Upload unlimited documents and save them online. It is thus possible to suggest some generalizations concerning the areal distribution of elevational demonstratives. Semantic universals and linguistic relativism. With time, this meaning changed once again, to 'attractive, skillfully made' until it shifted to 'fine'. "Such specialization is slow and need not be complete," notes linguist Tom McArthur. Figure 1. G. Senft (Canberra: Pacific Linguistics), 99128. I tentatively conclude that languages spoken in similar topographic environments do not tend to have similar systems of elevational demonstratives if they belong to different language families. This additional semantic component is either not expressed by a separate morpheme and then part of the basic demonstrative stem, or it is expressed by a separate morpheme. Definition. Position (standing vs. non-standing) (Movima). Hayward, R. J. Earn points, unlock badges and level up while studying. 4151; Dixon, 2003, pp. Semantic change can be caused by extralinguistic or linguistic causes. The original meaning of the word was negative - it was a way to describe a person's actions as foolish, simple or ignorant. In this paper I study semantic and pragmatic properties of elevational demonstratives by means of a typological investigation of 50 languages with elevational demonstratives from all across the globe. The examined languages come from all around the world. Or it can be derivational suffixes for the formation of demonstrative pronouns, adverbs or verbs as in Yupno and Makalero, and Khasi adverbial demonstratives. Language families and subbranches in which elevational demonstratives are attested for many languages are East Caucasian languages, Eskimo-Aleut languages, Sino-Tibetan (in particular Bodic languages, Kiranti languages, Macro-Tani), Timor-Alor-Pantar languages, Nuclear Trans New Guinea, and Omotic languages. Second, in two of the major mountain areas with elevationals, the elevationals are restricted to only one or two families. The word has been ameliorated over time and nowadays we use 'nice' in a positive sense - meaning someone or something that is good and pleasant. Deixis and demonstratives, in An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, Vol. Doctoral dissertation, La Trobe University, Melbourne. Sociocultural factors can influence narrowing as a major shift in a country's politics or social landscape will lead to semantic changes. Elevation refers to the expression of a location of a figure with respect to the ground on the vertical axis. Leiden: Brill. What is semantic change and how is it caused? Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms - Definition and Examples. A good example of a semantic shift is the word 'gay'. Doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam. Its 100% free. An example of Semantic Widening Guy - Guido (Guy) Fawkes was the leader of the plot to blow up the English Houses of Parliament. Second, elevational demonstratives only rarely refer to geomorphic landmarks and they do not make use of an absolute frame of reference comparable to cardinal directions. The second subset, which contains the intensifier d-, expresses additional distance or contrast. For instance, as (25) shows, in Galo we have UP = north, DOWN = south, and LEVEL = east or west. In the context of this sentence, the word 'sick' means 'corrupt, troubled'. Int. In order words, the word can be used in more contexts than it could originally. The inheritance, change and loss of topographical deixis in Trans-Himalayan languages, in Paper Presented at the 12th Biennial Conference of the Association for Linguistics Typology (Canberra: Australian National University). (1982). These changes occur for either extralinguistic or linguistic reasons. Random House, 2008) Hound and Indigenous Murane, E. (1974). Yarapea, A. M. (2006). It is now used to refer to hunting dogs, such as bloodhounds or beagles. Post, M. W. (2007). "The word silly is a classic example of pejoration, or gradual worsening of meaning. This means that different social or ethnic groups may experience semantic change differently for different words. Widening/Extension => range of meanings of a word increases so that the word can be used in more contexts than were appropriate before the change -dog =>1) specific powerful breed of dog => all breeds or races of dog LEXICAL SEMANTICS: Examples: 1. . doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(93)90011-j. The expression of elevation in demonstratives of the Omotic-Lowland East Cushitic contact zone, in Paper Presented at the 52th Annual Meeting of the SLE, Leipzig. In many other languages there are some restrictions. *Correspondence: Diana Forker, diana.forker@uni-jena.de, Demonstratives, Deictic Pointing and the Conceptualization of Space, View all
