How Words Develop New Meanings
Раздел 2 Семантика
Semantic of Lexical Units
What Is a Word? What Is Lexicology?
What's is a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.
(W. Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet,Act II, Sc. 2)
These famous lines reflect one of the fundamental problems of linguistic research: what is in a name, in a word? Is there any direct connection between a word and the object it represents? Could a rose have been called by "any other name" of lexical Units as Juliet says?
Referential and functional approaches to the study of word meaning.
The branch of lexicology that is devoted to the study of meaning is known as semasiology.
The school is called “academic semantics” or “pure semantics” and is a branch of symbolic or mathematical logic, originated by R. Carnap. It aims at the building of an abstract theory of relationships between signs and their referents (things meant). It is a part of semiotics – the study of signs and languages in general, including all sorts of codes, such as military signals, traffic signals, etc. Unlike linguistic semantics which deals with real languages, pure semantics has as its subject formalized language.
Thus, it has been made clear, that semantics is an inappropriate term, because having several different referents, it creates confusion. That is why the term ‘semasiology’ should be used to designate the science of meaning.
The problem of meaning is considered to be the most controversial one in the linguistic theory. There are two schools of thought in present –day linguistics representing contemporary thinking on the problem:
1) referential approach (founded by Ferdinand de Saussure) distinguishes between the three components connected with meaning: the sound form of the linguistic sign, the concept underlying this sound form and the actual referent, the aspect of reality to which the linguistic sign refers.
Establishing this relationship our approach to the problem of meaning is referential because we refer to the sound form, to the concept and to the referent and discuss their relationship.
- This referential approach is criticized because the scholars in their theory use extra-linguistic terms such as concept, referent. Besides, approaching the problem of meaning the linguistic elements (words) are discussed in isolation from each other (from other words). So referential approach is paradigmatic. We discuss the meanings of words in a certain system. But in speech we use words in their environment and not in isolation. In this environment we define the meaning of words.
Meaning
The very function of the word as a unit of communication is made possible by its possessing a meaning. Therefore, among the word’s various characteristics, meaning is the most important. Meaning can be described as a component of the word through which a concept is communicated, in this way endowing the word with the ability of denoting real objects, qualities, actions and abstract notions.The relationships between referent(object etc. denoted by the word), conceptand wordare represented by the triangle:
Thought or Reference
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By the “symbol” here is meant the word; thought or reference is concept. The dotted line suggests that there is no immediate relation between word and referent: it is established only through the concept.
2) functional approach (L. Bloomfield) maintains that the meaning of a word may be studied only through its relation to other words.
These two approaches should not be set against each other. They should be used in peaceful combination. The examination of meaning must start by collecting an adequate number of samples of contexts. On examination of the samples the meaning will emerge from the contexts. Then it is logical to pass to the referential phase and try to formulate the meaning thus identified.
For some people studying words may seem uninteresting. But if studied properly, it may well prove just as exciting and novel as unearthing the mysteries of Outer Space.
It is significant that many scholars have attempted to define the word as a linguistic phenomenon. Yet none of the definitions can be considered totally satisfactory in all aspects. It is equally surprising that, despite all the achievements of modern science, certain essential aspects of the nature of the word still escape us. Nor do we fully understand the phenomenon called "language", of which the word is a fundamental unit.
We do not know much about the origin of language and, consequently, of the origin of words. It is true that there are several hypotheses, some of them no less fantastic than the theory of the divine origin of language.
We know nothing — or almost nothing — about the mechanism by which a speaker's mental process is converted into sound groups called "words", nor about the reverse process whereby a listener's brain converts the acoustic phenomena into concepts and ideas, thus establishing a two-way process of communication.
We know very little about the nature of relations between the word and the referent (i. e. object, phenomenon, quality, action, etc. denoted by the word). If we assume that there is a direct relation between the word and the referent — which seems logical — it gives rise to another question: how should we explain the fact that the same referent is designated by quite different sound groups in different languages.
Each word is a small unit within a vast, efficient and perfectly balanced system. But we do not know why it possesses these qualities, nor do we know much about the processes by which it has acquired them.
The list of unknowns could be extended, but it is probably high time to look at the brighter side and register some of the things we do know about the nature of the word.
First, we do know that the word is a unit of speech which, as such, serves the purposes of human communication. Thus, the word can be defined as a unit of communication.
Secondly, the word can be perceived as the total of the sounds which comprise it.
Third, the word, viewed structurally, possesses several characteristics.
The modern approach to word studies is based on distinguishing between the external and the internal structures of the word.
By external structure of the word we mean its morphological structure. For example, in the word post-impressionists the following morphemes can be distinguished: the prefixes post-, im-,the root press, the noun-forming suffixes-ion, - ist,and the grammatical suffix of plurality -s. All these morphemes constitute the external structure of the word post-impressionists.
