Title: Regularity in Semantic Change
Series Title: Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 97
Published: 2005
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
http://us.cambridge.org
Author: Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Stanford University, California
Author: Richard B. Dasher, Stanford University, California
Paperback: ISBN: 052161791X Pages: 362 Price: U.S. $ 39.99
Abstract:
This new and 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. In the last few decades 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 the first 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.
1. The framework 2. Prior and current work on semantic change 3. The development of modal verbs 4. The development of adverbials with discourse marker function 5. The development of performative verbs and constructions 6. The development of social deictics 7. Conclusion
Linguistic Field(s):
Discourse Analysis
Historical Linguistics
Pragmatics
Semantics
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