Page 38 - 6806

as brave as a tiger, as brave as a rabbit; Our club is both for
schoolchildren and college students, Our society is both for
teachers and students; modal modification — certain semes
acquire a modal shade of meaning (mainly for dispositional,
possible semes): He usually visits his father on weekends. How can
you be so indifferent to the boy? You are his father! Her mother
usually cooks for the family. He has caught a cold, but his mother
is now with him.
Specification is the implementation of an abstract seme in a
specific alloseme (mainly for semes with the high level of
abstraction).

4. Sematic changes
Word-meaning is liable to change in the course of the
historical development of language. Changes of lexical meaning
may be illustrated by a diachronic semantic analysis of many
commonly used English words. The word fond (OE. fond) used to
mean ‘foolish’, ‘foolishly credulous’; glad (OE, glaed) had the
meaning of ‘bright’, ’shining’ and so on.
Change of meaning has been thoroughly studied and as a
matter of fact monopolised the attention of all semanticists whose
work up to the early 1930’s was centered almost exclusively on the
description and classification of various changes of meaning.
Abundant language data can be found in almost all the books
dealing with semantics. Here we shall confine the discussion to a
brief outline of the problem as it is viewed in modern linguistic
science.
To avoid the ensuing confusion of terms and concepts it is
necessary to discriminate between the causes of semantic change,
the results and the nature of the process of change of meaning.1
These are three closely bound up, but essentially different aspects
of one and the same problem.
Discussing the causes of semantic change we concentrate on
the factors bringing about -this change and attempt to find out why

38