9. Types of Semantic change. Result.

There are Direct and Figurative meanings of the word, so we try to figure out all the changes of meanings and its peculiarities. It’s closely connected to the stylistics, it states figurative meaning.

We distinguish 1) Similarity and 2) Contiguity of meanings. 1) Similarity of meanings – metaphor, based on the shape, position, duration: head – the head of department (position). 2) Contiguity: a) Metonymy – also transform the meaning, but we use part for a whole: a plate of soup; b) Instrumental metonymy – we use an instrument: the writers are the best pen; 3) Positional metonymy – the name of the place instead of people: Kyiv’s reply; 4) Synecdoche – pert for the whole, name of the inventor or head of the company for the whole company: Macintosh, Diesel, Xerox; 5) Hyperbole - exaggeration: hundred years; 6) Litotes – minimize: I hate it – it’s not good; 7) Euphemism – to milder the situation – figurative meaning; 8) Zoozemy: when we try to find out similarity between an animal and a person: deer party – мальчишник, hen party – девичник, a fox, a snake...

The Results of Semantic change are the followings: First of all we observe the changes in denotational and connotational meaning. These changes are in the focus of linguistics, it notices the changes in denotational meaning first of all. The change results in the restrictional meaning or extensional meaning: queen – first of all denotes a woman, a squaw was the synonym of it; to write – O.E. to scratch – handwritings, writings now. Generalization of the meaning (extension) – to fly.

Connotational component: 1) amelioration of the meaning; 2) degradation of the meaning. 1) Ameliorating development – the meaning is improved: minister now is high-rank position, O.E. – boy, servant; knight helped and defended his master; bad fellow meant a villager or peasant. 2) Degradation. In the course of time some old meanings died out, we can’t find them in the dictionary: a spoon was a thing of wood. There are some words with lots of meaning, and it’s very difficult to find the first one. While speaking about semantic change, there is a qualitative change – appearance of polysemantic words; qualitative words are lost, dead, so appered homonymy. Semantic change is the universal problem, in each language; it is researched diachronically: how, what is the result of this change.

10. Polysemy in synchronic approach. Types of meaning.

Synchronically polysemy is understood as the coexistence of various meanings of the same word at a certain historical period of the development of the English language. In the course of a synchronic semantic analysis of the world table all its meanings represent the semantic structure of it. The central (basic) place in the semantic structure occupies the meaning ‘a piece of furniture’. This emerges as the central (basic) meaning of the word, and all other meanings are marginal (minor) meanings.

The central meaning occurs in various and widely different contexts, marginal meanings are observed only in certain contexts. There is a tendency in modern linguistics to interpret the concept of the central meaning in terms of the frequency of occurrence of this meaning. The word table in the meaning of ‘a piece of furniture’ possesses the highest frequency of value and makes up the highest percent of all uses of this word.