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Most droughts go unnamed. At the time they are happening, they are generally referred to simply as “the drought.” After the fact, they are typically designated by a year or run of years rather than by a name: 1927–29, for instance. But in recent decades, proper names have increasingly been bestowed on droughts in southeast Australia in an informal although widely accepted practice. Examples include the Federation Drought, the World War II Drought, the Millennium Drought and, most recently, the Tinderbox Drought. This paper positions the practice of naming droughts within a longer history of naming weather extremes. It examines the implications of the naming practice for the investigation of droughts as complex objects of interdisciplinary knowledge that call for analysis from across the sciences, social sciences and humanities. And it considers the qualities and meanings attributed to the drought of 2017-19 by the name “Tinderbox.” Using the word “tinderbox” to describe environmental conditions has been criticised for naturalizing landscape flammability and so effacing human agency. But in fact the name “Tinderbox Drought” potentially enacts a semantic reversal that allows human-caused climate change to be reassociated discursively with recent and future drought events.

Copyright of Journal of Educational Studies (1673-1298) is the property of Journal of Educational Studies Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

It is argued that Arm. zowr ‘vain’ is the derivational basis of zroyc‘ ‘talk’ with a semantic shift from ‘idle talk’ to ‘talk’. -oyc‘ may be a case-form of a decasuative derivative of the underlying nominal zowr, i.e., *zroy → *zroyk‘, zroyc‘.

Studying the precise meanings and grasping the vocabulary of a text is an essential aspect of research in specialized fields like Semantics. Semantics, traditionally, examines how meanings have evolved, perceiving human language as a dynamic and continuous entity. This study delves into the semantics of the term "al-Amr" in the Quran through a historical-descriptive method, exploring the interconnected meanings and contexts of the term using the axes of substitution and co-occurrence. The findings suggest that the primary significance of "al-Amr" primarily revolves around work and command, with other meanings like subject, consultation, and advice identified as secondary meanings during the Jahiliyyah era. This term, along with its variations, is found 249 times in the Quran, with 78 occurrences in singular form, primarily appearing nominally and frequently co-occurring with the words "Allah and al-Rabb." In the Quran, "al-Amr" is a word with multiple meanings, encompassing 19 semantic facets, with twelve of these aspects achieving consensus. Some of its interpretations include "command, victory, punishment, sin, killing, conquest of Mecca, resurrection, revelation, denial, promise, Jesus son of Mary, decree, circumstance, drowning, abundance, death, consultation, caution, and fertility." The term "al-Amr" in the Quran can be categorized into three groups: matters concerning God, humans, or Satan, with the majority of occurrences of the word "al-Amr" being linked to God. Issues related to "those in authority and enjoining good" pertain to humans, while matters associated with Satan are connected to indecency and denial. When a matter is attributed to God, it signifies the negation of material objects, whereas when attributed to a creation, it denotes gradual existence within temporal and spatial constraints. When paired with the verbs "Qudia, Ata, and Jaa," it indicates punishment and retribution, and when paired with "Wabal" and the verb "Dhaq," it signifies sin and disbelief. Linking a command with providence conveys the concept of divine will and decree, and its correlation with the act of sending down implies revelation. Synonyms for al-Amr in the Quran include "Ahida and Wasiya," where, due to the necessity of implementation, these matters are used interchangeably with commands.

