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The chapter investigates semantic changes in core concepts of psychology, specifically focusing on those related to harm. Haslam (2016) hypothesized that many psychological concepts associated with harm (i.e., forms of psychological disturbance, threat, and maltreatment) have undergone semantic broadening in the past half-century in association with cultural shifts and social change. The implications of this "concept creep" hypothesis have been previously explored by prominent social, political, and legal thinkers (Levari et al. 2018, Lukianoff & Haidt 2019, Pinker 2018, Sunstein 2018), but its linguistic dimension has received little empirical atten- tion. Here we apply computational models in order to address the concept creep hypothesis. We start with a description of a typology of semantic shifts and provide a summary of computational methods for automatic detection of the most common changes (broadening, narrowing, hyperbole, and litotes) and utilise those to evaluate core harm-related concepts such as 'trauma', 'harassment', and 'bullying' on a new corpus of psychology literature extending from 1970 to 2017. Our results confirm the initial hypothesis and are in line with earlier studies: most concepts became broader and milder over the last few decades. We then continue with a more detailed study in order to understand how exactly the concepts changed, and to do so employ and evaluate different types of semantic representations. Finally, we additionally train the models on a general domain corpus in order to investigate whether the broadening of harm-related concepts also applies to society at large, rather than only to the academic discourse of psychology. Haslam's influential account of concept creep (Haslam 2016) proposes that broadened concepts of harm disseminate from academic language into wider public use. This final analysis enables a direct test of that conjecture, including comparative analysis of the extent and timing of historical semantic changes across the two corpora.

The language has changed over the years due to social, cultural, economic and scientific developments. Changes are not only in new words, but also in the same words with different meanings. These words are explained differently in dictionaries. In the language of politics, emphasis is a fruitful discourse strategy. Persuasion and convincing are key strategies of politics. In this paper, we study these words, reasons of changes. This study is based in the dictionaries of Albanian language. Comparing the dictionaries of 1980 to 2006 word by word, we highlight those words with different explanation.

This article does three things. First, it argues that the usage of dharma in the sense of 'customary practice', which is found in compounds such as desadharma and kuladharma, can be traced back to the Atharvaveda. Second, it argues that in the Dharmasastra tradition this usage of the word dharma as 'custom' ought to be distinguished from acara, which is also often taken in the sense of 'custom', because acara frequently implies a hieratic sense of 'customary behaviour', especially in its association with the cultured practices of particular elites (the sat, sadhu, or sista). Therefore, dharma in the usage this article is concerned with is a broader term for 'custom' than acara. And, third, it suggests that when the Dharmasastra writers restricted the currency of such customary dharmas to cases where existing sacred texts (sruti or smrti) could not be called upon, they were reaffirming that such dharmas were worldly rather than transcendent, and not to be confused with the transcendent dharma the principled few now identified with these sacred texts--a development attributable to other changes that shifted the word dharma to the very centre of brahmanic ideology.

This paper discusses semantic movement as evidenced in Malay/Indonesian Islamic texts. The primary text in focus provides an example of 'Abd al-Ra'ūf al-Singkīlī's Malay commentary on the Quran, Tarjumān al-Mustafīd, produced around 1675. The study of the lexical data from this text is informed by comparative reference to three modern Indonesian texts of Sūrah Yūsuf: Mahmoed Joenoes' rendering (1954), the official Indonesian government rendering drawn from Al-Quraan dan Terjemahnya (1974), and H.B. Jassin's rendering (1978). The goal of this paper will be to answer two questions. First, the semantic range of certain lexical items used in the 'Abd al-Ra'ūf Quran commentary compare with the norms of late 20th century literary Indonesian. Second, the semantic change of differences identified in this comparative process.DOI:10.15408/sdi.v19i2.362

