17.192, Review: Semantics/Historical Ling: Traugott & Dasher(2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-192. Fri Jan 20 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.192, Review: Semantics/Historical Ling: Traugott & Dasher(2005)

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1)
Date: 14-Jan-2006
From: Rolf Kreyer < rkreyer at uni-bonn.de >
Subject: Regularity in Semantic Change 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 16:35:00
From: Rolf Kreyer < rkreyer at uni-bonn.de >
Subject: Regularity in Semantic Change 
 

AUTHORS: Traugott, Elizabeth C.; Dasher, Richard B.
TITLE: Regularity in Semantic Change
SERIES: Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 97
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/12/12-1982.html 

Rolf Kreyer, Institut für Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Keltologie, 
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany

[A review of the first edition of this book, published in 2001, appears in 
http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-1975.html -- Eds.]

The book by Traugott and Dasher aims to show that semantic change 
can be described with reference to predictable unidirectional paths of 
change. In particular, the authors argue for an 'Invited Inferencing 
Theory of Semantic Change' (IITSC), the prime objective of which 
is ''to account for the conventionalization of pragmatic meanings and 
their reanalysis as semantic meanings.'' (35) Semantic change, thus, 
is seen as a product of language use. Accordingly, the authors make 
extensive use of contextualized data from diachronic corpora of 
(mainly) English and Japanese spanning over more than one 
thousand years to provide evidence for their claims.

The book is divided into six main chapters: the first gives an overview 
of the general framework underlying the findings of the authors. 
Chapter two discusses relevant previous and current work on 
semantic change. The following four chapters are detailed case 
studies relating to different areas of linguistic description, namely 
modal verbs, adverbials with discourse marker function, performative 
verbs and constructions, and social deictics. The book concludes with 
a summary of the major findings and with some directions for future 
research. 

Chapter one describes in detail the aim of the whole book. The 
authors start off with the observation that ''the direction of semantic 
change is often highly predictable, not only within a language but also 
cross-linguistically.'' (4) To account for such regularities, the authors 
suggest an Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change' (IITSC), 
which roughly can be sketched as follows: At the basis of semantic 
change is the individual who makes innovative use of a particular word 
with a particular coded meaning by exploiting 'invited inferences' ''in 
associated streams of speech.'' (38) Such a particular utterance token 
thus is used to convey a meaning by the speaker/writer which differs 
from the original coded meaning. If this meaning persists in the speech 
community and is also used by other speakers/writers the invited 
inference will become a 'generalized invited inference': although the 
original meaning is still the dominant one, an additional meaning 
based on the invited inference is associated with the word. Once the 
original meaning recedes to certain contexts or disappears altogether, 
the generalized invited inference has become semanticized as a new 
coded meaning of the word. 

Basic to the authors' understanding of semantic change are the 
notions of 'subjectivity' and 'intersubjectivity.' The former refers to the 
explicit encoding of the ''SP/W's [speaker/writer's] point of view, for 
example in deixis, modality, and marking of discourse strategies. [... 
The latter] is most usefully thought of in parallel with subjectivity: as 
the explicit, coded expression of SP/W's attention to the image 
or ''self'' of AD/R [addressee/reader] in a social or epistemic sense, for 
example, in honorification.'' (21-2) 

The main mechanism underlying semantic change, according to the 
authors, is subjectification, i.e. the development of meaning 
components in lexemes that increase subjectivity, or, in the authors' 
words ''the semasiological process whereby the SP/Ws 
[speakers/writers] come over time to develop meanings for Ls 
[lexemes] that encode or externalize their perspectives and attitudes 
as constrained by the communicative world of the speech event, 
rather than by the so-called ''real-world'' characteristics of the event or 
situation referred to.'' (30)

This mechanism also accounts for one of four general tendencies in 
semantic change, namely the development from non-subjective to 
subjective to intersubjective meanings, i.e. from meanings that merely 
express a particular state of the extralinguistic world, to meanings that 
allow to express the speaker or writer's general point of view, to 
meanings that serve to specifically express the speaker or writer's 
attitude towards the hearer or reader or their needs.  

