Semantic change

Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift) is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage. In diachronic (or historical) linguistics, semantic change is a change in one of the meanings of a word. Every word has a variety of senses and connotations, which can be added, removed, or altered over time, often to the extent that cognates across space and time have very different meanings. The study of semantic change can be seen as part of etymology, onomasiology, semasiology, and semantics.

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So let’s talk about meat. You might think you’ve got a pretty good handle on what “meat” means. Right? It’s the fleshy bits of animals, that you eat. Good old reliable meat. Except, maybe not so reliable, because it hasn’t always meant that! There used to be a time where “meat” simply was our word for food. And that’s just one of the many words existing today that's shifted around in meaning through history. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space. Language is a thing that’s just changing all the time. Like we saw in our video on the History of English, change can affect any part of language! We can change the sounds we have, like pronouncing the word knight the way we do now instead of the way we did 500 years ago, like [kniçt]. We can change the way that our sentences get put together, like how many dialects of English have lost the double negation that Old English had. Back a thousand years in English, something like “Shelley didn’t never back down from a challenge” was okay everywhere. Now that construction only exists in a limited number of dialects. But one of the most noticeable ways that change can hit a language is right in the vocabulary. New words are invented or borrowed from other languages, and old words fall out of use. Languages can do more than that, though! Even when you have a word already, it’s not a static object. A lot of the time, words get shifted around to mean new things. You only need to look around you to come up with a lot of examples. Your mouse isn’t a rodent. Your shirt is probably not a tunic. And your chair is not a throne. Unless it is. Not judging. This is all neat, but it seems kind of random, right? As it happens, there are actually some big trends to how meanings can change over time. You do get a bit of random wiggle in the meaning, but a lot of the kinds of changes that we see are systematic. As a category, we call these different processes semantic shift. For example, one really common kind of change is Narrowing. That's when a word’s meaning goes from something general to something more specific. Like meat! Meat’s a lot more specific now than it used to be. Some other really neat examples exist in this category, too. Like, girl used to refer to any young child, regardless of their gender. It was only in the 1500s that it became specifically used just for, well, girls. Or, “deer” was just a general term for animals, up until Shakespeare’s time. Of course, semantic shift happens in all languages, not just in English. For example, if we look at Spanish, we can find the word for “pray”, “rezar”. That used to just mean to say something aloud, like the English “recite”. This got narrowed in meaning to just apply to praying. The opposite of Narrowing is Broadening, which also happens a lot. This is when a word's meaning becomes more general. So, like, a holiday used to literally mean a holy day, like a religious event of some sort. Now it’s used for any kind of day off, or even for a trip or vacation. If you say that you’re going on holiday to Wales to visit your friend Tim, no one's going to think you’re going on a religious pilgrimage. Or, if you’ve studied Japanese, you might know that the word “sake” is used both for the rice wine we call sake in English, and also for alcohol in general. This is because a really long time ago, Japan only had one kind of alcoholic drink, which they fermented from rice and called sake. But later, when beer and wine and whiskey and all the rest made their way to Japan? They needed a label for all of that, and used “sake” as an extension. So that’s another example of Broadening. Additionally, a word can pick up more meanings by being used as a metaphor. That’s where you get something like “grasp”, a verb that originally just meant to physically hold on to something. But look at something like “Desmond finally grasped the essentials of reading and writing”. No one is going to think that sentence means that he picked up a book and a pen. Through metaphorical usage, “grasp” has come to also mean “understand”. Another type of semantic change is when a word gets a meaning that's more positive than it was originally. “Nice” is a good example. If you tell me that Eustace is “nice”, you probably mean that The Boy is agreeable and pleasant. But dial it back a few centuries, and you'd be telling me that he’s foolish, which might not actually be wrong, but it's probably not what you meant. “Nice” passed