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Change in the Meaning of the Word Cool: A study comparing the 1890s, the 1950s and the 2010s
Umeå University, Faculty of Arts, Department of language studies.
2023 (English)Independent thesis Basic level (degree of Bachelor), 10 credits / 15 HE creditsStudent thesisAlternative title
Betydelseförändring i ordet cool : En studie som jämför 1890-talet, 1950-talet och 2010-talet (Swedish)
Abstract [en]

The aim of this thesis was to study change in the meaning of the word cool, comparing the 1890s, the 1950s and the 2010s. Examples where the word cool was used were obtained from the Corpus of Historical American English, which is created by Mark Davies, and analyzed in terms of in which senses and text types they were used. The results show that the biggest meaning change in cool between the 1890s and the 2010s is that the most prominent sense in the 1890s is ‘calm’, and ‘slightly cold in a pleasant way’ not far after, and in the 2010s the most prominent sense was ‘pleasant, enjoyable or likable’. The most frequent senses of cool in the 1950s were ‘slightly cold in a pleasant way’, ‘temperature that is too cold’, and ‘calm’ as the most commonly used. The most prominent text type where the word cool occurred was fiction in all three analyzed decades.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2023. , p. 40
Keywords [en]
Lexical semantics, meaning, synonyms, semantic widening, metaphor, metonymy
National Category
General Language Studies and Linguistics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-209763OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-209763DiVA, id: diva2:1767183
Subject / course
Engelska, examensarbete för kandidatexamen
Supervisors
Examiners
Available from: 2023-06-16 Created: 2023-06-13 Last updated: 2023-06-16Bibliographically approved

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Change in the Meaning of the Word Cool - Sandra Andersson(1221 kB)535 downloads
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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf