A diachronic study of the semantics of the adjectives mean and gay

Abstract: This essay explores the semantic change of the adjectives mean and gay from the 1920s to the2000s. This was done by going through concordance lines which was collected from the Time Corpus. The aim of the paper is to investigate if there has been any change of meaning of the two words, and if that is the case how have they changed. The results showed that both words have had a tremendous change in meaning, the most prominent one being the adjective gay which has gone from denoting something or someone who is happy to referring to a homosexual person. The adjective mean has also had a change in meaning, or has rather gained several new meanings along with the original one.