Semantic inflation and pronoun avoidance

Word meanings tend to weaken over time with exposure to more listeners and lose some of their original power. This process of semantic inflation will be motivated in this paper as a major linguistic force that systematically triggers semantic change. Then, it will be illustrated that this process is widespread, being attested in various domains such as metaphor, superlatives, terms of address, and swear words. In particular, we will show how it is responsible for the phenomenon of pronoun avoidance, the fact that Korean and some other East and Southeast Asian languages do not possess a polite form of second person pronouns in their pronominal paradigm and have to rely on an honorific term of address in their places. (Kyung Hee University)