Old Words, New Meanings: A Survey of Semantic Change Amongst Yoruba-English Bilingual Undergraduates

Abstract

Language functions best when it serves the communicative intent of its users, even if such is
achieved by adding, removing or modifying the existing meanings of words. This development
and change of the semantic structure of a word usually brings about qualitative and quantitative
development of the vocabulary. The focus of this paper is to review semantic change that has
occurred with some Yoruba words, its types and the motivations of such especially amongst
undergraduates using Blank Andreas’s principles and motive for semantic change as theoretical
framework.
The tool used for the study is a self-constructed questionnaire administered to YorubaEnglish Bilingual and a corpus of words that have undergone semantic change frequently used
by them. The findings reveals that using words that have undergone meaning change is a
frequent occurrence amongst Yoruba-English Bilingual undergraduates, a habit motivated by
linguistic, psychological, sociocultural and cultural/encyclopedic forces. Also, it was found
that the principles similarity, contiguity and contrast. as highlighted by Blank underlie all the
types of semantic changes identified