Some cats eat wool. In the context of this sentence, the word 'sick' means 'corrupt, troubled'. The structure of Muna demonstratives (van den Berg, 1989/2013, p. 89). Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA. Psychological factors can influence narrowing as they can occur when a language undergoes widespread changes. Bender and Beller (2014, p. 348) provide useful graphic representations of the basic types and further subtypes. However, over the years, the meaning of this word broadened to refer to any type of work or job. "Semantic Narrowing (Specialization)." Today 'pretty' refers to someone or something that is beautiful. What are Intensifiers in English Grammar? Grimes (1991, p. 170) does not provide a precise definition for the term emic, but writes that the concept away from an emic center as it is expressed by the topographic demonstrative lawe in Buru indicates energy directed away from the actor. It is possible though not unambiguously clear from the description that this formulation can be translated into away from the speaker.. 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. As explained in the Section Materials and Methods, the sample is a convenience sample, but based on a rather systematic and comprehensive survey of all areas of the world and more than half of the language families (Killian, unpublished). Willett, T. L. (1991). Table 8. (2014). Stop procrastinating with our study reminders. Doctoral dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra. I, ed. There are three major types of semantic change. 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. A grammar sketch of Sougb, in Languages of the Eastern Birds Head, ed. Casad, E. H. (1984). Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms. 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. '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. 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. I also suggest that the same principle should apply to other semantic distinctions that demonstratives in some languages express such as visibility or audibility since such semantic categories are only relevant when the referent is not near to the speaker. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. Seaward/landward (Iaai, Tidore, Tanacross, and Koyukon). 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. van den Berg, R. (1997). *Correspondence: Diana Forker, diana.forker@uni-jena.de, Demonstratives, Deictic Pointing and the Conceptualization of Space, View all
J. H. Greenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 369400. Spatial deixis in Iaai (Loyalty islands), in Deixis and Demonstratives in Oceanic Languages, ed. doi: 10.3758/bf03205000. EXAMPLES: My oldest cousin is female. 39, 51; Diessel, 2012, p. 2,421). In Daga, there seems to exist a correlation such that FUTURE/PAST = UP because yampoa utu-pa (third up.there-out.of.sight) means next Wednesday and wataget utu-p (before up.there-out.of.sight) means long ago (Murane, 1974, pp. In practice, locations above the speaker and above the addressee during a conversation largely coincide. 57, 322), and thus Dyirbal belongs to the (b) subtype. In Iaai, the elevationals are in complementary distribution with other items that also convey compass points. 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. doi: 10.1017/9781108333818.017. The demonstrative system of Tanacross (Holton, 2019). Only topographic elevational systems make a straightforward reference to mountains or hills, but as I stated above, most languages have general elevational systems and genuine topographic systems are rare. Earn points, unlock badges and level up while studying. Cora, in Studies in Uto-Aztecan Grammar 4: Southern Uto-Aztecan Grammatical Sketches, ed. Hafniensia 50, 129160. 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 Only when the referent is potentially visible (i.e., within the minimal local and larger local domain) the relevant items encode elevational and riverine meanings. A Grammar of Movima. Nie wieder prokastinieren mit unseren Lernerinnerungen. What is the term given to the opposite of narrowing? Above I explained that gravity is the natural source for the direction of elevationals and thus for the determination of what counts as UP and what as DOWN independently of an observer or an intrinsic orientation of the ground. . Typol. Huber, J. 11:1712. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01712. Doctoral dissertation, La Trobe University, Melbourne. Bachelors thesis, Australian National University, Canberra. Reesink, G. P. (2000). I do not have an explanation for the third demonstrative and the grammar provides only one example (27), in which its meaning seems to correspond to the meaning of the first and is thus in accordance with the DOWN = BACK = PAST schema. Will you pass the quiz? Place naming strategies in lower Tanana Dene, in Language and Toponymy in Alaska and Beyond: Papers in Honor of James Kari, eds G. Holton and T. F. Thornton (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press), 121138. Let me show you an example to make this a little more concrete. (2011). Linguist. If we consider the entire greater Hindu Kush Himalayan Region, we have to add some more Indo-Aryan languages. This type of semantic change usually occurs due to extralinguistic causes. the term 'pass away' can be used to describe someone dying. I did not find any other types of landmarks defining topographic elevational demonstratives. Nordquist, Richard. Mandarin and English speakers conceptions of time. The only language I found so far that contradicts this otherwise robust cross-linguistic tendency is Yakkha. Its 100% free. What is the difference between amelioration and semantic reclamation? The sense of the word 'terrific' that we still use now - meaning 'excellent' - began to be used later in the 19th century. This is an example of amelioration. The languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea, but in different areas of the country, and they belong to two different language families. Semantic broadening is the name given to the process where a word's meaning becomes more general over time. MacDonald, G. E. (1976). 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. This is sometimes referred to as semantic generalisation. Heegrd, J., and Liljegren, H. (2018). Spatial demonstratives and perceptual space: describing and remembering object location. 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. In this language, uphill location is at the same time away from the river, and upriver (upstream) is along the river and thus orthogonal to uphill. From a word used to describe something that causes fear, terribly is now an alternative for 'very': The case of the word 'sick' is a more recent example of amelioration. Woldemariam, H. (2001). How can you kill bunnies just for fun ?! G. Senft (Canberra: Pacific Linguistics), 127137. Many slang terms, such as 'sick', have undergone the process of amelioration over the years. Many of the languages have been identified through the works by Diessel (1999); Post (2011, 2017); Sarvasy (2014), and Breunesse (2019). In the future, this line of research should be extended to languages with rich demonstrative systems such as the languages discussed in this paper. 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. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Psychol. Because of this (usual) unambiguity of locations along the vertical axis, the anchor point of an observer can shift without difficulty (we will see below what repercussions this has for elevational demonstratives). Doctoral dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra. Table 7. Linguist. Frames of reference in vision and language: where is above? 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. For example, in Manambu (Ndu, Sepik, Papua New Guinea), three person-based deictic stems take gender, number and the current relevance suffix, followed by the topographic and general elevational morphemes (Table 8). Typol. Schubert, T. W. (2005). In their demonstrative systems, languages repeatedly combine elevation with distance. 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. Fig. How does the environment shape spatial language? _____________ isan important process in the development of language. When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. Around the year 1100, 'knight' came to mean 'military follower of a king or other superior.'. Semantically, elevational demonstratives are deictic expressions that also convey elevational or verticality distinctions. Another important factor to keep in mind when investigating the meaning of elevational demonstratives is scale or domain of use. 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). It is important to remember when discussing this form of semantic change that, unlike amelioration, the word may still also be used in the pejorative sense. Is control really UP? Pejoration involves the process of degenerating meaning over time so that a word takes on more negative connotations. The more specific value ACROSS (8 languages) occurs only around half as often as LEVEL (19 languages). The meaning words may be extended to show a connection between two similar things. Anthropol. We will cover five types of semantic change: narrowing, broadening, amelioration, pejoration, and semantic reclamation. 2461). A Grammar of Hatam: Birds Head Peninsula Irian Jaya. Front. 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). This means that elevational demonstratives largely refer to areas outside the peripersonal sphere in a similar way as simple distal demonstratives. Table 4. Gurin, V. (2015). The word 'pretty' comes from West Saxon ('prttig'), Kentish ('pretti'), and Mercian ('prettig'). If elevationals were deictic by themselves, they would be ego-centered or only allow for shifting the deictic center to another speech act participant. Another fruitful direction of research are various experimental approaches. 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). Create flashcards in notes completely automatically. 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. Spatial reference in weightlessness: perceptual factors and mental representations. 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). The first two equations are also found in Bantawa. Elevation and spatial orientation in Alaska, in Paper Presented at the 52th Annual Meeting of the SLE, Leipzig. 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. It's interesting to imagine and guess what words that we associate with something negative today would be ameliorated with time. A Grammar of Aguaruna. The vertical axis is special in comparison to the other two axes of the body (frontal and sagittal) (Figure 1) for one major reason: gravity normally determines what counts as up and down. The projection can be explained by the fact that due to their upright position human beings have to move the head downward in order to look at proximal items whereas the gaze goes upward in order to look at distal items (see Bickel (1997 and references therein). Linguistic causes of semantic change are factors that occur within the system of the language spoken. 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). For example, demonstratives in the Athabaskan language Tanacross (Alaska) morphologically and semantically combine deictic meaning (distality) with specific topographic and elevational morphemes. From this, we can see that amelioration is a process that can take centuries to occur. In the following, I will provide examples from the four languages and discuss this type of spatial metaphor. Nowadays, the word 'lady' has kept its 13th-century meaning but it is also used to describe any woman. The first example comes from Tidore (North Halmahera), in which the elevational with the meaning UP is used to refer to locations and movements in the direction of the sultans palace even though the palace is located rather low.18 van Staden (2018) calls this usage royal up and shows that in certain cases it includes de facto downward movement. Cognition 46, 223244. Amelioration is ____ common than pejoration. Sci. How many types of semantic changes are there? Broadening can be caused by both extralinguistic and linguistic causes, such as a change in worldview, or linguistic analogy. The opposite process is called broadening or semantic generalization. When semantic reclamation occurs the word does not lose its pejorative meaning. However, like semantic narrowing, this process often occurs over the course of many years. 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. 188189). 3, eds C. Maienborn, K. von Heusinger, and P. Portner (Berlin: de Gruyter), 24072431. 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). 'Pretty' used to have the negative meaning of someone or something that was cunning and astute. J. What are two examples of semantic narrowing? 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. 