Chapter 35 . Semantic change

35.1 Preliminaries This chapter discusses how linguistic expressions may change their meaning over time. Actually the scope is a bit more limited than that, in the sense that here we will only see examples of how words  e.g. silly, very  change their meaning. The term 'linguistic expressions' includes words, but also larger grammatical constructions. Grammatical constructions  e.g. what in present-day English (PDE) are the BE going to + infinitive and WILL + infinitive future tense constructions, as in It's going to/will rain tomorrow  may also change their meaning. Indeed, these two future tense constructions started out with the verbs GO and WILL used in their primitive sense. In the case of GO this was the motion meaning, which it still often has in PDE. The old sense of WILL has almost completely disappeared: it used to mean something like 'want, desire'. One may wonder why the developments that gave rise to these two future tense constructions are seen as semantic changes in constructions, as opposed to meaning changes in the single words go and will. To see that what is involved is actually a change in grammatical construction, consider that originally both these verbs would not be combined with infinitives, see I am going to London, I will ('want') more silver). Over time, it became possible to combine them with infinitives. Now in order to account for these grammatical facts it is not sufficient to think of the changes as having affected only the verbs go and will. (Another reason why we treat these developments as examples of grammatical change is that many linguists consider future tense marking as part of the grammar of a language.) The exact way in which both of these constructions developed into future tense constructions will be discussed in chapter 36, on grammatical change. In other words, while here we are concerned with lexical semantic change, one of the topics of the next chapter will be grammatical semantic change. The fact that we discuss these two levels of change in different chapters should not be taken to mean that the causes and mechanisms involved are completely different: there is actually a lot of overlap. We will see, for instance, that the development of very (from an adjective meaning 'true' to the intensifying meaning it carries today) and the trajectory that led to (especially certain uses of) WILL + infinitive both involve …