Download or read book An Insight on Semantic Change written by Florian Wenz and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2012-04-27 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Bamberg (Lehrstuhl für Englische Sprachwissenschaft ), course: English Etymology, language: English, abstract: "Nothing is perfectly static. Every word, every grammatical element, every locution, every sound and accent is a slowly changing configuration, molded by the invisible and impersonal drift that is the life of language." (Sapir 1949: 171) Reading this quote, in which Edward Sapir describes the nature of language, there are two important points, which I would like to use as a starting point for this paper. The first point is that language undergoes a continuous change and is never "perfectly static". This is especially true for semantics as Ullmann states: "Of all linguistic elements caught up in this drift, meaning is probably the least resistant to change." (Ullmann 1977: 193) The meaning of words is in a constant process of alteration. The second point is that the change mentioned above is done by "the invisible and impersonal drift" or to put it in simple words: The change in language in general and in meaning in particular happens unconsciously to the speakers. This fact poses the following questions: Why do speakers change the meaning of a word if they are not aware of it? What are the forces behind this process, how does this process look like and what are the most relevant types of change? Or in general: What is semantic change? To give answers to exactly these major questions about semantic change, will be the aim of this paper. The basis for this paper will be the theories of Andreas Blank, who even though being a Romanist, developed a precise, extensive and still very comprehensive theoretical work on semantic change, which is "[...] recommendable for historical semanticists of all languages." (Grzega 2000: 233)

Download or read book Semantic Change written by Thomas Heim and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2006-01-12 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1, LMU Munich (Institut für Englische Philologie), course: Hauptseminar, language: English, abstract: “Semantic change deals with change in meaning, understood to be a change in the concepts associated with a word [...]” (Campbell 1998: 255). To some of you, Campbell’s definition may seem a bit simplistic. Some scholars, too (for example Blank whom we’ll be hearing of later on), argue that it’s not one meaning of word that changes, but with semantic change a new meaning is added to the already existing meaning or meanings of a word and then this new meaning is lexicalised, or one of the already lexicalised meanings is no longer used and becomes extinct. I think Campbell’s definition can suffice as a basis for our little “immersion” into semantic change. And what is more important than a theoretically watertight definition is a “practical insight” into semantic change. So let’s have quick look on what exactly changes when words change their meanings.

Download or read book Regularity in Semantic Change written by Elizabeth Closs Traugott and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-20 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important study of semantic change examines how new meanings arise through language use, especially the various ways in which speakers and writers experiment with uses of words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees. There has been growing interest in exploring systemicities in semantic change from a number of perspectives including theories of metaphor, pragmatic inferencing, and grammaticalization. Like earlier studies, these have for the most part been based on data taken out of context. This book is a detailed examination of semantic change from the perspective of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis. Drawing on extensive corpus data from over a thousand years of English and Japanese textual history, Traugott and Dasher show that most changes in meaning originate in and are motivated by the associative flow of speech and conceptual metonymy.

Download or read book Computational approaches to semantic change written by Nina Tahmasebi and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Semantic change — how the meanings of words change over time — has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century, encompassing many languages and language families. Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Such computational studies still tended to be small-scale, method-oriented, and qualitative. However, recent years have witnessed a sea-change in this regard. Big-data empirical quantitative investigations are now coming to the forefront, enabled by enormous advances in storage capability and processing power. Diachronic corpora have grown beyond imagination, defying exploration by traditional manual qualitative methods, and language technology has become increasingly data-driven and semantics-oriented. These developments present a golden opportunity for the empirical study of semantic change over both long and short time spans. A major challenge presently is to integrate the hard-earned knowledge and expertise of traditional historical linguistics with cutting-edge methodology explored primarily in computational linguistics. The idea for the present volume came out of a concrete response to this challenge. The 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change (LChange'19), at ACL 2019, brought together scholars from both fields. This volume offers a survey of this exciting new direction in the study of semantic change, a discussion of the many remaining challenges that we face in pursuing it, and considerably updated and extended versions of a selection of the contributions to the LChange'19 workshop, addressing both more theoretical problems — e.g., discovery of "laws of semantic change" — and practical applications, such as information retrieval in longitudinal text archives.

