Week 10

Question 1

Examples of linguistic change

Answer 1

Semantic change
- Narrowing = becomes more specific over time.
- Broadening = meaning becomes less specific, more general.

Morphological change
- Analogical labelling (analogy) = English slay, slew to slay, slayed.
- Univerbation = process of combining a fixed expression of several words into a new single word.
- Reanalysis = a new generation of speakers may analyse a word structure differently than the previous generation.

Syntactic change
- Change in word order: loss of non-SVO word orders in the growth of English.
- Grammaticalisation: evolution of grammatical forms; lexical word becomes auxiliary word.

Sound change
- Prothesis
- Intervocalic voicing

Question 2

Example of narrowing

Answer 2

Old English steorfan ‘die’ -> PDE starve ‘die from hunger’.

Question 3

Example of broadening

Answer 3

Spanish caballero ‘rider, horseman’ -> ‘gentleman, man of upper society’.

‘Business’ is an example of broadening. The word ‘business’ was originally only used to mean someone was busy.

Question 4

Cognates

Answer 4

Words from different languages that derive from the same ancestor. They developed from the same ancestor language.

English: father
Dutch: vader
German: Vater

Question 5

PIE

Answer 5

Proto-Indo-European; Latin, English, Dutch, German, Gothic, Celtic, Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, etc.

Question 6

Subfamilies in PIE

Answer 6

Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic (Greek), Romance, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian.

Question 7

Comparative reconstruction

Answer 7

Because there are no written records from PIE times, the ancestor word for ‘father’ must be reconstructed. Here we focus on the initial sound of the word; the reconstructed sound is called a proto-sound.

By using the comparative method, we try to reconstruct as much as possible from the photo-language by comparing the various ‘daughter languages’, and by determining the various changes that have taken place.

Question 8

What is a reconstructed language called?

Answer 8

A proto-language.

Question 9

What is a reconstructed sound called?

Answer 9

A proto-sound.

Question 10

Grimm’s Law

Answer 10

The change from p- to f-/v- in Germanic was part of a more general sound changes in which voiceless aspirated stops developed into fricatives. This change is called spirantisation.

p -> f
t -> θ
k -> x (h)

Question 11

What is an example of spirantisation?

Answer 11

Grimm’s Law

Question 12

Most natural development principle

Answer 12

Asking the question of which sound could have developed naturally into the sounds in the daughter language.

Also known as directionality principle.

Question 13

What do you call it when similarities are due to chance?

Answer 13

Accidental similarities

Question 14

Historical linguistics

Answer 14

A branch of linguistics that’s connected with observing, describing and explaining language change.

Question 15

On which two aspects does historical linguistics focus?

Answer 15

Historical linguistics focuses on diachronic (= across-time, mapping the shifts of language over centuries), rather than synchronic (= a comparison of languages/dialects, spoken differences in the same language).

Question 16

Three tasks of studying historical linguistics

Answer 16

1. Observation (collecting evidence).
2. Description (describe what changes and how).
3. Explanation (identifying the causes and mechanisms of change).

Question 17

Prothesis

Answer 17

The addition of a letter or syllable at the beginning of a word, as in Spanish escuela derived from Latin scola.

Question 18

Intervocalic voicing

Answer 18

A process where a voiceless segment such as /ptk/ is realised as partially or totally voiced [bdg] when occurring between two vowels.

Question 19

Pidgins

Answer 19

A contact language used by people who don’t speak the same language.

Question 20

Creole

Answer 20

When a pidgin develops beyond its role as a trade or contact language and becomes the first language of a social community, it is a creole.

Question 21

Univerbation

Answer 21

Process of combining a fixed expression of several words into a new single word.

Albeit (from all be it).

Question 22

Reanalysis

Answer 22

A new generation of speakers may analyse a word structure differently than the previous generation.

The transformation of ‘an napron’ into ‘an apron’. Originally, the word had ‘napron’ as its base, but through reanalysis, speakers mistakenly interpreted it as ‘an apron’.