Multiple Meaning and Change of Meaning in English

Abstract

Many scholars have attempted to classify changes in meaning,' but few have written persuasively of either the fundamental causes or the processes of semantic change.2 The great 19th-century linguists tried to explain already accomplished results both in the form and the meaning of words. The linguistic geographers have now taught us that neither phonetic change nor semantic change can be understood without observing the process as well as the result; but their work has modified chiefly the concept of phonetic change. One could assume that most shifts of sense in words referring to things, e.g. car, hose, fee, should be explained by the social historian; and that most changes of words referring to qualities, states of mind, or actions dependent on feelings, e.g. silly, passion, to want, might be left to the psychologist. Such an abnegation would impoverish linguistic studies. Linguistic geography has clearly shown that, however arbitrarily form may be attached to sense, sound and sense are constantly interfering with each other in unexpected ways, as in folk-etymology and in the conflict of homonyms. In this paper I wish to discuss, not the causes of semantic change, but what I believe to be a neglected aspect of the process of change, the relation of obsolescence of meaning to multiple meaning. It is now well recognized that homonyms have mutually disturbing effects and that one of two homonyms may even disappear from a dialect because of a conflict in sense with the other.3 But if this is true of words historically distinct, it ought to be equally true of one word which in the course of time develops contradictory senses. Speakers who are not etymologists have no means of knowing that mad 'crazy' and mad 'angry' were historically one word, while light 'levis' and light 'lucidus' were historically two.4 Only the literate conscious of spelling realize that the two senses of [stret] 'direct' and 'narrow' represent two historically different words straight (OE