Language Change Flashcards
Which factors play a role in language change?
5 factors
LG INTERNAL factors
(focus on system)
–> ease of articulation: assimilation, elision, epenthesis
–> balance of the system: chain shifts, regularizations
–> redundancy reduction
–> analogy and rule extension
–> the generative hypothesis: rule change across generations
LG-EXTERNAL factors
(focus on world)
–> change of the world: immigration, technological advance…
–> language contact: borrowing and further effects of borrowing
COGNITIVE factors
(focus on speaker 1)
–> human cognition
–> metaphor theory:
expression of abstract by concrete terms, body, place metaphors…
–> conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory
–> prototype theory, change of categories
SOCIO-PSYCHOlogical factors (focus on speaker 2) --> speaker psychology -- desire for novelty -- desire to be snobbish, cool, different...
sociolinguistic approaches
- questions: actuation, transmission, embedding
- group membership, aspirations,
- accommodation theory and audience design
- apparent time versus real time versus life-time cycle
- Labov’s advanced speakers vs. Milroy’s innovators and early adopters
PRAGMATIC factors
(focus on communicative situation)
–> grammaticalisation:
development of lexical items into grammatical ones
– the process (semantic bleaching, morphological reduction, phonetic erosion, extension, decategorization)
– unidirectionality hypothesis
– typical clines: content word > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix
– the modals, other auxiliaries, the going to future, development of sentence connectives, discourse markers…
what are approaches to language change and name the four major hypotheses and main interests
- ) structural approaches (system dynamics; phonology and morpho-syntax)
- ) generative approaches (generational jumps; mainly syntax)
- ) functional approaches (effects of communicative situation; morpho-syntax)
- ) sociolinguistic approaches (social group membership, identification, aspirations; phonology)
- ) cognitive approaches (effects of general cognition and categorization; mainly semantics)
____
major hypothesis:
- the generative hypothesis: rule change across generations
- conceptual metaphor theory / conceptual blending theory
- prototype theory
- accommodation theory and audience design
- unidirectionality hypothesis
—> proposes that grammaticalisation works in a single direction. That is, pronouns may fuse with verbs, or prepositions may fuse with nouns, to create new inflectional systems, but inflectional endings do not break off to create new pronouns or prepositions.
The unidirectionality hypothesis does not claim that linguistic change will occur in any particular instance, only that if it does occur, it will be in the direction of lexical word to grammatical word and not the other way around.
Name a few key words to describe the History of the English language
major sound changes,
change of English from inflectional to analytical language,
semantic change patterns,
lexical change: borrowing history
modern orthography and other irregularities as an indicator of previous changes
Comment on Language Change
considering pragmatic factors as cause
Grammaticalisation
In historical linguistics and language change, grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions (i.e. nouns and verbs) become grammatical markers (affixes, prepositions, etc.). Thus it creates new function words by a process other than deriving them from existing bound, inflectional constructions, instead deriving them from content words. For example, the Old English verb willan ‘to want’, ‘to wish’ has become the Modern English auxiliary verb will, which expresses intention or simply futurity.
- the process (semantic bleaching, morphological reduction, phonetic erosion, extension, decategorization)
- unidirectionality hypothesis:
proposes that grammaticalisation works in a single direction. That is, pronouns may fuse with verbs, or prepositions may fuse with nouns, to create new inflectional systems, but inflectional endings do not break off to create new pronouns or prepositions. - typical clines:
content word > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix - the modals, other auxiliaries, the going to future, development of sentence connectives, discourse markers…
Comment on socio-psychological factors considering Language Change
- speaker psychology
- desire for novelty
- desire to be snobbish, cool, different…
- sociolinguistic approaches
– questions: actuation, transmission, embedding
– group membership, aspirations, accommodation theory and audience design
–> Communication accommodation theory (CAT) is a theory of communication developed by Howard Giles. This theory concerns “(1) the behavioral changes that people make to attune their communication to their partner, (2) the extent to which people perceive their partner as appropriately attuning to them.”[1] The basis of the theory lies in the idea that people adjust (or accommodate) their style of speech to one another. Doing this helps the message sender gain approval from the receiver, increases efficiency in communication between both parties, and helps the sender maintain a positive social identity.
