'Lord' comes from the Old English word 'hlafweard' which meant 'the keeper of the bread, the head of the household', or as we would call it today, the breadwinner. Radden (2003) hypothesizes that the cultural importance of the Yangtze River may have also played a role: the river flows downward and any objects moving on it would be located higher at an earlier period of the journey and lower at a later period [(see also Bender and Beller, 2014, p. 369), who call this the river model of time]. However, in (22) the UP-demonstrative occurs together with the hearsay evidential, which means that the speaker has acquired her/his information from the speech of others. Semantically, elevational demonstratives are deictic expressions that also convey elevational or verticality distinctions. Donaldson, T. (1980). From a logical point of view there is no reason to exclude such usages, but their actual existence has yet to be proven by future research.4. However, in none of the languages in my sample I encountered examples illustrating an elevational demonstrative used with an intrinsic frame of reference (i.e., DEM.UP A). Friedman, V. (1994). A Reference Grammar of Southeastern Tepehuan. Elevation as a category of grammar: Sanzhi Dargwa and beyond. West Greenlandic. Internal and external spatial frameworks for representing described scenes. Thank you for being so nice to my brother! By contrast, the mountainous areas of the Americas largely lack languages with elevational demonstratives with the exception of Cora and Pacaraos Quechua. Lexis and Semantics Summary: Definition and Examples Whitby, C. (1990). My sample is a convenience sample because elevational demonstratives are not particularly frequent in the worlds languages. Lexical semantics is the analysis of word meaning. Co-expression of elevational and basic deictic demonstrative meaning at the synchronic level occurs in Muna (Table 1), Daga (Table 9), Yakkha (Table 11), Iaai (32), (33), Jahai, Abui, Tidore, Sougb, Tulil, Hatam, Fore, Usan, Yale, Dadibi, and Zayse. 19, 141199. What did the word `` knight '' mean in Old English? Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Humanities, The University of Manchester, United Kingdom. This means that FURTHER is equated with UP and NEARER with DOWN. Languages belonging to this type are Sanzhi Dargwa, Hua (Yagaria dialect), Central Alaskan Yupik, Kurtp (9), (22), and Galo (19). We've discussed examples of the different types of semantic change. There are a number of languages whose elevational demonstratives also encode cardinal directions, but these meanings seem not to be available within the local domain. What are two examples of extralinguistic factors? For example, demonstratives in the Athabaskan language Tanacross (Alaska) morphologically and semantically combine deictic meaning (distality) with specific topographic and elevational morphemes. Heeschen, V. (1998). "Semantic Narrowing (Specialization)." Another important finding of this study concerns the metaphorical extension of spatial elevational demonstrative meanings to the domain of time: the future is metaphorically located higher than the deictic center, and the past below. 39, 51; Diessel, 2012, p. 2,421). Cookies collect information about your preferences and your devices and are used to make the site work as you expect it to, to understand how you interact with the site, and to show advertisements that are targeted to your interests. Random House, 2008) Hound and Indigenous Earn points, unlock badges and level up while studying. Semantics Meaning & Examples | What is Semantics? - Video & Lesson However, since we know that other elevational terms such as ABOVE or BELOW can, in principle, be employed within intrinsic and relative frames of reference, it is desirable in future research on elevational demonstratives to systematically test if there are any elevational demonstratives that can also be used in that way. In linguistics, amelioration is the upgrading or elevation of a word's meaning, as when a word with a negative sense develops a positive one. 101102). Breunesse, M. (2019). Received: 03 March 2020; Accepted: 22 June 2020;Published: 30 July 2020. Nordquist, Richard. With respect to the languages of this paper, this claim is only partially confirmed. This kind of projection happens at least in Sanzhi Dargwa (Forker, 2019), Tulil (Meng, 2018, p. 266), Nungon (Sarvasy, 2014, p. 413) and Belhare (Bickel, 1997), and has been called person-morphic mapping by Bickel (1997, pp. 57, 322), and thus Dyirbal belongs to the (b) subtype. Levinson (2018, pp. The intrinsic frame of reference entails that the ground and the origin of the coordinate system that serves as anchoring point are identical and the spatial relation between the figure and the ground is binary. For example, the verb 'to starve' originally meant 'to die'; however, it was frequently used in sentences about hunger. doi: 10.1017/9781108333818.018, Carlson-Radvansky, L. A., and Irwin, D. F. (1993). This word was originally used to refer to someone's pose or posture. Another example of semantic change is the word 'nice'. Yarapea, A. M. (2006). This can be gender marking as in the pronominal demonstratives in Baskeet (8) or in Khasi. So far, I encountered only two languages that are spoken in the Melanesia/West Papua area and have this type of semantic extension. Based on the descriptions it is not always possible to distinguish between the subtypes (ii) and (iii) because not all grammars explicitly state whether the elevational morpheme also occurs in some other parts of speech (e.g., as preverb or spatial case affix). Demonstratives in Zilo Andi, in Paper Presented at Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, Moscow. Dr. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks. I first lay out the conceptional and notional background for verticality and its relation to deixis, and describe morphological, syntactic and semantic properties of elevational demonstratives. Tidore: non-contrastive demonstratives, in Demonstratives in Cross- Linguistic Perspective, eds S. Levinson, S. Cutfield, M. Dunn, N. Enfield, and S. Meira (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 343360. This study therefore goes beyond general cross-linguistic studies of demonstratives, which devote only a few sentences to demonstratives with elevational meaning. (2012). Test your knowledge with gamified quizzes. In those languages that optionally or obligatorily conjoin elevational meanings with distance, it is almost always the distal demonstratives that express elevation, whereas medial or proximal demonstratives can lack elevational distinctions. In Buru (Malayo-Polynesia, Moluccas of Indonesia) topographic elevationals express three elevational values (UP, DOWN, and ACROSS) and general elevational morphemes only two (UP and DOWN) (Table 6). 2 - An example of semantic broadening is 'Jazz.'. For example, in Andi (Table 5), only the distal demonstrative roots can attach elevational suffixes. (2012). Grammaire de la Langue Avar (Langue du Caucase Nord-Est). Originally meaning "lighthearted", "joyous" or "happy", the word has undergone a complete shift in meaning to now refer to a homosexual person. Yu adds that in Western cultures family trees are arranged in a similar fashion: the oldest (earliest) generations are placed on the treetop and the last generation on the bottom. 4151; Dixon, 2003, pp. For example, the word "fowl is now usually restricted to the farmyard hen, but it retains its old meaning of 'bird' in expressions like the fowls of the air and wild fowl" (Oxford Companion to the English Language, 1992). Languages with elevational demonstratives are found in flat, hilly, and mountainous regions, and they are a characteristic feature of a few language families worldwide (East Caucasian, Eskimo-Aleut, Sino-Tibetan, Timor-Alor-Pantar, Nuclear Trans New Guinea, and Omotic). A fundamental issue in the study of semantic transfer is the relation between language and thought. (2011). The publication of this article was supported by the Thringer Universitts- und Landesbibliothek Jena. Doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam. 240, 263, 271). A Grammar of Nungon: A Papuan Language of the Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. Ratliff, M. (2019). Only when occurring in opposition with tatu, the neutral distal demonstrative watu can also mean DOWN or LEVEL. Brown, P. (2012). However, like semantic narrowing, this process often occurs over the course of many years. Amelioration is a type of semantic change that elevates a word's meaning over time. Cognition 132, 342382. It is now used to refer to hunting dogs, such as bloodhounds or beagles. The opposite of amelioration is pejoration (degenerating meaning over time so that a word takes on more negative connotations). "The word silly is a classic example of pejoration, or gradual worsening of meaning. Similarly to 'lord', the word 'lady' derives from the Old English word for 'kneader of the bread, the woman of the household' which is 'hlaefdige'. Contours of time: topographic construals of past, present, and future in the Yupno valley of Papua New Guinea. I also want to thank two reviewers, my colleagues Gary Holton and Diana Schackow who answered my questions on their languages of expertise and the audience at the LingConLab (Linguistic Convergence Laboratory) seminar of the HSE Moscow on May 12, 2020, in particular Michael Daniel, for many questions and suggestions. 48, 359384. Typically this process is caused by linguistic factors, such as ellipses, and can take many years to occur. The word 'pretty' is an example of amelioration. A synonym for broadening is semantic generalisation. There are clear areal hotspots in which there is a particular dense concentration of languages with elevational demonstratives. Keywords: elevation, vertical axis, space, deixis, time, demonstrative pronouns, Citation: Forker D (2020) Elevation as a Grammatical and Semantic Category of Demonstratives.