Semantic change of nouns with pronounmeaning property (A case study of the word “cô” in Vietnamese dictionary data)

Abstract

The article explores a case study of the word “cô” to prove that there is a semantic change of nouns with pronoun-meaning properties in Vietnamese. For this purpose, the article provides an overview of the research situation and identifies some theories related to the semantic change. Thereby, the article surveys the meanings of the word “cô”. The survey data is based on 2 sources: 1) Vietnamese explanatory dictionaries; 2) The actual contexts from books, stories, newspapers, etc. As a result, it is possible to generalize the characteristics of semantic change of the word “cô” in Vietnamese, a word that has both the noun-and pronoun-meaning property.