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MY REPORT On Lexical Change
MY REPORT On Lexical Change
• BORROWING
SAMCYRNO
• ACRONYMS
SNELBD
• BLENDS
SANBOBIRITEVA
•ABBREVIATIONS
LADENORITIVA
• DERIVATIONAL
PYRIDTOVUCTI
• PRODUCTIVITY
SOLS
• LOSS
EREVIDUTAPLIC
GRYNHIM
•REDUPLICATIVE
RHYMING
MESUPIMEH
•EUPHEMISM
New vocabulary or changes in
fashionable usage spread rapidly and
evenly across the country due to our
sophisticated
. communication links.
LE XI C AL C H AN GE
ARVIN D. VILLACORTA
MAELT
DR. JASMIN SUMIPO
PROFESSOR
LEXICAL CHANGE
• Probably the most frequent type of language change and certainly the easiest to observe.
WORD COINAGE IN ENGLISH
• The word formation process in which a new word is created either deliberately or accidentally
without using the other word formation processes and often from seemingly nothing.
BORROWING
• Borrowing words from other languages is an important source of new words, which are called
loan words.
• Borrowing occurs when one language adds a word or morpheme from another language to its
own lexicon.
• This often happens in situations of language contact, when speakers of different languages
regularly interact with one another, and especially where there are many bilingual or multilingual
speakers.
BORROWING
• The pronunciation of loan words is often (but not always) altered to fit the phonological rules of
the borrowing language. For example,
• English borrowed ensemble [ãsãbəl] from French but pronounce it [ãnsãmbəl], with [n] and [m]
inserted, because English doesn’t ordinarily have syllables centered on nasal vowels alone.
• Other borrowed words such as the composer’s name Bach will often be pronounced as the
original German [bax], with a final velar fricative, even though such a pronunciation does not
conform to the rules of English
HISTORY THROUGH LOAN WORDS
• We may trace the history of the English-speaking people by studying the kinds of loan words in
their language, their source, and when they were borrowed.
• Until the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes inhabited England.
• They were of Germanic origin when they came to Britain in the fifth century to eventually
become the English.
• Originally, they spoke Germanic dialects, from which Old English developed.
• These dialects contained some Latin borrowings but few foreign elements beyond that.
HISTORY THROUGH LOAN WORDS
• These Germanic tribes had displaced the earlier Celtic inhabitants, whose influence on Old
English was confined to a few Celtic place names. (The modern languages Welsh, Irish, and
Scots Gaelic are descended from the Celtic dialects.)
• English has borrowed from Yiddish. Many non-Jews as well as non-Yiddish speaking Jews use
Yiddish words.
HISTORY THROUGH LOAN WORDS
• There was once even a bumper sticker proclaiming:
• “Marcel Proust is a Yenta.”
• Yenta is a Yiddish word meaning “gossipy woman.”
• Lox, meaning “smoked salmon,” and bagel, “a doughnut dipped in cement,” now belong to
English, as well as Yiddish expressions like chutzpah, schmaltz, schlemiel, schmuck, schmo,
schlep, and kibitz.
HISTORY THROUGH LOAN WORDS
• English is a lender of many words to other languages, especially in the areas of technology,
sports, and entertainment.
• Words and expressions such as jazz, whisky, blue jeans, rock music, supermarket, baseball,
picnic, and computer have been borrowed from English into languages as diverse as Twi,
Hungarian, Russian, and Japanese
BORROWING
• The Spanish rascacielo is a calque of the English "skyscraper" (rasca means "it scrapes" and
cielo means "sky”
• The English phrase "piña colada," which is a simple borrowing of the Spanish phrase rather than
a translation of the words (which mean "strained pineapple")
.
• Some languages borrow freely; others do not , sometimes languages borrow the
same word twice (`doublets;), or borrow a word they already have,
• English `shirt, skirt'; `gauche, gawky', `castle, chateau'; `nurse, nourish'; `lance,
launch'; `rancid, raunchy';
• However, we will concern ourselves with spoken language and observe three reduction
phenomena: clipping, acronyms, and alphabetic abbreviations.
CLIPPING
• Is the abbreviation of longer words into shorter ones, such as fax for facsimile, the British word
telly for television, prof for professor, piano for pianoforte, and gym for gymnasium.
• Once considered slang, these words have now become lexicalized, that is, full words in their own
right.
• These are only a few examples of such clipped forms that are now used as whole words.
CLIPPING
• Other examples are ad, bike, math, gas, phone, bus, and van (from advertisement, bicycle,
mathematics, gasoline, telephone, omnibus, and caravan).
• More recently, dis and rad (from disrespect and radical) have entered the language, and dis has
come to be used as a verb meaning “to show disrespect.
ACRONYMS
• Are words derived from the initials of several words. Such words are pronounced as the spelling
indicates:
• Recently coined additions are AIDS (1980s), from the initials of acquired immune deficiency
syndrome, and
• Unbelievable though it may seem, acronyms are use somewhere in the English speaking world
number into the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands, a dramatic nod to the creativity
and changeability of human language
ABBREVIATIONS
• Its IC’s are (brains + trust)+ -еr. The suffix -er'is one of the productive suffixes in forming
derivational compounds.
DERIVATIONAL COMPOUND
• Another frequent type of derivational compounds are the possessive compounds of the type kind-
hearted: adjective stem + noun stem + -ed.
• Its IC’s are a noun phrase kind heart and the suffix -ed that unites the elements of the phrase and turns
them into the elements of a compound adjective.
