Regularity in Semantic Change (review)

In the volume under consideration here, Elizabeth Closs Traugott, well known for her contributions to the study of grammaticalization and historical syntax, joins forces with Richard B. Dasher, a specialist in Asian languages, to investigate a hitherto generally neglected area of language change. The ‘regularity’ of the title is not the regularity of Neogrammarian views of sound change (as the authors explicitly note in the preface), but rather a regularity defined as ‘typical change, or frequent replication across time and across languages’ (xi). The book is therefore intended to defend the idea that ‘there are predictable paths for semantic change across different conceptual structures and domains of language function’ (1).

After the obligatory front matter, the volume proper begins with a chapter titled ‘The framework’ (1–50), which generally concentrates on outlining ‘the assumptions and claims of the Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC)’ (49). According to this theory, ‘historically there is a path from … pragmatically polysemous meanings … to new semantically polysemous meanings’ (35). This claim is not completely original to T&D; they note that it is ‘foreshadowed by some brief and often hesitant statements made in the early 1970s’ (35) by scholars like Dwight Bolinger, Michael Geis, and Arnold Zwicky. A number of other issues are discussed in this chapter, ranging from mechanisms of semantic change to child vs. adult language acquisition and semantic change and the nature of the evidence for semantic change.

Ch. 2, ‘Prior and current work on semantic change’ (51–104), reviews earlier approaches to semantic change, as well as some more contemporary work, beginning with that of Michel Bréal and also touching on the work of scholars like Antoine Meillet and Ferdinand de Saussure. The concept of ‘semantic field’ is discussed at length, before the authors turn to what they see as ‘contemporary theoretical issues in work on semantic change that are particularly relevant to this book’ (75), including metaphor, metonymy and invited inference, unidirectionality in grammaticalization, and subjectification and inter-subjectification. The chapter concludes with a look at historical pragmatics, concentrating largely on proposals made by Laurence Horn.

The next four chapters offer detailed case studies in support of their theoretical claims. Ch. 3, ‘The development of modal verbs’ (105–51), focuses generally on evidence from English, although data from Chinese is also briefly examined. This chapter largely confirms the results of earlier studies in this domain; the authors conclude, for instance, that deontic modals (i.e. modals having to do with ‘obligation or compulsion’ (106)) tend to develop epistemic meanings (i.e. meanings ‘largely concerned with knowledge and belief’ (106)), but not vice versa. Ch. 4, ‘The development of adverbials with discourse marker function’ (152–89), follows the same general pattern; data from English is examined at length, with a short discussion of material from an Asian language, in this case Japanese. Here the authors conclude that ‘as in the case of modals, epistemic adverbs and particles arise out of nonepistemic ones’ (187). Ch. 5, ‘The development of performative verbs and constructions’ (190–225), turns to verbal constructions, and also looks at the possible role of cultural norms in such developments. The final case study, Ch. 6, looks at ‘The development of social deictics’ (226–78), for example, T-V pronouns, parentheticals, sentence adverbials, and much more well-developed systems in languages like Korean and Japanese. Ch. 7, ‘Conclusion’ (279–85), sums up the work and offers some suggestions for future research. The volume concludes with lists of primary and secondary references and various indices.

A few miscellaneous criticisms should be offered. While the volume itself is generally well-produced, with only a handful of misprints in the English sections, as well as some misplaced figures, there are some other errors that raise red flags. For instance, in the table of ‘Approximate stages in the history of English’ (xiii–xiv), the years 800–1000 and 1300–1370 are omitted, leaving the...