Semantics Linguistics PDF

Andrew Sullivan! PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! Take a frikkin linguistics course! Ugh! Sullivan (and I love the little blogging devil, really) but damn! He promotes some of the most ass-backwards, wrong-headed linguists outside of that dried up old fogy Willy-boy Safire. Today, Sullivan from another blogger decrying the degradation of language (yawn) which made a plainly wrong and easily falsifiable claim:

"Words have value in their ability to distinguish and to discriminate. And they are only ever damaged in one direction: they become more abstracted, more broad, less specific, less forceful, less memorable, less powerful, more middling, less individual. " [my emphasis]

Sigh ... after years of teaching Linguistics 101 courses, this is just tiresome. And yet, here I shall plunge into the conventional examples (with 21st century hyperlinks, oooh, ahhhh).

There are many kinds of semantic change. Sullivan's reference focuses on one, widening, where a word's meaning changes from subordinate level to superordinate level (i.e., from specific to general). But there are many examples of the opposite, or narrowing (or some would use the term sepcialization) involving a change from superordinate level to subordinate level (i.e., from general to specific).

You don't belive me? You want examples? Okay.

Example 1: meat (pdf here)
Narrowing: the meaning of the word narrows to have a more specific meaning. The word mete (“meat”) in Old English used to mean “food.” Its meaning has narrowed to mean “food in the form of animal flesh.”

Example 2: skyline (original here)
Narrowing: Change from superordinate level to subordinate level. For example, skyline used to refer to any horizon, but now it has narrowed to a horizon decorated by skyscrapers.

Example 3: hound (original from Google books here)
Old English hund 'dog' narrowed to Modern English hound to refer to 'a particular breed of dog'.

Example 4: deer (original here)
SPECIALIZATION, in which the meaning of a word narrows over the years (deer once meant any four-legged beast and now means only members of the family Cervidae).

See also:

• USA apostille service - apostille services.