Understanding Sign Language: Semiotics and Semantic Change
The Sign Language
Verbal language consists of a special type of symbol: the sign language. According to Saussure, it is an inseparable unit with two levels: the signifier or expression and the signified or content. Besides being so composed, it is characterized by the following features:
- Arbitrariness: The relationship between signifier and signified is unmotivated, i.e., a product of human will.
- Conventionality: Users of the same language must accept the signs it contains, whose values have been agreed upon during their history.
- Immutability (synchronically at the specified time): No speaker can voluntarily change the value of a sign because it runs the risk of not being understood. This trait is due to its conventionality.
- Mutability (diachronically over a period of time): Over time, the signs may change in form and content.
- Doubly articulated: Any message can be decomposed into minimal units of meaning, morphemes, which constitute the first articulation. These, in turn, support a second joint, i.e., can be segmented into smaller units without meaning: the phonemes. These minimal units, despite having no meaning, allow us to construct an infinite number of complete messages. Thus, a limited number of phonemes can build an unlimited number of texts.
Semantic and Lexical Changes
Words, like living beings, may undergo changes over time in form and in meaning. This is what is addressed in this section.
Denotation and Connotation
We talk about denotation when a word has a meaning that matches the entire linguistic community. Next, we speak of connotation, or the action that will involve the word, besides its own or specific meaning, one or more others by association.
Types of Connotation:
- Generalized: The connotative meaning is known by most speakers. Sometimes it may become more common than the denotative meaning itself. Blaze, which is used primarily in the sense of malicious or fatal, before the meaning of left.
- Individual: It is the added significance that a particular individual brings to a word. They are critical in literary circles.
Semantic Change and Lexical Change
We understand semantic change as any permanent change of meaning in words. This change may be due to many reasons, extralinguistic. Semantic changes occur due to mechanisms such as metaphor.
Metaphor: The metaphor is the change in meanings between two words that have lexical similarity.
Lexical Change: A change is altering a significant for several reasons: taboo, euphemism, or folk etymology.
- Taboo: A taboo is any word whose use is not recommended for being socially frowned upon and having negative connotations. Instead, there is usually called euphemisms, by which we avoid the term prestige. The euphemistic substitution affects basically four groups of words: those referring to sex, some referred to beliefs, races and professions with an unsocial value, and those relating to diseases and death.
- Popular Etymology: Popular etymology is a usual form of confusion in people with poor language skills, which they attribute to a wrong word origins. The two lexemes associated speaker because its signifiers are similar.