Deixis, in The Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. Heegrd, J., and Liljegren, H. (2018). For example, Sanzhi Dargwa has a general elevational system clearly based on an abstract vertical axis (Forker, 2019). The term 'gay' has undergone a process of semantic reclamation by LGBTQIA people. Cogn. These are extralinguistic causes (not involving language) and linguistic causes (involving language). However, the categorization of Blank (1998) has gained increasing acceptance: . From Space to Time: Temporal Adverbials in the Worlds Languages. Above I explained that gravity is the natural source for the direction of elevationals and thus for the determination of what counts as UP and what as DOWN independently of an observer or an intrinsic orientation of the ground. Semantic change often occurs as societal values change. Berlin: de Gruyter. R. J. Hayward (London: SOAS), 210355. van den Berg, R. (1997). Narrowing is when the meaning of a word becomes more specialized whereas broadening happens when a word's meaning changes to be more generalized. 3, ed. However, as a modern slang term, the word has been elevated and has taken on the positive meaning of 'great': Think of other slang words that have gone through a similar process like 'wicked', for example. They can also be general as in Usan and applied in the local domain (14). The word knight is a good example of this semantic phenomenon. Upload unlimited documents and save them online. The handling editor declared a shared affiliation, though no other collaboration, with the author DF at the time of the review. Bril further writes that it is generally improper to address others by name. Random House, 2008) Hound and Indigenous Metaphoric usage extensions, projections onto the horizontal plane and conventionalized uses can create problems for the correct categorization of elevational demonstratives as general or topographic because they might obscure the basic elevational meanings. Silly. Position (standing vs. non-standing) (Movima). It is well known that words for front and back are commonly used as temporal metaphors in a wide range of different languages and cultures (e.g., Traugott, 1978; Haspelmath, 1997, pp. For example, demonstratives in the Athabaskan language Tanacross (Alaska) morphologically and semantically combine deictic meaning (distality) with specific topographic and elevational morphemes. Linguistic semantics has been defined as the study of how languages organize and express meanings. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.03.016, PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar, Bickel, B. MA thesis, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX. Typol. Amsterdam: Benjamins. (2012). I suspect that these claims are probably sometimes wrong or at least misleading because, first, the authors do not provide unambiguous evidence that the relevant items refer on the basis of the geophysical environment and not simply to the vertical dimension. An example of alinguistic cause would be linguistic analogy - a process where when a word gets a new meaning, so does its synonyms. Elevation refers to the expression of a location of a figure with respect to the ground on the vertical axis. For instance, the elevationals of Galo are translated as given in (16) (Post, 2007, pp. Words have been reclaimed by groups such as women, ethnic minorities and the LGBTQIA community. Leiden: Brill. English up can co-occur with adverbial demonstratives (up there) and verbs (climb up). An alternative explanation could be that positions further away from the speaker are (almost) unlimited in the sense that there is no clear and unambiguous natural boundary or limit (e.g., if we climb up a mountain we can see even further away). Semantics Examples A classic example of this specialization of meaning is the word doctor. Soc. As you can see with our examples of amelioration, some words in the English language have adapted to the changing times and to certain sociocultural situations. Amelioration is also referred to as semantic melioration or semantic elevation. Except for East Caucasian none of the other language families spoken in the Caucasus has elevational demonstratives. For example, in everyday use, a child might make use of semantics to understand a mom's directive to "do your chores" as, "do your chores whenever you feel like it." Spatial demonstratives and perceptual space: describing and remembering object location. Linguist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Treis, Y. A Grammar of Dime. These include narrowing, broadening, amelioration, and pejoration. This is an example of narrowing. There are five major types of semantic change. However, for this paper the answer to that question is largely irrelevant, because I am only interested in the combined forms, i.e., the co-occurrence of demonstratives and elevational morphemes. With respect to the topic of this paper the category of deixis comes into play because the items examined are either categorized as demonstratives themselves or as parts (bound roots, affixes, or clitics) of demonstratives. Frames of reference in vision and language: where is above? 