The brief historical overview comprises an account of classical crowd theories and their contemporary metamorphoses to contextualize the thematic section of the journal. Regarding the proverbial "age of the crowd" of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, a variety of attempts of conceptualization proved controversial but productive. Hyppolite Taine, Scipio Sighele, or Gustave Le Bon approached the phenomenon dominantly in psychological terms foregrounding the destructive elements of mass dynamics. In the interwar period, however, a first wave of differentiation might be detected, insofar as younger academic sub-disciplines, i.e., social statistics, seek to grasp the crowd as a structure with its intricate and partly paradoxical qualities. In recent scholarship, however, the diversification of the concept seems to have become even more complex: by shifting the focus from the "object crowd" to the "subject crowd", descriptions of the multitude, the network, the swarm, or the assembly reflect the need to think of the crowd as an autonomous agency with emancipatory potentials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the article is to demonstrate the role of the cultural context in historical linguistics research. In the first part, the author discusses the C.S. Lewis’ concept of highlighting the danger of being inspired by the dictionary definitions in works concerning historical linguistics. In the second part, presented are the examples of works by historians and historical linguists who had examined the terminology of the political system and the key concepts of the political discourse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The third part shows the possibilities of applying theories and methods of cultural cognition to similar research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the semantics of the French and Spanish prepositions en from the point of view of diachrony. We focus on the spatial variation of their usage in both languages. Our methodological approach is based on a corpus analysis. We draw on comparable ancient texts and analyze some semantic categories that are fundamental for the spatial description. Our results reveal a fairly active evolution of prepositions with increases and decreases of usage where we did not expect them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the ‘Language of Mechanisation’ datasets with examples of re-use in visualisations and analysis. These reusable CSV files, published on the British Library’s Research Repository, contain automatically-transcribed text from 19th century British newspaper articles. Volunteers on the Zooniverse crowdsourcing platform took part in tasks that asked ‘How did the word x change over time and place?’ They annotated articles with pre-selected meanings (senses) for the words coach, car, trolley and bike. The datasets can support scholarship on a range of historical and linguistic research areas, including research on crowdsourcing and online volunteering behaviours, data processing and data visualisations methodologies.

This paper presents the historical semantics approach as a method for social history. While usually understood either as a form of conceptual and intellectual history of ideas or as a subdiscipline of philology and digital humanities, the authors of this article use historical semantics to address the way historians read their sources. The approach is presented as a necessary extension of historical methodology: Historians need to distrust their own common sense, depart from presupposed analytical categories and concepts, and base their interpretative work on the emic vocabulary of the societies under examination and on the document(s) forming the material legacy of the past. By linking words to historical and potential situations of language use, the historical semantics approach reveals the social taxonomies and inherent power relations between the dominant and the dominated. The paper outlines the guiding principles and methodological implications of this approach before presenting four concise vignettes illustrating the analytical potential and methodological diversity of the approach based on concrete case studies.

In Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion, a French Arthurian romance written by Chrétien de Troyes around 1180, the protagonist finds three hundred captive maidens forced to work on silk fabrics in a cursed castle and complaining about their insufficient remuneration. According to the Gesta Abbatum Trudoniensum, a twelfth-century chronicle of the Abbey of Sint-Truiden (Limburg, Flanders), hired weavers were forced by domanial officers – most probably their employers – to pull a false ship from Kornelimünster near Aachen to Sint-Truiden in 1133. In this article, the two mentioned texts are examined using semantic methods to understand the logics behind the combination of coercion and remuneration in textile labour. The action phrases are analysed, as are the lexical fields of poverty and freedom. The weavers in the Gesta Abbatum Trudoniensum seemed to have the status of hired servants (mercennarius), which implied temporary servitude for the duration of a contract. In Yvain, the insufficient wage of the weaving maidens is presented as chicanery employed to force them to work more. In both texts, poverty is conceptualised in a social, economic, legal, and political sense at once.

The idea for the project presented in this volume began with an encounter and a discovery. When we – a medievalist and a sinologist – first met in autumn 2017, we realised that although we came from different disciplines and worked on different regions and time periods, we were struggling with the same problem: As historians working on slaving practices in the Venetian empire (14th–16th centuries) respectively servitude in late imperial China (15th–19th centuries), we were both spending much of our time explaining the contextual differences and similarities between the social configurations we were studying to the broader community of social, labour, and global historians. We both felt that our objects of study did not fit well within the much-debated subfield of “free and unfree labour”, and that the postcolonial critiques and the so-called global turn in history did not solve the conceptual problem we were facing. Integrating a medieval or Chinese case study into a conference panel or a special journal issue on household service or slavery helped to enlarge the horizon of the historiographical debates on the history of unfree labour relations, but the umbrella terms of these subfields of study and the limited conceptual references available did little to help us understand and properly convey the social taxonomies shaping the power relations we were studying.

This case study of historical semantics examines an ancient Egyptian term related to dependency and dependent labour, ‘nemeh’, along with its varied (and seemingly paradoxical) proposed translations, ranging from ‘orphan’ to ‘citizen’, from ‘deprived person’ to ‘free man’. This contribution considers nemeh through historical semantics, investigating the shared thematic background among concepts and lexical meanings which appear contradictory to modern historians and philologists – but were not so in their original social context.

