semantic elevation examples

Doctoral dissertation, James Cook University, Cairns. 240, 263, 271). However, at the scale of the main modern settlement, which is located in the lowland coastal area close to the Caspian Sea with virtually no differences in height, there is an upper part of the village located closer to the hills and a lower part located closer to the sea coast. For this paper I surveyed elevational demonstratives in 50 languages from 20 language families plus one isolate. Create the most beautiful study materials using our templates. Z. Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 8, 226239. Plaisier, H. (2007). Identify your study strength and weaknesses. Grimes, C. E. (1991). Or it can be derivational suffixes for the formation of demonstrative pronouns, adverbs or verbs as in Yupno and Makalero, and Khasi adverbial demonstratives. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.03.007. There are a number of languages such as Baskeet, Yupno, Makalero (Table 3), and Khasi, which obligatorily require further morphology to be added to the elevational demonstrative. Semantics is/refers to the study of the meaning of words, Semantic change is the term given to how the meanings of words can change over time. Many of the languages have been identified through the works by Diessel (1999); Post (2011, 2017); Sarvasy (2014), and Breunesse (2019). 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. The demonstrative system of Makalero (Huber, 2011, p. 232). Amelioration (word meanings). Topographical deixis and the Tani languages, in North East Indian Linguistics, Vol. Zhirkov, L. I. This can include a word becoming taboo, or being linked with a taboo within the culture. Stop procrastinating with our smart planner features. What are the major types of semantic change? 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. Doornenbal, M. (2009). Lakskij Jazyk: Fonetika I Morfologija [The Lak Language: Phonetics and Morphology]. With time, the negative meaning of the word weakened, and it changed from 'frightful' to 'severe'. Acta Linguist. Trask in Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics, "some of . The Buru Language of Eastern Indonesia. How many major types of semantic change are there? There are a few languages in my sample that have specialized motion verbs referring to upward or downward movement, but the elevational markers that those verbs contain are historically unrelated to the elevational demonstratives (Galo, Sanzhi Dargwa, Yupno, and Bantawa). There are three major types of semantic change. A Grammar of Movima. The word 'terrific' comes from the Latin word _________. It is the process in which the word's meaning changes from negative to positive over time. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 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. Elevational values are frequently co-expressed with distance-based meanings of demonstratives, and it is almost always distal demonstratives that express elevation, whereas medial or proximal demonstratives can lack elevational distinctions. Heegrd, J., and Liljegren, H. (2018). Another important finding of this study concerns the metaphorical extension of spatial elevational demonstrative meanings to the domain of time: the future is metaphorically located higher than the deictic center, and the past below. The opposite process is called broadening or semantic generalization. Have all your study materials in one place. What are some examples of semantic change? Create the most beautiful study materials using our templates. 177186). Narrowing is when the meaning of a word becomes more specialised whereas broadening happens when a word's meaning changes to be more generalised. 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. G. P. Reesink (Canberra: Australian National University), 181275. There are also some traditional examples of "elevation" in which even this readjustment cannot be traced: Marshal: manservant attending horses the highest rank in the army Lord: master of the house, head of the family baronet (aristocratic title) Lady: mistress of the house, married woman wife or daughter of baronet Commonly distinguished categories of deixis are person, place, time, discourse, and social deixis (Diessel, 2012, p. 2414), and demonstratives usually express place deixis/spatial deixis (Diessel, 1999, p. 36). There are a few languages in which elevational demonstratives with the meaning UP express the temporal meaning future, whereas the DOWN demonstratives encode past. Demonstrative verbs: a typology of verbal manner deixis. van Staden, M. (2018). In practice, locations above the speaker and above the addressee during a conversation largely coincide. 