A Reference Grammar of Southeastern Tepehuan. (1980). Here are some more amelioration examples: terrific and sick. Think of the word 'nice' as an example of amelioration. In linguistics, amelioration is the upgrading or elevation of a word's meaning, as when a word with a negative sense develops a positive one. The metaphor TIME AS SPACE across languages. The Fore Language of Papua New Guinea. "The original meaning was followed by a succession of narrower ones, including 'spiritually blessed . (2018). Moreover, Ma Manda speakers gesture upward and downward in accordance with the meaning of the demonstratives when they refer to future and past, respectively. By contrast, in Dyirbal they can also be added to verbs to form verbs of motion (Dixon, 1972, pp. For example, the original meaning of ambassador was . Consider these two examples that reveal the two different meanings we associate the word 'lady' with: Of course she only drinks champagne and wears silk - she is a proper lady! In addition, it seems that there are systems that cannot be categorized as truly belonging to the one or to the other type, or should be analyzed as combining both types. The roots of the word 'lord' are in Old English. Psychol. Trask in Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics, "some of . What are two examples of extralinguistic factors? Sentence (34) is the only example that she cites for this use and it shows the elevational UP-directional da up (without a preceding pronoun, deictic or anaphoric suffix). I finally examine areal tendencies and potential correlations between elevational demonstratives and the geographical location of speech communities in mountainous areas such as the Himalayas, the Papuan Highlands and the Caucasus. By the mid-fifteenth century, the adjective 'pretty' was used to describe something or someone 'beautiful in a slight way, good looking' which is the meaning we still have for 'pretty' now. "Amelioration (word meanings)." (1997). These features include personification, simile, imagery, metaphor, and allusion. The publication of this article was supported by the Thringer Universitts- und Landesbibliothek Jena. Yale does not formally distinguish between adnominal and adverbial elevational demonstratives (and the author of the grammar does not explicitly mention a pronominal or identificational use). The term, 'cool', was popular within the language of jazz musicians, as it referred to a specific style of music ('cool jazz')! Set individual study goals and earn points reaching them. Schapper, A. Linguist. Casad, E. H. (1984). 3, ed. Bender and Beller (2014, p. 348) provide useful graphic representations of the basic types and further subtypes. Berlin: de Gruyter. HUA: A Papuan Language of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea. Identify your study strength and weaknesses. Daga (Papuan), for instance, has a particularly rich system with 14 demonstratives, of which two are merely person-based, eight co-express three distance-based meanings (CLOSE, DISTAL, and FAR DISTAL) with the elevational values UP, DOWN, and LEVEL, and four more encode only elevational meanings (Table 9). Dixon, R. M. W. (1972). Semantic Narrowing (Specialization). doi: 10.1017/upo9788175968875.011. (2004). This is a clear indication that the speaker cannot be the deictic center that serves as the point of anchoring for the location of the woman. 94, 187). The word 'terrific' comes from the Latin word 'terrificus' which meant 'causing terror or fear, frightful'. Which elevational expresses which compass direction depends on the local position of the mountains that serve as anchor points and thus varies from language to language. Note that in the following example the elevational morpheme is actually an adverbial demonstrative with originally spatial function (due to the locative prefix n-> n-p-bo up there), but it has been translated with a temporal meaning. But by the year 1400, with language developing from Old English to Middle English, the word 'pretty' had taken on a new meaning which was 'manly, gallant'. The same applies to other animals that move with legs the head is normally in front and turned into the direction of movement. Semantic broadening is the antonym of semantic narrowing, as the process that takes place is the opposite. From Space to Time: Temporal Adverbials in the Worlds Languages. My sample is a convenience sample because elevational demonstratives are not particularly frequent in the worlds languages. They are part of paradigms or subparadigms that consist of three (Andi) to five (Makalero, Manambu, and Buru) items on average, but more than seven members are not exceptional (Daga). It is the process in which the word's meaning changes from negative to positive over time. They are narrowing, broadening, amelioration, pejoration, and semantic reclamation. 287295). Broadening is the opposite. This is an example of amelioration. Lang. A Grammar of Central Alaskan Yupik: An Eskimo Language. Distance, direction, and relevance: how to choose and use a demonstrative in Manambu. This means that in terms of cardinal directions and gravity (i.e., location above sea level) uphill and upstream differ (Gary Holton, p.c.). There are three major types of semantic change. The other American languages in my sample that have elevational demonstratives are spoken in rather flat areas (Movima in the Bolivian plains, Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Den languages in Alaska and Greenland). (2015). Narrowing can also be referred to as semantic specialisation or semantic restriction. Fig. The structure of Yakkha demonstratives,/u/-forms (Schackow, 2015, pp. Demonstratives in the Blagar of Dolap, in Papers in Papuan Linguistics, ed. Verhees, S. (2019). Cogn. However, in none of the languages in my sample I encountered examples illustrating an elevational demonstrative used with an intrinsic