Wu, Xiaojing
Abstract：The English word midwife has undergone the 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 took at least more than 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 Antonym-as-Head (a process of compounding), the Return Effects (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 shift from man/male midwife1 to man/male midwife2 makes simpler and easier the processes of encoding and decoding.
Key Words: Antonym-as-Head, semantic broadening, semantic combination, Return Effect, Superonym-as-Head
Conference paper announced on Nov. 24, 2007.
Originally uploaded (Nov. 30, 2007) to http://www.linguaroom.com/ , which will expire soon.
The article itself will be carried on Tamkang Studies of Foreign Languages and Literatures, 2008 (12).
