고대영어와 중세영어의 어휘의미변화연구

A Study of Narrowing and Widening between OE and ME

The purpose of this study is to investigate narrowing and widening which are major semantic changes between Old English and Middle English, In the matter of classification I have classified the materials investigated more as specialization, deterioration and generalization. I attempted to find out whether the comprehensive causes of semantic change, which are 1) linguistic causes 2) historical causes 3) social causes 4) psychological causes 5) foreign influence 6) the need for a new name suggested by many scholars can be found in the semantic development between OE and ME. Most of the influencing factors investigated here is as follows: 1) grammatical usage, 2) practical usage, 3) onomatopoeic origin, 4) metaphorical use, 5) contextual interpretation, 5) listener's attitude speaker's intention, 6) foreign language influence, 7) social and culture conditions and change, 8) political cause, 9) religious cause or order, 10) metaphorical use, 11) change of social status with strong depreciative tone. All the factors above, therefore, can belong to the above 6 categories. In addition, we find out that in most cases the new meanings were used along with the original sences of OE.