Historical Development of Word Meaning – Semantic Change - Контрольная работа

Hock 1991: 280). These rules are known as phonology and morphology. As a consequence, the meaning of a word can be conveyed in an economical way by using a limited set of speech sounds. These speech sounds range between approximately 25 and 125. Here, the lexicon and the rules of syntax come into play: These two make it possible that infinity of possible sentences can be produced. So it is the economy and the conventional nature of the building blocks and their rules for combination that make it possible for humans to communicate. Yet at this point a problem arises: The economy and the conventional nature of the English language that have been praised before, are also responsible for the fact that the number of meanings that one wants to convey without having an ambiguous expression is indeed limited. Thus, a single phonetic expression (which I will analyze in detail in the following example) can actually have a number of different meanings. They can either be quite close to each other concerning their meaning or they can have completely unrelated meanings. These different shades of meaning or the completely unrelated meanings depend on the linguistic, the social and on the cultural context. The following example is simply meant to be a lead-in to the great variety of phenomena the historical development of word meaning has caused. It illustrates in how far one single sentence can be understood in different ways. Starting from here, one will understand how much word meaning has developed. History should be studied because it is essential to individuals and to society, and because it harbors beauty. There are many ways to discuss the real functions of the subject-as there are many different historical talents and many different paths to historical meaning. All definitions of historys utility, however, rely on two fundamental facts. History Helps Us Understand People and Societies In the first place, history offers a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave. Understanding the operations of people and societies is difficult, though a number of disciplines make the attempt. An exclusive reliance on current data would needlessly handicap our efforts. How can we evaluate war if the nation is at peace-unless we use historical materials? How can we understand genius, the influence of technological innovation, or the role that beliefs play in shaping family life, if we dont use what we know about experiences in the past? Some social scientists attempt to formulate laws or theories about human behavior. But even these recourses depend on historical information, except for in limited, often artificial cases in which experiments can be devised to determine how people act. Major aspects of a societys operation, like mass elections, missionary activities, or military alliances, cannot be set up as precise experiments. Consequently, history must serve, however imperfectly, as our laboratory, and data from the past must serve as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to figure out why our complex species behaves as it does in societal settings. This, fundamentally, is why we cannot stay away from history: it offers the only extensive evidential base for the contemplation and analysis of how societies function, and people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives. History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Be The second reason history is inescapable as a subject of serious study follows closely on the first. The past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know why something happened-whether a shift in political party dominance in the American Congress, a major change in the teenage suicide rate, or a war in the Balkans or the Middle East-we have to look for factors that took shape earlier. Sometimes fairly recent history will suffice to explain a major development, but often we need to look further back to identify the causes of change. Only through studying history can we grasp how things change; only through history can we begin to comprehend the factors that cause change; and only through history can we understand what elements of an institution or a society persist despite change. The importance of history in explaining and understanding change in human behavior is no mere abstraction. Take an important human phenomenon such as alcoholism. Through biological experiments scientists have identified specific genes that seem to cause a proclivity toward alcohol addiction in some individuals. This is a notable advance. But alcoholism, as a social reality, has a history: rates of alcoholism have risen and fallen, and they have varied from one group to the next. Attitudes and policies about alcoholism have also changed and varied. History is indispensable to understanding why such changes occur. And in many ways historical analysis is a more challenging kind of exploration than genetic experimentation. Histo