through all kinds of meanings to get to the one we have today, but overall, the direction was from negative to positive. This linguistic process is called Amelioration, and as you might imagine, it also happens in other languages too. In German today, “Pumpernickel” is a kind of coarse whole-grain brown bread. It’s sold around the world, so you might have heard of it. But before it was a sandwich favourite, it used to refer to an uncouth and unrefined person: “Pumper” was a word for fart, and “Nickel” short for Nicholas, so “Farting Nick”. The bread, which was once considered fairly unrefined itself, got slapped with this term, because only a boorish fellow would like it. The shift only became full amelioration when those brown loaves gained in popularity. Okay, but, the opposite also happens! Sometimes a perfectly nice or neutral word takes on a more negative meaning. So, let’s say your friend Tim invents a time-traveling teapot. If you want to tell him how silly that is, make sure you haven’t already traveled back to the Middle Ages first, because back then “silly” meant “blessed” and “prosperous”, and you wouldn't want Tim to get the wrong idea. When a word’s meaning gets more negative over time, that’s called Pejoration. We get another toxic from French, where the word “poison” used to mean “potion.” It used to be something good for you! And then it referred to any deadly beverage, and then to an ingredient you slip into something to make it a little more lethal. And we got our word “poison” from there! Okay, so, but what if your meaning isn’t becoming more or less good, or more or less general? What if it’s just changing? Well, another pretty common pattern is when a word with a really intense meaning becomes less extreme over time because of Weakening. Now, this happens all the time! Just think about all the words that you have to say how good something is. You can tell people that your favourite flavour of jam is awesome, amazing, fantastic, incredible, fabulous, stupendous, spectacular! Hyperbole like that is really common across languages. But one thing it does is cause the weakening of the meaning of the original words. After all, does jam really fill you with a sense of awe? Or does it seem like something that's out of a fantasy or a fable? Probably not, unless you really really like jam. And one of our favourite words, LITERALLY, has undergone weakening from meaning, well, “LITERALLY” to meaning more like “figuratively”. Language! It’s awesome. So, does Weakening get its opposite too? I mean, we have broadening and narrowing, and we have amelioration and pejoration, so, is Strengthening a thing? Well… not really. You’ve probably used hyperbole a lot to exaggerate how much you like something. But did you ever really do the opposite? How often do you talk about a band that you love by saying they're “tolerable” or “okay”? Semantic change doesn’t just occur by itself. People fuel it by the ways that they have of talking. So, Strengthening doesn’t really exist. Finally, you sometimes end up with words just losing one meaning and taking on another, which tends to be related. This is usually just called Shift. So, “immoral” used to just mean that something wasn’t customary. Or that didn’t correspond to that community's regular way of doing things - so, outside of its mores. The word took on its sense of “unethical” only through our unfortunate tendency to equate “different” with “bad”. Language doesn’t have any rules about how many times a word can change meanings, either. Semantic shift can happen over and over again to the same word. Like, take “hearse”! So a hearse now is the kind of car that coffins get carted around in, like, to funerals. But originally, a hearse was a kind of farming tool, with a triangular shape. Later, it became a candle-holder used in churches, with the same triangular shape. Then the word was used for a candle-holder placed over coffins, specifically, and then just the coffin itself. Finally, it came to mean the vehicle used in coffin transport. So language changes all the time, as people keep using it generation after generation. And it’s not just the grammar that evolves - it’s the regular meat of the language, the words, that shift, too. So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you followed the shifts in my meaning, you learned words can change their senses over time; that this happens because of how people use language; and that meanings can get narrower or broader, better or worse, weaker, or just plain different. The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost, and it’s written by both of us. Our production assistants are Georges Coulombe and Stephan Hurtubise, our music and sound design is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our website, where we have some extra materials on this topic. Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding your own personal Ling Space, please subscribe. And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Tuonane tena!

