Stetkevych’s View on Semantic Development

Turning now to more evidence on semantic extension in Arabic as illustrated by Stetkevych (2006), Stetkevych’s work has been described by Stowasser (1971: 423) as follows: ‘[w]ith the greatest insight and sensitivity, the author analyzes the methods by which Arabic has been and is currently changing’. Stetkevych’s theoretical approach is lexical-historical, which seems directly relevant to my scope of study because it explores the diachronic change of meaning. As expounded in Stetkevych (2006: 20-22), Arabic neologisms are moulded on the basis of two criteria: derivations and semantic extensions. However, ‘[i]t goes without saying that ʾišti ā ‘derivation’ in Arabic has been and still is the most important principle of word creation’ (Ali 1987: 19). Therefore, it is worth sketching briefly some of Stetkevych’s examples of Arabic semantic extensions designating locality (a-f) and instruments or machines (g-i). The asterisked items are used throughout Kuwait:

a) maṣnaʿ* (factory) – could be considered as a semantic extension (however, Stetkevych did not explain the semantic extension from/of what)

b) maṭbaʿ (printing house, press) – remotely a semantic extension16

c) mağmaʿ (academy) – semantic extension, originally ‘a place of gathering’

d) maṭā * (airport) – a semantic extension, the classical meaning being ‘a place from which, or to which, a bird flies’

e) mawqif* (stop, station; bus, train) – a semantic extension

f) maḥaṭṭah* (station railroad, broadcasting) – a semantic extension, the old meaning being ‘a place where something (a load) is put down’, ‘a place where one alights’ g) dabbābah (tank) – a semantic extension of the medieval war-machine ‘testudo’17 h) ḥa ā ah (torpedo) – a semantic extension of the medieval ‘fireship’

i) ba ādah (refrigerator, icebox) – a semantic extension of the old term for a vessel for cooling water, or a stand upon which vessels are put for cooling18

It should be pointed out that Stetkevych’s use of the term ‘semantic extension’ has been criticised as being ‘loose and uninformative’ (Beeston 1972: 138). I believe it is necessary to clarify exactly what is meant by ‘semantic extension’. Individual senses are often related by a process of extension or modification of meaning, and this process ‘could be historical, functional, semantic, or metaphorical’ (Edmonds 2009: 225). Among the standard categories of semantic change discussed earlier, Stetkevych’s use of the term ‘semantic extension’ would probably equate to the ‘broadening/generalisation’ of meaning since all the items listed above have evolved and acquired new senses in order to cope with new localities and machineries. Accordingly, Cruse (2011: 241) identifies three types of extensions of meaning:

a) Naturalised extensions: ‘what is historically no doubt an extended meaning may be so entrenched and familiar a part of a language that its speakers no longer feel that a figure of speech is involved at all’. For example, He’s in love.

b) Established extensions: ‘readings which are well established, and presumably have entries in the mental lexicon, but are nonetheless felt to be figures of speech’. For example, She swallowed the story.

16 _{In the spoken Arabic of Kuwait, the feminine form maṭbaʿa is currently used to mean ‘printing press’.} 17 _{Beeston (2006: 104) observes that dabbāb ‘a creeper’ has generated dabbābah, which now exclusively}

means ‘a tank’. In Kuwaiti, the old-fashioned footwear dabbābah ‘women’s (tank) shoes’ used to be worn in the 1940s (al-Ayyoub 1982: 301, 1997: 217; al-Sabʿān 1983: 107, 111; al-Maghribī 1986: 88).

18 _{In the spoken Arabic of Bahrain, Holes (2001: 36) lists ba ādah (pl. ba ādāt), meaning ‘cold store;}

supermarket’. While in Kuwait City, ba ādah is a ‘drinking water cooler’. However, Holmes and Samaan (1957: 191) list ba ādah as an ‘air-conditioner’ for Kuwait. But this has been replaced by the literary mukayyif and wiḥdāt ‘AC units’ and the English borrowings indēšin ‘(air-) conditioner’ and sint āl ‘central’ in the modern Kuwaiti dialect (cf. al-Sabʿān 1983: 94, 109).

c) Novel extensions: ‘nonce readings are ones for which there are no entries in the mental lexicon; they therefore cannot be ‘looked up’’.

Furthermore, Beeston (1972: 138) describes Stetkevych’s analytical approach as being ‘marred by a certain linguistic naïveté’, illustrating his point by giving examples of semantic extensions drawn from Stetkevych’s book. Below, I will only quote Beeston’s constructive comment made on the word maḥaṭṭah:

What S[tetkevych] calls its ‘old’ meaning is ‘a place where a load is put down’, ‘a place where one alights’: since this is precisely and exactly what a railway station is, the word still in a certain way has its ‘old’ sense. Nevertheless, it has lost its applicability in a large number of other contexts where it could formerly have been used, because it has become so particularly associated with the railway. This is a clear case of semantic contraction. But maḥaṭṭah also illustrates another noticeable feature of modern Arabic, to which S. devotes hardly any attention. This is the occurrence of lexical calques on European languages (usually English): that is to say, if an English word has a range of meanings not covered by any one Arabic word, there is a tendency to take one of the English meanings and find an Arabic equivalent for that, and then to extend the range of the Arabic word over the whole field of the English word. This is true semantic extension, and a result of it is that the extended range of the Arabic word cannot be deduced from within Arabic itself but only by reference to the foreign language on which it is calqué. Now, simply because English uses ‘station’ in the context of broadcasting as well as that of railways, maḥaṭṭah has acquired purely mechanically the additional implication of a ‘broadcasting station’, without any consideration of the earlier meaning of the word in Arabic (Beeston 1972: 138-9).

