Narrowing of meaning is the restriction of the semantic capacity of a word in the historical development. At first it came to denote not only a female child but, also, a young unmarried woman, later, any young woman, and in modern colloquial English it is practically synonymous to the noun woman.
In its further semantic development the word gradually broadened its range of meaning. Then the word underwent the process of transference based on contiguity and developed the meaning of “ a small child of a female sex”, so that the range of meaning was somewhat narrowed. In Middle English it had the meaning of “a small child of either sex”. It is interesting to trace the history of the word “girl” as an example of the changes in the range of meaning in the course of the semantic development of a word. manuscript originally meant “ written by hand”. the expansion of polysemy in the course of its historical development, e.g. The meaning developed through transference based on contiguity (the concept of coming somewhere is the same for both meanings), but the range of the second meaning is much wider.Įxtension (widening of meaning)is the extension of semantic capacity of a word, i.e.
In Modern English it has considerably widened its combinability and developed the general meaning “to come”. For example, the verb “ to arrive” was borrowed from French in a narrow meaning “ to come to shore, to land”. Sometimes, the process of transference may result in a considerable change in range of meaning.
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