Appropriation, Gentrification, Colonisation: Newly Synonymous?

Abstract

Appropriation, gentrification, and colonisation originated as precise technical terms. This study analyses examples of each word in recent mainstream online news texts, and demonstrates that all three have undergone semantic change, particularly metaphorisation and generalisation (cf. Geeraerts [2010: 26]). Language users tend to select and emphasise shared semantic features of each, to the exclusion of other semantic features, such that the terms are in some circumstances, for many language users, interchangeable. I provide factual evidence (cf. Wallis [2019]) or attestations (cf. Zgusta [1971]) of these terms’ newly emerging semantic relationships, and I present evidence for decolonisation as a preferred contradictory antonym to all three (cf. Murphy [2010]). I analyse examples in which language users actively and critically employ these terms alongside each other, defining or negotiating meanings of each; and I explore possibilities for alternation in some shared attested syntagmatic combinations, such as the appropriation, gentrification, or (de)colonisation of history. I discuss mechanisms of change, with reference to the philological tradition (Sperber [1923], [1938]; Nerlich [1992]), structuralism (Ullmann [1963]), and cognitive semantics (Blank [1999]), and propose a process whereby affective charge motivates semantic generalisation in precise technical vocabulary when it begins to be used in contentious, fraught public debate.