Browsing by Author "Pakkala, Katri"

This paper studies semantic changes within a semantic field of English. The data consists of ten words which form five female - male word pairs. The study is largely based on Adrienne Lehrer’s theory according to which semantically related words are more likely to undergo parallel semantic changes than semantically unrelated ones because of their semantic relationships. The aim of the study is to answer the following research questions: what types of semantic changes have taken place within the semantic field, have the meanings gone through changes which could be considered to be parallel, is it possible to make any generalisations based on the findings of the analysis and are there any differences between how words referring to women have changed as opposed to words referring to men. The data consists of ten English nouns denoting humans, and their meanings: girl, boy, mistress, master, lady, gentleman, woman, man, madam and sir. All of the meanings have been taken from the Oxford English Dictionary. The meanings have been analysed based on the categorisation presented in the paper, based on Lyle Campbell’s theory. The analysis shows that all word pairs have parallel semantic changes, in varying degrees. Due to the restricted size of the data, it is not possible to make generalisations about semantic change as a whole, but some comments can be made about the semantic field in question. The semantic changes of female and male words differ somewhat. For example, degeneration affects female words more frequently, as is proposed in the theory section of the study. Another point that can be made is that the female words refer solely to women, with only exception, whereas the male words can refer to men, women or both