230170 Semantics and Semantic Change (S) (WiSe 2014/2015)

"Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law." (Ferdinand de Saussure)
From its beginning, - even long before Saussure arrived on the scene - linguistics has been looking at language change. Throughout history people noticed that the meaning of words is especially prone to change, which makes it difficult for us to understand literature written long ago. Thus, English 'silly' is cognate with German 'selig' or Old English 'deor' (with the meaning of 'animal') became today's 'deer'. In this course, we will therefore look at the different models that have been developed to explain the nature, the reasons and the effects of this change. We will take the socio-cultural approach and investigate to what extent the relationship between language and society or culture has influenced and changed word meanings. We will also discuss the structuralist approach and see how the different parts of the linguistic sign are affected by change. In addition, we will see how cognitive linguistics, diachronic metaphorical analysis and prototype semantics provide explanations for the phenomenon. Eventually, we will discuss to what extent semantic change is regular or predictable and how a theory of semantic change can also explain grammaticalisation, i.e. the historical process whereby a lexical item acquires a new status as a grammatical form.