SEMANTIC CHANGE

SEMANTIC CHANGE

  Language-acquisition is based on problem-solving in context; so is language understanding or communication. Words in this conception are not static entities, invariants (how could they be, given that they do not express a ‘substance’?) they are not just there to encode and decode thought. They are dynamic entities, flexible instruments that the speaker uses in the framework of a speech situation, embedded itself in a cultural situation. Words constantly interact, or better are made to interact, with each other and with other domains of knowledge in the speaker’s and the hearer’s mind. Words do not carry meaning in themselves, they are invested with meaning according to the totality of the context. They only have meaning in so far as they are interpreted as meaningful, in so far as the hearer attributes meaning to them in context (cf. Juchem 1986:155). According to this view of language, change of meaning is not unexpected. As there are no invariants, variation is the norm, meaning changes all the time (cf. US: 48f.157f.):

  We must therewith reject the assumption of the uniformity of word meaning…. Therefore, if we use a word within the complex of a sentence, its connection with the other words allows only one part of the group of thoughts which are connected with the word to become conscious.

  (US: 50159; cf. Bréal on polysemy; ES: ch. XIV)

  Given the need for interpretation of any word as part of an utterance in situation, the interpretation of a metaphor has to be considered as only slightly different from the interpretation of any other utterance. We understand the force of a metaphorical utterance on the same principles that we understand the (illocutionary) force of any speech act, that is by drawing conclusions from the speech situation and the situation of consciousness, including certain presuppositions or beliefs common to speaker and hearer. One of the most important beliefs shared by all speakers is that we speak to do something, to influence others, to change their state of consciousness. That is to say, we all believe that

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  an utterance has a purpose, that wordforms have a function. In this sense utterances are, as we have seen, orders or imperatives, or instructions to the hearer to make sense. And how to make himher make sense more constructively than by using a metaphor. Metaphor is one of the primary instruments by which we make new sense of the world, our experience and the language we use to talk about it—hence to change it.

  How, then, do we attribute meaning to a metaphor, an apparent linguistic nonsense, such as ‘You are a pig’? The person addressed in this way is certainly not a pig! Wegener uses another example (US: 51151): ‘the war takes fire’ (der Krieg entbrennt) (i.e. the war flares up, in the sense of ‘begins’). What actually happens when we hear this metaphorical utterance is: we understand it immediately as ‘the war breaks out’, which is, of course, another metaphor, a wonderful example for the evolution of language, that Wegener describes in the following.

  We understand a metaphor through inferences drawn from the exposition and situation, the linguistic or extra-linguistic context. This reliance on the exposition and situation slowly fades away, until the metaphor decays and becomes an established linguistic tool, is understood automatically. Wegener describes this evolution in three steps:

  1) War blazes up like a fire…—one thus adds an expositive comment to the figurative idea.

  2) War blazes up…—one senses that the predicate is taken from the fire. However, one no longer contemplates the similarity of the two groups, because the comparison has already been made familiar; the comparison is shortened or compromised.

  3) War breaks out…—we are now only aware of the ideas contained in the group war, no longer those in the original simile.

  (US: 52161)

  In Darmesteter (1887) we can find a similar description of metaphor. Instead of speaking about the process by which form and function become ‘congruent’, he speaks about them becoming ‘adequate’:

  the process of metaphor comprises two stages: one where the metaphor is still noticeable and where the name, used to designate the second object, still evokes the image of the first: the other, where, by forgetting the first image, the name does only designate the second object and becomes adequate to it.

  (1886 [1887]: 63; quoted by Delesalle 1987:276–7)

  Delesalle comments on this passage in the following, most enlightening way:

  What interests Darmesteter first and foremost in the figures of speech are the processes which make them appear and disappear; admitting that language has the right ‘to produce the most glaring contradictions’, given that ‘forgetting the primary etymological meaning is itself the law that governs all semantic changes’, he comes close to a conception a ‘logic of

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  language’ [term used by Bréal], which allows you to say ‘pavé de bois’ [wooden paving stone], inspite of the primary sense of the word pavé. The emancipation of meaning from form is marked by that ability to forget the original meaning, or to make a primary element out of a secondary one— which in turn risks becoming a secondary one, or disappearing—this is what the author calls ‘one of the living forms of language’.

  (Delesalle 1987:277)

  In Wegener’s terms: the metaphorical predicate becomes congruent to its function and can now be used as an instrument of exposition. The metaphor has evolved into a congruent expression. The evolution of language can thus be summarized by the following cycles:

  In the evolution of language pragmatics has the primacy over semantics, meaning is always derived from situated and purposeful action. This is a ‘universal’ law of language evolution: words that can be used as logical subjects, i.e. expositionally, only became usable in this way after having gone through a phase where they were predicates needing active interpretation in context. That is to say: all the words we use, and which seem to have such fixed and stable meanings, went through a phase where they did not have this fixed meaning, but were only understood because the hearer attributed meaning to them in context. After having thus been used as predicates and having been more and more frequently interpreted in a similar way, because they were inserted in similar situations and actions, they slowly lose their strong contextually-dependent meaning, and gain something like a conventional meaning, in short they can be used as expositional tools that are interpreted automatically (cf. US: 54163). The form which only functions through active interpretation now becomes congruent to its function, i.e. the form functions automatically. This also means that special forms have special functions, there is something like a specialization of function or a distribution of functions over specific forms (cf. Bréal’s law of specialization, ES: ch. I). This constant change and specialization is the real life and growth of language. One can say that Wegener’s model of language-change has achieved what Whitney and Bréal were striving for: to show that speakers and hearers are the true language-makers!

  This constant modification and adaptation of language to communicational needs, is only possible because the language that speakers and hearers use is semantically underdetermined (cf. Bhattacharya 1978:732), that is, open to contextual specification

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  and remodelling according to new experiences. Our mind has continually to fill in gaps and shape the linguistic forms in order to make sense. This is exactly what Bréal wanted to show in his Les Idées latentes du langage. As Bhattacharya writes:

  The tropes of similarity, analogy and metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche affect such restructuring and if standardized in specific instances, change the language. The problem here is to model my differing experience in terms of accepted conceptual units by rearranging them. To the degree that the listener succeeds in his attempts to model my differing experience, communication is possible.

  (1978:732–3)

  To conclude this section on Wegener’s model of semantic change one might quote Bhattacharya again, who has captured the essential message of Wegener: ‘To use language is to be metaphoric, and to understand the uses of language is to attempt constructing different metaphors than the standard ones, when the standard ones do not influence others appropriately’ (ibid.: 733).

  The indeterminacy of language and its necessary reliance on co-and context, is the reason why the meanings of words are constantly reshaped, and this especially according to two shaping mechanisms: metaphor and metonymy. In metonymy the word absorbs meaning from the context of situation and reference, in metaphor it adapts itself to the cognitive co-text and context.