Examples in English

Awful – Literally "full of awe", originally meant "inspiring wonder (or fear)", hence "impressive". In contemporary usage, the word means "extremely bad".
Awesome – Literally "awe-inducing", originally meant "inspiring wonder (or fear)", hence "impressive". In contemporary usage, the word means "extremely good".
Terrible – Originally meant "inspiring terror", shifted to indicate anything spectacular, then to something spectacularly bad.
Terrific – Originally meant "inspiring terror", shifted to indicate anything spectacular, then to something spectacularly good.^[1]
Nice – Originally meant "foolish, ignorant, frivolous, senseless". from Old French nice (12c.) meaning "careless, clumsy; weak; poor, needy; simple, stupid, silly, foolish", from Latin nescius ("ignorant or unaware"). Literally "not-knowing", from ne- "not" (from PIE root *ne- "not") + stem of scire "to know" (compare with science). "The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adj". [Weekley] -- from "timid, faint-hearted" (pre-1300); to "fussy, fastidious" (late 14c.); to "dainty, delicate" (c. 1400); to "precise, careful" (1500s, preserved in such terms as a nice distinction and nice and early); to "agreeable, delightful" (1769); to "kind, thoughtful" (1830).
Naïf or Naïve – Initially meant "natural, primitive, or native" . From French naïf, literally "native". The masculine form of the French word, but used in English without reference to gender. As a noun, "natural, artless, naive person", first attested 1893, from French, where Old French naif also meant "native inhabitant; simpleton, natural fool".
Demagogue – Originally meant "a popular leader". It is from the Greek dēmagōgós "leader of the people", from dēmos "people" + agōgós "leading, guiding". Now the word has strong connotations of a politician who panders to emotions and prejudice.
Egregious – Originally described something that was remarkably good (as in Theorema Egregium). The word is from the Latin egregius "illustrious, select", literally, "standing out from the flock", which is from ex—"out of" + greg—(grex) "flock". Now it means something that is remarkably bad or flagrant.
Gay – Originally meant (13th century) "lighthearted", "joyous" or (14th century) "bright and showy", it also came to mean "happy"; it acquired connotations of immorality as early as 1637, either sexual e.g., gay woman "prostitute", gay man "womaniser", gay house "brothel", or otherwise, e.g., gay dog "over-indulgent man" and gay deceiver "deceitful and lecherous". In the United States by 1897 the expression gay cat referred to a hobo, especially a younger hobo in the company of an older one; by 1935, it was used in prison slang for a homosexual boy; and by 1951, and clipped to gay, referred to homosexuals. George Chauncey, in his book Gay New York, would put this shift as early as the late 19th century among a certain "in crowd", knowledgeable of gay night-life. In the modern day, it is most often used to refer to homosexuals, at first among themselves and then in society at large, with a neutral connotation; or as a derogatory synonym for "silly", "dumb", or "boring".^[2]
Guy – Guy Fawkes was the alleged leader of a plot to blow up the English Houses of Parliament on 5 November 1605. The day was made a holiday, Guy Fawkes Day, commemorated by parading and burning a ragged manikin of Fawkes, known as a Guy. This led to the use of the word guy as a term for any "person of grotesque appearance" and then by the late 1800s—especially in the United States—for "any man", as in, e.g., "Some guy called for you". Over the 20th century, guy has replaced fellow in the U.S., and, under the influence of American popular culture, has been gradually replacing fellow, bloke, chap and other such words throughout the rest of the English-speaking world. In the plural, it can refer to a mixture of genders (e.g., "Come on, you guys!" could be directed to a group of mixed gender instead of only men).

Evolution of types

A number of classification schemes have been suggested for semantic change.

Recent overviews have been presented by Blank^[3] and Blank & Koch (1999). Semantic change has attracted academic discussions since ancient times, although the first major works emerged in the 19th century with Reisig (1839), Paul (1880), and Darmesteter (1887).^[4] Studies beyond the analysis of single words have been started with the word-field analyses of Trier (1931), who claimed that every semantic change of a word would also affect all other words in a lexical field.^[5] His approach was later refined by Coseriu (1964). Fritz (1974) introduced Generative semantics. More recent works including pragmatic and cognitive theories are those in Warren (1992), Dirk Geeraerts,^[6] Traugott (1990) and Blank (1997).

A chronological list of typologies is presented below. Today, the most currently used typologies are those by Bloomfield (1933) and Blank (1999).

Typology by Reisig (1839)

Reisig's ideas for a classification were published posthumously. He resorts to classical rhetorics and distinguishes between

Synecdoche: shifts between part and whole
Metonymy: shifts between cause and effect
Metaphor

Typology by Paul (1880)

Generalization: enlargement of single senses of a word's meaning
Specialization on a specific part of the contents: reduction of single senses of a word's meaning
Transfer on a notion linked to the based notion in a spatial, temporal, or causal way

Typology by Darmesteter (1887)

Metaphor
Metonymy
Narrowing of meaning
Widening of meaning

The last two are defined as change between whole and part, which would today be rendered as synecdoche.

