. Amelioration is a type of semantic change that elevates a word's meaning over time, so that a word that previously had a negative meaning develops a positive one. Have you seen my grandmother? This language has two cognate sets of basic adverbial elevational roots, which are classified in the grammar as topographic. The first set, which in the grammar is called /u/-forms based on their stem vowel, is given in the lower part of Table 11. There are languages in which all distance-based deictics can be combined with all elevationals. Nordquist, Richard. Woldemariam, H. (2001). A phrase such as 'he has a bad attitude' can become shortened to 'he has an attitude', showing that the word has gained a negative meaning. Bachelors thesis, Australian National University, Canberra. Nie wieder prokastinieren mit unseren Lernerinnerungen. Palmer, B. There are a few languages in which elevational demonstratives with the meaning UP express the temporal meaning future, whereas the DOWN demonstratives encode past. These areas are the New Guinea Highlands, the Himalayas, the Ethiopian Highlands and the Eastern Caucasus. Silly. 2 - An example of semantic broadening is 'Jazz.'. 177186). Which is an example of a potential psychological factor? Gurin, V. (2015). If the combination is tight such that the items are synchronically monomorphemic, this leads to the deceptive impression that the elevational component is also deictic. An example of alinguistic cause would be linguistic analogy - a process where when a word gets a new meaning, so does its synonyms. Another important factor to keep in mind when investigating the meaning of elevational demonstratives is scale or domain of use. The word knight is a good example of this semantic phenomenon. As I already explained, it is sound to expect the absolute use to be the default such that the interpretation of down there in (17) is normally understood in relation to the position of the speaker and not some other ground object because of gravity. The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. night downward). The word, 'engine', was originally used to mean any war machine. Anthropol. Because other forms need further research they will only be mentioned in passing. For example, demonstratives in the Athabaskan language Tanacross (Alaska) morphologically and semantically combine deictic meaning (distality) with specific topographic and elevational morphemes. By contrast, in Dyirbal they can also be added to verbs to form verbs of motion (Dixon, 1972, pp. For instance, terms that express ACROSS can be topographic and refer to locations across a valley at the same altitude of the opposite mountain as in Yakkha (12), or across the river as in Tanacross (13). (2020, August 27). Furthermore, a number of languages spoken on volcanic islands of Southeast Asia have elevational demonstratives. By the 13th century, the meaning of the word had changed to 'a woman of superior position in society'. Hafniensia 50, 129160. The two systems (general and topographic) as portrayed so far are idealized prototypes. Demonstratives: a cross-linguistic typology. Deixis and demonstratives, in An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, Vol.
