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Narrowing and extension of meaning. Transfer of meaning






When passingfrom general usage into some special sphere of communication, a word usually undergoes some sort of specialization of its meaning. (The reverse is also true, but not so frequent.) Consider the word case, which alongside of a general meaning possesses special meanings in law, medicine and grammar. This difference of meaning reveals itself in different contexts the word gets into (= differences in distribution), and also in different valency, or combining power. As a result, we ascribe a different semantic structureto the word, depending on its distribution or semantic paradigm.

Consider the word play as used by: a child; a playwright; a football player; a musician; and a chess player. It would clearly have different semantic paradigms in their speech, although a certain general notion (approximately that of " enjoyment") is preserved. Note also the difference in the meaning of Careful, this car is hot! as used: by its owner to a companion invited for a ride (on a very sunny day); by a proud owner of a Ferrari to an inexperienced friend; by a road patrolman to his partner after consulting a list of stolen cars; and by a man armed with a radiation detector, in a place like Fukushima.

There seems to be a directly proportional connection between the frequency of a word usage and a number of notions it may be used to denote (sometimes this is referred to as " Zipf's law". Zipf's law states that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc.). The more often a word is used, the more objects it applies to, and therefore the vaguer its meaning becomes. (The most frequently used words are form words, almost devoid of denotational meaning.) On the other hand, if a word becomes specialized, it names fewer objects and therefore has fewer referents. At the same time, the corresponding concept is being enriched; it includes an ever greater number of relevant features. The word now applies to fewer things but tells us more about them.

The process described above is known as " narrowing of meaning", which is slightly misleading, as it is not the meaning but the applicability of the word that is narrowed or restricted. We should, therefore, speak of " restriction" or " specialization" of meaning, or of " differentiation" of meaning if relations with other words are implied.

History of English is rich in examples of restriction of meaning. Thus OE mete meant food in general – the present meaning is only one kind of food (probably the most important). Note that the old meaning is preserved in sweetmeat. OE fuʒ ol (cf. German Vogel) and OE hund (cf. German Hund) were likewise generic words but became specialized in meaning as new generic words, bird and dog, also of OE origin, came into use. In other cases the older word was forced into a specialized use by a borrowing. This was the fate of OE tacen (cf. Germ. Zeichen) meaning " sign". The present-day generic word is of Latin origin, while token survives in a number of idioms (e.g. as a token of goodwill) and in specialized use (lexical token).

The process reverse to specialization is called generalization, or widening of meaning. This means a word is gradually applied to a wider field of objects, whereas the underlying concept becomes more abstract. In fact, most abstract words appeared in that way. Prom the point of view of semantics, the process may be described as loss of less significant components of meaning. Thus ready originally meant " prepared for the ride", while fly implied moving through the air with wings but now may be used for almost any kind of quick movement. In the case of generic terms like person or thing, the grammatical categorial meaning became dominant in the semantic structure of the word, while all the other components gradually weakened or disappeared altogether.

Narrowing and extension of meaning are by far not the only types of semantic change. More typically, they are supplemented by various kinds of semantic transfer, often based on various associations. Thus, by extension, a word comes to be used for an object similar to, or connected with, the object originally denoted. Small children are particularly fond of associative use of the language, coining their own words for anything they see – thus a fur coat becomes a pussy, and a globe-shaped lampshade, a melon.

The major types of semantic transfer are well-known to linguists, ever since they were described by Ancient Greek rhetoric – the science studying the art of expressive speech (and, by extension, expressive writing). The most common transfers are those based on similarity (the metaphor) and contiguity, or connection (the metonymy). The names of these and other tropes, or figures of speech, are traditional, and therefore should be known to any self-respecting student of philology.

A metaphor is a meaning transfer based on an association of similarity, or likeness, and is therefore a hidden comparison. A thing is therefore referred to as if it were something perfectly different – but the thing meant and the thing referred to must have at least one point in common, as when the trousers of a specific cut are referred to as bananas (the similarity is in shape). Many words that originated as metaphors are no longer felt as such: thus we say foot (of a mountain), leg (of a table), etc. On the other hand, new metaphors are being created by authors; hence the difference between trite or dead, and poetic metaphors.

Unlike a metaphor, metonymy is based on an objectively existing connection between a thing named and a thing implied. The name of a thing may then imply the material the thing is made of (as book is indirectly related to bark because it was the first writing material used), the place (as cash is indirectly related to case – the container where it was kept), the symbol (as crown for monarchy), etc.

Other tropes described in rhetoric (hyperbole, litotes, irony) are less productive as methods of semantic transfer, since they usually depend on a wider context. They can, however, be used in forming expressive words and phrases, with a weakened denotative meaning. A hyperbolic aspect, for example, is clearly felt in emotive words like splendid! marvellous!, etc., used as exclamations, and understatemen t is considered to be a typically British way of putting things, especially in male colloquial speech, so a humble " not so bad" may actually bе a term of high praise.

 






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