Beeston is pointing out the fact that Stetkevych does not distinguish between semantic extension and semantic borrowing, which is explicitly defined by Geeraerts (2010: 29-30) as ‘the process by means of which a word x in language A that translates the primary meaning of word y in language B copies a secondary meaning of y’. According to a definition of semantic calqué provided by Zalizniak (2008: 225), ‘the reproduction of a given semantic shift can be the result of independent similar semantic evolution as well as the result of a borrowing from another language’. Additionally, examples of dialectal calques have been noted by Smeaton (1973: 53) in Ḥasāwī colloquial as spoken in eastern Saudi Arabia. He exemplifies that sikkat ḥadīd ‘railway’ is a direct translation from the French ‘chemin de fer’ that reached the Arabian Peninsula from Cairo.19 We therefore understand from this argument that colloquial Arabic uses more foreign loanwords than literary Arabic does. This state is apparently due to the fact that ‘in many cases literary Arabic uses loan-translations (calqué) and newly coined terms rather than foreign ones used in colloquial Arabic’ ( osenhouse

19 _{Mansour (1991: 193) records the French borrowing šamandáfa ‘chemin de fer’ in the Jewish}

2007: 668).20 It seems to me that the fact of semantic borrowing, as well as its direction, is hard to establish.

Stetkevych (2006: 66-78) devotes chapter four of his book to investigating semantic developments and change in the Arabic language. He opens the chapter with the following quotation:

Since pre-Islamic times until the present moment, the change in meanings of words has been so great that it now requires a special philological background to be able to read and properly understand poets like Imruʾ al-Qays, al-Nābighah, or al-Shanfarā (Stetkevych 2006: 66).21

Stetkevych’s argument is limited to developments within the modern literary language. He does not attempt to discuss the existing differences between ‘the classical meanings and their colloquial offsprings’ (2006: 67). In contrast, in his Semantic Dictionary of Colloquial and Classical Arabic, al-Jabboury (1998: 74) notes the semantic change of the noun as-sālfa where it means ‘the front part of the neck’ in Classical Arabic but in colloquial Arabic has generated the meaning of ‘story’ in Iraq (and throughout the Arabian Gulf). Nonetheless, Stetkevych principally focuses on Arabic verbs, whether the shift is from concrete to abstract or vice versa. For example, he argues that the verb šaġala ‘to occupy, to busy, as to busy anyone in’ can be used concretely as in: naḥnu našġalu ʿan a al-ma taʿa ‘we occupy the place of pasturage so as to keep it from you’ (2006: 71). One may thus argue that the process of semantic development and extension is made possible ‘by a general openness of meanings’ and is not to be seen as a simple shift from concrete to abstract or from abstract to concrete, but rather ‘as an increasingly conceptualized concentration of meaning in a word, without any qualifications beyond the concept’ (Stetkevych 2006: 72). egarding Arabic nouns, Beeston ([1970] 2006: 25) shows that rizq ‘is not only applicable to the abstract ‘act/notion of providing someone with his daily needs’ but also to the concrete ‘wages’’. In a nutshell, we learn from Stetkevych’s exploration that meaning change as change in the conceptualisation of our world, and the use of words, is driven by the speakers’ interests and needs. As Eckardt et al. (2003: 11) argue, ‘[o]ur beliefs are constantly adjusted, renewed, extended and corrected as we learn more about the world and its inhabitants. And finally, there is language change’. Despite his technical shortcomings, the data Stetkevych discusses are informative.

20 _{According to Holes (2004a: 38), ‘[m]uch foreign lexical, phraseological, and even syntactic influence}

has been exerted on MSA in recent years as a result of loan translation from European languages’.

21 _{Pre-Islamic Arabic is the cover term for all varieties of Arabic spoken in the Arabian Peninsula until}

immediately after the Arab conquests in the 7th century C.E. (El-Sharkawy 2008: 689). A number of interesting examples regarding semantic development in pre-Islamic poetry have been collected by Zarzour (2001) in which she focuses on the semantic field of Arabic moral values.

In sum, as Esseesy (2009: 165) states, ‘medieval Arabic grammarians did pay attention to instances of polysemous words and their various extensions by cataloguing putative cases encountered in Classical Arabic’. So we can learn from the previous arguments that a strong relationship between polysemy/homonymy and semantic change has been reported in the Arabic literature since the medieval period but that it has not been studied in a systematic way. In fact, words are open to different semantic interpretations depending on the context.