Providing an ideal introduction to historical semantics, this book offers graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in linguistics an accessible overview of the structural and cognitive approaches to English historical semantics. Focusing primarily on Lexical Semantics, the study of word meaning, the book looks at how such studies help to answer two key questions in Historical Linguistics: how and why languages change.

Considering changes both in the meanings of individual word forms and in larger areas of the lexicon, English Historical Semantics illustrates how data can be...