Language change terms Flashcards
Amelioration
positive
The process of a word’s meaning changing and picking up more positive connotations over time.
example: ‘Pretty’ used to have the negative meaning of someone or something that was cunning and astute. Today ‘pretty’ refers to someone or something that is beautiful.
Pejoration
negative
The process of a word’s meaning changing and picking up more negative connotations over time.
example: the word ‘silly’ (spelled ‘sely’) which meant ‘happy’ or ‘fortunate’ in the Middle English period. The meaning shifted to mean ‘innocent’ or ‘holy’, then again to ‘naïve’. Nowadays, ‘silly’ has negative connotations of foolishness and idiocy.
Broadening
The process of a word’s meanings becoming generalised over time.
example: The word companion used to mean ‘someone who eats bread with you’ (see Italian con ‘with’ plus pain ‘bread’); now it means ‘someone who is with you.’
Narrowing
also called semantic narrowing
The process of a word’s meanings becoming more specialised over time.
example: deer originally had the general meaning ‘animal’
Descriptivism
A way of viewing language as being standard or non-standard, not making judgements about correctness.
It is based on how language is actually used, rather than imposing rules.
Prescriptivism
A way of viewing language as correct or incorrect, prescribing a ‘correct’ way to use language. Imposes rules.
Declinism
A tendency noted by Robert Lane Greene for prescriptivists to view language as being in a state of constant decline from a once great peak.
Lexicon
The vocabulary of language. Also understood as a collection of words.
Linguistic Purism
A pejorative (contemptuous) label used for a view that sees a language as needing preservation from things that might make it change, such as dialect variation and borrowings from other languages.
A purist (or grammaticaster) is someone who expresses a desire to eliminate certain undesirable features from a language, including grammatical errors, jargon (specialised language of a professional group), neologisms (newly coined word/coinage), colloquialisms (conversational informal expressions), and words of foreign origin.
also referred to as verbal hygiene (coined by Deborah Cameron)
Problem with linguistic purism
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language,” says James Nicoll, “is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary”.
Linguistic Purism through the years
16th Century Purism:
“I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges, wherein if we take not heed by tiim, ever borowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt.”
This policy (borrowing of language) recalls an Old English practice in which Latin words like discipulus were rendered using native formations like leorningcniht, or ‘learning follower,’ rather than by borrowing the Latin word, as Modern English does with disciple.
19th Century Purism:
“A certain Captain Hamilton in 1833 demonstrates the invective (curses) the British directed at the language used in America. He claims that his denunciation is ‘the natural feeling of an Englishman at finding the language of Shakespeare and Milton thus gratuitously degraded. Unless the present progress of change be arrested by an increase of taste and judgment in the more educated classes, there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an English man . . ..’
Hamilton’s vituperation (invective) exemplifies a purist view of language, which allows only one fixed, immutable, correct version [and] which sees difference and change as degradation.”
Brander Matthews on Linguistic Purism
“To ‘fix’ a living language finally is an idle dream, and if it could be brought about it would be a dire calamity.”
Uptalk
A way of speaking in which the intonation pattern moves up towards the end of a declarative utterance.
motherFUCKER
Speech Community
Any socially or regionally defined group in which its members share a number of linguistic characteristics.
Speech communities may be large regions like an urban area with a common, distinct accent (think of Boston with its dropped r’s) or small units like families and friends (think of a nickname for a sibling). They help people define themselves as individuals and community members and identify (or misidentify) others.
Free Morpheme
A free morpheme is a morpheme (or word element) that can stand alone as a word. It is also called an unbound morpheme or a free-standing morpheme.
“I need to go now, but you can stay.” Put another way, none of the nine words in that sentence can be divided into smaller parts that are also meaningful.