The aim of this paper is to analyse written records associated with the establishment of bonds between military orders as territorial lords and Muslims as settlers in the Christian kingdoms of medieval Iberia. These records are usually known as cartas de población or population charters and were issued in the context of the settlement of populations in a given area. Methods derived from historical semantics are applied to these texts, and the analysis explores the ways in which the existing asymmetrical power relationships were reflected not only in the contents of the charters but also in the grammar and expressions used to formulate them.

Copyright of Historische Zeitschrift is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Historia y Politica: Ideas, Procesos y Movimientos Sociales is the property of Departamento De Historia del Pensamiento y de los Moviemientos Sociales y Politicos (Madrid) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Using an onomasiological, document-centred historical semantic approach, this paper focuses on the reconfiguration of labour in Italian society during the 1970s and 1980s. This is analysed both at the level of discourse and at the level of the performative changes that the development of a new semantics of labour, coercion, and freedom entailed. At the end of the 1970s, with the onset of the post-boom crisis, the rejection of regulated labour and the theorisation of its liberation through precarisation and flexibilisation became part of a cultural and social semantics for the young generation of workers entering the wage labour system. Their motto was "freeing labour to free life from labour". Through both a quantitative and qualitative historical semantic analysis of the sources, this contribution examines the medium- and long-term impacts of this reconfiguration on the practices of regulated and controlled wage labour. It also aims to offer an initial reflection on the use of the historical semantic approach for contemporary history and its possible - or rather, necessary - differentiation from other forms of discourse analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution uses a set of documents dealing with the case of a fugitive slave named Samuel Johannes in Upper Lusatia in 1754 to demonstrate the merits of a historical semantics-inspired approach. Not only does the studied case present evidence of the extension of colonial slaveries into the Holy Roman Empire, it also provides a snapshot of the language of subservience spoken in mid-eighteenth-century Germany. By revealing a striking indifference towards defining and explaining categorisations of dependency, the sources analysed here defy simple juxtapositions like 'enslaved' versus 'free'. Labels like 'slave', 'serf ', or 'Moor' were employed to enforce and legitimise authority and proprietorial claims over Samuel Johannes. But these labels had to be constantly translated into actual practices and filled with meaning, as they did not readily convert into established, closely circumscribed positions or categories of status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study of historical semantics examines an ancient Egyptian term related to dependency and dependent labour, 'nemeh', along with its varied (and seemingly paradoxical) proposed translations, ranging from 'orphan' to 'citizen', from 'deprived person' to 'free man'. This contribution considers nemeh through historical semantics, investigating the shared thematic background among concepts and lexical meanings which appear contradictory to modern historians and philologists - but were not so in their original social context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion, a French Arthurian romance written by Chrétien de Troyes around 1180, the protagonist finds three hundred captive maidens forced to work on silk fabrics in a cursed castle and complaining about their insufficient remuneration. According to the Gesta Abbatum Trudoniensum, a twelfth-century chronicle of the Abbey of Sint-Truiden (Limburg, Flanders), hired weavers were forced by domanial officers - most probably their employers - to pull a false ship from Kornelimünster near Aachen to Sint-Truiden in 1133. In this article, the two mentioned texts are examined using semantic methods to understand the logics behind the combination of coercion and remuneration in textile labour. The action phrases are analysed, as are the lexical fields of poverty and freedom. The weavers in the Gesta Abbatum Trudoniensum seemed to have the status of hired servants (mercennarius), which implied temporary servitude for the duration of a contract. In Yvain, the insufficient wage of the weaving maidens is presented as chicanery employed to force them to work more. In both texts, poverty is conceptualised in a social, economic, legal, and political sense at once. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyse written records associated with the establishment of bonds between military orders as territorial lords and Muslims as settlers in the Christian kingdoms of medieval Iberia. These records are usually known as cartas de población or population charters and were issued in the context of the settlement of populations in a given area. Methods derived from historical semantics are applied to these texts, and the analysis explores the ways in which the existing asymmetrical power relationships were reflected not only in the contents of the charters but also in the grammar and expressions used to formulate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Ludolf Kuchenbuch, Professor emeritus at the Open University of Hagen, is presented. He discusses the approaches of Historical Semantics, including the historical microsemantics, corpus linguistics, and digital humanities. Kuchenbuch elaborates on the microsemantic analysis of historical and contemporary documents, emphasizing their significance and challenges within the realms of historical research.