The remaining three paths of semantic change are from truth-
conditional to non-truth conditional meaning, from contentful to 
procedural meaning, and from meanings that only have scope within 
the proposition to meanings that have scope over the whole 
discourse. The figure below summarizes these four pragmatic-
semantic tendencies in semantic change (note that this diagram 
should only be read horizontally, not vertically; s-w: scope within, s-o: 
scope over) (cf. Traugott & Dasher 2005: 40):<pre>
nonsubjective    > subjective         > intersubjective
truth conditional           >           non-truth-conditional
content          > content/procedural > procedural
s-w proposition  > s-o proposition    > s-o discourse</pre>
It is important to note, though, that not every lexeme has to undergo 
these changes; each of the four lines of development are just possible 
kinds of changes. However, ''if a lexeme with the appropriate 
semantics undergoes change, it is probable that the change will be of 
the type specified,'' (281) even though not every lexeme will undergo 
all possible changes. In addition, the four paths are unidirectional, that 
is a change in the opposite direction is usually ruled out. How these 
general tendencies are instantiated in different semantic domains is 
discussed in chapters three to six of the book. Before that, however, 
in chapter 2 the authors discuss the scientific context in which their 
model of semantic change is placed.

Chapter 2 gives a brief outline of previous and current research on 
semantic change and discusses Bréal, major research of the early 
twentieth century (Meillet, Bloomfield, Saussure, the concept of 
semantic fields as discussed, among others, by Trier, Stern, or Berlin 
and Kay) and contemporary approaches, such as studies on 
metaphor, metonymy and invited inference, issues of grammicalization 
and historical pragmatics. With regard to these different approaches 
to semantic change, the authors consider their book to be ''a 
contribution especially to the interface between historical pragmatics 
and historical semantics, building on the various approaches [...] 
sketched in [...] chapter [2], especially Neogricean pragmatics.'' (104) 
Specifically, the authors contend that semantic change is dominated 
by what Horn (1984) has formulated as the R[elevance]-heuristic, 
i.e. ''say/write no more than you must, and mean more thereby'': ''[T]he 
R-heuristic leads to change because it evokes utterance meanings 
beyond what is said; in other words, it involves ''pragmatic 
strengthening''.'' (19) 

Chapter three presents three case studies on the development of 
modal auxiliaries and particles, namely English 'must' and 'ought to' 
and Chinese 'de'. Of the more general paths of semantic change 
posited in chapter one, the authors find the following instantiations in 
the semantic change of modal verbs (cf. Traugott & Dasher 2005: 
148):<pre>
premodal              > deontic                  > epistemic
content                      >                     content/procedural 
s-w proposition       > s-o proposition
deontic-nonsubjective > deontic-subjective
                        epistemic-nonsubjective  > epistemic-subjective</pre>
As an example of the first path consider the discussion of the 
development of 'must'. In OE 'must' or 'mot-' usually had the meaning 
of ability or permission, as for instance in (1):
(1) (c. 880 Boethius 5, 12.12 [Traugott & Dasher 2005: 123])
Mot ic nu cunnian hwon þinre fæstrædnesse, ...
''May I now inquire a little about your fortitude, ...''

In later OE and EarlyME 'mot-' acquired an additional deontic meaning 
component:
(2) (c. 1000 AECHom I, 17 (App) 182.240 [Traugott & Dasher 2005: 
124])
we moton eow secgan eowre sawle þearfe, licige eow ne licige eow.
''we must tell you about your soul's need, whether it please you or not.''

The epistemic use of 'must' occurs sporadically already in LateOE and 
ME. A fully semanticized and regular epistemic use, however, does 
not occur before the EarlyMdE period. 

(3) (1586 Apr. 30, Dudley [Traugott & Dasher 2005: 129])
... surely his expences cannott be lytle, albeyt his grefe must be more 
to have no countenance at all but his own estate.
''... surely his expenses can't be small, although it must be an even 
greater grief to him that he has no standing other than his own 
estate.'' 

