Summary Details
| Query: |
Contrasting senses for 'leave'
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| Author: | baskaran - | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Semantics
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| Summary: |
Hi all,
I had posted a question in January (Linguist 14.34) as quoted below: Recently I came across a conversation given below. Person-1: John left his company last month. Person-2: Then what is left there? It is interesting to see the meaning of 'left' in these sentences. In the first one, it means, 'go away' or 'move permanantly out' and in the second one, it means, 'remaining there'. These two senses are squarely opposite to each other. (The 10th edition of the Consice Oxford dictionary lists the following two (contrasting) senses among others for the word 'leave', 1. go away from, depart permanantly 2. allow or cause to remain) I would like to know whether this phenomenon has been studied earlier for any language. I would also welcome more examples in English or other languages. I will post the summary of the responses. Thanks in advance. *********** I summarize the responses for the posting. I deeply regret for the delayed summary, which was not intentional. 1. Karen gave a list of similar words, he prefer to call auto-antonyms. He further says that, most of these are secondary meanings that have grown up in place of the originals (moot) some of them are parallel derivations, usually two verbs from one noun (dust) some are cultural (table) some are derived from entirely different sources (cleave, which come from ''kleben'' (stick) and ''klioban'' (split). Some of them are considered substandard or ''wrong'', but they're in common, valid use. Like these: aught everything, all / nothing, zero bill invoice, charge / money cleave cut apart / stick together clip cut apart / join together custom usual, ordinary / special, made-to-order doubtful causing doubt or uncertainty / having doubt; showing doubt dust remove fine particles / cover with fine particles fast steady, unmoving / at high speed, quick inflamable able to be set aflame / unable to be set aflame let to permit / to hinder (without let or hindrance; a let ball) literally actually / figuratively (at least in the US!) marry to join two people in marriage / to get married model archetype, prototype / copy, imitation, display momentarily immediately / for a moment moot academic, of little importance / debatable, important note a promise to pay / money overlook to look over / to refuse or fail to see paper official / spurious partition a division / the thing used to divide NOTE: I am not giving a complete list to save space. Interested persons pls. write me personally. 2. Marc picard have provided a thread from linguistlist in this regard. http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/6/6-74.html NOTE: I could not add the content of this link due to space constraints. 3. Geoffrey Sampson writes: I shouldn't have thought that the alternative senses of ''leave'' are so opposite to one another. One of them is transitive, the other intransitive; it seems natural that if you go away, what you go away from stays put! There are certainly cases in various languages where a word has senses that are opposite in different contexts. For English, I think a better case might be ''cleave''. In Chinese, the middle syllable of the late Chiang Kai-shek's name (in Mandarin, jie4 I think) has a sense ''big'', and also has a sense ''small'' -- I don't know what the respective contexts are, though. 4. Kurt Godded sent a related joke which reads like below. The English professor summed up his lecture by saying, ''And while there are cases where a double negative is used to indicate a positive meaning, there are no cases where a double positive is used to indicate a negative.'' And from the back of the room there came the voice of a disgruntled student who said, ''Yea, right!'' (I had to say English prof, because a Linguistics prof would never make such a claim in the first place.) 5. Laurence Horn points out a thread in linguistlist that ran in 1998. He now prefer to call this phenomenon as 'enantionymy' which he earlier termed as 'antilogy'. NOTE: He has also attached a collection of relevant posts from the thread. Again I am not attaching it for fear of overloading the list. I am willing to send it to interested persons when they write me separately. 6. Pete Unseth says: I think part of the answer to this question is that when something is ''left behind'', that is a passive verb construction. So it is ''leave a place'' and ''leave a thing''. NOt so different after all. 7. Luis gives another example: 'overlook' It means 'fail to observe' and 'supervise, oversee'. The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives the senses as INSPECT, on the one hand, and MISS, IGNORE, EXCUSE, NEGLECT, on the other. 8. John Atkinson explains: Two well-known examples in English are ''cleave'' (meaning either ''split, separate'' or ''stick together'') and ''let'' (meaning either ''allow'' or ''hinder''). In both these cases, the two meanings correspond to different Old English words, whose pronunciation has become the same in modern English through regular sound changes. This is not the case with ''leave'', apparently, both senses you mention deriving from the same OE word. (The noun ''leave'', meaning permission, has a different derivation.) ''Cleave'' is a fairly rare word today, in both senses, and it has been argued that it is avoided because of its ambiguity. ''Let'' with the meaning ''allow'' is very common, but with the meaning ''hinder'' is just about obsolete except in a few fixed phrases like ''without let or hindrance''; some say for a similar reason. However both senses of ''leave'' remain in common use, despite the possibility of some ambiguity (as in ''He left the car''). 