This paper presents the historical semantics approach as a method for social history. While usually understood either as a form of conceptual and intellectual history of ideas or as a subdiscipline of philology and digital humanities, the authors of this article use historical semantics to address the way historians read their sources. The approach is presented as a necessary extension of historical methodology: Historians need to distrust their own common sense, depart from presupposed analytical categories and concepts, and base their interpretative work on the emic vocabulary of the societies under examination and on the document(s) forming the material legacy of the past. By linking words to historical and potential situations of language use, the historical semantics approach reveals the social taxonomies and inherent power relations between the dominant and the dominated. The paper outlines the guiding principles and methodological implications of this approach before presenting four concise vignettes illustrating the analytical potential and methodological diversity of the approach based on concrete case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic change is attested commonly in the historical development of lexicons across the world's languages. Extensive research has sought to characterize regularity in semantic change, but existing studies have typically relied on manual approaches or the analysis of a restricted set of languages. We present a large-scale computational analysis to explore regular patterns in word meaning change shared across many languages. We focus on two levels of analysis: (1) regularity in directionality, which we explore by inferring the historical direction of semantic change between a source meaning and a target meaning; (2) regularity in source-target mapping, which we explore by inferring the target meaning given a source meaning. We work with DatSemShift, the world's largest public database of semantic change that records thousands of meaning changes from over hundreds of languages. For directionality inference, we find that concreteness explains directionality in more than 70% of the attested cases of semantic change and is the strongest predictor among the alternatives including frequency and valence. For target inference, we find that a parallelogram-style analogy model based on contextual embeddings predicts the attested source-target mappings substantially better than chance and similarity-based models. Clustering the meaning pairs of semantic change reveals regular meaning shiftings between domains, such as body parts to geological formations. Our study provides an automated approach and large-scale evidence for multifaceted regularity in semantic change across languages.

