Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Every word has a variety of senses and connotations, which can be added, removed, or altered over time, often to the extent that cognates across space and time have very different meanings. The study of semantic change can be seen as part of etymology, onomasiology, semasiology, and semantics.
Diachronically (i.e. looking at changes over time), clines represent a natural path along which forms or words change over time. However, synchronically (i.e. looking at a single point in time), clines can be seen as an arrangement of forms along imaginary lines, with at one end a 'fuller' or lexical form and at the other a more 'reduced' or ...
Etymology studies the history of words: when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. Words may enter a language in several ways, including being borrowed as loanwords from another language, being derived by combining pre-existing elements in the language, by a hybrid known as phono ...
Expressiveness: Common or overused language tends to lose its emotional or rhetorical intensity over time; therefore, new words and constructions are continuously employed to revive that intensity [5] Analogy: Over time, speech communities unconsciously apply patterns of rules in certain words, sounds, etc. to unrelated other words, sounds, etc.
Cyclic drift is the mechanism of long-term evolution that changes the functional characteristics of a language over time, such as the reversible drifts from SOV word order to SVO and from synthetic inflection to analytic observable as typological parameters in the syntax of language families and of areal groupings of languages open to investigation over long periods of time.
Diachronic or historical lexicology is devoted to the evolution of words and word-formation over time. It investigates the origins of a word and the ways in which its structure, meaning, and usage have since changed. [9] Synchronic or descriptive lexicology examines the words of a language within a certain time frame. This could be a period ...
Etymology (/ ˌ ɛ t ɪ ˈ m ɒ l ə dʒ i /, ET-im-OL-ə-jee [1]) is the study of the origin and evolution of words, including their constituent units of sound and meaning, across time. [2] In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. [1]
Because it gives definitions in historical order, it is the best single-volume choice for people interested in how the meanings of words have changed over time." However, he notes, "In my experience as a translator of contemporary Japanese, though, I have found Koujien less useful than Daijirin." This criticism is based on his use of the fourth ...