Lexical Change
Lexical Change Overview:
- Lexical change refers to the process of how the vocabulary, or lexicon, of a language changes over time.
Types of Lexical Change:
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Borrowing: A language borrows words from another language. English, for example, has borrowed words like ‘pyjama’ from Hindi and ‘ballet’ from French.
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Loan Translation: This refers to the direct translation of elements of a word to create a new term in another language. An example includes ‘skyscraper’, which was translated from the French term ‘gratte-ciel’.
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Semantic Shift: Words acquire new meanings over time. ‘Nice’, for instance, once meant ‘stupid’ but now means ‘pleasant’ or ‘agreeable’.
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Coinage: The creation of entirely new words. These often come from brand names such as ‘hoover’ becoming a synonym for ‘vacuum cleaner’.
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Compounding: This type of change happens when two existing words are combined to create a new word, like ‘firefly’ or ‘bluebird’. This occurs often in Germanic languages, including English.
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Clipping: This refers to the shortening of a word. For example, ‘advertisement’ becomes ‘ad’ or ‘advert’ over time.
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Conversion (also known as zero derivation): This is when a word changes grammatical category without undergoing any spelling alterations. For example, ‘run’ is a verb, but in the sentence ‘I went for a run’, it functions as a noun.
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Blending: This happens when parts of two words are combined to make a new word. A well-known example in English is ‘brunch’ which is a blend of ‘breakfast’ and ‘lunch’.
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Affixation: This involves adding prefixes or suffixes to words. For instance, ‘do’ becomes ‘redo’ after adding the prefix ‘re-‘.
Understanding these various types of lexical change can help further comprehension of language change.
Each type of lexical change can be identified using appropriate terminology, constructing an argument about the nature of change, and analysing the causes and effects of lexical changes in real language data.