Typology by Bréal (1899)

Restriction of sense: change from a general to a special meaning
Enlargement of sense: change from a special to a general meaning
Metaphor
"Thickening" of sense: change from an abstract to a concrete meaning

Typology by Stern (1931)

Substitution: Change related to the change of an object, of the knowledge referring to the object, of the attitude toward the object, e.g., artillery "engines of war used to throw missiles" → "mounted guns", atom "inseparable smallest physical-chemical element" → "physical-chemical element consisting of electrons", scholasticism "philosophical system of the Middle Ages" → "servile adherence to the methods and teaching of schools"
Analogy: Change triggered by the change of an associated word, e.g., fast adj. "fixed and rapid" ← fast adv. "fixedly, rapidly"
Shortening: e.g., periodical ← periodical paper
Nomination: "the intentional naming of a referent, new or old, with a name that has not previously been used for it" (Stern 1931: 282), e.g., lion "brave man" ← "lion"
Regular transfer: a subconscious Nomination
Permutation: non-intentional shift of one referent to another due to a reinterpretation of a situation, e.g., bead "prayer" → "pearl in a rosary")
Adequation: Change in the attitude of a concept; distinction from substitution is unclear.

This classification does not neatly distinguish between processes and forces/causes of semantic change.

Typology by Bloomfield (1933)

The most widely accepted scheme in the English-speaking academic world^{[according to whom?]} is from Bloomfield (1933):

Narrowing: Change from superordinate level to subordinate level. For example, skyline formerly referred to any horizon, but now in the US it has narrowed to a horizon decorated by skyscrapers.^[7]
Widening: There are many examples of specific brand names being used for the general product, such as with Kleenex.^[7] Such uses are known as generonyms: see genericization.
Metaphor: Change based on similarity of thing. For example, broadcast originally meant "to cast seeds out"; with the advent of radio and television, the word was extended to indicate the transmission of audio and video signals. Outside of agricultural circles, very few use broadcast in the earlier sense.^[7]
Metonymy: Change based on nearness in space or time, e.g., jaw "cheek" → "mandible".
Synecdoche: Change based on whole-part relation. The convention of using capital cities to represent countries or their governments is an example of this.
Hyperbole: Change from weaker to stronger meaning, e.g., kill "torment" → "slaughter"
Meiosis: Change from stronger to weaker meaning, e.g., astound "strike with thunder" → "surprise strongly".
Degeneration: e.g., knave "boy" → "servant" → "deceitful or despicable man"; awful "awe-inspiring" → "very bad".
Elevation: e.g., knight "boy" → "nobleman"; terrific "terrifying" → "astonishing" → "very good".

Typology by Ullmann (1957, 1962)

Ullmann distinguishes between nature and consequences of semantic change:

Nature of semantic change
- Metaphor: change based on a similarity of senses
- Metonymy: change based on a contiguity of senses
- Folk-etymology: change based on a similarity of names
- Ellipsis: change based on a contiguity of names
Consequences of semantic change
- Widening of meaning: rise of quantity
- Narrowing of meaning: loss of quantity
- Amelioration of meaning: rise of quality
- Pejoration of meaning: loss of quality

Typology by Blank (1999)

However, the categorization of Blank (1999) has gained increasing acceptance:^[8]

Metaphor: Change based on similarity between concepts, e.g., mouse "rodent" → "computer device".
Metonymy: Change based on contiguity between concepts, e.g., horn "animal horn" → "musical instrument".
Synecdoche: A type of metonymy involving a part to whole relationship, e.g. "hands" from "all hands on deck" → "bodies"
Specialization of meaning: Downward shift in a taxonomy, e.g., corn "grain" → "wheat" (UK), → "maize" (US).
Generalization of meaning: Upward shift in a taxonomy, e.g., hoover "Hoover vacuum cleaner" → "any type of vacuum cleaner".
Cohyponymic transfer: Horizontal shift in a taxonomy, e.g., the confusion of mouse and rat in some dialects.
Antiphrasis: Change based on a contrastive aspect of the concepts, e.g., perfect lady in the sense of "prostitute".
Auto-antonymy: Change of a word's sense and concept to the complementary opposite, e.g., bad in the slang sense of "good".
Auto-converse: Lexical expression of a relationship by the two extremes of the respective relationship, e.g., take in the dialectal use as "give".
Ellipsis: Semantic change based on the contiguity of names, e.g., car "cart" → "automobile", due to the invention of the (motor) car.
Folk-etymology: Semantic change based on the similarity of names, e.g., French contredanse, orig. English country dance.