3, eds G. Hyslop, S. Morey, and M. W. Post (Delhi: Foundation Books), 137154. Leer, J. Yonder/away (Ngiyambaa, Buru, Tanacross, Koyukon, and Movima). Semantics Examples A classic example of this specialization of meaning is the word doctor. Deixis, in The Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. In Yakkha, the unmarked forms function as adverbials (12), and the adnominal forms are derived (15). There are two types of landmarks outside and generally further away from the speaker that naturally expand along the vertical dimension, namely topographical contour (i.e., mountains including hills or large rocks) and hydrological contour (i.e., rivers and creeks).10 The vertical dimension of rivers might not be obvious at first glance. In languages such as Manambu, Sougb, or Nlmwa-Nixumwak, in which the morphemes with the elevational semantics can be readily identified and are sometimes also used with lexical items other than demonstratives (e.g., verbs), the elevationals resemble English non-deictic expressions such as up. Blagar, in Papuan Languages of Timor-Alor-Pantar: Sketch Grammars, Vol. Bril further writes that it is generally improper to address others by name. In the above sentence, the word 'attitude', which used to simply refer to a person's position and state of mind, is now associated with negative behaviour. 94, 187). This means that FURTHER is equated with UP and NEARER with DOWN. 11:1712. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01712. Formerly the word meant learned men in theology, law, and in many other fields besides medicine, but nowadays it is applied only to the practitioner of the healing art, whether having a University degree or not. 23, 59106. In the Himalayas, only Sino-Tibetan languages have elevationals. Such systems have been called environmental space deixis (Bickel, 1997), spatial coordinate systems (Burenhult, 2008) or topographical deixis (Post, 2011). From a logical point of view there is no reason to exclude such usages, but their actual existence has yet to be proven by future research.4. 6. salary The division of the areas within a house are even used within modern houses that do not always face the water. It is now used to refer to hunting dogs, such as bloodhounds or beagles. In Makalero and Baskeet, the relation is UP = east and DOWN = west, (and Baskeet has additionally over there = north/south). See Examples and Observations below. When functioning as demonstrative determiners, they can be employed with nouns such as vnu(=a) day, atade(=e) week, vgam(=e) month, or lalng(=a) year, whereby demonstratives can precede or follow the noun (27). However, over the centuries the meaning narrowed until it was only used when discussing dogs used when hunting (such as beagles and bloodhounds). If we break the term 'extralinguistic' down we can see that it refers to factors that are 'extra' so exist outside the language itself. The five major kinds of semantic change are: narrowing, broadening, amelioration, pejoration, and semantic reclamation. This study therefore goes beyond general cross-linguistic studies of demonstratives, which devote only a few sentences to demonstratives with elevational meaning. Create beautiful notes faster than ever before. Daga grammar: From Morpheme to Discourse. 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. Pejoration is a term used to describe the process where a word that once had a positive meaning acquires a negative one. How can you kill bunnies just for fun ?! Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, Meiosis, Hyperbole, Degeneration, Elevation. Narrowing can also be referred to as semantic specialisation or semantic restriction. In Sougb the equation is the opposite, namely UP = west and DOWN = east (26). For example, the verb 'to starve' originally meant 'to die'; however, it was frequently used in sentences about hunger. Lerne mit deinen Freunden und bleibe auf dem richtigen Kurs mit deinen persnlichen Lernstatistiken. Berlin: de Gruyter. See Examples and Observations below. She adds that there are other conventionalized usages that cannot be explained in terms of verticality or social deixis (e.g., Papua, which is located to the southeast of the island of Tidore, is referred to as UP because of sea currents and historical trading routes). The first two demonstratives are formed by reduplication and the third one by compounding: m down, downhill, downstream > pm down distal, back > (near/far) past., bo up, uphill, upstream > pbo front, up near > (near/far) future., mu far from speaker and hearer + m down > mum down distal > far past/future.. 