Tags · Mechanism
Semantic bleaching
Loss of specific content as a form spreads to more contexts.
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How does negation rebuild itself over time?
A preverbal negator weakens and is reinforced by an extra element, often a minimizer like “step” or “thing”. The reinforcer is reanalysed as the negator itself, then weakens in turn, and the cycle starts again.
How does “I have it written” turn into an ordinary past tense?
Latin habeō litterās scrīptās means “I have the letter in a written state” — a description of how the letter is now. That sentence became French j’ai écrit la lettre, which reports the writing rather than the letter, and in speech it is now the plain past: the old simple past has gone out of use. The same road runs from Old Japanese -tari to modern -ta. English started down it and stopped: have written is still a perfect, and cannot be used with yesterday.
How does “see” come to mean “try”?
Verbs of seeing repeatedly become markers of attempting. Japanese 食べてみる “eat and see”, Korean 먹어 보다, Mandarin 試試看, and the Turkic converb + kör- constructions all say “do it and see” for “try doing it”; Voinov (2013) traces the co-lexification across Eurasia, New Guinea, India, and West Africa.