12, 99142. Which best describes the meaning of amelioration? Daga grammar: From Morpheme to Discourse. If the combination is tight such that the items are synchronically monomorphemic, this leads to the deceptive impression that the elevational component is also deictic. Amelioration elevates a word's meaning over time. This hints at one major problem concerning research on elevational demonstratives. Many of the languages have been identified through the works by Diessel (1999); Post (2011, 2017); Sarvasy (2014), and Breunesse (2019). Willett, T. L. (1991). I have proposed that the metaphor can be explained by the direction of the biological growing process of humans, many animals and plants. Linguist. The word 'terrific' comes from the Latin word 'terrificus' which meant 'causing terror or fear, frightful'. However, many languages do not have words referring to the sagittal (back/front) or transverse (left/right) axes or do not employ them regularly and in the same fashion as familiar European languages (Levinson, 2003, p. 46). In the following, I will provide examples from the four languages and discuss this type of spatial metaphor. I then propose the elevational hierarchy along which the basic elevational meaning categories can be ordered. Which word has a double meaning in our language today? Cats are fish. 89, 121. Dr. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks. How many types of semantic changes are there? This is an example of amelioration. My sample is a convenience sample because elevational demonstratives are not particularly frequent in the worlds languages. Narrowing is commonly caused by extralinguistic factors, These are defined as factors that occur outside the system of the language. Psychol. This finding is particularly interesting in view of the widely-debated use of Mandarin Chinese spatial terms up for past events and down for future events, which show the opposite metaphorical extension. New Guinea is the only area in which a wide range of languages with different genealogical affiliations that are spoken in mountain settlements have elevational demonstratives and thus geography or even language contact might have played a role in the development of those systems. Doctoral dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra. This means that elevational demonstratives largely refer to areas outside the peripersonal sphere in a similar way as simple distal demonstratives. I'm afraid I'm sick, the doctor said I need to stay in bed. Linguist. Lerne mit deinen Freunden und bleibe auf dem richtigen Kurs mit deinen persnlichen Lernstatistiken. As I already explained, it is sound to expect the absolute use to be the default such that the interpretation of down there in (17) is normally understood in relation to the position of the speaker and not some other ground object because of gravity. I also suggest that the same principle should apply to other semantic distinctions that demonstratives in some languages express such as visibility or audibility since such semantic categories are only relevant when the referent is not near to the speaker. the meaning of the word 'engine' changed from describing general devices used in war to describing a specific mechanical device. The same kind of projection is applied at the global scale on an imagined map, e.g., Estonians are located UP with respect to Latvians because Estonia is further to the north (Forker, 2019). doi: 10.1086/465747. On the development of elevation deictics in Hmong-Mien, in Paper Presented at the 52th Annual Meeting of the SLE, Leipzig. A Grammar of Hatam: Birds Head Peninsula Irian Jaya. (ii) Obligatory co-occurrence of demonstrative morphemes with elevational morphemes in a single word-form. For example, the verb 'to starve' originally meant 'to die'; however, it was frequently used in sentences about hunger. Yarapea, A. M. (2006). Bender and Beller (2014, p. 348) provide useful graphic representations of the basic types and further subtypes. Z. Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 8, 226239. What are the major types of semantic change? The word 'pretty' is an example of amelioration. They can have very local meanings, which means that they can be applied, for instance, to refer to positions close to the speaker, inside a room or in the immediate environment (7), (8) but they are also used to denote locations in the geophysical environment (9). Languages with morphologically complex elevational demonstratives in which the elevational meaning is expressed by bound roots or affixes and regularly combines with demonstrative stems are Blagar, Tauya, Tanacross (Table 4), Koyukon, Andi (Table 5), Manambu (Table 8), Ngiyambaa (7), and Dyirbal (10). 