Tags · Mechanism
Semantic bleaching
Loss of specific content as a form spreads to more contexts.
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Pathway
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.
NegationNegative concordGrammaticalizationReanalysis +3
Jespersen's Cycle →
Pathway
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.
PerceptionModalityColexificationMultiverb construction +6
From seeing to trying →