–> Audience design is a sociolinguistic model outlined by Allan Bell in 1984 which proposes that linguistic style-shifting occurs primarily in response to a speaker’s audience. According to this model, speakers adjust their speech primarily towards that of their audience in order to express solidarity or intimacy with them, or away from their audience’s speech to express distance.
The audience design model was inspired by Giles’ communication accommodation theory and Bell’s own research on the speech of radio news broadcasters in New Zealand. The study focused on two radio stations which shared the same recording studio and some of the same individual newsreaders. One station, National Radio, attracted an audience from higher socioeconomic brackets. The other, a local community station, drew a broader range of listeners including those from lower socioeconomic brackets. - apparent time versus real time versus life-time cycle
- -> The apparent-time hypothesis is a methodological construct in sociolinguistics whereby language change is studied by comparing the speech of individuals of different ages.
- -> contrasts with real-time sociolinguistics, which compares data from two points in time to observe change directly.
- Labov’s advanced speakers vs. Milroy’s innovators and early adopters
- Labov’s study on wide scale and Milroy studied within social network
What is the generative hypothesis concerning language change?
rule change across generations
What is the metaphor theory concerning language change?
expression of abstract by concrete terms, body, place metaphors…
What are the conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory?
.
What is the prototype theory?
E.g. in connection to language change
sociolinguistic approach to lg change
What are the accommodation theory and audience design theory?
Where is the difference?
.
Explain apparent time vs. real time vs. life-time cycle
Method to study Language change
Apparent time: compare younger vs Leder generation. Assumption is that older generation speaks ‘an older form’ of the lg that is being observed.
Real time: longitudinal study
Explain the Concept of Labov’s explanation of Language Change through advanced speakers (who are they?) versus Milroy’s innovators and early adopters.
.
What processes are undergone that lead to grammaticalization?
What is grammaticalization?
= development of lexical items into grammatical ones
A well-known example of grammaticalization is that of the process in which the lexical cluster let us, for example in “let us eat”, is reduced to let’s as in “let’s you and me fight”. Here, the phrase has lost its lexical meaning of “allow us” and has become an auxiliary introducing a suggestion, the pronoun ‘us’ reduced first to a suffix and then to an unanalyzed phoneme.
Where grammaticalization takes place, nouns and verbs which carry certain lexical meaning develop over time into grammatical items such as auxiliaries, case markers, inflections, and sentence connectives.
______
the process:
- semantic bleaching/desemanticization
- -> loss of all (or most) lexical content of an entity, so it can be used in an “abstracter, grammatical-hardware-like way”
- morphological reduction
–> Also called decategorialization. after bleaching: likely to lose morphological and syntactic elements that were characteristic of its initial category, but which are not relevant to the grammatical function.
EXAMPLE:
…the demonstrative ‘that’ as in “that book” came to be used as a relative clause marker, and lost the grammatical category of number - phonetic erosion
–> also called phonological reduction. often linked to grammaticalization, but not a necessary feature. implies that a linguistic expression loses phonetic substance when it has undergone grammaticalization.
EXAMPLE
‘Going to’ → ‘gonna’
‘because’ → ‘coz’ - extension
- -> class of all objects that the expression can be applied to. E.g. The class of all bottles - a ‘referent’ is always is a member (subset) of the class of objects. Often ‘extension’ = ‘denotation’ even though the latter can be understood in a broader sense, not only objects but can relate words belonging to other word classes.
- decategorization
- ->
Name examples that show how English has changed/ changes?
.
Semantic bleaching
Morphological reduction
Phonetic erosion
Extension
Decategorization
–> these are processes describing what?
They describe processes concerning grammaticalization (development of lexical items into grammatical ones)