In chapter 4 the authors analyse case studies on the development of 
adverbials in discourse marker function. Three classes are discussed: 
(1) discourse markers that signal local connectivity, i.e. between 
utterances, (2) discourse markers that have developed intersubjective 
meaning, i.e. that explicitly mark the speaker's or writer's attention to 
the addressee, and (3) discourse markers that signal global 
connectivity, i.e. that serve discourse structuring purposes on a more 
global level. As to the first group, the authors discuss 
English 'indeed,' 'in fact,' and 'actually,' and find that all three 
underwent similar changes in the history of English, namely a 
development from clause-internal adverbial to epistemic sentential 
adverbial to discourse marker. As examples of discourse markers with 
intersubjective meanings English 'well' and 'let's' are discussed. With 
the former, for instance, Traugott & Dasher find a widening of contexts 
in which 'well' in discourse marker function occurs: ''At first it is 
anchored in the speech of others than the narrator; then it comes to 
be preempted to the narrator/speaker/writer's perspective, and finally 
it develops meanings with strong orientation to AD/R's [addressee's or 
reader's] face.'' (176)  A similar increase in intersubjectivity is also 
shown for 'let's'. 

In addition, however, 'let's' has also undergone ''a shift from content 
meanings based in argument structure at the clausal level to 
pragmatic procedural meanings based in argument structure at the 
discourse level.'' (177) The final case study in chapter 4 involves 
Japanese 'sate': it originates in a clause-internal adverbial function 
(similar to English 'thus') and gradually extents scope over the whole 
clause and, finally, over larger portions of the discourse. 
Concomitantly, the authors claim, an increase in subjectification is also 
given which eventually leads to an increase in intersubjective meaning 
when 'sate' serves as a hedging device and as an epistolary formula. 
The findings on adverbials with discourse-marker function, again, are 
summarized in four correlated paths of directionality in semantic 
development (cf. Traugott & Dasher 2005: 187):<pre> 
Adverb(manner)  > Adverb(adversative)  > Adverb(elaboration) > Adverb hedge
content         > content/procedural                         > procedural
s-w propostion  > s-o proposition      > s-o discourse 
nonsubjective   > subjective                                 > intersubjective</pre>
The next series of case studies in chapter 5 concerns the 
development of performative verbs and constructions, in particular 
directives and declaratives. As an example of the first, the authors 
consider the semantic changes in the English verb 'promise.' The 
verb ''seems to have been coined from the noun'' (205), which, 
borrowed from Latin shortly after 1400, had a spatial meaning, i.e. ''a 
promise was something ''sent forward''.'' (205) The verb 'promise' 
seems to have undergone changes along two paths: it is likely to have 
been used performatively when introducing sentential complements in 
the first person present tense. This shows an increase in subjectivity 
since ''it expresses the speaker's approbation of authority as an actor 
attempting to match world to word.'' (209) A further change leads to 
the use of the verb as epistemic parenthetical in LateME:

(4) (1469 Paston I, 542 [Traugott & Dasher 2005: 207])
He losyth sore hys tyme her, I promyse yow.
''he is wasting his time badly here, actually.'' 

This use also is an instance of intersubjectification ''since it explicitly 
pays attention to AD/R's [addressee's or reader's] image needs in the 
here and now of the speech event. [... It acknowledges] at the 
discourse level that AD/R might have doubts about SP/W's message.'' 
(209) In contrast to this use of the verb, the second path of change is 
most frequent in third-person contexts. The first change is that to an 
epistemic meaning of the verb, i.e. ''portend'', a change that also 
shows an increase in subjectivity since it makes an explicit statement 
about the belief-state of the speaker. This use, again, seems ''to be a 
precursor for the development in the eighteenth century of 
nonperformative raising uses with nonfinite complements,'' as in 
example (5):

(5) (1700 Congreve, Way of the World, Act I [Traugott & Dasher 2005: 
208])
I have seen him. He promises to be an extraordinary person;

