Dear all, I have heard that verbs are the most unchanging class of grammatical elements of a language (possibly, restricted to Indo-european languages) in terms of semantics. If have gotten this right, nouns, adjectives etc. change semantics more frequently than verbs. For example, the noun "fascination" and has changed meaning from bewitching (cf. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=fascination) to a less dangerous form (cf. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/fascination). Verbs such as eat, sleep still retain their meaning. Note, that the verb "fascinate" has changed semantics. If I gotten this right, it is more likely that verbs are more stable over time, not an absolute guarantee.
When I look for sources (see links), however, I do not find this. Instead I find evidence that can be interpreted as verb are less stable than other grammatical elements (time stability). However, my guess is that this refers to the fact that there are different tenses in verbs not that they are as a class of grammatical elements unchanging. I also found "corpus-based" studies that seems to relate more to what I am looking for.
Questions:
I am looking for a source to either support or not support the argument that looking at activities (in, for example, conceptual modeling) that are related to verbs is better than looking at other classes of grammatical elements since they are less changing.
https://books.google.se/books?id=48xT8RU3AuAC&pg=PA238&lpg=PA238&dq=stability+of+verbs&source=bl&ots=F-wrWtVSiA&sig=cYEsdvY9QJHaYlKVjiHhAkvRG54&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj0_MuV0t_MAhWM3SwKHZvFDfEQ6AEILTAD#v=onepage&q=stability%20of%20verbs&f=false
Hi Jonas,
very interesting question. Frankly speaking, I didn't know that verbs' meaning changes less frequently than that of other grammatical elements, but if you say ))
I would look for a correlation between semantic classes of verbs and their meanings using etymological dictionaries from different periods. There are different taxonomies of semantic classes in Levin verbs (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/levin.verbs) or General Inquirer (http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~inquirer/homecat.htm). There are many etymological dictionaries on the Internet, for example, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, eISBN: 9780191727153.
HIH, Alexander
Thank you @Alexander Osherenko, the links are really useful to me (for other purposes than just this particular question).
As I stated in the post, I do not actually know that verbs as a class of grammatical elements are less changing over time, it is something I have heard. I am pursuing the answer to this via various channels and hope that this can be clarified.
Dear @Ora Schwarzwald, what exactly do you mean by "yes"? Can you elaborate and provide references to sources?
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