5. Extralinguistic causes of semantic change

The extralinguistic causes are determined by the social nature of the language In other words, extralinguistic causes of semantic change are connected with the development of the human mind. Languages are powerfully affected by social, political, economic, cultural and technical change. The influence of those factors upon linguistic phenomena is studied by sociolinguistics. It shows that social factors can influence even structural features of linguistic units (terms of science). The new inventions, new concepts and the phenomena should be named. There are two ways of formation of names for these concepts (понятий) and objects: creation of new words by word-formation and loan of the foreign. However, one more way of filling of such blanks of the dictionary is an application of already available words to new concepts.

EXAMPLES

1. The word bikini may be taken as an example. Bikini, a very scanty two-piece bathing suit worn by women, is named after Bikini atoll in the Western Pacific. But it was connected with the atomic bomb tests by the US in the Bikini atoll. Thus it was based on association.

2. A word «mill» "a building in which corn is ground into flour" when the first cotton-mills have appeared to England it was added absolutely new meaning «textile factory». Both word meanings was connected with the water and the definition should be an establishment using water power to produce certain goods»

3.The first meaning carriage «a vehicle drawn by horses» + «a railway car» when the first railways appeared.Both objects was connected with idea of travel and their work was connected with transportation of passengers.

5. Homonymy. Types of homonyms. Sources of homonyms.

Homonyms -words identical in sound form but different in meaning.

Types:

1. Perfect homonyms are words identical both in spelling and in sound-form but different in meaning (case- something that has happened, case- a box, a container)

2. Homographs are words identical in spelling, but different both in their sound-form and meaning (bow=/bou/ and bow /bau/: tear /tie/ and tear /teз/ )

3. Homophones are words identical in sound-form but different both in spelling and meaning (sea- to see, son and sun).

Sources:

1. phonetic change- less or more words, which were formerly pronounced differently, may develop identical sound forms and thus become homonyms. “Night” and “knight”, for instance, were not homonyms in Old English (O.E.) as the initial “k” in the second word was pronounced.

2. borrowing - group of homonyms “rite n – to write – right adj.” The second and third words are of native origin, whereas “rite” is Latin borrowing (Latin “ritus”); “bank “ n (“a shore”) is a native word, and bank n (a financial institution) is an Italian borrowing.

3. Word building also contributes significantly to the growth of homonymy,( значительно способствует росту омонимии) the most important type of it being conversion. Such pairs of words as “comb” n – “comb” v; “pale” adj. – “pale” v; “make” v – “make” n, etc. are numerous in vocabulary. Homonyms of this type refer to different categories of parts of speech and called lexico-grammatical homonyms.

4. Shortening is a further type of word-building, which increases the number of homonyms. For example “fan” (an enthusiastic admirer of some sportsmen, actor, singer, etc.) is a shortening produced from “fanatic” [f nætik]. Its homonym is a Latin borrowing “fan” – an element for waving and produce some cool wind.

5. split polysemy - “spring” means 1) The act of springing, leap; 2) A place, where a steam of water comes up out to the sky; 3) A season of the year.