23, 59106. Note that in the following example the elevational morpheme is actually an adverbial demonstrative with originally spatial function (due to the locative prefix n-> n-p-bo up there), but it has been translated with a temporal meaning. What concerns the distribution of elevational demonstratives of the language sample used for this paper, they do not show evidence of topographical correspondence. The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Several languages have been claimed to possess topographic elevationals that employ an absolute frame of reference, but these claims are normally not proven by a comprehensive argumentation and detailed data. TABLE 4 Table 4. However, those languages constitute a minority. Morphosyntax of Kewapi. (2018). The word 'pretty' comes from West Saxon ('prttig'), Kentish ('pretti'), and Mercian ('prettig'). Below, we will discuss the characteristics of these, and look at examples of each type of semantic change. It is sometimes also referred to as semantic deterioration. Elevational values are frequently co-expressed with distance-based meanings of demonstratives, and it is almost always distal demonstratives that express elevation, whereas medial or proximal demonstratives can lack elevational distinctions. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.03.007. The word, 'engine', was originally used to mean any war machine. Semantic change can be caused by extralinguistic or linguistic causes. Widening/Extension => range of meanings of a word increases so that the word can be used in more contexts than were appropriate before the change -dog =>1) specific powerful breed of dog => all breeds or races of dog However, in (22) the UP-demonstrative occurs together with the hearsay evidential, which means that the speaker has acquired her/his information from the speech of others. doi: 10.1515/lingty-2019-0001. In this paper, I concentrate on the semantic and pragmatic properties of elevational demonstratives, more specifically, adnominal, spatial adverbial, and pronominal demonstratives. Eipo (Mek, Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea) has two subsets of demonstratives (Table 2). In the context of this sentence, the word 'sick' means 'corrupt, troubled'. I do not have an explanation for the third demonstrative and the grammar provides only one example (27), in which its meaning seems to correspond to the meaning of the first and is thus in accordance with the DOWN = BACK = PAST schema. Similarly, by means of the second topographic system of Yakkha the uphill and downhill elevationals can be mapped onto the human body and teeth are then referred to as uphill, i.e., upper teeth and downhill lower teeth irrespectively of their actual position (even when a person is not in the canonical upright position). An old lady with short white hair who usually wears a red coat. Whitby, C. (1990). The roots of the word 'lord' are in Old English. Grimes, C. E. (1991). Distance contrasts in demonstratives, in The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, eds M. S. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology). Around the year 1100, 'knight' came to mean 'military follower of a king or other superior.'. Adelaar, W. (2019). By contrast, in Dyirbal they can also be added to verbs to form verbs of motion (Dixon, 1972, pp. This means that FURTHER is equated with UP and NEARER with DOWN. A Grammar of Tulil. Radden, G. (2003). While amelioration is a process in which a word that used to have a more negative meaning develops a more positive one over time, pejoration occurs when the once positive meaning of a word changes into a more negative one. If elevationals were deictic by themselves, they would be ego-centered or only allow for shifting the deictic center to another speech act participant. Burenhult, N. (2018). There are three other languages in my sample that do not employ their elevational demonstratives with temporal meaning, but make use of the same or a very similar type of metaphor, namely Yupno (which belongs to the same language family as Tulil), Avar, and Lak.16 Yupno speakers have been found to consistently use topographic (i.e., geocentrically anchored) gestures toward the ground for referring to the present, uphill for reference to the future and downhill for past (Nez et al., 2012). Woldemariam, H. (2001). The metaphor TIME AS SPACE across languages. The word, 'hound', traditionally referred to any type of dog. However, no linguist has ever claimed that English has an elevational demonstrative although such a claim would perhaps be imaginable if we wrote up-there or upthere instead of up there. 188189). 69, 4670. Nordquist, Richard. 