The Influence Of Contextual Factors Upon The Semantics Of Selly

KWARTALNIK NEOFILOLOGICZNY, LIX, 1/2012 AGNIESZKA WAWRZYNIAK (KALISZ) THE INFLUENCE OF CONTEXTUAL FACTORS UPON THE SEMANTICS OF SELLY The aim of the present paper is to analyse the impact of contextual factors upon the semantic development of selly (PDE ‘silly’). The analysis is a cognitively oriented study based on The Canterbury Tales. The paper will emphasise the role of context, the contextual implications, and the metonymic shifts that led to the gradual changes in selly. It will be demonstrated that the senses in the conceptual framework of selly are not distinct and unconnected, but rather, are in close semantic proximity, while the borders between the emerging senses are not fixed, but are fuzzy and difficult to delineate. The overall process will be shown to be one that is complex, gradual and slow, characterised by the synchronic coexistence of various senses, and highly contingent on the role of context, rather than a dynamic one that could be explained solely by means of metaphor. 1. INTRODUCTION The present paper explores the semantics of Middle English selly (PDE ‘silly’), thus a word which was subject to pejoration. The analysis attempts to account for the processes, whereby a word which originally evoked the positive sense of ‘happy’ or ‘blessed’, started to acquire unfavourable connotations, such as ‘wretched’, ‘unfavourable’ or ‘miserable’. The aims of the paper are the following: The present study is cognitively oriented, so the semantics of selly will not be separated from its etymological, cultural and semantic contexts. The suggested conceptualisation of selly will not reflect objective reality, but rather a mental reality. The paper will thus reflect the widely-held idea that the former sharp distinction between linguistic knowledge, and thus a knowledge of linguistic categories, and an encyclopaedic one, stemming from the acquisition of culture, should be abandoned. The way humans use lexical categories is always conditioned by the cultural background in which such lexical categories have been acquired. Hence, the borderline between the two formerly rigidly defined types of knowledge becomes blurred, a consequence of which is one type of knowledge affecting the concept formation. Various linguists have emphasised the active role of experience in the human perception of concepts. Langacker (1987) uses 86 AGNIESZKA WAWRZYNIAK the term degree of entrenchment to refer to the extent to which people highlight and downgrade the semantic properties of concepts as a result of their interaction with the corresponding entities or events. Lakoff (1982) discusses ICM (Idealised Cogntive Models) (Lakoff 1982), which constitute idealised, conventional schema that are heavily laden with the cultural stereotypes of a particular society and do not fit external world directly. Grzegorczykowa (1993) stresses the term global patterns of knowledge to refer to the categorisation of reality. Similarly, Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (1985: 306) emphasises that cognitive categories are associated with cultural specificity, personal experience, recurring salient contextual features and language-specific discourse organisation. Moreover, she indicates that the ability to form concepts and the ability to conceive of and interpret diverse phenomena is unquestionably a cognitive universal. Secondly, the analysis will suggest that selly originally denoted a less evaluative, and hence, a less abstract sense when compared with latter senses, which reflects the tendencies related to the unidirectionality of semantic change (Traugott 1989; Sweetser 1990). The study will show that new senses in the lexeme selly can coexist synchronically, which is in agreement with the idea of layering (Hopper 1991). The aim of the analysis will therefore point to a variety of senses existing side by side. The paper will also try to distinguish which senses are central and peripheral in the conceptual framework of selly, as well as establish the mode of the contexts where the marginal senses were put. Moreover, the paper will emphasise the role of conventionalisation of conversational implicature in the emergence of new senses, in line with Grice’s analysis of implicational inferences. He claims that they are not due to lexical meanings alone, but due to lexical meanings together with implicatures: “It may not be implausible for what starts life, so to speak, as conversational implicature to become conventionalised” (1975: 58). Hence, the semantic analysis of selly will be shown as a slow and a gradual process affected by the contextual implications in the discourse. Dahl (1985), advocates the similar idea that conversational implicature contributes to the original meaning of a category, and consequently becomes a part of a new meaning. Furthermore, the study will attempt to relate the role of the pragmaticalisation of conversational implicature to a purely metonymic process (Panther and Thornburg 1999). Panther and Thornburg describe this kind of inference as the POTENTIALITY FOR ACTUALITY. They emphasise that the conceptual relationship between a named and an implied entity is based on contiguity, and thereby on metonymy. Moreover, the implicature itself rests on the Grice’s second maxim of Quality – Say no more than you must and mean more thereby. In other words, Panther and Thornburg view the emergence of a new sense in terms of the pragmaticalisation of the implicature, and thus of the implied meaning by the utterer. What takes place is the development of a semantic link between the named and implied entity in the mind of a conceptualiser. THE INFLUENCE OF CONTEXTUAL FACTORS UPON THE SEMANTICS OF SELLY 87 The analysis is based on all texts of Caxton’s The Canterbury Tales: The British Library Copies (ed. by Barbara Bordalejo), which is a CD-Rom that contains the first full-colour facsimiles of all copies of Willliam Caxton’s first and second editions of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The semantic analysis focuses on all the contexts and phrases in which selly was recorded, and views them from a cognitive perspective. The paper also takes data from the Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (1882), edited by Walter W. Skeat, and from the Middle English Dictionary (1925). 2. THE ETYMOLOGICAL BACKGROUND OF SELLY According to the Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (CEDEL, sv. silly), silly originates from PIE base sel – ‘happy’. In the Anglo-Saxon period, selly had the form of gesælig, which denoted ‘happy, blessed.’ Its recorded cognates point to the following senses; O.N. sæl ‘happy’, Goth. sels ‘good, kindhearted’, as well as O.S. salig, M.Du. salich, OHG salig and Ger selig, all of which stood for ‘blessed, happy, blissful’. Furthermore, the available data from the CEDEL record the following timespan for the emergence of the various senses of silly: – innocent (c. 1200) – harmless, pitiable (late 13c) – weak (c. 1300) – feeble in mind, lacking in reason (...truncated)