Universals in Semantic Change: Lexical Diffusion and Biological Bases
语义变化的共性：词汇扩散与生物基础
Mieko Ogura

Abstract 摘要
ABSTRACT A great deal of scholarship over the last two centuries has gone into phonological change. With respect to meaning, our understanding is much more obscure. There is not nearly the kind of orderly knowledge on semantic change as there is on phonological change.

The important line of cross-linguistic research that has opened up new perspectives is on how humans categorize the color continuum. Berlin & Kay (1991), Kay (1975), Kay & McDaniel (1978) and Kay, Berlin &Merrifield (1991) have examined the implication of the results for language variation and change. Investigations in this area have revealed some basic tendencies in the color vocabulary of a wide diversity of languages, drawn material from cultures that range from the very simple to the highly technological. Furthermore, the categorization data are directly related to neurophysiologic properties of the visual system. Research along this line, where attention is given to niversal tendencies as well as to their biological bases, offers the best clue toward understanding how semantic change actually takes place.

Williams (1976) pursues this line of research in the transfer of a lexeme from one sensory modality to another, one of the most common types of metaphoric transfer in all languages, drawing very similar evidence from English, Indo-European cognates and Japanese. Traugott (1986, 1987, 1989, 1995), Traugott & Dasher (1987), and Traugott & Ko_nig (1991) explore the general tendency toward greater subjectivity in presuppositional terms, modal auxiliaries and adverbs in Englsih, and speech act verbs in English and Japanese.

However, as Traugott (1987) states, semantic change very rarely applies to items of the same lexical field at the same time, and thus it is impossible to predict either when that will occur, or which lexical item in a given field will change and which will not. Our perspective on this area has been broadened by considering the question within a perspective of lexical diffusion, a process which is implemented in a manner that is lexically gradual, diffusing across the lexicon (Wang 1969, 1976, 1979, 1983a, b, 1987).

In all cases of lexical diffusion, we find leaders and laggers among the words, which raises the issue of what factors determine these changes. One such factor is word frequency. How the interaction between word frequency and environments determines the schedules has been demonstrated in phonological change, e.g., diatone formation in English (Philips 1983), shortening of EModE u# (Ogura 1987, Chapter 5), the early stages of the acquisition of the vowels and consonants in English and German by a bilingual child (Ogura 1990, Chapter 6.) and vowel merger in Shanghai (Shen 1990), in morphological change, e.g., the development of –s in the third person singular present indicative in English (Orgura & Wang 1996), and in syntactic change, e.g., the development of negation in English (Tottie 1991), grammaticalization processes in To’aba’ita (Lichtenberk 1991) and the development of periphrastic do in English (Ogura 1993).

In the present study, we will proceed with Williams’ and Traugott’s investigations, and examine how the interplay of word frequency and environments determines the leaders and laggers in the metaphoric transfer of sensory terms in English, Japanese and Chinese, and in the development of speech act verbs in English and Japanese and modal auxiliaries in English. Furthermore, we will explore the biological bases that underlie these changes.