One of two examples of declaratives discussed in this book is 
Japanese 'aisatu', which ''entered Japanese as a Zen term for a 
particular type of religious training that involved speech events.'' (219) 
A first change in meaning, namely that from ''question and answer'' 
to ''answer'', according to the authors, is indicative of subjectification. 
The final change is its associations ''with the speech act of ''greeting,'' 
apparently first as an indirect way of describing this act and more 
recently as a declarative performative to name a particular speech act 
as one of greetings.'' (219) This, in the view of the authors, shows an 
increase in intersubjectification. As a summary of their findings the 
authors name the following paths of semantic change (cf. Traugott & 
Dasher 2005: 225):<pre>
Pre-speech-act-verb > speech-act-verb > performative       > parenthetical
content                               > content/procedural > procedural
s-w proposition     > s-o proposition > s-o discourse
nonsubjective                         > subjective         >  intersubjective</pre>
The final set of case studies involves the development of social 
deictics, which ''directly encod[e...] within their semantic structures the 
conceptualized relative social standing (superiority/inferiority, (non)
intimacy, in-group versus out-group status, etc.) of a participant either 
in the CDE [conceptualized described event] or in the CSE 
[conceptualized speech event] by ''pointing'' to that social standing 
from the deictic ground (perspective) of SP/W relative to AD/R and 
other elements of the CSE.'' (226) In the centre of the authors' 
observations stand a subclass of social deictics, namely referent and 
addressee honorifics for Japanese predicate items (verbs, adjectives 
and copula). The semantic development of these seems to 
encompass four distinct stages: 
-- These honorifics usually start off as nonhonorific lexemes 
without any social deictic meaning component and are only concerned 
with the conceptualized described event (CDE). (Stage 1) 
-- This is the referent honorific stage: Lexemes on this stage 
are still primarily concerned with the described event, but they have 
acquired an additional social deictic meaning. As a consequence, the 
world of the conceptualized speech event (CSE) 'informs', i.e. 
interacts and enriches, the described event, because the deictic 
pointing realized in the referent honorific ''is made from a grounding in 
the CSE, namely SP/W's conceptualization of his or her status vis-à-
vis AD/R.'' (236) (Stage 2) 
-- Some of these referent honorifics may develop into 
addressee honorific lexemes (Stage 3),
-- and even further into addressee honorific affixes. (Stage 4) 

The difference between the first and the last two stages lies in their 
dependence vs. independence from the described event: while 
referent honorifics ''point to the social standing of at least 
one ''referent,'' i.e. participant in the CDE, addressee honorifics 
directly encode the social deictic positioning of AD/R relative to SP/W 
independently of their possible roles in the CDE.'' (240) The difference 
between the two kinds of addressee honorific elements lies in the fact 
that the first still retains non-social-deictic meaning which continues to 
inform the conceptualized described event. With addressee honorific 
affixes, however, the non-social-deictic component does not interact 
with the described event but ''is procedural rather than contentful: it 
plays a role in the marking of discourse structure by orienting the 
utterance in which it appears to the ongoing discourse [...].'' (241) The 
kinds of lexemes that undergo the change from stage 1 to stage 2 
point to the conclusion that although ''[m]any of these patterns of 
semantic change may appear to represent metaphoric shifts across 
conceptual domains [...] it is consistently the case that new predicate 
honorifics in Japanese develop from those L[exeme]s and 
constructions that index social status marking as a GIIN [generalized 
invited inference].'' (244) In addition, the authors claim that the rise of 
social deictic meaning ''intrinsically involves the development of 
procedural meaning'' (245), subjectification and intersubjectification. 

Summing up, Traugott & Dasher again posit four correlated paths of 
semantic development in social deictics, where RefHon = Referent 
honorific, AddHon = Adressee honorific (cf. Traugott & Dasher 2005: 
276):<pre>
pre-honorific >  RefHon              >  lexical AddHon >  affixal AddHon   
informs CDE   >  CDE/(CSE)           >  CSE/(CDE)      >  CSE
content       >  content/procedural                    >  procedural
nonsubjective >  coded subjectivity  >  coded intersubjectivity</pre>
CRITICAL EVALUATION

The appeal and the strength of Traugott and Dasher's book, in my 
view, lies in the central role that the authors ascribe to language use, 
pragmatic considerations and principles, and the speaker or writer 
as ''the prime negotiator (with the AD/R) of reference and of meaning 
in general [...].'' (7) This focus on actual language use and, 
consequently, the discussion of contextualized data allow the authors 
to investigate the influence of invited inference in processes of 
semantic change, which eventually leads to the formulation of the 
model of the Invited Inference Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC). 

