Week 10 Flashcards
Examples of linguistic change
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
Example of narrowing
Old English steorfan ‘die’ -> PDE starve ‘die from hunger’.
Example of broadening
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.
Cognates
Words from different languages that derive from the same ancestor. They developed from the same ancestor language.
English: father
Dutch: vader
German: Vater
PIE
Proto-Indo-European; Latin, English, Dutch, German, Gothic, Celtic, Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, etc.
Subfamilies in PIE
Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic (Greek), Romance, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian.
Comparative reconstruction
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.
What is a reconstructed language called?
A proto-language.
What is a reconstructed sound called?
A proto-sound.
Grimm’s Law
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)
What is an example of spirantisation?
Grimm’s Law
Most natural development principle
Asking the question of which sound could have developed naturally into the sounds in the daughter language.
Also known as directionality principle.
What do you call it when similarities are due to chance?
Accidental similarities
Historical linguistics
A branch of linguistics that’s connected with observing, describing and explaining language change.
On which two aspects does historical linguistics focus?
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).
Three tasks of studying historical linguistics
- Observation (collecting evidence).
- Description (describe what changes and how).
- Explanation (identifying the causes and mechanisms of change).
Prothesis
The addition of a letter or syllable at the beginning of a word, as in Spanish escuela derived from Latin scola.
Intervocalic voicing
A process where a voiceless segment such as /ptk/ is realised as partially or totally voiced [bdg] when occurring between two vowels.
Pidgins
A contact language used by people who don’t speak the same language.
Creole
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.
Univerbation
Process of combining a fixed expression of several words into a new single word.
Albeit (from all be it).
Reanalysis
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’.