Blank considered it problematic to include amelioration and pejoration of meaning (as in Ullman) as well as strengthening and weakening of meaning (as in Bloomfield). According to Blank, these are not objectively classifiable phenomena; moreover, Blank has argued that all of the examples listed under these headings can be grouped under other phenomena, rendering the categories redundant.

Forces triggering change

Blank^[9] has tried to create a complete list of motivations for semantic change. They can be summarized as:

Linguistic forces
Psychological forces
Sociocultural forces
Cultural/encyclopedic forces

This list has been revised and slightly enlarged by Grzega (2004):^[10]

Fuzziness (i.e., difficulties in classifying the referent or attributing the right word to the referent, thus mixing up designations)
Dominance of the prototype (i.e., fuzzy difference between superordinate and subordinate term due to the monopoly of the prototypical member of a category in the real world)
Social reasons (i.e., contact situation with "undemarcation" effects)
Institutional and non-institutional linguistic pre- and proscriptivism (i.e., legal and peer-group linguistic pre- and proscriptivism, aiming at "demarcation")
Flattery
Insult
Disguising language (i.e., "misnomers")
Taboo (i.e., taboo concepts)
Aesthetic-formal reasons (i.e., avoidance of words that are phonetically similar or identical to negatively associated words)
Communicative-formal reasons (i.e., abolition of the ambiguity of forms in context, keyword: "homonymic conflict and polysemic conflict")
Wordplay/punning
Excessive length of words
Morphological misinterpretation (keyword: "folk-etymology", creation of transparency by changes within a word)
Logical-formal reasons (keyword: "lexical regularization", creation of consociation)
Desire for plasticity (creation of a salient motivation of a name)
Anthropological salience of a concept (i.e., anthropologically given emotionality of a concept, "natural salience")
Culture-induced salience of a concept ("cultural importance")
Changes in the referents (i.e., changes in the world)
Worldview change (i.e., changes in the categorization of the world)
Prestige/fashion (based on the prestige of another language or variety, of certain word-formation patterns, or of certain semasiological centers of expansion)

The case of reappropriation

A specific case of semantic change is reappropriation, a cultural process by which a group reclaims words or artifacts that were previously used in a way disparaging of that group, for example like with the word queer. Other related processes include pejoration and amelioration.^[11]

Practical studies

Apart from many individual studies, etymological dictionaries are prominent reference books for finding out about semantic changes. A recent survey lists practical tools and online systems for investigating semantic change of words over time.^[12] WordEvolutionStudy is an academic platform that takes arbitrary words as input to generate summary views of their evolution based on Google Books ngram dataset and the Corpus of Historical American English.^[13]

Notes

^ "13 Words That Changed From Negative to Positive Meanings (or Vice Versa)". Mental Floss. July 9, 2015. Retrieved May 7, 2022.
^ Lalor, Therese (2007). "'That's So Gay': A Contemporary Use of Gay in Australian English". Australian Journal of Linguistics. 27 (200): 147–173. doi:10.1080/07268600701522764. hdl:1885/30763. S2CID 53710541.
^ Blank (1997:7–46)
^ in Ullmann (1957), and Ullmann (1962)
^ An example of this comes from Old English: meat (or rather mete) referred to all forms of solid food while flesh (flæsc) referred to animal tissue and food (foda) referred to animal fodder; meat was eventually restricted to flesh of animals, then flesh restricted to the tissue of humans and food was generalized to refer to all forms of solid food Jeffers & Lehiste (1979:130)
^ in Geeraerts (1983) and Geeraerts (1997)
^ ^a ^b ^c Jeffers & Lehiste (1979:129)
^ Grzega (2004) paraphrases these categories (except ellipses and folk etymology) as "similar-to" relation, "neighbor-of" relation, "part-of" relation, "kind-of" relation (for both specialization and generalization), "sibling-of" relation, and "contrast-to" relation (for antiphrasis, auto-antonymy, and auto-converse), respectively
^ in Blank (1997) and Blank (1999)
^ Compare Grzega (2004) and Grzega & Schöner (2007)
^ Anne Curzan (May 8, 2014). Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History. Cambridge University Press. pp. 146–148. ISBN 978-1-107-02075-7.
^ Adam Jatowt, Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin (2021). Computational Approaches to Lexical Semantic Change: Visualization Systems and Novel Applications. Language Science Press. pp. 311–340.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^ Adam Jatowt (2018). "Every Word has its History: Interactive Exploration and Visualization of Word Sense Evolution" (PDF). ACM Press. pp. 1988–1902.