2461). An example of Semantic Widening Guy - Guido (Guy) Fawkes was the leader of the plot to blow up the English Houses of Parliament. Furthermore, as illustrated by means of Figures 2, 3 and in the discussion of the preceding section, when studying elevational morphemes it is necessary to examine whether they allow not only for the absolute frame of reference but if intrinsic and relative interpretations are also available. Languages with elevational demonstratives are found in flat, hilly, and mountainous regions, and they are a characteristic feature of a few language families worldwide (East Caucasian, Eskimo-Aleut, Sino-Tibetan, Timor-Alor-Pantar, Nuclear Trans New Guinea, and Omotic). By contrast, the direction downward is limited by the ground as are locations near or close to the speaker limited by the position of the speaker.15. Table 7. EXAMPLES: Elephants are not animals. True- broadening can be caused by only linguistic. There are languages in which all distance-based deictics can be combined with all elevationals. However, we can escape gravity in the sense that we can change the frame of reference from absolute to intrinsic or relative. Everything you need for your studies in one place. Broadening: Meaning & Examples | StudySmarter English Lexis and Semantics Broadening Broadening Broadening 5 Paragraph Essay A Hook for an Essay APA Body Paragraph Context Essay Outline Evidence Harvard Hedging Language Used in Academic Writing MHRA Referencing MLA Opinion Opinion vs Fact Plagiarism Quotations Restate Summarize Summary Works Cited Set individual study goals and earn points reaching them. The Jahai multi-term demonstrative system: whats spatial about it? in Demonstratives in Cross-Linguistic Perspective, eds S. Levinson, S. Cutfield, M. Dunn, N. Enfield, and S. Meira (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 361380. Finally, I have argued that with respect to elevational demonstratives genealogical affiliation is more predictive than areal location. A fundamental issue in the study of semantic transfer is the relation between language and thought. Berlin: Language Science Press. Cookies collect information about your preferences and your devices and are used to make the site work as you expect it to, to understand how you interact with the site, and to show advertisements that are targeted to your interests. Masters thesis, University of Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby. One example of semantic change would be the word 'hound'. Among the languages in my sample Blagar, Makalero, and Tidore have elevational demonstrative verbs with the meanings be here/there up/down that exhibit predicative use: The four basic contexts are attested to various extents for elevational demonstratives. Typically this process occurs due to different extralinguistic reasons, such as cultural and worldview changes occurring. Forker, D. (2019). Spatial operations in deixis, cognition, and culture: where to orient oneself in Belhare, in Language and Conceptualization, eds J. Nuyts and E. Pederson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 4683. In their demonstrative systems, languages repeatedly combine elevation with distance. But by the year 1400, with language developing from Old English to Middle English, the word 'pretty' had taken on a new meaning which was 'manly, gallant'. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. . T. Moore (New York, NY: Academic Press), 2763. A synonym for broadening is semantic generalisation. Blagar, Galo (26) and all East Caucasian languages in my sample (Avar, Lak, Andi, and Sanzhi Dargwa) have not only spatial elevational demonstratives, but also a further class of elevational demonstratives that function as manner adverbs, e.g., Blagar do-la (up.there-as) like that/those up there (not necessarily visible) (Steinhauer, 2014, p. 159). "Oddly," says R.L. Diessel, H. (2012). As stated in Section Verticality Within the Domain of Spatial Language above, demonstratives are deictic and express distance-based meanings with the speaker (ego) as deictic center or person-based meanings that additionally consider the position of the hearer. Table 10. Similarly, there is no unambiguous natural boundary or limit for the direction upward of the vertical axis. They are narrowing, broadening, amelioration, pejoration, and semantic reclamation. They are used at the local scale (17), the larger local scale (18) and the global scale (26). Fillmore, C. J. 9091; Levinson, 2018, p. 30), but also terminological confusion (Breunesse, 2019, pp. What is an example of a linguistic cause? The demonstratives also express temporal meanings similar to Tulil, i.e., UP = FUTURE and DOWN = PAST, and the items with the LEVEL-meaning do not cover temporal functions. 57, 322), and thus Dyirbal belongs to the (b) subtype. A. Schapper (Berlin: de Gruyter), 115172. But several descriptions explicitly mention that the anchor point serving as the ground (=deictic center) for elevational demonstratives can easily shift, e.g., in a story it shifts to a protagonist or to another salient inanimate anchor point [Tulil as analyzed by Meng (2018) and Ma Manda as examined in Pennington (2016)].12. According to Killian, the database is not completely unbiased, but it covers all areas of the world and more than half of the worlds language families. Zhirkov, L. I. Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Humanities, The University of Manchester, United Kingdom. It is important to remember when discussing this form of semantic change that, unlike amelioration, the word may still also be used in the pejorative sense. What are some examples of semantic change? I then discuss metaphorical extensions of elevational demonstratives to non-spatial uses such as temporal and social deixis.
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