Explanation
Semantic change is the historical alteration of what a linguistic form denotes, evaluates, or evokes as an associated meaning. It rarely consists in an abrupt replacement of one meaning by another. New readings often emerge in particular contexts, coexist with older ones, spread to further uses, and gradually change their relative weight. Metaphor, metonymy, social evaluation, technical innovation, and language contact can initiate such pathways. Change does not reside in the word form alone but in recurrent patterns of use within a community. Earlier meanings may survive as reverberations that continue to structure later interpretations.
Movement of thought
1. A form is used with an established meaning. 2. A particular context licenses an additional interpretation. 3. The new reading recurs without immediately eliminating the older one. 4. Its distribution, evaluation, or frequency shifts within the community. 5. Later speakers inherit a changed semantic landscape in which earlier layers may persist.
Scientific use case
Diachronic corpora can trace earliest attestations, contextual distribution, collocations, and the relative frequency of competing readings. Historical dictionaries can then help test whether a proposed metaphorical extension, amelioration, or narrowing is chronologically supported.
Example
“Mouse” first denoted the animal; technological use developed the input-device sense through similarity of shape. Both meanings coexist and are normally separated by context.
Counterexample
A single creative metaphor does not by itself establish semantic change. A comparison of dictionaries without dated usage evidence also cannot show when or by what route a reading became conventional.
Distinction
Distinguish semantic change from reference change, polysemy, and reanalysis. Polysemy describes coexisting readings, semantic change their historical emergence or redistribution, while reanalysis primarily concerns a new structural interpretation.
Effect on thought and perception
Semantic change turns words into historical stores: present understanding carries earlier patterns of use and social evaluation.
Resonance
A new use answers older meanings; even after a shift, earlier semantic layers may continue to sound within the form.
Cite this entry
Reich, Michael (Hrsg./ed.): „Shift in meaning“. Atlas der Sprache, AT-W3-0413. ATLAS 260, data model 1.6.0. https://atlasoflanguage.com/concept/AT-W3-0413The address remains stable; editorial content may evolve. Editorial reading state: 2026-10-15. Include your access date for precise references.
Historical background
In its discussion of change, the Cours does not treat a sign as two permanently matched components. Over time, their relation can shift, through changes of form, changes of interpretation or developments involving both. This matters because visible continuity of a word does not guarantee semantic continuity, while a formal change need not be matched by a comparably large conceptual change. The historical account links innovation to collective transmission rather than making every change the deliberate decision of an individual speaker. That is a theoretical position in the edited 1916 work, not a complete causal explanation of every documented semantic shift. For the Atlas, it suggests a disciplined comparison across dated uses: which relation changed, for whom, and in what setting? Merely contrasting an ancient root gloss with a present definition skips the intermediate evidence. The source establishes one influential way of framing the problem; the English expression shift in meaning and specific mechanisms such as widening, narrowing or evaluative change require their own historical documentation.
How conceptual history changes the analysis
Semantic change is a trajectory of attested uses, not merely a distance between two glossaries.
References for the historical section
- Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (1916), edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with Albert Riedlinger; French text in the 1971 Payot printing, Wikisource transcription · First Part, Chapter II, §2: displacement of the relation between signifier and signified
The original editorial preface and named French sections were read. The Cours is a posthumous editorial reconstruction from lectures, not Saussure’s completed manuscript. Later prefatory material is not treated as a 1916 witness. No English first-attestation claim; no full collation of the transcription with the first edition.