Гос филология / Гос филология / Лексикология / 5 development and change of the semantic structure

7 The main semantic processes. Specialization or narrowing of m-ng indicates that the word passes from general usage & acquires some special m-ng. When the m-ng is specialized, the range of the notion is narrowed, i.e. the word can name, fewer objects , but the content of the notion is enriched, the notion will include a greater number of relevant features. O.E. "deor" - "wild beast" means now only "wild animal of a particular species" - "oлень"; "girl" in O.E. meant "a child of any sex", now only "a female child". Common nouns are often specialized in toponymics (place names) becoming proper names, e.g. The City (the business part of London), the Tower (of London) - a fortress and a palace & now a museum.

Generalizing or widening of m-ng. The word having a special m-ng due to wide use gets widened in m-ng: thing, business. In case of generalization the range of the new notion is wider than that of the original one, but the content of the notion becomes poorer. In many cases it is a kind of transition from a concrete m-ng to an abstract one. In O.E. "season'' meant only "spring time" then it acquired the m-ng "time for sowing & in Modern Eng it means "any of the 4 seasons". The process of gener-n is mostly at work in creating generic terms, words which can be applied to a great number of individual members of a big class of words: thing, business, to have, to do.

Elevation & degradation of m-ng are the semantic changes determined by social evaluation of the thing or phenomenon named & emotional tone. As the referent of the word comes up or down the social scale, its m-ng is either elevated or becomes pejorative. examples of elevation: Minister - in earlier times meant merely "a servant", now it means "an important public official". Comrade - is a Spanish borr-ng which originally meant "a room-mate". Smart - in earlier times meant "causing pain", now it is syn-mous with "chic”. Knight - O.E. "lad, servant, soldier" now "a nobleman". Degradation of m-ng is the reverse of elevation often reflecting relations b/w classes. O.E. "cnafa" meant "a boy", the ruling classes called their servants "knaves" and the word got a negative emotive colouring. Now it means "негодяй. плут". "vulgar, silly, insane, idiot" originally were neutral words m-ng correspondently; vulgar - "common, ordinary", silly - "happy", insane - "not well", idiot - "a private person". We speak of gener-n, special-n, elevation, degradation when we compare the results of the development of the semantic structure of words.