Again

Part 1: Again, how and what for

Again:

The association between 'back' and 'again' are even today quite noticeable. They share a sense of returning to something whether spatial in the case of 'back', or temporal in the caes of 'again'. How the older sense of 'again' as 'back' became the modern sense of 'again' as in repetition of an action can be traced to this semantic extension of a spatial sense to a temporal sense of the meaning. When some person moves 'back' away from a point in space (directly, horizontally), then that person is returning to where they came from. So, the literal sense can be represented with an image of one arrow going ---> over another arrow <---. The connected lines <---> do not work as well either because the repetition of the moving forward and then moving back is not so evident. This double arrow looks like two different points moving away from one another instead of returning or moving back to the starting point. The best image to illustrate this idea of coming back or moving back to where you started could be a circle with an arrow included in the line in either direction. So, this image schema refers to the spatial sense of going away from and moving back to the same spot. The lexical item 'back' refers to the last half of this notion, of returning, but it implies the first half of moving away.

Even when 'again' mean 'back' spatially, it was metaphorically extended to other realms such as emotion. The example from 1440: "He wedde a yonge gentil damiselle to wyfe; and he loviede hir moche, and she hatide him ayene.' imparts the meaning that the young wife is giving hatred back for love with no spatial sense.

The collocations with 'again' are interesting as well. The example from 1200: "Ele cristene man maketh this dai procession from chirche to chirche and eft again.' In this example both the old word meaning 'again' and the word meaning 'back' are used together. This collocation is found today as well. The word meaning 'back' is associated with a repeated motion because in going 'back' you are going from whence you came, a journey.

In modern English the meanings are often used in metaphorical phrases in the same way. For example, these two sentences mean about the same thing: 1. So, you're back to doing what? 2. So, you're doing that again.

So, it seems that the word for 'back' was both used in metaphorical situations (at least with emotion) and in situations where it was semantically associated with 'again'. It seems that 'again' meaning to return to something spatially was extended to mean to return to something temporally. It could have already been in use in this way metaphorically, and eventually, this metaphorical temporal meaning increased in importance over the spatial meaning. The actual word 'back' was also present in the vocabulary at the same time according to the OED so, for some reason (possibly due to it being a body part), 'back' became preferred for the spatial sense and 'again' became preferred over 'eft'.

posted by Sarah @ 11:00 PM