Synaesthetic adjectives: A possible law of semantic change

要旨

The century-old failure of historical linguistics to discover regularities of semantic change comparable to those in phonological change, as described by Grassmann or Grimm, has forced us to entertain as ‘semantic laws’ proposals that express mere tendencies, or are so restricted to a particular time, language, or narrow inventory, that the ‘law’ is indistinguishable from a description of a discrete historical event. But in the lexical field of English adjectives referring to sensory experience, there has been a continuing semantic change so regular, so enduring, and so inclusive that its description may be the strongest generalization in diachronic semantics reported for English or any other language. On the basis of very similar evidence from Indo-European cognates and from Japanese, the possibility exists that the regularity described here might characterize more than just these languages. It qualifies as a testable hypothesis in regard to future semantic change in any language.

主題