Background: There is a situation when people are discussing topics that are considered sensitive which labeled vulgar or inconsiderate such as death, religion, sex, racial issues, or politics, the use of euphemism is very useful. By using the euphemism, it can turn unmentionable words into mentionable and less offensive. Turning the unmentionable or bad words into mentionable or good words that make euphemism give rise to semantic change through changing the sense of words.Purpose: The aim of this research is to find the types of euphemism in The Washington Times online political articles.Design and methods: This research applied a descriptive qualitative method, while the data were collected by close reading and observing the words, phrases, or clauses that contain the euphemism types in The Washington Times online political articles. This research applies the theory of Allan and Burridge for euphemism typesResults: As the results of representative data, the types of euphemism found in the articles are 3 metaphors, 1 remodeling, 9 circumlocutions, 1 abbreviation, 2 one-for-one substitutions, and 1 hyperbole. All of the euphemism types in this research are often used as substitute expressions in order to have a positive connotation and to save the readers from unpleasant topics or issues.

Background: There is a situation when people are discussing topics that are considered sensitive which labeled vulgar or inconsiderate such as death, religion, sex, racial issues or politics, the use of euphemism is very useful. By using the euphemism, it can turn unmentionable words into mentionable and less offensive. Turning the unmentionable or bad words into mentionable or good words that make euphemism give rise to semantic change through changing the sense of words. Purpose: The aim of this research is to find the types of euphemism in The Washington Times online political articles. Design and methods: This research applied descriptive qualitative method, while the data were collected by close reading and observing the words, phrases or clauses that contains the euphemism types in The Washington Times online political articles. This research applies the theory of Allan and Burridge for euphemism types Results: As the results of representative data, the types of euphemism found in the articles are 3 metaphors, 1 remodeling, 9 circumlocutions, 1 abbreviation, 2 one-for-one substitutions, and 1 hyperbole. All of the euphemism types in this research are often used as the substitute expression in order to have the positive connotation and to save the readers from unpleasant topics or issues.

AbstractThe wordnativeis a key term in nineteenth-century British colonial administrative vocabulary. The question is how it comes to be central to the classification of indigenous subjects in Britain's southern African possessions in the early twentieth century, and how the word is appropriated by colonial citizens to designate the race of indigenous subjects. To answer the question, I construct a semasiological history ofnativeas a word that has to do with the identification of a person with a place by birth, by residence or by citizenship. I track the manner in which speakers invest old words with new meanings in specific settings and differentiate among them in different domains. In the case ofnative, a signal keyword is recruited to do particular work in several contemporaneous discourses which take different ideological directions as the nature of the involvement of their speakers changes. The result is a particularly complicated word history, and one which offers a clue to the ways in which colonial rhetoric is domesticated in specific settings at the very same time as the colonising power eschews it in the process of divesting itself of its colonies.

AbstractMost words have a variety of senses that can be added, removed, or altered over time. Understanding how they change across different contexts and time periods is crucial for revealing the role of language in social and cultural evolution. In this study we aimed to explore the collective changes in the mental lexicon as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. We performed a large-scale word association experiment in Rioplatense Spanish. The data were obtained in December 2020, and compared with responses previously obtained from the Small World of Words database (SWOW-RP, Cabana et al., 2023). Three different word-association measures detected changes in a word's mental representation from Precovid to Covid. First, significantly more new associations appeared for a set of pandemic-related words. These new associations can be interpreted as incorporating new senses. For example, the word 'isolated' incorporated direct associations with 'coronavirus' and 'quarantine'. Second, when analyzing the distribution of responses, we observed a greater Kullback-Leibler divergence (i.e., relative entropy) between the Precovid and Covid periods for pandemic words. Thus, some words (e.g., 'protocol', or 'virtual') changed their overall association patterns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, using semantic similarity analysis, we evaluated the changes between the Precovid and Covid periods for each cue word's nearest neighbors and the changes in their similarity to certain word senses. We found a larger diachronic difference for pandemic cues where polysemic words like 'immunity' or 'trial' increased their similarity to sanitary/health words during the Covid period. We propose that this novel methodology can be expanded to other scenarios of fast diachronic semantic changes.