120226 SE Linguistics Seminar / MA historical & descriptive linguistics (2017S)

In this course, we attempt to describe and explain changes in the meanings of English words such as 'to cope with', which originally meant 'to fight with' or 'to worry', which originally meant 'to strangle'. We collect evidence from the Oxford English Dictionary Online and from diachronic corpora such as the Corpus of Historical American English, and try to account for it in terms of recent theories of semantic change. We investigate the interplay between pragmatic mechanisms of meaning construction and negotiation and the transmission of conventionalised lexical meanings, identify the mechanisms exploited for semantic innovation and attempt to detect any general principles by which semantic change may be driven.

The aim of this course is to develop expertise in the description of word meaning and its situational and historical variability, and in the systematic treatment of dictionary and corpus data. We shall also try to develop an understanding of linguistic meanings as cultural constructs that owe their historical stability to successful transmission, that are highly variable, and that are subject to evolutionary change.