For example: "aggressive recruitment", "aggressive cleaning" or "more aggressive guidelines".
Is there a formal term for when a word begins to be used in a broader sense than the original sense?
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The question is clear enough, but I'm not sure how your example is using the word in a broader sense?– curiousdannii ♦Feb 10, 2018 at 4:18
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The term aggressive i guess– WiccanKarnakFeb 10, 2018 at 6:40
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4Semantic widening?– user0721090601Feb 10, 2018 at 6:51
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Just to say that this usage of "aggressive" belongs to sub-standard English, basically advertising jargon. "Aggressive cleaning" works only as a deliberate joke.– fdbFeb 13, 2018 at 14:29
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2 Answers
As mentioned by @guifa, a commonly used term is semantic widening (as opposed to narrowing), dating to Arsène Darmesteter (1887) at least and also used by Leonardo Bloomfield, Stephen Ullman and many others. An equivalent term is generalization (as opposed to specialization), used by Paul Hermann (1880) and also by Bréal, Blank and many others. Depending on the specific semantic theory, these technical terms may be given more specialized or narrower (wink) meanings. The Wikipedia page has more examples.
answered Feb 10, 2018 at 11:24
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Ha, I just took a stab based on semantic drift a term I'm more familiar with (hence my question mark). Didn't realize it was an established term :-) Feb 11, 2018 at 13:41
A term often used synonymously to "generalisation" is bleaching. Joan Bybee in his Cambridge Textbook in Linguistics on Language Change defines it as "a meaning change in which specific features of meaning are lost" (p. 267).
