How did meaning 1 beneath semantically shift to 2? What semantic notions underlie them? [Etymonline]
Bubulus wrote:Somehow I feel "you can see" > "namely" isn't that strange...
The meaning of videlicet, therefore, from its literal Latin meaning 'one is permitted to see', to its meaning as it was borrowed into English, 'namely', suggests in the context of speech representation that it will be followed by the direct speech of the defendant. And this assumption is supported by the corresponding switch into the language of the utterance, which mimics the original words, suggesting that the text reproduces the utterance verbatim.
The legal register, while typically a very conservative register, seems to have had particular need for a quotative, even one that functioned as imprecisely as videlicet. The grammaticalized sense of the word in this register does not appear to have been influential enough to spread to other registers, perhaps because of the limited circulation and functionality of legal records. A genre-specific usage (particularly one specific to a written genre) would have been likely an insecure form, and in these records we see that the use of videlicet begins to give way to other methods of marking quotations brought in through other text types: the use of punctuation and italics. These supplanted the use of videlicet, and the word was used after this point only in its less-grammaticalized sense of 'namely'.
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