7. Language change.

LANGUAGE CHANGE

Yet one glance at the works of Chaucer or Shakespeare shows how much English has changed in a relatively short time.

How language changes

The American sociolinguist William Labov was one of the first people to examine in detail how a change spreads through a population. Some changes occur 'from above', meaning 'from above the level of consciousness', when people consciously imitate the accent of oth­ers. Other changes are 'from below', meaning 'from below the level of consciousness', as with the Martha's Vineyard changes, where those involved might have been unaware of which parts of their speech were changing.

Causes of language change on the one hand, there are underlying tendencies in language, tendencies which can get triggered by social factors. On the other hand, there is a therapeu­tic.tendency, a tendency to make readjustments in order to restore broken patterns. Let us briefly consider these.

Natural tendencies There are numerous natural tendencies, and some of them are stronger than others. They can be triggered by social factors, or may be held at bay for centuries, perhaps held in check by other opposing tendencies.

A widespread tendency is for the ends of words to disappear. In cases where this has largely occurred already, as in the Polynesian languages, Italian, and French, many English speakers claim the lan­guage 'sounds beautiful', 'has Mowing sounds'. Hut when it begins to happen to our own language, and people leave 111 oil the end of words such as hot, what, and replace it with л 'gloltal stop' - a closure at the back of the vocal tract with no actual sound emitted - then many peo­ple get upset, and talk about 'sloppiness', and 'disgraceful swallowing of sounds'. (England- ingland)

Therapeutic changes

Therapeutic changes restore patterns which have been damaged by previous changes. A number of examples of this are provided by the use of analogy, the ability to reason from parallel cases, which is a fundamental feature of human language. It is most obvious in the case of child language, when children create past tenses such as taked, drinked, after hearing forms such as baked, blinked.

Chain shifts - that is, changes which seem to occur in linked sequences - are a particularly interesting therapeutic phenomenon. For example, in Chaucer's time the word lyf 'life' was pronounced [li:f] (like today's leaf).

Interacting changes

So far, the changes examined have been fairly straightforward. But some types of change are far more complex. In order to give some idea of the numerous factors normally involved in a language change, let us finally look at some interacting changes.

Meanwhile, it gradually became normal to put the subject before the verb, and the object after it. So the sentence The king liked pears', which originally meant To the king were a pleasure pears', was rein­terpreted as The king took pleasure in pears'.

7. Language change.

Spread of change from person to person: Labov’s sociolinguistic study

The spread of a change through the language is a topic which at one time seemed even more mysterious than its spread through a popula­tion. One puzzling phenomenon was the so-called 'regularity' of sound change. If one sound changes, the alteration does not only occur in an isolated word. It affects all similar words in which the same sound occurs. So, in English wyf became wife, just as lyf became life, and bryd became bride, all showing a change from [i:] to [ai].

52. Towards the end, a change tends to lose its impetus and peter out, so there may be a few words it never reaches. This scenario, then, of a change creeping from word to word accounts for why changes are for the most part regular, but why some words can get left out. The process is known as lexical diffusion. The words affected by a change fluctuate at first, with the new and old pronuncia­tion coexisting. But eventually, the newer pronunciation wins out.Reconstruction

"There are a number of different types of reconstruction. The best known of these is external reconstruction, also known as compara­tive historical linguistics. In this, a linguist compares the forms of words in genetically related languages, that is, languages which have developed from some common source, and then draws conclusions about their common ancestor. This type of reconstruction will be dis­cussed further in Chapter 13. An older name for it is 'comparative philology', which sometimes causes confusion, since in the USA, France and Germany, 'philology' normally refers to the study of liter­ary texts.

A second type of reconstruction is known as internal reconstruc­tion. In this, linguists look at the state of one language at a single point in time. By comparing elements which are likely to have had a com­mon origin, they are often able to draw conclusions about their earlier form. To take a simple example, consider the words long and longer. /Ion/ and /\ot)g/ (with /g/ on the end) are both allomorphs of the morpheme long. This suggests that, originally, they were identical,and that the word long was once pronounced with |g| at the end (as it still is in some parts of England, such as Liverpool).

A third type of reconstruction is typological reconstruction, This is somewhat newer than the other two. Linguists are beginning to be able to divide languages into different types, and to recognize the basic characteristics attached to each type: this branch of linguistics is known as language typology. For example, those languages (such as Hindi) which have verbs after their objects, also tend to have auxil­iary verbs after the main verb.