Distinguish semantic narrowing from semantic bleaching with examples.

• A. Narrowing expands a word’s meaning; bleaching broadens content.
• B. Narrowing reduces content while bleaching reduces form.
• C. Narrowing reduces a word’s scope (meat); bleaching reduces content while retaining form (literally used as an intensifier).
• D. Both processes are identical in effect.

Answer: (C)

The main idea here is how words change meaning in two distinct ways: narrowing and semantic bleaching. Narrowing happens when a word’s range becomes more restricted over time. A classic illustration is meat, which once referred to all kinds of food but now mainly means animal flesh. Semantic bleaching, on the other hand, is about losing some of the word’s semantic content while the form stays the same, often turning a word into a lighter, more general or functional use. A familiar example is literally, which has shifted from signaling an exact, literal meaning to also acting as an intensifier in many contexts. So the correct distinction is that narrowing reduces a word’s scope, while bleaching reduces content while retaining form. This contrasts with other statements that misstate the direction of change or the way the word’s meaning shifts.