Abstract: The English word midwife has undergone a process of semantic broadening, i.e., a shift from midwife1 (a woman who helps women in childbirth) to midwife2 (a person who helps women in childbirth). This change has lasted more than at least four hundred years. That men began to “help women in childbirth” can be considered as the external cause. This paper shows that the important factors which constitute the internal cause include Antonymic Head Rule (a rule of compounding), Elemental Return (a type of reanalysis), etc. This paper also shows that the following factor should be another cause inside language for the change. That is, the processes of encoding and decoding man/male midwife are made simpler and easier by the shift from man/male midwife1 to man/male midwife2 .
Key Words: Antonymic Head Rule, semantic broadening, semantic combination, Elemental Return, Superonymic Head Rule
Wu, Xiaojing. 2007. The internal causes of the semantic broadening of widwife. conference paper.
3 comments:
I compared the revised version with the original one, the latter might be better for Antonym-as-Head is more easily understandable than Antonymic Head Rule. Antonym-as-head is a process, not a rule. so that is a mistranslation if a process in put into "rule".
thank you very much. i'll post the early version of translation.
best regards,
wu
Thanks for writing this.
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