9. Khalifa offers some cognitive perspective to the question, which I give below in his own words. >Recently I came across a conversation given below. Person-1: John >left his company last month. Person-2: Then what is left there? It >is interesting to see the meaning of 'left' in these sentences. In >the first one, it means, 'go away' or 'move permanantly out' and in >the second one, it means, 'remaining there'. These two senses are >squarely opposite to each other. I wouldn't really say that here. From a cognitive point of view, what we have is some sort of entity (call it ''trajector'' if you like, in cognitive grammar fashion) breaking away, or losing contact, with some reference point (call it ''ground'' if you like). Now, everything will crucially depend on whether it is only the trajector that is being profiled (i.e. John left), or trajector AND ground (i.e. John left the company), or ground only, in which case you get meanings that indeed might sound as opposite or contradictory to the first use, but it is only a question of windowing (i.e. what part of the complex event is lexicalized). To take another example, the English verb ''to fetch'' is analysable as : 1) move away towards object 2) pick up object 3) come back with object to departure point In French for instance, we'd have to use 2 verbs in something quite similar to a serial construction: ''aller chercher'', literally ''go look for'' ; now, that means that French will only window stage 1 of the process (GO), and, say, half of stage 2 (LOOK FOR, and then FIND & PICK UP). It's pretty much what happens with ''leave'', I guess, where different languages might (and indeed, do) need a different verb when it's only ground that is profiled. Interestingly though, French does not behave like English, the verb ''laisser'' (leave) being available to translate ''John left his coat in the room'' (''Jean a laiss? son manteau dans la pi?ce''), but neither ''John left'' (where a different verb is needed, i.e. ''partir'' [go away, depart] => ''Jean est parti''), nor ''John left Mary/the company'' (another berb, ''quitter'' => ''Jean a quitt? Marie / l'entreprise). > (The 10th edition of the Consice Oxford dictionary lists the >following two (contrasting) senses among others for the word 'leave', >1. go away from, depart permanantly 2. allow or cause to remain) Well, what is interesting to note is the underlying causative in sense 2, which shows that, even though it is indeed the ground (departure point) that is being profiled, the trajector is construed as the causee of the new state of affairs prevailing relative to the ground. These were just off-the-cuff thoughts on your problem, don't know whether this is relevant, I'd be curious to know what other languages do behave like English when you get enough replies. 10. Ghil `ad Zuckermann gives few Hebrew examples along with two references (which I am yet to see). You might want to check out ENANTIOSEMIC words or AUTO-OPPOSITES, see both Zuckermann 2000 and 2003 - as following: Zuckermann, G. 2003 (forthcoming). Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. London - New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zuckermann, G. 2000. Camouflaged Borrowing: 'Folk-Etymological Nativization' in the Service of Puristic Language Engineering. D.Phil. Thesis, University of Oxford. LOCATIONS: HARVARD (USA): Widener Library: Harvard Depository HNFW3I; OXFORD (UK): Bodleian Library: Bookstack, MS. D.Phil. c.15877; CAMBRIDGE (UK): Churchill College Library: 492.424. Some examples from Hebrew: mazor: remedy; disease k.l.s.: praize; curse 11. Michael Johnstone's response: Thinking about 'leave/left' in English: According to the OED, 'leave' comes from Germanic *laibjan, the causative of *liban 'to remain'. So the earlier meaning would appear to be 'cause to remain'. I suppose on the one hand 'cause to remain' led to a newer sense 'go away from': John left his briefcase in the office = caused it to remain (intentionally or not) John left the office = went away from (temporarily or for good) While on the other hand, the past participle 'left' would logically mean 'caused to remain', which if the agent is not mentioned, comes to mean simply 'remaining': The briefcase was left by John = allowed to remain It was left = still there, remaining Did you leave any cake for us? (let it remain) Is there any cake left? (remaining) So 'go away', and 'remaining' both come from the sense 'cause to remain' - somebody leaves something, and that thing is left behind. Interestingly, *liban 'to remain' also led to Dutch 'blijven', High German 'bleiben', Low German 'blieven', all meaning 'to remain'. But when this verb was borrowed from Low German into Danish as 'blive', it came to mean not only 'remain' but also 'become', and it is used to form the passive: blive hjemme - stay at home blive siddende - stay sitting down vs. blive vred - become angry blive spist - get eaten I wonder if you've received any other examples of this semantic change? |
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| LL Issue: | 14.553 | |
| Date Posted: | 24-Feb-2003 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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