As a result of an ameliorative shift-to-opposite, the polysemous adjective wicked is an auto-antonym, having two senses opposite in meaning, that is, ‘evil’ and ‘good’. We discuss two studies which explore the social life of this word, with the first focusing on its production and the second on its perception. In the first study, conducted in Cornwall, United Kingdom, we find that young men are most advanced in the use of wicked ‘good’ while young women appear not to contribute to the incrementation, that is, the advancement, of this change. In the second study, conducted online across England, we find wicked ‘good’, relative to its synonym good, to be perceived as less young and to be evaluated positively across disparate characteristics relating to status and solidarity, particularly by older men. We find wicked ‘evil’, in contrast to its synonym evil, to be evaluated higher in status-type characteristics. This newly uncovered indexical field of wicked presents a possible explanation for the observed changes in production, contributing to ongoing questions about the role of social meaning in driving the incrementation of change. More generally, this article adds to the growing yet limited literature which explores semantic variation through the lens of variationist sociolinguistics.

This article suggests that in the investigation of World Englishes, which has tended to focus on syntactic, phonological and lexical preferences, the analysis of shifts in word meanings (and meaning–form relations in lexical items) needs to be incorporated. Exemplary small-scale studies show that in polysemic words certain varieties come to prefer specific meanings, and in word fields some varieties begin to prefer certain forms over others. Based on analyses of different ICE corpora, a set of prospective verbs, their meaning relationships and their varying correlations with syntactic construction choices in different varieties are investigated quantitatively (using HCFA and conditional inference trees) and qualitatively (showcasing interesting innovative, possibly emerging uses in some countries). Regionality is consistently shown to be a weakly conditioning significant factor. Thus, it is suggested that lexicosemantic variability and diffusion in the evolution of World Englishes deserve and need to be investigated systematically.

This article proposes a cognitive linguistic analysis of the prefix post- in contemporary English by looking into the possible motivations of the semantic changes which have led to the increasing applicability of the prefix. The prefix's productivity in combinations such as post-truth and post-fact calls for expanding its original definition. These recent combinations go beyond the main two established meanings of the prefix, namely the spatial and the temporal meaning. In order to explain this semantic extension a radial model of categorisation is proposed. Offering an analysis of contexts in which the prefix post- is used in British and American press coverage, especially in relation to the 2016 UK Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential campaign, the article claims that the appearance of the prefix in new combinations is motivated by the need to describe the changing reality (especially in political and media discourse).

A general address term in Communist China, the Chinese word tongzhi ‘comrade’ was appropriated by gay rights activists in Hong Kong to refer to members of sexual minorities. It has positive connotations of respect, equality, and resistance. This article focuses on the reappropriation of this word by a mainstream newspaper in Hong Kong. The parodic use of tongzhi allows journalists to ridicule gay rights activists so as to increase the entertainment value of news stories. At the same time, it mocks activists' demand for equality and may lead to the pejoration of the term. This study provides synchronic evidence for sociolinguistic accounts that explain how lexical items may undergo pejoration because of the context of their use. It shows that because the meaning potential of a word is not bounded by the intentions of its users, words that marginalized groups have appropriated can be resignified yet again in hateful contexts.An earlier version of this article was presented at the First IGALA (International Gender and Language Association) Conference at Stanford in May 2000 and was published in the proceedings of that conference. I would like to thank Penny Eckert, Jane Hill, Miyako Inoue, Don Kulick, Sally McConnell-Ginet, John Rickford, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.