Originally meaning "lighthearted", "joyous" or "happy", the word has undergone a complete shift in meaning to now refer to a homosexual person. The word 'nice', which used to be negative a long time ago, now clearly has a positive meaning. "Such specialization is slow and need not be complete," notes linguist Tom McArthur. Amelioration is when a word's meaning changes from negative to positive over time. There are two types of semantics: logical and lexical. Semantic change can be caused by extralinguistic or linguistic causes. Levinson summarizes the distinctiveness of the vertical axis by stating that the intrinsic (canonical position of objects), the relative (perception from an upright stance) and the absolute (as defined by the gravitational axis) tend to coincide (Levinson, 2003, p. 75; see also Carlson-Radvansky and Irwin, 1993, p. 224 for the same observation). Position (standing vs. non-standing) (Movima). 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. Psychological factors can influence narrowing as they can occur when a language undergoes widespread changes. One example of semantic change would be the word 'hound'. Deixis, in The Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. Holton, G. (2000). In Sanzhi, the projection occurs not only within the local, peripersonal sphere, for example, items on a table in front of the speaker are located as UP when they are further away and DOWN when they are closer to the speaker (but always in front of the speaker). Out of six demonstrative forms (with anaphoric and deictic variants), only one (tatu) co-expresses the elevational meaning UP and the deictic meaning distal. So far, I encountered only two languages that are spoken in the Melanesia/West Papua area and have this type of semantic extension. Nowadays, the word 'lady' has kept its 13th-century meaning but it is also used to describe any woman. All languages expect for Tanacross and Maale employ elevational demonstratives in the adnominal context, and this is therefore the second most commonly attested type of usage. The peculiarity of the vertical axis has also been examined in psychology. See also: When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. In relation with that finding one possible direction for future research is to clarify whether the languages with elevational demonstratives, which were discussed in this paper, confirm the Topographic Correspondence Hypothesis. Languages have a plethora of linguistic means to express locations of objects along the vertical axis, e.g., A is above/over B, A is higher than B, A can be upward, uphill, up the road with respect to B. 101102). Makalero and Tidore do not have genuine elevational adverbial demonstratives, and the adverbial function is fulfilled by demonstrative verbs (5). A Grammar of Ma Manda a Papuan Language of Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. The Maale Language. Acta Linguist. Forker, D. (2019). Haiman, J. Typol. This touches upon a problem I encountered during this study. Cogn. In such a context, the anchor point can be the actual location of the speaker, or her/his home village can serve as conventionalized anchor point (similar to the conventionalized use of Sanzhi Dargwa demonstratives mentioned above). Which is an example of a potential psychological factor? The original meaning of the word was negative - it was a way to describe a person's actions as foolish, simple or ignorant. What is thus needed when describing elevational demonstratives is to test if they can also refer to the position A in Figure 2 (intrinsic frame), or relative to an anchor point that is distinct from the observer, e.g., to object A in Figure 3, or if such usages are always excluded. The adverbial use normally refers to the occurrence of elevational demonstratives in the function of spatial adverbs (3), (24). I did not come across any language that always distinguishes all four types formally. doi: 10.1017/9781108333818.018, Carlson-Radvansky, L. A., and Irwin, D. F. (1993). Second, a simple translation of a demonstrative as uphill is not a proof for its topographic meaning with an absolute frame of reference. Fig. A number of languages in my sample have not only elevational demonstratives but some more terms.19 Other semantic distinctions with which elevational demonstratives are combined or are in complementary distribution in languages with rich demonstrative systems are, Direction/movement: TOWARD vs. AWAY FROM20. No language has been reported so far to have demonstratives for the other two axes.2. This meaning partially survives today in expressions such as 'a dizzy blonde', for example. This can be taken as another way of the default co-expression of elevation with further distance as opposed to proximity or middle distance. Elevational demonstratives that are characterized as topographic in grammars can be used at the local scale such as within a house or close by a house or, with respect to a tree. And what is more relevant for the topic of this paper, the vertical axis is the only of the three axes that is encoded by demonstratives. 2 - An example of semantic broadening is 'Jazz.'. These contexts are (i) pronominal use, (ii) adnominal use (i.e., as determiner), (iii) spatial and manner adverbial use, and (iv) identificational use in copula and non-verbal clauses. doi: 10.1016/0749-596x(92)90006-j. Lexical semantics is the analysis of word meaning. Many of the languages have been identified through the works by Diessel (1999); Post (2011, 2017); Sarvasy (2014), and Breunesse (2019). Set individual study goals and earn points reaching them. R. J. Hayward (London: SOAS), 210355. (1980). Dr. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks. doi: 10.3758/bf03205000. This exemplification of English prepositions, adjectives and adverbs is far from being exhaustive. Psychol. Charachidz, G. (1981). On the horizontal plane, the genuinely vertical dimension can, in principle, be translated into FURTHER/NEARER (or FRONT/BACK) along the sagittal axis (Bender and Beller, 2014). Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms. Broadening is when a word's meaning changes to become more generalised. Zurich: ASAS. Types of Semantic Change-Extension of meaning-Narrowing of meaning-Elevation of meaning-Degradation of meaning 5. Hyslop, C. (1993). Haspelmath, M. (1997). It was originally used to mean any dog, however, over time this word came to mean a hunting dog specifically. Demonstratives in Dawuro. (2020, August 28). van den Berg, R. (1989/2013). For this paper I surveyed elevational demonstratives in 50 languages from 20 language families plus one isolate. 9193). As stated in the introduction, I focus on adnominal, spatial adverbial, and pronominal elevational demonstratives. Identify your study strength and weaknesses. A Grammar of Galo. A Grammar of Central Alaskan Yupik: An Eskimo Language. H. I. Aronson (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press), 7993. 240, 263, 271). Below are two examples of semantic broadening: The word, 'business' originally was only used to refer to being busy. Am. Bril further writes that it is generally improper to address others by name. Psychological factors are factors that affect how people view a word and its meaning. (2011). Terms such as 'sick' or 'wicked' now also have positive connotations. In order to prove that an elevational demonstrative really makes use of an absolute frame of reference one has to explicate the coordinate system that serves as the observer-independent anchoring point in a similar way as cardinal directions. Another fruitful direction of research are various experimental approaches. Imai, S. (2003). For instance, the elevationals of Galo are translated as given in (16) (Post, 2007, pp. The last context (iv) has several subtypes (presentative, identifier, localizer, and copular demonstratives, see Killian, unpublished for the full typology, explanations and examples). Utrecht: LOT. 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). Create beautiful notes faster than ever before. The meaning of a word doesn't just change in an instant, it can take many years. Amelioration: I'm having a lovely time - today is a nice day! ThoughtCo, Aug. 27, 2020, thoughtco.com/semantic-narrowing-specialization-1692083. It is important to remember that the nature of semantic change is a gradual process. However, for this paper the answer to that question is largely irrelevant, because I am only interested in the combined forms, i.e., the co-occurrence of demonstratives and elevational morphemes. Topography in language: absolute frame of reference and the topographic correspondence hypothesis, in Language Structure and Environment: Social, Cultural, and Natural Factors, eds R. De Busser and R. J. LaPolla (Amsterdam: Benjamins), 177226. Semantic change is a process where a word is given a new meaning. (ii) The local larger, but delimited environment, e.g., a village, a valley, or an island; locations within this area can be visible or not. "Semantic Narrowing (Specialization)." The hypothesis has been supported by data from atoll-based languages (Palmer, 2015; Palmer et al., 2017), and two languages spoken in the Hindu Kush mountain range (Heegrd and Liljegren, 2018). To put it simply, pejoration is the opposite of amelioration. Ngiyambaa. Based on the descriptions it is not always possible to distinguish between the subtypes (ii) and (iii) because not all grammars explicitly state whether the elevational morpheme also occurs in some other parts of speech (e.g., as preverb or spatial case affix). In order words, the word can be used in more contexts than it could originally. Elevation and spatial orientation in Alaska, in Paper Presented at the 52th Annual Meeting of the SLE, Leipzig. A Grammar of Tauya. Today 'pretty' refers to someone or something that is beautiful. These values can be ordered along the elevational hierarchy that reflects cross-linguistic frequency of occurrence (23): Elevational demonstratives with the meanings UP and DOWN are more commonly found than those with the meanings LEVEL or ACROSS (Table 7). Palmer, B., Lum, J. T. S., Schlossberg, J., and Gaby, A. R. (2017). In Old English, the word dizzy meant what? Other examples of specialization are deer, which originally had the general meaning 'animal,' girl, which meant originally 'a young person,' and meat, whose original meaning was 'food.'" (Sol Steinmetz, Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meanings. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/semantic-narrowing-specialization-1692083. Some examples of amelioration are words such as 'nice', 'pretty' and 'lady'. 'Lord' comes from the Old English word 'hlafweard' which meant 'the keeper of the bread, the head of the household', or as we would call it today, the breadwinner. Amelioration is ____ common than pejoration. 'Sick' derives from the Old English word 'seoc' and from the Proto-Germanic word 'seuka' which meant 'ill, diseased, feeble, weak; corrupt; sad, troubled, deeply affected'. Have you seen my grandmother? In Usan and Eipo, elevational demonstratives can be used as modifiers within a noun phrase (i.e., adnominal use), but not in the syntactic function of determiners. Definition. 