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A gay paper: why should sociolinguistics bother with semantics?: Can sociolinguistic methods shed light on semantic variation and change in reference to the adjective gay?

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 12:40 authored by Justyna RobinsonJustyna Robinson
The study of meaning and changes in meaning has enjoyed varying levels of popularity within linguistics. There have been periods during which the exploration of meaning was of prime importance. For instance, in the late 19th century scholars considered the exploration of the etymology of words to be crucial in their quest to find the ‘true’ meaning of lexemes (Geeraerts, 2010; Malkiel, 1993). There have also been periods where semantic analysis was considered redundant to linguistic investigation (Hockett, 1954: 152). In the past 20–30 years semantics has enjoyed a period of revival. This has been mainly led by the advances in cognitive linguistics (and to some extent, historical linguistics) as well by the innovations associated with the development of electronic corpora and computational methods for extracting and tracing changes in the behaviour of the lexicon (cf. Geeraerts, 2010: 168ff, 261ff). However, there are still areas of linguistics which hardly involve lexis in their theoretical and epistemological considerations. One such area is sociolinguistics.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

English Today

ISSN

0266-0784

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Issue

4

Volume

28

Page range

38-54

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2013-03-11

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    University of Sussex (Publications)

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