;s what I found when I tried this myself: daughter has these senses, among others: 's female child.female descendant.woman thought of as if in a parent/child relationship: a daughter of Christ.personified as a female descendant: the Singer sewing machine is the daughter of the loom .. The immediate product of the radioactive decay of an element.last sense makes me want to write a short story, The Daughter of Fat Man, in which I could use the word daughter in at least three of its senses. How does a word come to have such broad, often very different, meanings? The simplest level, words do undergo only two types of meaning change, not amelioration and pejoration, but generalization (a word's meaning widens to include new concepts), and specialization (a word's meaning contracts to focus on fewer concepts). taxonomy of semantic changeknown as extension, generalization is the use of a word in a broader realm of meaning than it originally possessed, often referring to all items in a class, rather than one specific item. For instance, place derives from Latin platea, В«broad streetВ», but its meaning grew broader than the street, to include В«a particular cityВ», В«a business officeВ», В«an area dedicated to a specific purposeВ» before broadening even wider to mean В«areaВ». In the process, the word place displaced (!) The Old English word stow and became used instead of the Old English word stede (which survives instead, steadfast, steady and - of course - instead). Is a natural process, especially in situations of В«language on a shoestringВ», where the speaker has a limited vocabulary at her disposal, either because she is young and just acquiring language or because she is not fluent in a second language. A first-year Spanish student on her first vacation in Spain might find herself using the word coche, В«carВ», for cars, trucks, jeeps, buses, and so on. When my son Alexander was two, he used the word oinju (from orange juice) to refer to any type of juice, including grape juice and apple juice; wawa (from water) referred to water and hoses, among other things.examples of general English words that have undergone generalization include: Old Meaning В«men's wide breeches extending from waist to ankleВ» В«broad streetВ» opposite of generalization, specialization is the narrowing of a word to refer to what previously would have been but one example of what it referred to. For instance, the word meat originally referred to В«any type of foodВ», but came to mean В«the flesh of animals as opposed to the flesh of fishВ». The original sense of meat survives in terms like mincemeat, В«chopped apples and spices used as a pie fillingВ»; sweetmeat, В«candyВ»; and nutmeat, В«the edible portion of a nutВ». When developing your model language, it is meet to leave compounds untouched, even if one of their morphemes has undergone specialization (or any other meaning change). An example from another language, the Japanese word koto o...