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. Semantic change often occurs as societal values change. Everything you need for your studies in one place. Pejoration is a type of semantic change that is more common than amelioration. What are the four types of semantic change? doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.89.1.1. In Muna and Eipo (Tables 1, 2), elevational semantics and distal deixis are obligatorily co-expressed. Dadibi Grammar: Morpheme to Sentence. (2015). Because it shows us how societal perceptions have changed over time. When the referent is not potentially visible and also not located on the path of a nearby river, but is separate from the speaker by at least a mountain range (i.e., global scale), then the same items function as labels for cardinal directions (19), and elevational differences are ignored. This is because when used as slang, they gain a new, positive, meaning and are associated with the word, 'cool'. Spot two examples of semantic broadening! Some systems of spatial deixis in Papuan languages, in Here and There: Cross-Linguistic Studies on Deixis and Demonstration, eds J. Weissenborn and W. Klein (Amsterdam: Benjamins), 81110. Furthermore, a number of languages spoken on volcanic islands of Southeast Asia have elevational demonstratives. 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. Think of the word 'nice' as an example of amelioration. Create beautiful notes faster than ever before. The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. True- broadening can be caused by only linguistic. In Makalero and Baskeet, the relation is UP = east and DOWN = west, (and Baskeet has additionally over there = north/south). Distance, direction, and relevance: how to choose and use a demonstrative in Manambu. I also want to thank two reviewers, my colleagues Gary Holton and Diana Schackow who answered my questions on their languages of expertise and the audience at the LingConLab (Linguistic Convergence Laboratory) seminar of the HSE Moscow on May 12, 2020, in particular Michael Daniel, for many questions and suggestions. Semantics Examples in Literature Lesson Summary Activities FAQs Semantics and You Now that you understand how difficult it can be for people to know they are understanding all words in the. All languages with LEVEL or ACROSS elevationals also have DOWN and UP elevationals. How many major types of semantic change are there? 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). This is an example of narrowing. As stated in Section Verticality Within the Domain of Spatial Language above, demonstratives are deictic and express distance-based meanings with the speaker (ego) as deictic center or person-based meanings that additionally consider the position of the hearer. Whitby, C. (1990). 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). Elevational meanings have repeatedly been grouped together with grammatical items that refer to salient landmarks (e.g., seawards/landwards, upriver/downriver). Figure 2 shows a person stretched out on the ground. Which best describes the meaning of amelioration? Broadening is the opposite. What is an example of an extralinguistic cause? Post, M. W. (2007). Five of the surveyed languages are spoken in lower hills (in general lower than 500 m above sea level), and seven languages on flat territory. Narrowing can also be referred to as semantic specialisation or semantic restriction. Miyaoka, O. The word 'attitude' is an example of pejoration. It is caused by extralinguistic factors typically. Ukarumpa: SIL. 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.). 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. an inaccurate name). Reesink, G. P. (1999). 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. 48, 359384. Doctoral dissertation, La Trobe University, Melbourne. Silly. A Grammar of Kurtp. Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 65, 157167. It also goes beyond more specific surveys such as Post (2011, 2017) and Schapper (2014), which devote considerable space to elevationals, but focus on particular linguistic areas/languages families. Have you seen my grandmother? Levinson, S. C. (2003). Psychol. There are many other open questions left for future studies of elevational demonstratives. Yupno combines MEDIAL and DISTAL but not PROXIMAL with elevationals (Cooperrider et al., 2017, p. 771). the meaning of the word 'engine' changed from describing general devices used in war to describing a specific mechanical device. 413414). Distance contrasts in demonstratives, in The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, eds M. S. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology). An Ethnographic Grammar of the Eipo Language Spoken in the Central Mountains of Irian Jaya (West New Guinea), Indonesia. Create and find flashcards in record time. 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. Typol. Some examples of amelioration are words such as 'nice', 'pretty' and 'lady'. Also known as specializationor restriction. Doornenbal, M. (2009). The topographic elevationals can be followed by another marker from a smaller set that contains only three items that encode general elevation and the meaning out in front but also seem to have some additional meanings that are not explicitly discussed in the grammar (Dixon, 1972, p. 48). (2008). 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). According to the survey in Diessel (2013), which included 234 languages, demonstratives are distance-neutral or express up to five distance contrasts (i.e., five positions that differ in terms of distance from the deictic center). Charachidz, G. (1981). This study therefore goes beyond general cross-linguistic studies of demonstratives, which devote only a few sentences to demonstratives with elevational meaning. Figure 1. Elevation as a category of grammar: Sanzhi Dargwa and beyond. Cognition 132, 342382. Also called melioration or elevation . Similarly, by means of the second topographic system of Yakkha the uphill and downhill elevationals can be mapped onto the human body and teeth are then referred to as uphill, i.e., upper teeth and downhill lower teeth irrespectively of their actual position (even when a person is not in the canonical upright position). They seem to be absolute because normally gravity determines the direction and thus what is up and down, but the same is true for relational adverbials referring to the vertical axis. However, no linguist has ever claimed that English has an elevational demonstrative although such a claim would perhaps be imaginable if we wrote up-there or upthere instead of up there. 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). Amelioration is less common than the opposite historical process, called pejoration . Below, we will look at two different examples of pejoration: The word, 'silly', is a common example of pejoration. The term spatial deixis refers to the localization of a figure relative to a ground (object) in terms of (radial) distance categories by means of language (e.g., here vs. there), or in combination with a pointing gesture (Levinson, 2003, p. 65). Furthermore, the importance of the peripersonal sphere is linguistically reflected by elevational demonstratives because they predominantly co-express distance as opposed to proximity to the speaker.
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