The external structure of words, and also typical word-formation patterns, are studied in the section on word-building
The internal structure of the word, or its meaning, is nowadays commonly referred to as the word's semantic structure. This is certainly the word's main aspect. Words can serve the purposes of human communication solely due to their meanings, and it is most unfortunate when this fact is ignored by some contemporary scholars who, in their obsession with the fetish of structure tend to condemn as irrelevant anything that eludes mathematical analysis. And this is exactly what meaning, with its subtle variations and shifts, is apt to do.
The area of lexicology specialising in the semantic studies of the word is called semantics
Another structural aspect of the word is its unity. The word possesses both external (or formal) unity and semantic unity. Formal unity of the word is sometimes inaccurately interpreted as indivisibility. The example of postimpressionists has already shown that the word is not, strictly speaking, indivisible. Yet, its component morphemes are permanently linked together in opposition to word-groups, both free and with fixed contexts, whose components possess a certain structural freedom, e. g. bright light, to take for granted.
The formal unity of the word can best be illustrated by comparing a word and a word-group comprising identical constituents. The difference between a blackbird and a black bird is best explained by their relationship with the grammatical system of the language. The word blackbird, which is characterised by unity, possesses a single grammatical framing: blackbird/s. The first constituent black is not subject to any grammatical changes. In the word-group a black bird each constituent can acquire grammatical forms of its own: the blackest birds I've ever seen. Other words can be inserted between the components which is impossible so far as the word is concerned as it would violate its unity: a black night bird.
The same example may be used to illustrate what we mean by semantic unity.
In the word-group a black bird each of the meaningful words conveys a separate concept: bird— a kind of living creature: black— a colour.
The word blackbird conveys only one concept: the type of bird. This is one of the main features of any word: it always conveys one concept, no matter how many component morphemes it may have in its external structure.
A further structural feature of the word is its susceptibility to grammatical employment. In speech most words can be used in different grammatical forms in which their interrelations are realised.
So far we have only underlined the word's major peculiarities, but this suffices to convey the general idea of the difficulties and questions faced by the scholar attempting to give a detailed definition of the word. The difficulty does not merely consist in the considerable number of aspects that are to be taken into account, but, also, in the essential unanswered questions of word theory which concern the nature of its meaning.
All that we have said about the word can be summed up as follows.
The word is a speech unit used for the purposes of human communication, materially representing a group of sounds, possessing a meaning, susceptible to grammatical employment and characterised by formal and semantic unity.
How Words Develop New Meanings
It has been mentioned that the systems of meanings of polysemantic words evolve gradually. The older a word is, the better developed is its semantic structure. The normal pattern of a word's semantic development is from monosemy to a simple semantic structure encompassing only two or three meanings, with a further movement to an increasingly more complex semantic structure.
In this chapter we shall have a closer look at the complicated processes by which words acquire new meanings.
There are two aspects to this problem, which can be generally de-scribed in the following way: a) Why should new meanings appear at all? What circumstances cause and stimulate their development? b) How does it happen? What is the nature of the very process of development of new meanings?
The first group of causes is traditionally termed historical or ex-tralinguistic.
Different kinds of changes in a nation's social life, in its culture, knowledge, technology, arts lead to gaps appearing in the vocabulary which beg to be filled. Newly created objects, new concepts and phenomena must be named. We already know of two ways for providing new names for newly created concepts: making new words (word- building) and borrowing foreign ones. One more way of filling such vocabulary gaps is by applying some old word to a new object or notion.
When the first textile factories appeared in England, the old word mill was applied to these early industrial enterprises. In this way, mill (a Latin borrowing of the first century В. С.) added a new meaning to its former meaning "a building in which corn is ground into flour". The new meaning was "textile factory".
A similar case is the word carriage which had (and still has) the meaning "a vehicle drawn by horses", but, with the first appearance of railways in England, it received a new meaning, that of "a railway car". -
The history of English nouns describing different parts of a theatre may also serve as a good illustration of how well-established words can be used to denote newly-created objects and phenomena. The words stalls, box, pit, circle had existed for a long time before the first theatres appeared in England. With their appearance, the gaps in the vocabulary were easily filled by these widely used words which, as a result, developed new meanings.
New meanings can also be developed due to linguistic factors (the second group of causes).
Linguistically speaking, the development of new meanings, and also a complete change of meaning, may
1 It is of some interest to note that the Russian language found a different way of filling the same gap: in Russian, all the parts of the theatre are named by borrowed words: партер, ложа, амфитеатр, бельэтаж.
be caused through the influence of other words, mostly of synonyms.
Let us consider the following examples.
The Old English verb steorfan meant "to perish". When the verb to die was borrowed from the Scandinavian, these two synonyms, which were very close in their meaning, collided, and, as a result, to starve gradually changed into its present meaning: "to die (or suffer) from hunger".
The history of the noun deer is essentially the same. In Old English (О. Е. deor) it had a general meaning denoting any beast. In that meaning it collided with the borrowed word animal and changed its meaning to the modern one ("a certain kind of beast", R. олень).
The noun knave (О. Е. knafa) suffered an even more striking change of meaning as a result of collision with its synonym boy. Now it has a pronounced negative evaluative connotation and means "swindler, scoundrel".