frame of reference (i.e., DEM.UP A). Linguist. This finding is particularly interesting in view of the widely-debated use of Mandarin Chinese spatial terms up for past events and down for future events, which show the opposite metaphorical extension. I propose that this can be explained in the following way: in the proximal domain, fine grained semantic distinctions are superfluous since this area is accessible to the interlocutors who in the default case of a normal conversation are located in close proximity to each other [(see also Imai, 2003, p. 42) for a similar observation]. As stated in the introduction, I focus on adnominal, spatial adverbial, and pronominal elevational demonstratives. Nungon makes formal distinctions between the first three syntactic contexts (Sarvasy, 2014, pp. We have to distinguish at least three domains (which obviously form a continuum and therefore lack clear borders): (i) The local domain: the minimal local scale is the peripersonal sphere, but it extends to the area inside a house or its immediate surrounding; locations within this area are often visible. With respect to the languages of this paper, this claim is only partially confirmed. Cognition 124, 2535. doi: 10.1353/anl.2015.0003. True or false - broadening is only caused by linguistic factors. The term 'semantic change' refers to how the meaning of words changes over time. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12357, Coventry, K. R., Griffiths, D., and Hamilton, C. J. Table 9. 7, 101117. First, there are many mountainous areas in the world without languages that have elevational demonstratives (e.g., almost all languages spoken in the American Cordillera, the Alps, the Great Dividing Range in Australia, the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, the slopes of the Great Escarpment in Southern Africa, and many more). The topographic and elevational morphemes express also directional and locational meanings (e.g., allative). For example, in Shakespeare's time, actors were living in the low class of society and were looked down upon. In topographic systems the locations of the points A and B are projected on the ground and the positions of A and B determine the use of the appropriate demonstratives. What is the difference between narrowing and broadening? Doctoral dissertation, James Cook University, Cairns. You can find out more about our use, change your default settings, and withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future by visiting Cookies Settings, which can also be found in the footer of the site. I suspect that these claims are probably sometimes wrong or at least misleading because, first, the authors do not provide unambiguous evidence that the relevant items refer on the basis of the geophysical environment and not simply to the vertical dimension. Spatial deixis in Muna (Sulawesi), in Studies in Austronesian and Papuan Languages, ed. Languages belonging to this type are Sanzhi Dargwa, Hua (Yagaria dialect), Central Alaskan Yupik, Kurtp (9), (22), and Galo (19). (2014). Stop procrastinating with our smart planner features. I had to rely on the often implicit assumptions of the linguists whose descriptions I consulted that the items classified as elevational demonstratives represent single lexical units. Grimes, C. E. (1991). Natural language changes tend to take longer than extralinguistic causes. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Difference Between "Quote" and "Quotation": What Is the Right Word? Changes in the referents (what is being referred to), Disguising language / misnomers (i.e. of the users don't pass the Amelioration quiz! For example, sometimes when discussing horse racing, the tracks are referred to as 'turf'. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.03.007. Yu, N. (1998). However, many languages do not have words referring to the sagittal (back/front) or transverse (left/right) axes or do not employ them regularly and in the same fashion as familiar European languages (Levinson, 2003, p. 46). H. I. Aronson (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press), 7993. etc can lead to the semantic change. The identificational context of use has been and/or is also called predicative use (e.g., in the first typological paper on this topic written by Killian, unpublished.). Literally means "using formal methods for the study of meaning." 2.Semantic change, also known as semantic shift or semantic progression) that describes the . This led to the word's meaning to die of hunger. The meaning words may be extended to show a connection between two similar things. Holton, G. (2019). 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. The Language of the Wangaaybuwan. The Manambu Language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea. Breunesse, M. (2019). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Demonstratives in Space and Discourse: A Synchronic and Diachronic Analysis. The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01712/full#supplementary-material. Thus, items such as tunna or tukha are morphologically complex, consisting of a morpheme with elevational meaning, followed by a morpheme with (originally) proximal demonstrative meaning.14. Bril further writes that it is generally improper to address others by name.
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