There are certain linguistic phenomena of great importance in the most current semantics whose relevance can be traced, stage by stage, from the end of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century. In this article we want to focus on one of them, which is essential in diachronic semantics: the change of meaning caused by the frequent contact of words in the same context. This phenomenon is behind two fundamental concepts for the stage of semantics called "historical semantics", both for the French current of this stage and for the German one: contagion, described by Michel Bréal, and consociation, described by Hans Sperber. The central part of this work is dedicated to the description of these two concepts and their immediate repercussions. However, this phenomenon begins to be treated more frequently from the moment that Stephen Ullmann includes it in his classification of semantic changes, as a previous step to the ellipsis originated by lexical combination. It is from this classification that this type of change later reaches the cognitive studies on semantic change. Along the way, the origins of the concept have been somewhat forgotten. We hope that this article will help to recover them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The investigations of Aza A. Takho-Godi, devoted to the evolution of concepts and terms in European culture, were ahead of their time and, as it turns out today, paved the way for historical semantics, which turned out to be a kind of independent version of the "history of concepts": a direction of humanitarian thought aimed at identifying cultural, social, and political functions concepts in their historical dynamics and in relation to a wide field of cultural interactions of a particular era. The impressive results of "historical semantics" in the version of Takho-Godi are connected not only with the masterful and strictly substantiated identification of the developing conceptual core of lexemes, not only with the penetrating intuitions of the living word, but also with the vision of an absolute spiritual context in which semantic worlds are driven not by mechanical causality and not by historical chance, but by a kind of teleology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Nazi concentration and extermination camps, especially in Auschwitz, prisoners marked by utter physical and psychological exhaustion were called Muselmänner ("Mussulmen"). In recent years, based on a passing remark by Giorgio Agamben, many have taken this linguistic phenomenon to mean that Jews died as Muslims in the Holocaust. Quickly absorbed into current political theory, intellectual discourses, and discussion forums on the internet, this idea has become as widespread as widely misunderstood, all but turning Muselmann into a buzzword which may be (mis)used for anything from Jewish Islamophobia to US-American torture practices. The paper retraces the historical semantics of the German word Muselmann and discusses the possible reasons for its introduction into the language of the concentration camps. Based on the finding that the word's Orientalist implications do not sufficiently explain its use in the concentration camps and that neither guards nor prisoners employed it with the intention of turning Jews into Muslims, the paper cautions against the transfer of this word's historically specific use, developed under extreme conditions, into the heated political debates of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article develops three complementary lines of argument. It first points to the great theoretical gap that characterizes Koselleck's work: quasi-transcendental anthropology on the one hand, and historical semantics on the other. The hybrid status of historical semantics, both macro- and micro- sociological, is also specified. Secondly, the article critiques the neo-Hobbesianism implicit in Koselleck's historical ontology. Departing from Jean Baechler's anthropology, it reformulates the conceptual framework within which the initial foundational ambition could be maintained without however renewing the aporiai of the Koselleckian systematics. Finally, it asks how to connect the three M's (the meta-historical, the macro- and the micro-sociological levels). The solution focuses on the core aspects of the intermediate, macro-sociological level to make the case for a heuristic reciprocal hybridization of meta-historical anthropology, of comparative historical sociology and of the pragmatic history of historical semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article pursues two tasks. The first is to clarify the value and productivity of Williams's Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (first edition 1976, second expanded edition 1983a) for the project of Cultural Studies. This clarification is helped, I argue, by reading it alongside Vološinov's Marxism and the philosophy of language (published in Russian in 1929, translated into English in 1973). The second and related task is a speculative development of 'keywording' (or keyword analysis) based on an assessment of the limitations and potential of Williams's broad philological project for today. My argument is that Keywords initially sought to provide a historical map of changing patterns of feeling associated (primarily) with industrialization in England, and that this was sometimes in an uneasy relationship with what he would later name as the project of providing 'resources of hope'. One consequential limitation of the original work is that its historical perspective was built on semantic examples provided by the OED (or to give it its original title, the Oxford new English dictionary on historical principles) and supplemented with Williams's literary studies. My suggestion is that Cultural Studies can develop (and has, to some degree, already developed) Williams's Keywords project without it being centred on literature or beholden to the OED. This would mean treating the project less as an exemplary milestone or methodology and more as an unfinished and unfinishable project whose methodology is critically dynamic: in other words, to move from Keywords to 'keywording' requires altering Williams's methodology. In conclusion I speculate about the ways in which the historical aims of keywording could be expanded to make it more conducive to providing 'useable histories' and semantic counter-narratives, while also pursuing the radical contextualism of Vološinov and Bakhtin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study is dedicated to describing the historical development of the word family of usura (which is constituted by usura, usurar, usurário, usureiro, usurável, usurento, usuroso, usurador, zura, zuraco e usurariamente) in the Portuguese language. It takes as a basis for its diachronic and comparative approach the integration of dialectal data and online posts with a variety of other data sources in several Romance languages and in the English language. These sources constitute its corpus and the foundation which underpins the elucidation of borrowing and neology processes. It examines the etymology of this lexical family via the gradual analysis of semantic and morphological changes in each word, which is supported by textual evidence for such phenomena. Being defined from an interfacial standpoint to Morphology, Semantics, and the Lexicon, it incorporates into the resultant etymological description the discussion of themes such as word formation, the synonymy of co-radical words, affix synonymy, and morpho-lexical variation and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Prace Jezykoznawcze is the property of University of Warmia & Mazury in Olsztyn and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of WestEnd is the property of Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article addresses the question of zongjiao as a modern translation for the Western term "religion." Neither criticizing nor defending its application, it instead takes for granted the Western concept's adoption and argues that the general acceptance of the newly coined binome and its semantics can be best understood through a genealogical approach that includes global, especially Western, as much as local Chinese roots and discourses. The article builds on recent scholarship and adds new insights from a discursive perspective with a special focus on the important transformational period of the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, it argues for the continuing hybrid character of the historically shaped semantics of zongjiao and its lasting semantic ambiguities, which allow one to understand zongjiao as a signifier that interconnects uses in local, traditional, as well as modern academic and international discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic categories in the world's languages often reflect a historical process of chaining: A name for one referent is extended to a conceptually related referent, and from there on to other referents, producing a chain of exemplars that all bear the same name. The beginning and end points of such a chain might in principle be rather dissimilar. There is also evidence supporting a contrasting picture: Languages tend to support efficient, informative communication, often through semantic categories in which all exemplars are similar. Here, we explore this tension through computational analyses of existing cross-language naming and sorting data from the domain of household containers. We find (a) formal evidence for historical semantic chaining, and (b) evidence that systems of categories in this domain nonetheless support near-optimally efficient communication. Our results demonstrate that semantic chaining is compatible with efficient communication, and they suggest that chaining may be constrained by the functional need for efficient communication.