In addition to emphasizing the importance of language use in semantic 
change, and in addition to providing a convincing explanation of 
semantic change, a further merit of this study is the identification of 
regular correlated paths of semantic change. These generalizations 
are interesting and insightful and provide testable hypotheses for 
future research. 

The evidence the authors adduce to substantiate their claims is 
usually convincing, and the wealth and range (as regards aspects of 
the linguistic system as well as languages) of examples is very 
impressive. However, one has to keep in mind, that the authors 
provide 'only' a set of case studies. That is the authors manage to 
show that for some lexemes, semantic change can be explained by 
IITSC. They leave open, however, how these findings relate to other 
lexemes of the respective semantic domains, i.e. what is the 
proportion of instances of semantic change in one domain that can be 
explained by IITSC? It would have been interesting to have an 
exhaustive analysis of, say, all modal verbs in English to see if the 
mechanisms and paths the authors describe can also account for 
other tokens. This would help to substantiate their claim that ''if a 
lexeme with the appropriate semantics undergoes change, it is 
probable that the change will be of the type specified.'' (281) A further 
point of criticism concerns the sparseness of frequency data in the 
study (sections 6.4 and 6.5 being notable exceptions). Since the 
authors make use, for instance, of the Helsinki Corpus it would have 
been useful to provide information on the distribution of the different 
meanings over time. In particular, a more extensive use of corpus data 
would have been helpful in describing the step from invited inference 
to generalized invited inference. What are the possible contexts that 
allow an invited inference of a particular kind, and do all of these 
contexts lead to the development of generalized invited inferences? 
Information on these aspects would definitely have made this study 
still more convincing. So, although the study is based on corpus data, 
it is not a corpus-study in the strict sense: the corpora used, for the 
most part, do not seem to have been analysed exhaustively but rather 
been used as a convenient source for illustrative examples.

Another remark concerns the 'balancing' of languages in the case 
studies within the different semantic domains. The first three sets of 
case studies, i.e. discussion of modal verbs, adverbials with discourse 
marker function and performative verbs and constructions are 
primarily concerned with English data, although some information on 
Chinese and/or Japanese data is also given. The analysis of social 
deictics, in contrast, heavily draws on Japanese data and only 
provides supplementary analyses of English examples. A more 
balanced choice of material would have made the cross-linguistic 
relevance of the authors' finding even clearer.  

A final note should be made with regard to the fact that some of the 
case studies in this book are based on earlier publications of the 
authors: those that are familiar with the works of Traugott and Dasher, 
therefore, will find less new information (although still enough!) in this 
book than those which are unfamiliar with the authors previous work.

On the whole, the book by Traugott and Dasher is a highly stimulating 
and interesting read, which, on the basis of a large range of 
examples, provides an innovative and convincing analysis of semantic 
change. Particularly appealing is the book's focus on language use 
and pragmatic mechanisms. This, in my view, is a very promising 
approach to semantic change, and it is hoped that further research 
along these lines will be conducted. 

REFERENCE

Horn, Laurence R. 1984. Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic 
inference: Q-based and R-based implicature. In D. Schiffrin (ed.), 
Meaning, Form, and Use in Context: Linguistic Applications; 
Georgetown University Round Table '84, 11-42. Washington DC: 
Georgetown University Press. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Rolf Kreyer is an Assistant Professor of Modern English Linguistics in 
the department of English, American and Celtic Studies of the 
University of Bonn, Germany. His research interests include corpus 
linguistics, syntax, and text linguistics. He is the author of "Inversion in 
Modern Written English. Syntactic Complexity, Information Status and 
the Creative Writer", which will soon be published by Gunter Narr. At 
present he is working on a corpus-linguistic study that aims to analyse 
the interaction of language use and grammar.





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