References

Blank, Andreas (1997), Prinzipien des lexikalischen Bedeutungswandels am Beispiel der romanischen Sprachen (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 285), Tübingen: Niemeyer
Blank, Andreas (1999), "Why do new meanings occur? A cognitive typology of the motivations for lexical Semantic change", in Blank, Andreas; Koch, Peter (eds.), Historical Semantics and Cognition, Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 61–90
Blank, Andreas; Koch, Peter (1999), "Introduction: Historical Semantics and Cognition", in Blank, Andreas; Koch, Peter (eds.), Historical Semantics and Cognition, Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1–16
Bloomfield, Leonard (1933), Language, New York: Allen & Unwin
Bréal, Michel (1899), Essai de sémantique (2nd ed.), Paris: Hachette
Coseriu, Eugenio (1964), "Pour une sémantique diachronique structurale", Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature, 2: 139–186
Darmesteter, Arsène (1887), La vie des mots, Paris: Delagrave
Fritz, Gerd (1974), Bedeutungswandel im Deutschen, Tübingen: Niemeyer
Geeraerts, Dirk (1983), "Reclassifying Semantic change", Quaderni di Semantica, 4: 217–240
Geeraerts, Dirk (1997), Diachronic prototype Semantics: a contribution to historical lexicology, Oxford: Clarendon
Grzega, Joachim (2004), Bezeichnungswandel: Wie, Warum, Wozu? Ein Beitrag zur englischen und allgemeinen Onomasiologie, Heidelberg: Winter
Grzega, Joachim; Schöner, Marion (2007), English and general historical lexicology: materials for onomasiology seminars (PDF), Eichstätt: Universität
Jeffers, Robert J.; Lehiste, Ilse (1979), Principles and methods for historical linguistics, MIT press, ISBN 0-262-60011-0
Paul, Hermann (1880), Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, Tübingen: Niemeyer
Reisig, Karl (1839), "Semasiologie oder Bedeutungslehre", in Haase, Friedrich (ed.), Professor Karl Reisigs Vorlesungen über lateinische Sprachwissenschaft, Leipzig: Lehnhold
Stern, Gustaf (1931), Meaning and change of meaning with special reference to the English language, Göteborg: Elander
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (1990), "From less to more situated in language: the unidirectionality of Semantic change", in Adamson, Silvia; Law, Vivian A.; Vincent, Nigel; Wright, Susan (eds.), Papers from the Fifth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 496–517
Trier, Jost (1931), Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes (dissertation)
Ullmann, Stephen (1957), Principles of Semantics (2nd ed.), Oxford: Blackwell
Ullmann, Stephen (1962), Semantics: An introduction to the science of meaning, Oxford: Blackwell
Vanhove, Martine (2008), From Polysemy to Semantic change: Towards a Typology of Lexical Semantic Associations, Studies in Language Companion Series 106, Amsterdam, New York: Benjamins.
Warren, Beatrice (1992), Sense Developments: A contrastive study of the development of slang senses and novel standard senses in English, [Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis 80], Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2003), Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew Archived February 1, 2014, at the Wayback Machine. Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 1-4039-1723-X.

External links

Onomasiology Online (internet platform by Joachim Grzega, Alfred Bammesberger and Marion Schöner, including a list of etymological dictionaries)
Etymonline, Online Etymology Dictionary of the English language.
Exploring Word Evolution An online analysis tool for studying evolution of any input words based on Google Books n-gram dataset and the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA).

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Topics	Comparative Linguistics Synchrony and diachrony Protolanguage Language death Neogrammarians More...
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This page was last edited on 21 March 2024, at 08:22

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