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the meaning of the Old Polish lexeme gędźba, which was inherited from the Proto‑Slavic *gǫdьba against the background of its equivalents in Old Bohemian and Old Russian. The inspiration was the text of prof. W. Boryś on the Proto‑Slavic musical vocabulary. Semantic analysis has shown that in Old Polish, Old Bohemian and Old Russian languages, the continuants of the Proto‑Slavic *gǫdьba had a meaning limited to playing a specific type of instrument, as in Proto‑Slavic. So the words did not refer to the notion of music in the general sense, but only to a certain part of it. This testifies to the absence of a general notion of music in the Middle Ages in the Polish language area and is a continuation of the original Slavic state. But the old concept, which was called gędźba, had some characteristics that have been transfered to the later concept „music”, called a new word borrowed from the Latin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Etnolingwistyka is the property of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper takes as a starting point Hamblin and Gibbs 's (1999) claim that kick alone already had the sense 'die' before it was used in the idiom kick the bucket, and this may be the case with verbs in other nondecomposable expressions. The idioms provided by Hamblin and Gibbs (1999) are examined for attestations in OED and the dates are compared with the dates of matching meanings of the verbs to see whether the verb with the same sense emerged before the idiom. The verb is considered to have a matching sense if it is the same as the holistic sense of the expression (where this sense cannot be distributed over the components) or the sense of the verbal part of the idiom (where the idiom is decomposable). It has been found that the verbs of some idioms (typically decomposable expressions) emerged in a matching sense before the idiom appeared. Kick the bucket is exceptional, since the verbs of nondecomposable idioms do not have senses closely related to the idiomatic meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a semantic analysis of the Vojvodina Ruthenian basic verbs expressing auditory perception with particular reference to their etymology and parallels in other contemporary Slavic languages. In Slavic languages, auditory perception is most often lexicalized by the verbs coming from *slyšati/*slušati, *sluxati/*slyxati, and *čuti. However, the distribution of these verbs differs in every contemporary language since they lexicalize the three main meanings of auditory perception, i.e., the meaning of active auditory perception, inert auditory perception, and passive auditory perception, in different ways. The first part of the paper deals with the etymology of the Slavic verbs of auditory perception and their semantic distribution in contemporary Slavic languages. The system of the Slavic verbs of auditory perception can be divided into three types: (1) Belorussian, Ukrainian, Carpatho-Rusyn, Serbian, Croatian, and Bulgarian use *slušati or *sluxati for the meaning of active auditory perception and *čuti for the meaning of inert auditory perception; (2) Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Slovene uses different verbs coming from the same root for the active and inert auditory perception; (3) Macedonian lexicalizes the two meanings of auditory perception using only one verb (sluša 'listen/hear'). The second part of the paper analyzes the Vojvodina Ruthenian verbs of auditory perception sluxac 'listen' and čuc 'hear'. It is pointed out that in Vojvodina Ruthenian, the verb of active auditory perception sluxac 'listen' can be used with a proposition, and in such case, the verb with a proposition implies that the subject-Experiencer is sure that the information received by auditory perception is correct or certain, while the verb of inert perception čuc with a proposition implies that the information may be incorrect or uncertain. In this part, the two constructions for expressing the meaning of passive auditory perception are also analyzed: the construction with the reflective verb čuc še 'be heard' is usually used in the passive contexts but without any focus on the possibility of passive auditory perception, while the impersonal predicative construction buc čuc '(possible to) hear/be heard' is preferred in the contexts referring to the possibility of passive auditory perception. In addition to that, it is pointed out that there are some parallels in some other Slavic languages such as Czech, Slovene, Slovak, and Ukrainian, and that a few other verbs such as obačic 'spot' and poznac 'recognize' can also appear in this construction and this fact requires more detailed investigation in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russian plant names are a semantic group poorly represented in historical dictionaries. During the project "Russian phytonyms in diachronic aspect (11th-17th c.)" (2017-2020), the PhytoLex database was created, which contains plant names recorded in Russian texts of the 11th-17th centuries. The population of the database was accompanied by research work devoted to various issues relating to the representation of plant names in the Russian language in general, and in particular in relation to some specific genres: herbals, documents of the Apothecary Chancery, business documents, church literature and lexicons. Some earlier unknown plant names were identified. These database materials will be the basis for the dictionary of Old Russian plant names, draft word entries for which have been compiled. Technical solutions will be used during the creation of a further database representing plant names recorded in later periods of the Russian language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article concentrates on the development of the Polish adjective ogromny which, in contemporary Polish, has a parametric meaning only. The research is conducted in a historical frame which means that the starting point were the etymological and historical word formation data. We treat the information referring to the use of this adjective in the old texts and its presence in other Slavonic languages as complementary. Our analyses led, inter alia, to the following conclusions: – the parametric value of the adjective ogromny is secondary – it took shape during the history of Polish language; the main mechanism in the development of parametric value of ogromny is lexicalization. Its determinant is, in that case, the semantic fading and blurring of morphological boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to demonstrate that the transition from the mainstream narrative to the interactional history of concepts promises tangible benefits for scholars of social time in general and temporal comparisons in particular. It is shown that the traditionally close alignment of narration with the production of historical consciousness at various levels hinders the study of time as a semantic variable perpetually contested, amended and upheld across society. Alternatively, the references to time made in public settings, allowing for more or less instant reactions (turn-taking) as well as expression of dissenting opinions (stance-taking), offer a much more representative palette of temporal semantics and pragmatics in a given sociopolitical environment. In a particularly intriguing case, the essentially deliberative venue where contestation is supported by both institutional arrangements and political reasons (British House of Commons) is put to test under circumstances commonly known as 'the post-war consensus' – the unspoken convention directing opposing political parties to suspend stance-taking regarding the past actions of the government during WWII, its immediate aftermath and its future prospects. As a reliable indicator of this arrangement, the contestation of temporal comparisons between relevant pasts and futures is tested in oppositions reflecting party allegiances (Conservatives vs. Labour vs. Liberals) and executive functions (government vs. opposition) between 1946 and 1952. It is shown that, notwithstanding the prevalence of non-contested statements aimed at preserving interactional coherence and pragmatic functionality of the setting, the moderately active contestation of the adversary's temporal comparisons in the House of Commons at that time helped all parties, albeit to a different degree, to shape their own political and institutional roles as well as to delegitimize their respective adversaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the stability or changes of the Persian Language Speakers' views towards Bravery, as one of the concepts of the target domain of Morality from Kövecses's (1393: 43) point of view. The main question of this study is weather the concept of Bravery has changed from 8th to 10th lunar century compaired to the contemporary period. Moreover we aim to find a pattern to represent these changes. To achieve this goal, the authors studied the conceptual change or stability, through comparing the conceptual metaphors of Bravery. The results of this study show changes in some cultural components of this concept in Persian language speaker's society. It should be noted that the comparison of historical and contemporary evidences show that the general source domain of objects in both cases have been remained unchanging but the special source domains of objects have changed. The high frequency source domains of conceptualizing Bravery in Persian language are as follows: Power, Path, War, Material. The theoretical framework of the present research is the theory of conceptual metaphors proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and the Trim's pattern for the conceptual networking of metaphors (2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic categories in the world’s languages often reflect ahistorical process of chaining: A name for one idea is extendedto a conceptually related idea, and from there on to other ideas,producing a chain of concepts that all bear the same name.The beginning and end points of such a chain might in prin-ciple be conceptually rather dissimilar. There is also evidencesupporting a contrasting picture: Languages tend to supportefficient, informative communication, often through semanticcategories in which all exemplars are similar. Here, we explorethis tension through computational analyses of existing cross-language naming and sorting data from the domain of house-hold containers. We find: (1) formal evidence for historical se-mantic chaining, and (2) evidence that systems of categories inthis domain nonetheless support near-optimally efficient com-munication. Our results suggest that semantic chaining maybe constrained by the functional need for efficient, informativecommunication.