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). If the combination is tight such that the items are synchronically monomorphemic, this leads to the deceptive impression that the elevational component is also deictic. The role of demonstratives in spatial cognition has been mainly investigated with respect to peripersonal space and distance as well as pointing, and the vast majority of controlled, experimental studies that I am familiar with examine languages with small demonstrative systems (English, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, Turkish, etc.). One example of semantic change would be the word 'hound . Second, a simple translation of a demonstrative as uphill is not a proof for its topographic meaning with an absolute frame of reference. Diessel, H. (2005). By contrast, in a relative frame of reference there is a ternary relation because in addition to the figure and the ground (relatum or ground object) there is an anchoring point (=the origin of the coordinate system). In the following, I will provide examples from the four languages and discuss this type of spatial metaphor. Clark, H. H. (1973). . Hayward, R. J. Elevation and the relative frame of reference. Internal and external spatial frameworks for representing described scenes. If elevationals were deictic by themselves, they would be ego-centered or only allow for shifting the deictic center to another speech act participant. The first type (general) corresponds to Burenhults verticality proper and global elevation, and the second term (topographic) to his geophysical elevation. General elevationals are used in accordance with the gravitational axis. Linguist. In particular, it is not sufficient if the demonstrative only occurs in example sentences that refer to people, animals, and other relatively big objects such as trees or houses and their location in the outside geophysical environment. 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. For example, in Makalero (Alor-Pantar, East Timor) nominal and verbal demonstratives are derived from the same bound roots by means of the nominalizer -r- and the verbalizer (glottal stop; Table 3). doi: 10.1075/sl.27.1.04dix. Semantic broadening is the name given to the process where a word's meaning becomes more general over time. Elevational meanings have repeatedly been grouped together with grammatical items that refer to salient landmarks (e.g., seawards/landwards, upriver/downriver). 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). Elevation: e.g., knight "boy" "nobleman". 349350). There are many other open questions left for future studies of elevational demonstratives. They are used at the local scale (17), the larger local scale (18) and the global scale (26). Fig. I encountered only very few cases of elevational demonstratives that combine with person-based deictic systems and therefore express person-based elevational meanings, e.g., Manambu (24) (Table 8). The term, 'cool', was popular within the language of jazz musicians, as it referred to a specific style of music ('cool jazz')! HUA: A Papuan Language of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea. The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01712/full#supplementary-material. But several descriptions explicitly mention that the anchor point serving as the ground (=deictic center) for elevational demonstratives can easily shift, e.g., in a story it shifts to a protagonist or to another salient inanimate anchor point [Tulil as analyzed by Meng (2018) and Ma Manda as examined in Pennington (2016)].12. Huber, J. Table 4. 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. Bril (2004, p. 120) provides another example from Nlmwa-Nixumwak (Oceanic), where so-called directionals, which are regularly added to deictic or anaphoric suffixes, which, in turn, are added to pronouns or determiners to form demonstratives, can be used for respectful reference to people of a higher social status. Furthermore, as illustrated by means of Figures 2, 3 and in the discussion of the preceding section, when studying elevational morphemes it is necessary to examine whether they allow not only for the absolute frame of reference but if intrinsic and relative interpretations are also available. Table 1 shows the demonstrative system of Muna (Malayo-Polynesian, Sulawesi). Lang. The meaning of the word changed, referring to someone's way of thinking instead. Murane, E. (1974). Towards a descriptive framework for spatial deixis, in Speech, Place, and Action, eds R. J. Jarvella and W. Klein (Chichester: John Wiley), 3159. Radden, G. (2003). Amelioration occurs for different _______________ reasons. Charachidz, G. (1981). True or False: Amelioration is more common than pejoration. The meaning of a word may also become taboo or is used as a euphemism, eg. Levinson (2018, pp. Paris: Farvard. What is the term given to the opposite of narrowing? 1 - An example of semantic narrowing is 'hound.'