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

Language functions best when it serves the communicative intent of its users, even if such isachieved by adding, removing or modifying the existing meanings of words. This developmentand change of the semantic structure of a word usually brings about qualitative and quantitativedevelopment of the vocabulary. The focus of this paper is to review semantic change that hasoccurred with some Yoruba words, its types and the motivations of such especially amongstundergraduates using Blank Andreas’s principles and motive for semantic change as theoreticalframework.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 usedby them. The findings reveals that using words that have undergone meaning change is afrequent occurrence amongst Yoruba-English Bilingual undergraduates, a habit motivated bylinguistic, psychological, sociocultural and cultural/encyclopedic forces. Also, it was foundthat the principles similarity, contiguity and contrast. as highlighted by Blank underlie all thetypes of semantic changes identified