English Historical Semantics Vocabulary

Flashcards with key vocabulary and definitions from lecture notes on English Historical Semantics.

Semantics

The study of meaning

Lexical Semantics

The study of word meaning, and within that, on historical factors

Etymology

The study of the origins of words

Sociolinguistics

The study of language use among different groups in society

Discourse Analysis and Text Linguistics

The study of linguistic relationships within texts

Pragmatics

The study of language in everyday interaction

Semasiology

Concerned with the meaning or meanings attached to individual word forms

Onomasiology

Concerned first with meaning, and then with the form or forms used to express that meaning

Synchronic

Research focuses on language at a particular point of time, or, more accurately, proceeds as if time is not a factor in the study.

Diachronic

Study considers a longer period and takes full account of the passage and effects of time

Old English

450 AD - 1066 AD

Middle English

1066 AD - 1500 AD

Early Modern English

1500 AD - 1800 AD

Late Modern English

1800 AD - present day

Core vocabulary

Words for basic concepts that we still use in daily communication

Derivation

Through the use of affixes

Compounding

Two (or occasionally more) independent words are joined to express a complex idea

Kennings

Metaphorical compounds

Normans

‘people from the north’

Denotative meaning

Its basic core meaning or denotation, generally agreed by speakers of a language and that appear in dictionaries

Connotative meanings

Meanings vary more from speaker to speaker, and occur in particular contexts.

Syntagmatic relationships

Relationships are formed by items which can occur together in a grammatical structure and are often referred to as collocations.

Paradigmatic relationships

Relationships, by contrast, are formed by items which can occur in the same position in a grammatical structure, sometimes changing the meaning, sometimes not.

Monosemy

When a word form has only one sense

Polysemy

The condition that occurs when a single form has more than one sense

Hyponymy or inclusion

Identifies hierarchies of meaning

Superordinate or hyperonym

The most general term in the group

Co-hyponyms

Terms which occur at the same level in the hierarchy are co-hyponyms of one another

Meronymy

The relationship between wholes and parts

True antonyms or binary antonyms or complementary terms

Describe an either/or situation

Converse terms or conversives

Denotes a reciprocal relationship

Graded antonyms or polar terms

Refer to positions on some kind of scale

Feature or Componential Analysis (CA)

Breaking down the meaning of individual words into components – units of meaning smaller than a word

Lexical sets

Words can be organised into larger groups called lexical sets

Lexical or semantic fields

Sets build up into bigger units known as lexical or semantic fields, covering much larger areas of meaning

Polysemy

Meanings can be traced back to a single source

Homonymy

Two words share the same form, but go back to quite different roots

Homography

Applies to words which are spelled the same but pronounced differently

Homophony

Ambiguous in spoken language, where words are pronounced the same but spelled differently

Essential properties of objects

The features which define an object and allow it to be assigned uncontroversially to a particular class

Necessary conditions

The set of criteria used to define members of a category

Sufficient conditions

The set of criteria deduced from these which defines the category itself

Prototype

Prototype is the standard against which potential members of the category are measured

Stereotype

A list of defining features can be abstracted from the prototype

Prototype split

When a new meaning develops, the original prototype might disappear, or gradually shift towards the new meaning, or it might continue to exist alongside the new meaning.

Lexical prototypes

The word itself is seen as a category and each distinct meaning of that word is said to have a prototype

Semantic domains

We arrive at meanings by drawing on whatever relevant information we have

Schema

Is essentially an abstract model of the configuration of a domain

Frame

For the body of knowledge needed to process a particular situation

Script

Draws on the knowledge in the frame to indicate everything associated with a particular occasion

OED

Generally recognised as the most important of all English historical dictionaries

Philological Society

Started a project to compile a dictionary, called A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles

Headword

The word at the top of each entry

Grammaticalisation

A word loses some of its semantic content and becomes part of the grammatical system

Widening or broadening or generalisation

The tendency in semantic change referred to as widening, broadening or generalisation occurs when the meaning of a word becomes more general

Narrowing or specialisation

The opposite tendency to broadening is narrowing, also called specialisation

Amelioration or elevation and pejoration or degeneration

Occur when a sense of a word becomes more or less positive over time as changes in its connotations become conventionalised and part of its denotative meaning

Metonymy

Also involves a mapping between two concepts, but the source and target have a different kind of relationship, which is based on association rather than similarity

Thesaurus

The best- known of these for English, from a Greek word meaning a ‘storehouse’ or ‘treasury’

Basic Level Category

Identifies the level people find most useful in dealing with the world around them

Folk Taxonomies

Grounded in the perceptions and priorities of ordinary language users, how important things are to them, and how things function in their world.

Expert Taxonomies

Devised by people with specialised knowledge and expertise

Linguistic Determinism

Asserts that language imposes categories on the world

Linguistic Relativity

Claim that languages classify experience in different ways

Metaphor

A linguistic device, a ‘figure of speech’, which is something special and different from ‘normal’ language.

Metonymy

mapping from source to target