. As said in the introduction, elevation refers to the expression of a location of a figure with respect to the ground on the vertical axis.1 The three axes and planes through the human body provide the ground for three pairs of (linguistic) concepts, namely UP/DOWN, BACK/FRONT, and LEFT/RIGHT (Figure 1). Cogn. However, here are a few more interesting examples that show the change of the English language over time! History and Background What Research Suggests Doctoral dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra. Amelioration elevates a word's meaning over time. Leiden: Brill. INWARD vs. OUTWARD (or INTERIOR vs. This general elevation and availability is called spreading activation. Berlin: Language Science Press. In Buru (Malayo-Polynesia, Moluccas of Indonesia) topographic elevationals express three elevational values (UP, DOWN, and ACROSS) and general elevational morphemes only two (UP and DOWN) (Table 6). In this sentence, 'nice' indicates that the person is having a good day. I, ed. Types of Semantic Change-Extension of meaning-Narrowing of meaning-Elevation of meaning-Degradation of meaning 5. Masters thesis, University of Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby. Create flashcards in notes completely automatically. Table 1. There are clear areal hotspots in which there is a particular dense concentration of languages with elevational demonstratives. However, by Middle English, the main meaning of the word 'dizzy' had become 'to suffer from vertigo' which is the meaning we associate with the word nowadays. The term semantics (from the Greek word for sign) was coined by French linguist Michel Bral (1832-1915), who is commonly regarded as a founder of modern semantics. Even among the few languages which clearly have topographic elevationals, there are three languages not spoken in the mountains, but in lower hills (Dyirbal), on a flat island (Iaai) and in a flat area of Alaska (Tanacross). Therefore, human beings are faster at retrieving the names of objects located along the vertical axis than along the other two axes (Bryant et al., 1992). Among the languages examined in this paper, Movima is particularly rich in demonstratives with unusual meanings such as temporary possession or standing position (Haude, 2006, pp. Among the languages with a three-way distance contrast (88 languages in Diessel, 2013), around one third are so-called person-oriented or person-based systems. Stud. Ameliorate is pronounced like this: uh-mee-lee-uh-rayt. Narrowing is a process where a word's meaning changes to become more specific. 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. In Old English, the word dizzy meant what? Blagar, Galo (26) and all East Caucasian languages in my sample (Avar, Lak, Andi, and Sanzhi Dargwa) have not only spatial elevational demonstratives, but also a further class of elevational demonstratives that function as manner adverbs, e.g., Blagar do-la (up.there-as) like that/those up there (not necessarily visible) (Steinhauer, 2014, p. 159). What is semantic change and how is it caused? The demonstrative system of Tanacross (Holton, 2019). For example, the word "fowl is now usually restricted to the farmyard hen, but it retains its old meaning of 'bird' in expressions like the fowls of the air and wild fowl" (Oxford Companion to the English Language, 1992). Typol. 30, 37) suggests that in some languages invisibility might in fact better be analyzed as indirect evidentiality or simply audibility. It may also be referred to as semantic amelioration or semantic elevation. Let me show you an example to make this a little more concrete. 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. Be perfectly prepared on time with an individual plan. 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. EXAMPLES: Elephants are not animals. I will discuss the interaction of deixis with elevation in the Section The vertical dimension and its relation to deixis after having described in more detail elevational meanings. In early Middle English (around 1200), sely (as the word was then spelled) meant 'happy, blissful, blessed, fortunate,' as it did in Old English. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/amelioration-word-meanings-1689082. _____________ isan important process in the development of language. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12357, Coventry, K. R., Griffiths, D., and Hamilton, C. J. Literally means "using formal methods for the study of meaning." 2.Semantic change, also known as semantic shift or semantic progression) that describes the . 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. Doctoral dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra. I have proposed that the metaphor can be explained by the direction of the biological growing process of humans, many animals and plants. According to Schackow (2015, p. 187), the /u/-forms combine with the proximal demonstrative (singular na, non-singular kha), but not with the distal or anaphoric demonstratives (Table 11). As stated in the introduction, I focus on adnominal, spatial adverbial, and pronominal elevational demonstratives. 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). Table 3. This means that within a house there are four directions/locations, namely upstream, downstream, inland, and across because traditionally houses have been built with the door toward the water (Holton, 2000, p. 298).

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semantic elevation examples