Semantic Change
Semantic change is the diachronic process by which the meaning of a word shifts over time, often to the point that its modern sense diverges sharply from its historical one. It is one of the central topics of historical semantics and a major source of mismatch between etymology and current usage.
Foundational Frameworks
The systematic study of semantic change begins with Michel Bréal's Essai de Sémantique (1897), which named sémantique as a discipline and introduced terms still in use, including restriction (narrowing) and extension (widening). Leonard Bloomfield's Language (1933) consolidated the four-way classification that remains the most widely taught typology in English-language linguistics: narrowing, widening, pejoration, and amelioration. Stephen Ullmann (1962) refined the picture by separating the nature of a change (metaphor, metonymy, ellipsis, folk etymology) from its consequences (the four Bloomfieldian outcomes). Andreas Blank (1999) and Elizabeth Traugott have since proposed cognitive and pragmatic refinements grounded in invited inference and subjectification.
Major Types
| Type | Direction | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Broadening | specific → general | Old English brid "young bird" → modern bird (any bird) |
| Narrowing | general → specific | Old English mete "any food" → modern meat (animal flesh) |
| Pejoration | neutral → negative | Middle English vilein "farmworker" → modern villain |
| Amelioration | neutral → positive | Old English cniht "boy, servant" → modern knight |
| Metaphor | similarity-based | mouse (rodent → input device, c. 1965) |
| Metonymy | contiguity-based | crown (headpiece → monarchy) |
Metaphor and metonymy are the two principal mechanisms through which most changes proceed; broadening, narrowing, pejoration, and amelioration describe the outcomes.
Mechanisms
Metaphorical extension transfers a word from one conceptual domain to another on the basis of perceived similarity. Crane (the bird) gave its name to the lifting machine because of the long-necked profile. The computer mouse is named after the small, tailed object it resembles. Metaphor is especially productive in technical vocabulary, where new referents need labels (web, cloud, stream, virus, file, window).
Metonymic transfer moves a word along a relation of contiguity: container for content (the kettle is boiling), instrument for product (a fine hand), part for whole (hired hands). Many institutional senses are metonymic: the White House, Downing Street, the bench.
Ellipsis and clipping drop part of a phrase: daily (paper), general (officer), (motor) car. Folk etymology reshapes an opaque form into a transparent one: crayfish from Old French crevisse, reanalysed as cray- + fish.
Causes
Semantic change is driven by several pressures operating together. Referential change alters the meaning when the world changes: paper once meant only papyrus; to dial a phone survives the disappearance of the dial. Sociocultural prestige and taboo push words up or down the register scale (the euphemism treadmill cycles toilet → bathroom → restroom). Pragmatic inference routinises an implicature into a conventional meaning (Traugott's invited inferencing); since shifted from temporal to causal because temporal sequence often implies causation. Contact-induced change imports senses from other languages, particularly through calquing.
Examples in Detail
- Awful, c. 1300 "inspiring awe" → 1809 "very bad" → c. 1830 generic intensifier (pejoration).
- Terrific, 1660s "causing terror" → 1888 "excellent" (amelioration).
- Gay, 13th c. "lighthearted, bright" → 1951 "homosexual" (specialisation plus connotational shift).
- Mouse, Old English mūs "small rodent" → 1965 "computer pointing device" (metaphor).
- Decimate, originally "kill one in ten" (Roman military punishment) → modern "destroy a large proportion of" (broadening).
Teaching Relevance
For learners, semantic change explains why dictionary glosses and corpus evidence sometimes diverge from older texts and idioms. Make ends meet, bite the bullet, hoist by his own petard preserve historical senses no longer transparent in present-day English. Recognising metaphor and metonymy as ordinary processes also demystifies polysemous high-frequency words: run a race, run a company, run the water, run a fever are not random homonyms but motivated extensions from a single core sense.
A linked pedagogical point concerns prescriptive disputes. The "etymological fallacy" insists that earlier meanings are more correct (decimate must mean "ten percent"; literally must exclude figurative use). Diachronic semantics shows this position to be untenable: meaning is determined by current usage in a speech community, not by historical priority.
References
- Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. Henry Holt.
- Bréal, M. (1897). Essai de sémantique: Science des significations. Hachette.
- Traugott, E. C. & Dasher, R. B. (2002). Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge University Press.
- Ullmann, S. (1962). Semantics: An introduction to the science of meaning. Blackwell.