21, 457491. Berlin: de Gruyter. Berlin: de Gruyter. The metaphor can be explained by the direction of the biological growing process of upright human beings in the course of time. 39, 51; Diessel, 2012, p. 2,421). The word "guy," eventually came to mean "a person of grotesque appearance." Over time, the word came to mean "a man or a boy." Demagogue - Originally meant "a popular leader". 69, 4670. Thank you for being so nice to my brother! Recalling that April 1564 is the date on which Shakespeare was born. The basic semantic values that elevational demonstratives encode can be ordered along a hierarchy (UP/DOWN > LEVEL/ACROSS) that reflects cross-linguistic tendencies in the frequency of the respective elevational values. These areas are the New Guinea Highlands, the Himalayas, the Ethiopian Highlands and the Eastern Caucasus. Meng, C. (2018). Doctoral dissertation, James Cook University, Cairns. There are languages in which all distance-based deictics can be combined with all elevationals. Structures and Their Functions in Usan: A Papuan Language of Papua New Guinea. (2018). Hatam has even two terms for UP (nyo sloping up, hu vertically up), but only one for DOWN (mu) (Reesink, 1999, pp. These features include personification, simile, imagery, metaphor, and allusion. How many types of semantic changes are there? 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. An example of this is how the meaning of words changed following the Industrial Revolution e.g. Casad, E. H. (1984). A Reference Grammar of Southeastern Tepehuan. (2015). A Grammar of Bantawa. Finally, I have argued that with respect to elevational demonstratives genealogical affiliation is more predictive than areal location. . This means that FURTHER is equated with UP and NEARER with DOWN. Deixis and demonstratives, in An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, Vol. Bender and Beller (2014, p. 348) provide useful graphic representations of the basic types and further subtypes. Elevation and the relative frame of reference. Sign up to highlight and take notes. 15 Articles, This article is part of the Research Topic, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01712/full#supplementary-material, Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), Department of Caucasus Studies, Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena, Jena, Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. There are factors within these causes that will also impact semantic changes. This is an example of amelioration. Or it can be derivational suffixes for the formation of demonstrative pronouns, adverbs or verbs as in Yupno and Makalero, and Khasi adverbial demonstratives. Visibility has attracted some attention (Diessel, 1999, pp. With respect to the topic of this paper the category of deixis comes into play because the items examined are either categorized as demonstratives themselves or as parts (bound roots, affixes, or clitics) of demonstratives. The elevational morphemes that obligatorily or optionally co-occur with demonstrative morphemes are bound roots, affixes or clitics. Kewapi (Enga-Kewa-Huli, Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea) has a rich set of 13 demonstratives of which nine co-express elevational meanings, and relative distance and at the same time additional distance from the speaker (away from the speaker) (Table 10; Yarapea, 2006, pp. Typol. doi: 10.1075/sl.27.1.04dix. So far, I did not find any language with both LEVEL and ACROSS elevational demonstratives, so these two values seem to exclude each other (although semantically ACROSS can be considered a sub-category of LEVEL). Amha, A. 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 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. 110112; Boroditsky, 2001). As you can see with our examples of amelioration, some words in the English language have adapted to the changing times and to certain sociocultural situations. Random House, 2008) Hound and Indigenous If languages have elevationals and person-based deictics, these meanings are more commonly separately expressed as, for instance, in Muna, Daga (Table 9) or Sanzhi Dargwa. Yonder/away (Ngiyambaa, Buru, Tanacross, Koyukon, and Movima). (2020, August 27). For example, in Andi (Table 5), only the distal demonstrative roots can attach elevational suffixes. Dallas, TX: SIL. 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. Table 3. Knowing that elephants and giraffes are both mammals. the man up there. Reesink, G. P. (2000). The Phonology and Morphology of the Tanacross Athabaskan Language. It is important to keep in mind, however, that these verbal metaphors are not necessarily indications or proofs that speakers of those languages have a vertical mental time line. Sign up to highlight and take notes. Two examples are logical and lexical semantics. Linguist Andreas Blank breaks down this factor into three main subcategories. Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia, M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester, B.A., English, State University of New York. (2001). Note that another adjective - 'terribly' - that derives from the same source as 'terrific', has also been ameliorated with time. Gravelle, G. (2010). Only in the latter case the meaning would truly entail an absolute frame. These include narrowing, broadening, amelioration, and pejoration. Let's look at two examples of semantic narrowing: The word 'hound', traditionally was used to refer to any type of dog. Yu adds that in Western cultures family trees are arranged in a similar fashion: the oldest (earliest) generations are placed on the treetop and the last generation on the bottom. The structure of adnominal and pronominal demonstratives in Andi (Verhees, 2019). (2008). They are narrowing, broadening, amelioration, pejoration, and semantic reclamation. If a word's original meaning is unclear, it is given new meaning. doi: 10.1017/upo9788175968875.011, Post, M. W. (2017). Sci. Berlin: Language Science Press. Many slang terms, such as 'sick', have undergone the process of amelioration over the years. night downward). Directional systems in Athapaskan and Na-Dene, in Athapaskan Linguistics: Current Perspectives on a Language Family, eds E. Cook and K. D. Rice (Berlin: de Gruyter), 575622. They can have very local meanings, which means that they can be applied, for instance, to refer to positions close to the speaker, inside a room or in the immediate environment (7), (8) but they are also used to denote locations in the geophysical environment (9). This is because when used as slang, they gain a new, positive, meaning and are associated with the word, 'cool'. 349350). This language has two cognate sets of basic adverbial elevational roots, which are classified in the grammar as topographic. The first set, which in the grammar is called /u/-forms based on their stem vowel, is given in the lower part of Table 11. Pennington, R. (2016). Pejoration is when a word's meaning changes from positive to negative. The publication of this article was supported by the Thringer Universitts- und Landesbibliothek Jena. Ma Manda (FinisterreHuon), has a three-level contrast in elevation (DOWN/UP/LEVEL), in contrast to Tulil, which has only terms for UP and DOWN, co-expressed with distance such that we arrive at six items (Pennington, 2016, pp. In the Himalayas, only Sino-Tibetan languages have elevationals. The same applies to many other animals and plants with an upright position (e.g., trees).17. Paris: Farvard. 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. You might be surprised to know that there are many words that we use on a daily basis that have been ameliorated. 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. Rabel, L. (1961). However, as a modern slang term, the word has been elevated and has taken on the positive meaning of 'great': Think of other slang words that have gone through a similar process like 'wicked', for example. The word 'pretty' is an example of amelioration. Second, the descriptions lack a solid proof of the absolute frame of reference as opposed to the relative or intrinsic frame. Here are some more amelioration examples: terrific and sick. Amelioration is less common than its opposite - pejoration. MacDonald, G. E. (1976). What are two examples of extralinguistic factors? (2019). It is the process in which a word's meaning becomes more generalised over time. This means that the word went the semantic change (more specifically narrowing). Tulil (Taulil-Butam) has three morphologically complex demonstrative stems with elevational meaning that can be used for temporal expression (Meng, 2018, pp. Spatial deixis in Iaai (Loyalty islands), in Deixis and Demonstratives in Oceanic Languages, ed. The opposite process is called broadening or semantic generalization. Amelioration (word meanings). Percept. The term 'semantic change' refers to how the meaning of words changes over time. Doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam. 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. Directional are used instead, e.g., hey! 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! Figure 1. Heeschen, V. (1998). (ii) Topographic elevational demonstrative systems: The location is determined with respect to the geophysical environment. Demonstrative verbs: a typology of verbal manner deixis. The description of object B as over the head entails a relative (to an external upright observer) or absolute frame of reference as determined by gravity.3 We make use of an intrinsic frame of reference when we refer to object A, which is located at the same elevation of the head of the person and aligned with it along the same horizontal axis, as over the head. However, like semantic narrowing, this process often occurs over the course of many years. . I first lay out the conceptional and notional background for verticality and its relation to deixis, and describe morphological, syntactic and semantic properties of elevational demonstratives. Spatial coordinate systems in demonstrative meaning. 31, 7498. Table 10. The meaning of the word changed, referring to someone's way of thinking instead. Perhaps surprisingly, it does not seem to be common to employ elevational demonstratives for the expression of social deixis, at least not in the languages surveyed for this study. In these expressions, the demonstratives most likely refer to the path of the sun with its apparent rising and setting. "Amelioration (word meanings)." The demonstratives also express temporal meanings similar to Tulil, i.e., UP = FUTURE and DOWN = PAST, and the items with the LEVEL-meaning do not cover temporal functions. All 38 remaining languages are spoken in mountainous locations mostly between 1,000 and 3,000 m (see Supplementary Appendix Table A12 for more details). Time and space in Tzeltal: is the future uphill? By registering you get free access to our website and app (available on desktop AND mobile) which will help you to super-charge your learning process. The classification introduced at the beginning of this section makes a distinction between (a) and (b) subtypes, whereby the (a) subtypes refer to elevational morphemes that only combine with demonstrative morphemes, whereas the (b) subtypes of elevational morphemes also occur outside the demonstrative systems.

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