• Similar examples are extremely numerous. Compounds of this type can be coined very freely to meet the
requirements of different situations.
• The group consists of reduplicative compounds that fall into three main subgroups:
Reduplicative compounds proper,
Ablaut combinations,
Rhyme combinations.
REDUPLICATIVE COMPOUNDS PROPER
• Actually it is a very mixed group containing usual free forms, onomatopoeic stems and pseudo-
morphemes.
• namby-pamby, razzle-dazzle.
• The pattern is emotionally charged and chiefly colloquial, jocular, often sentimental in a babyish
sort of way.
• The expressive character is mainly due to the effect of rhythm, rhyme and sound suggestiveness.
VERB (OR NOUN) PLUS PARTICIPLE
• Germanic languages have many verb+ participle constructions, e.g.
`Go away, run out/in/up/down' etc.
• Revived during 60's and 70's:
`turn on, tune out, drop out; flake out; rip off, wig out;'
• more recently:
`max out, wimp out'; 'job out; to get a buy-in';
• particle plus noun: upscale, downscale, downsize, download/upload, uplink
PRODUCTIVITY
• It is quite clear that dead suffixes are irrelevant to present-day English word-formation, they
belong in its diachronic study.
PRODUCTIVITY- Living affixes
• may be easily singled out from a word, e.g.
• The noun-forming suffixes -ness, -dom, -hood, -age, -ance, as in darkness, freedom, childhood,
marriage, assistance, etc.
• Or the adjective-forming suffixes -en, -ous, -ive, -ful, -y as in wooden, poisonous, active,
hopeful, stony, etc.
• However, not all living derivational affixes of modern English possess the ability to coin new
words. Some of them may be employed to coin new words on the spur of the moment, others
cannot, so that they are different from the point of view of their productivity. Accordingly they
fall into two basic classes — productive and non-productive word-building affixes.
TABOO, EUPHEMISM
• Some items may acquire taboo, because of vulgarity
• A source of synonymy also well worthy of note is the so-called euphemism in which by a shift of
meaning a word of more or less ‘pleasant or at least inoffensive connotation becomes
synonymous to one that is harsh, obscene, indelicate or otherwise unpleasant.
• These are notions of death, madness, stupidity, drunkenness, certain physiological processes,
crimes and so on. For example:
• die : : be no more : : be gone : : lose one’s life : : breathe one’s last : : join the silent majority : :
go the way of alt flesh : : pass away : : be gathered to one’s fathers.
LOSS
• Louis Pasteur
Pasteurization, from the name of the fearless French chemist who invented the process.
• St. Valentine
Valentine, from the saintly name of not one but two early Christian martyrs.
SOUND IMITATION
(Onomatopoeia or echoism)
• Is consequently the naming of an action or thing by a more or less exact reproduction of a sound
associated with it.
• For instance words naming sounds and movement of water: babble, blob, bubble, flush, gurgle,
gush, splash, etc.
• It would, however, be wrong to think that onomatopoeic words reflect the real sounds directly,
irrespective of the laws of the language, because the same sounds are represented differently in
different languages.
SOUND IMITATION
(Onomatopoeia or echoism)
• Onomatopoeic words adopt the phonetic features of English and fall into the combinations
peculiar to it.
• The process is based on analogy. The words beggar, butler, cobbler, or typewriter look very much
like agent nouns with the suffix -er/-or, such as actor or painter.
• Their last syllable is therefore taken for a suffix and subtracted from the word leaving what is
understood as a verbal stem.
BACK-FORMATION
• In this way the verb butle ‘to act or serve as a butler’ is derived by subtraction of -er from a
supposedly verbal stem in the noun butler. Butler ( buteler, boteler from bouteillier ‘bottle
bearer’) has widened its meaning.
• Nothing more natural therefore than the prominent part this pattern plays in back-formation.
Alongside the examples already cited above are
• burgle v <— burglar n;
• cobble v <— cobbler n;
• sculpt v <—sculptor n.
SEMANTIC CHANGE
• When the meaning of a word becomes broader, it means everything it used to mean and more.
• The middle English word dogge referred to a specific breed of dog, but was eventually broadened
to encompass all members of the species canis familiaris.
• The word holiday originally meant a day of religious significance, from “holy day.”
• Today the word refers to any day that we do not have to work.
SEMANTIC CHANGE
• Picture used to mean “painted representation,” but now you can take a picture with a camera, not
to mention a cell phone.
• Quarantine once had the restricted meaning of “forty days’ isolation,” and
• manage once meant simply to handle a horse
MEANING SHIFTS
• kind of semantic change that a lexical item may undergo is a shift in meaning.
• The word knight once meant “youth” but shifted to “mounted man-at-arms.”
• Lust used to mean simply “pleasure,” with no negative or sexual overtones.
• Lewd was merely “ignorant,” and
• immoral meant “not customary.”
MEANING SHIFTS
• Silly used to mean “happy” in old English.
• By the middle English period it had come to mean “naive,” and
• only in modern English does it mean “foolish.”
• The overworked modern English word nice meant “ignorant” a thousand years ago. When Juliet
tells Romeo, “I am too fond,” she is not claiming she likes Romeo too much. She means “I am
too foolish.
BRAND NAMES
• Words may be created outright to fit some purpose. The advertising industry has added
many words to English, such as,
• ellipsosyllabophobia: “fear of words with a missing syllable” from greek elleipsis “ a falling short”
+ syllabẽ “ syllable” + phobia
.
Thank you
and have a
good day!