Forces Triggering Semantic Change
Blank has tried to create a complete list of motivations for semantic change. They can be summarized as:
- Linguistic forces
- Psychological forces
- Sociocultural forces
- Cultural/encyclopedic forces
This list has been revised and slightly enlarged by Grzega (2004):
- Fuzziness (i.e., difficulties in classifying the referent or attributing the right word to the referent, thus mixing up designations)
- Dominance of the prototype (i.e., fuzzy difference between superordinate and subordinate term due to the monopoly of the prototypical member of a category in the real world)
- Social reasons (i.e., contact situation with "undemarcation" effects)
- Institutional and non-institutional linguistic pre- and proscriptivism (i.e., legal and peer-group linguistic pre- and proscriptivism, aiming at "demarcation")
- Flattery
- Insult
- Disguising language (i.e., "mis-nomers")
- Taboo (i.e., taboo concepts)
- Aesthetic-formal reasons (i.e., avoidance of words that are phonetically similar or identical to negatively associated words)
- Communicative-formal reasons (i.e., abolition of the ambiguity of forms in context, keyword: "homonymic conflict and polysemic conflict")
- Word play/punning
- Excessive length of words
- Morphological misinterpretation (keyword: "folk-etymology", creation of transparency by changes within a word)
- Logical-formal reasons (keyword: "lexical regularization", creation of consociation)
- Desire for plasticity (creation of a salient motivation of a name)
- Anthropological salience of a concept (i.e., anthropologically given emotionality of a concept, "natural salience")
- Culture-induced salience of a concept ("cultural importance")
- Changes in the referents (i.e., changes in the world)
- World view change (i.e., changes in the categorization of the world)
- Prestige/fashion (based on the prestige of another language or variety, of certain word-formation patterns, or of certain semasiological centers of expansion)
Read more about this topic: Semantic Change
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