Download or read book Semantic Change in English written by Grzegorz Kleparski and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book From Polysemy to Semantic Change written by Martine Vanhove and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-11-21 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages, illustrated with numerous examples from different semantic domains and different languages. Part three is dedicated to detailed empirical studies of a large sample of languages in a limited set of semantic fields. It reveals possible universals of semantic association, as well as areal and cultural tendencies.

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics written by Merja Kytö and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 1092 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English historical linguistics is a subfield of linguistics which has developed theories and methods for exploring the history of the English language. This Handbook provides an account of state-of-the-art research on this history. It offers an in-depth survey of materials, methods, and language-theoretical models used to study the long diachrony of English. The frameworks covered include corpus linguistics, historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics and manuscript studies, among others. The chapters, by leading experts, examine the interplay of language theory and empirical data throughout, critically assessing the work in the field. Of particular importance are the diverse data sources which have become increasingly available in electronic form, allowing the discipline to develop in new directions. The Handbook offers access to the rich and many-faceted spectrum of work in English historical linguistics, past and present, and will be useful for researchers and students interested in hands-on research on the history of English.

Download or read book Semantic Change and Componential Analysis written by Grzegorz Kleparski and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Semantics written by James R. Hurford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1983-04-28 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces the major elements of semantics in a simple, step-by-step fashion. Sections of explanation and examples are followed by practice exercises with answers and comment provided.

Download or read book From Polysemy to Semantic Change written by Martine Vanhove and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages, illustrated with numerous examples from different semantic domains and different languages. Part three is dedicated to detailed empirical studies of a large sample of languages in a limited set of semantic fields. It reveals possible universals of semantic association, as well as areal and cultural tendencies.

Download or read book Semantic Change in the Early Modern English Period Latin Influences on the English Language written by David Stehling and published by Anchor Academic Publishing (aap_verlag). This book was released on 2013-08 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the history, English was changing steadily. Not only was the English grammar, pronunciation or vocabulary being altered over the centuries but also the semantics of lexemes. A major factor that has a considerable impact on the semantics of words is the influence of foreign languages. This study deals with semantic changes due to the Latin influence on the English language in the Early Modern English period. The aim of the analysis is – with the help of the Oxford English Dictionary Online – to determine potential patterns of meaning alterations of English lexemes that were caused by the influx of Latin-derived equivalents, especially on the field of human anatomy, and between the 15th and the 18th century. Moreover, the Early Modern English period is portrayed as well as the roles of Latin and English during that time, also considering the integration of Latin loanwords into English. In order to discuss meaning changes due to Latin influences, a closer look will be taken at language modifications in general, at lexical change and at the various types of semantic change by which English words might have been affected.

