The Process of Some Semantic Changes in English Language

Introduction

Semantic Change leads with change on meaning of words, however this change does not occur overnight or all of a sudden. On the contrary, this is a slow process into language evolution and these differences are only realised as time goes by. There are many reasons to transformation and change over a word meaning. They can be adopted thanks to insertion of vocabulary from another language, by borrowing or even through popular usage of a word inside another context, resulting its differentiation to the whole country where English is spoken.

Historical linguistics treats the semantic change process throughout years, explaining its alternation. This branch of linguistics treats one phenomenon under scientific value so as to explain some process and assign names, as amelioration, pejoration, broadening, semantic narrowing, bleaching, metaphor, and metonymy (Nordquist, 2010). This essay will not explain extensively each one of these processes because this is not interesting to the aim of this work. Conversely, some words will be presented and the reasons why they changed will be discussed herewith, as well as how this change in semantic occurred to these words, taking the reader to understand some semantics changes into English history.

Words and their transformations

"Semantic change is not a change in meaning per se, but the addition of a meaning to the semantic system or the loss of a meaning from the semantic system while the form remains constant." (Planck, 1991: 8). Some words lose their original meaning in order to transform in something with inferior or with pejorative meaning. As a matter of fact, there is the explanation to pejoration, which according to Henning (1995), in his website, “is the process...

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...treets cannot be put aside because it is a trend in its semantic change. Therefore, semantic changes cannot be confused with slang. This is so-called "sublanguage", "popular language" or even "slangs". Slangs are words that have nothing to do with the sentence. It is a language variation and the same word has another meaning, differently from semantic changes. Slang or language variation is shared by a restrict group (age or occupation) which is used to exclude from communication other people who do not belong to the original group, bracing with this an emotional identity.

Toward these facts, when we study language as a phenomenon featured by dynamism, it is possible to prove that all elements belonged to it (words, phrase order, phonemes, among others) suffered changes due to its evolution. A representative case to these kinds of changes is the semantic change.