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This important study of semantic change examines how new meanings arise through language use, especially the various ways in which speakers and writers experiment with uses of words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees. There has been growing interest in exploring systemicities in semantic change from a number of perspectives including theories of metaphor, pragmatic inferencing, and grammaticalization. Like earlier studies, these have for the most part been based on data taken out of context. This book is a detailed examination of semantic change from the perspective of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis. Drawing on extensive corpus data from over a thousand years of English and Japanese textual history, Traugott and Dasher show that most changes in meaning originate in and are motivated by the associative flow of speech and conceptual metonymy.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
List of figures; Preface and acknowledgements; Conventions; List of abbreviations; 1. The framework; 2. Prior and current work on semantic change; 3. The development of modal verbs; 4. The development of adverbials with discourse marker function; 5. The development of performative verbs and constructions; 6. The development of social deictics; 7. Conclusion; Primary references; Secondary references; Index of languages; Index of names; Index of subjects.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Elizabeth Closs Traugott is Professor of Linguistics and English at Stanford University. Her previous books include A History of English Syntax (1972), Linguistics for Students of Literature (with Mary L. Pratt, 1980) and Grammaticalization (with Paul J. Hopper, Cambridge, 1993).
Zusammenfassung
This important study of semantic change examines the various ways in which new meanings arise through language use, especially the ways in which speakers and writers experiment with words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees.