Download or read book Semantic Change A Comparison between Wandel der Wortbedeutung by Hermann Paul and Semantic change and cognition by G bor Gy ri written by Marie Adler and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2014-05-02 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject German Studies - Semiotics, Pragmatics, Semantics, grade: 1.0, University of Hannover, language: English, abstract: The study of language change has evolved at a high rate throughout the last century. Significant insights have been gained concerning the workings of the human mind and, by extension, the workings of semantic and linguistic change. Set in comparison and contrast, however, it becomes obvious that some convictions have remained stable and still play a role as prominent as they did in the year of 1880. It can even be argued that most of the accomplishments of today’s language change researchers strongly build on those of the last century and could not have been achieved without them. To illustrate this assumption, the present termpaper compares two works on language change that were written in two different centuries in two different countries; Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (Chapter 4: Wandel der Wortbedeutung) written by Hermann Paul in 1880 and Semantic Change and Cognition written by Gábor Györi in 2002. Hermann Paul was a German linguist and lexicographer, who was born on August 7 in 1846 and passed away on December 29 in 1921. He was a significant representative of the Neogrammarian school of thought. The cognitive linguist Gábor Györi is associate professor and head of the department of English linguistics at the University of Pécs, Hungary and has a strong focus on the evolution of cognition and categorization. It shall furthermore be shown that Paul’s work shares many of the tenets of modern cognitive linguistics even though that might not be obvious at the first glance, due to differences in terminology and methodology. In order to filter out similarities and differences between both the authors’ points of view, chapter 1.1 will briefly summarize the contents of Paul’s text, while chapter 1.2 will give an account of the most important tenets of Györi’s work. In chapter 2.1, the terminology Paul and Györi used will be explained and contrasted. Chapter 2.2 then deals with the contentual comparison of both texts. Here the focus will be set on the role that the authors assign to metaphor and metonymy as mechanisms of semantic change. In chapter 2.3, it will be analyzed, which notion of language is manifested in the respective works.

Download or read book Word Embeddings Reliability Semantic Change written by J. Hellrich and published by IOS Press. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Word embeddings are a form of distributional semantics increasingly popular for investigating lexical semantic change. However, typical training algorithms are probabilistic, limiting their reliability and the reproducibility of studies. Johannes Hellrich investigated this problem both empirically and theoretically and found some variants of SVD-based algorithms to be unaffected. Furthermore, he created the JeSemE website to make word embedding based diachronic research more accessible. It provides information on changes in word denotation and emotional connotation in five diachronic corpora. Finally, the author conducted two case studies on the applicability of these methods by investigating the historical understanding of electricity as well as words connected to Romanticism. They showed the high potential of distributional semantics for further applications in the digital humanities.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics written by Claire Bowern and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics provides a survey of the field covering the methods which underpin current work; models of language change; and the importance of historical linguistics for other subfields of linguistics and other disciplines. Divided into five sections, the volume encompass a wide range of approaches and addresses issues in the following areas: historical perspectives methods and models language change interfaces regional summaries Each of the thirty-two chapters is written by a specialist in the field and provides: a introduction to the subject; an analysis of the relationship between the diachronic and synchronic study of the topic; an overview of the main current and critical trends; and examples from primary data. The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in this area. Chapter 28 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315794013.ch28

Download or read book Historical Semantics and Cognition written by Andreas Blank and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-03-25 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains revised papers from a September 1996 symposium which provided a forum for synchronically and diachronically oriented scholars to exchange ideas and for American and European cognitive linguists to confront representatives of different directions in European structural semantics. Papers are in sections on theories and models, descriptive categories, and case studies, and examine areas such as cognitive and structural semantics, diachronic prototype semantics, synecdoche as a cognitive and communicative strategy, and intensifiers as targets and sources of semantic change.

Download or read book Semantic Change and Collective Knowledge in 18th Century Britain written by John Regan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-07-27 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth digital investigation of several 18th-century British corpora, this book identifies shared communities of meaning in the printed British 18th century by highlighting and analysing patterns in the distribution of lexis. There are forces of attraction between words: some are more likely to keep company than others, and how words attract and repel one another is worthy of note. Charting these forces, this book demonstrates how distant reading 18th-century corpora can tell us something new, methodologically defensible and, crucially, interesting, about the most common constructions of word meanings and epistemes in the printed British 18th century. In the case studies in this book, computation brings to light some remarkable facts about collectively-produced forms of meaning, without which the most common meanings of words, and the ways of knowing that they constituted, would remain matters of conjecture rather than evidence. Providing the first investigation of collective meaning and knowledge in the British 18th century, this interdisciplinary study builds on the existing stores of close reading, praxis, and history of ideas, presenting a view constructed at scale, rather than at the level of individual texts.

Download or read book Historical Semantics Historical Word Formation written by Jacek Fisiak and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-06-15 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.