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.

Among the numerous factors known or suspected to affect the length of a syllable in English is the nature of the immediately following syllable. It is widely recognized (P. Fijn van Draat, 1910, p. 14; Jones, 1956, §§ 886–7; Bolinger, 1965, pp. 168–9; Lehiste, 1972, p. 2021) that in a succession of monosyllabic words a word containing a full vowel will be longer when followed by another such word than when followed by a word containing a reduced vowel.1 Van Draat's example is Money makes the mare to go versus Money makes the mare go: in the latter, ‘We pronounce mare in two syllables.’ In the former one can say that the reduced to ‘borrows time’ from the full mare.

No abstract

No abstract