Specialization of Meaning(Registration/Narrowing)
Along with the generalization of
Meaning the opposite meaning of
Specialization is also possible. It often happens in the history of a language that a word which originally had a wider implication begins to be used in a strict or narrow sense. In Shakepeare’s “King Lear”, we come across a reference to ‘rats and mice’ and such small deer where the word deer is used in the
sense of wild
animal which was often used in the 13 century. But from the 14 th century, the term was used for the wild animal which was most hunted when the Latin ‘animal’ and the French ‘beast’ came to be used in the
general sense. The word ‘wed’
meant any ‘pledge’, later the term was restricted to the pledge taken at the time of
marriage and later it came to imply marriage vow. Today the word is used in the sense of ‘marry’.
The word “wife’ is an instance of specialization. In Old English ‘wife’ meant woman. Chaucer’s wife of bath is the woman of bath. Foul meant any bird in Chaucer and the Bible, but now it is restricted to domestic birds and that of a general kind. Meat is another word that has lost its general meaning of that of food in general, and it has come to mean flesh food.
Prohibition originally meant an act of forbidding anything but now otherwise suggested, it means the prohibition of liquor. The same process of specialization or narrowing down can be seen in the case of the terms ‘total abstainer’, fundamentalist, non-conformist revolution.etc.
More summaries about the specialisation of meaning