The Historical ROZKOSZ (PLEASURE, DELIGHT): On the Understanding and Evaluation of the Concept on the Basis of the Use of the Lexeme rozkosz This article is devoted to the reconstruction of the manner of understanding and evaluation of the concept ROZKOSZ (PLEASURE, DELIGHT) in the Old, Middle and subsequent periods of the development of the Polish language, until the early twentieth century, when the modern understanding of this concept was established. The analysis focuses on the contextual uses of the lexeme rozkosz and reveals the dichotomous nature of the early concept: from the Old Polish period until the breakthrough of the Enlightenment there was the ROZKOSZ DUCHOWA (SPIRITUAL DELIGHT), motivated in a religious way and evaluated positively, and the ROZKOSZ CIELESNA (CARNAL, SENSUAL PLEASURE), reduced to sin and burdened with a negative evaluation. From the Renaissance period the concept slowly expanded to cover various spheres of life, and after the breakthrough period of the Enlightenment it became more marked: rozkosz came to refer to the social, aesthetic and intellectual sphere and it began to lose its religious basis. This process was accompanied by the decline of the evaluation and the dichotomy of the concept. Dawna ROZKOSZ – o rozumieniu i wartościowaniu pojęcia na podstawie użyć leksemu rozkosz Artykuł poświęcony jest rekonstrukcji sposobu pojmowania i wartościowania pojęcia ROZKOSZ w dobie staro- i średniopolskiej i później, do początków XX w., kiedy ustaliło się jego współczesne rozumienie. Analiza skupia się na kontekstowych użyciach leksemu rozkosz. Ujawniła ona dychotomiczny charakter dawnego pojęcia – od staropolszczyzny aż do przełomu oświeceniowego istniała ROZKOSZ DUCHOWA – motywowana religijnie i wartościowana pozytywnie oraz ROZKOSZ CIELESNA, zmysłowa, sprowadzana do grzechu i obarczona negatywną oceną. Od renesansu pojęcie powoli rozszerzało się na różne sfery życia, co po przełomie oświeceniowym stało się wyraźniejsze – rozkosz zaczęła dotyczyć sfery społecznej, estetycznej, intelektualnej i traciła umocowanie religijne – wraz z tym procesem zanika wartościowanie i dychotomia pojęcia.

