[Eth] Nigger -> Nigga

[lingu_studentin]

Hallo.
Ich schreibe momentan an meiner Diplomarbeit und würde gerne wissen ob jemand weiß wie folgendes Phänomen heißt:

Wenn ein ursprünglich negatives Wort z.B. Nigger in einer Sprachgemeinschaft zu etwas positivem verwandelt wird ( "Nigga",) so wie es in den USA der Fall ist.

MfG

und

Danke

[LeaRebecca]

Das ist Melioration. Ist aber bissel umstritten, weil oft subjektiv.

[Sebastian]

Dazu solltest du in jedem Einführungswerk zu historischer Linguistik oder zur Semantik etwas finden. Z.B. bei Campell (2004:261).

Fortson (2003:650) schreibt z.B. dazu:

Zitat:Melioration and pejoration. These are purely subjective terms referring to cases when a word’s meaning becomes either more positive (melioration or amelioration) or more negative (pejoration). Two examples of melioration from English are nice, which meant originally ‘simple, ignorant’ but now ‘friendly, approachable,’ and paradise, which in Greek originally referred to an enclosed park or pleasure-garden, but came to be used for the Garden of Eden, whence the English meaning. Pejoration affected the word silly, earlier ‘blessed’ (cf. German selig), as well as mean, whose earlier meaning ‘average’ has been ratcheted down to ‘below average, nasty’ (cf. German gemein, now ‘common, low, vulgar’ from ‘common, shared’).

Campbell, L. (2004). Historical Linguistics. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2nd edition.
Fortson, B. W. (2003). An Approach to Semantic Change. In Joseph, B. D. and Janda, R., editors, The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, chapter 21, pages 648–666. Blackwell, Malden, MA / Oxford.