How different is prototype change?
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Margaret E. Winters✝
Abstract
Over the last twenty-five years a consensus has developed among cognitive linguists that semantic change (as viewed within polysemous radial categories or sets) includes the modification of meaning in ways that cause some element(s) of the category to become more or less central (or prototypical) over time. Among other changes, the prototype itself may change, with an earlier central instance becoming more peripheral (or disappearing entirely) and being replaced by another, related meaning. This paper addresses changes in prototypicality, through an exploration of the degree to which change in the most central meaning of a radially configured set is the same as or different from change in other aspects of the set. We examine examples from phonology, the lexicon, and grammar and conclude that the outcomes of prototype change are different from other changes in set configuration, but that the processes by which these central instances of a linguistic unit change are the same as other, non-prototype modifications in meaning.
Abstract
Over the last twenty-five years a consensus has developed among cognitive linguists that semantic change (as viewed within polysemous radial categories or sets) includes the modification of meaning in ways that cause some element(s) of the category to become more or less central (or prototypical) over time. Among other changes, the prototype itself may change, with an earlier central instance becoming more peripheral (or disappearing entirely) and being replaced by another, related meaning. This paper addresses changes in prototypicality, through an exploration of the degree to which change in the most central meaning of a radially configured set is the same as or different from change in other aspects of the set. We examine examples from phonology, the lexicon, and grammar and conclude that the outcomes of prototype change are different from other changes in set configuration, but that the processes by which these central instances of a linguistic unit change are the same as other, non-prototype modifications in meaning.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword & Acknowledgements vii
- Editors’ introduction ix
-
Part I. General and specific issues of language change
- Competing reinforcements 3
- On the reconstruction of experiential constructions in (Late) Proto-Indo-European 31
- Criteria for differentiating inherent and contact-induced changes in language reconstruction 49
- Misparsing and syntactic reanalysis 69
- How different is prototype change? 89
- The syntactic reconstruction of alignment and word order 107
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Part II. Linguistic variation and change in Germanic
- The Dutch-Afrikaans participial prefix ge- 131
- Diachronic changes in long-distance dependencies 155
- Changes in the use of the Frisian quantifiers ea/oait “ever” between 1250 and 1800 171
- On the development of the perfect (participle) 191
- OV and V-to-I in the history of Swedish 211
- Ethnicity as an independent factor of language variation across space 231
- The sociolinguistics of spelling 253
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Part III. Linguistic variation and change in Greek
- Dative loss and its replacement in the history of Greek 277
- Word order variation in New Testament Greek wh-questions 293
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Part IV. Linguistic change in Romance
- The morphological evolution of infinitive, future and conditional forms in Occitan 317
- The evolution of the encoding of direction in the history of French 333
- Velle -type prohibitions in Latin 355
- The use and development of habere + infinitive in Latin 373
- Index 399
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword & Acknowledgements vii
- Editors’ introduction ix
-
Part I. General and specific issues of language change
- Competing reinforcements 3
- On the reconstruction of experiential constructions in (Late) Proto-Indo-European 31
- Criteria for differentiating inherent and contact-induced changes in language reconstruction 49
- Misparsing and syntactic reanalysis 69
- How different is prototype change? 89
- The syntactic reconstruction of alignment and word order 107
-
Part II. Linguistic variation and change in Germanic
- The Dutch-Afrikaans participial prefix ge- 131
- Diachronic changes in long-distance dependencies 155
- Changes in the use of the Frisian quantifiers ea/oait “ever” between 1250 and 1800 171
- On the development of the perfect (participle) 191
- OV and V-to-I in the history of Swedish 211
- Ethnicity as an independent factor of language variation across space 231
- The sociolinguistics of spelling 253
-
Part III. Linguistic variation and change in Greek
- Dative loss and its replacement in the history of Greek 277
- Word order variation in New Testament Greek wh-questions 293
-
Part IV. Linguistic change in Romance
- The morphological evolution of infinitive, future and conditional forms in Occitan 317
- The evolution of the encoding of direction in the history of French 333
- Velle -type prohibitions in Latin 355
- The use and development of habere + infinitive in Latin 373
- Index 399