The article examines the impact of the French Enlightenment and the French revolution on the Russian socio-political language, on the literary process of Romanticism in Russia and, finally, on the change of the intellectual paradigm in the second half of the 19th century. The history of the concepts of citizen, of society, and of political opposition is traced from the second half of the 18th century (on the example of Nakaz by Catherine II, the texts by the writer A. Radishchev) to the 1830s (on the example of the political texts of the Decembrists). In conclusion, it is argued that the defeat of the Decembrist’s republicanism that was inspired by the French Enlightenment had oriented, in the second half of the 19th century, the Russian intellectuals to the problematics of human diversity and the nationalisation of the Empire. The universal principles of the Enlightenment were replaced by an interest in the human diversity of the Russian Empire that in turn required the development of a specific language and its concepts. However, this turn itself is viewed as a consequence of the reception of the ideas of the French Enlightenment and accelerated by the French Revolution.

This study is dedicated to describing the historical development of the word family of usura (which is constituted by usura, usurar, usurário, usureiro, usurável, usurento, usuroso, usurador, zura, zuraco e usurariamente) in the Portuguese language. It takes as a basis for its diachronic and comparative approach the integration of dialectal data and online posts with a variety of other data sources in several Romance languages and in the English language. These sources constitute its corpus and the foundation which underpins the elucidation of borrowing and neology processes. It examines the etymology of this lexical family via the gradual analysis of semantic and morphological changes in each word, which is supported by textual evidence for such phenomena. Being defined from an interfacial standpoint to Morphology, Semantics, and the Lexicon, it incorporates into the resultant etymological description the discussion of themes such as word formation, the synonymy of co-radical words, affix synonymy, and morpho-lexical variation and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines definitions and evaluations of as well as alternative terms for 'atheism' in encyclopedias of the early modern period. In a representative overview it will be shown that the early modern discourse about atheism must be interpreted in the light of the history of concepts, of ideas and of knowledge: Not only was the scope of the term 'atheism' much broader in the 16th and 17th centuries than it is today, but the sometimes highly ambitious attempts to classify the phenomenon of atheism according to the early modern orders of knowledge remained influential during the 18th and well into the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]