Introduction

In this chapter we outline some of the work and issues to date on semantic change, with particular attention to research focused on regularity and on mechanisms of semantic change that will be developed further in later chapters. No attempt is made to cover research into the history of research into semantic change comprehensively. For some overviews discussing different approaches, see Kronasser (1952: chapter 1), Ullmann (1957: chapter 4), Warren (1992: chapter 1), Blank (1997: chapter 1, 1999), Geeraerts (1997: chapter 3), Fritz (1998: chapter 4).

Backgrounds to contemporary work

In Europe and America much of the groundwork of semantic theory was laid by Greek and Roman grammarians, who argued at length about the arbitrariness or naturalness of meaning–form pairs, homonymy and polysemy, and by philosophers and logicians especially from the seventeenth century on, who focused on the nature of reference. Likewise, the nature of the lexicon was discussed by dictionary makers, especially from the eighteenth century on. In the nineteenth century the work on language families that led to comparative Indo-European linguistics focused on sound correspondences and plausible sound change, but crucially required a notion of cognate meaning and of plausible meaning changes as well, and triggered the development of more sophisticated views of semantic change. This is particularly true of the major comparative dictionaries that arose out of this work, much of it in the Neogrammarian tradition, among them Pokorny (1959/69), The Oxford English Dictionary (1989; the first volume appeared in 1884), Wartburg (1928–66).