Understanding Language Change [1 ed.] 9780415713382, 9780415713399, 9781315463018

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Understanding Language Change Understanding Language Change offers a complete and accessible introduction to historical linguistics. Assuming no prior knowledge, this engaging book introduces core concepts through English examples; builds on them with a rich variety of illustrations from across the Germanic, Romance, Pacific and Asiatic languages; and demonstrates their applicability to real-life changes taking place in languages today. Key features include: • A step-by-step approach introducing language change at the sound, word and sentence levels, covering shifts that are currently underway in addition to historical changes; • Coverage of topics such as pidgins, creoles and mixed languages, as well as language death and how to reconstruct lost stages of languages; • Breakout boxes showing the real-life applications and impact of theories, from Shakespeare’s English to the speech of modern-day celebrities, and introducing current research problems; • A wide range of supporting material, including exercises, further reading and research projects for more in-depth independent study. Written by two experienced teachers, Understanding Language Change is essential reading for anyone studying historical linguistics or language change for the first time. Kate Burridge is Professor and Chair of Linguistics at Monash University, Australia. Alexander Bergs is Professor and Chair of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Osnabrück, Germany.

Understanding Language series Series Editors: Bernard Comrie, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA Greville Corbett, Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey, UK The Understanding Language series provides approachable, yet authoritative, introductions to major topics in linguistics. Ideal for students with little or no prior knowledge of linguistics, each book carefully explains the basics, emphasising understanding of the essential notions rather than arguing for a particular theoretical position. Other titles in the series: Understanding Pragmatics Gunter Senft Understanding Child Language Acquisition Caroline Rowland Understanding Semantics, Second Edition Sebastian Löbner Understanding Syntax, Fourth Edition Maggie Tallerman Understanding Phonetics Patricia Ashby Understanding Phonology, Third Edition Carlos Gussenhoven and Haike Jacobs Understanding Morphology, Second Edition Martin Haspelmath and Andrea D. Sims Understanding Language Testing Dan Douglas Understanding Second Language Acquisition Lourdes Ortega Study Skills for Linguistics Jeanette Sakel Understanding Language Change Kate Burridge and Alexander Bergs For more information on any of these titles, or to order, go to www.routledge.com/series/ULAN

Understanding

Language Change Kate Burridge and Alexander Bergs

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Kate Burridge and Alexander Bergs The right of Kate Burridge and Alexander Bergs to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Burridge, Kate, author. | Bergs, Alexander, author. Title: Understanding language change / Kate Burridge and Alexander Bergs. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, [2017] | Series: Understanding Language series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016015297 | ISBN 9780415713382 (hardback) | ISBN 9780415713399 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315463018 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Linguistic change. | Historical linguistics. Classification: LCC P142 .B87 2017 | DDC 417/.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015297 ISBN: 978-0-415-71338-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-71339-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-46301-8 (ebk) Typeset in Minion Pro by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figures ix List of maps x List of tables xi Acknowledgementsxiii Publisher’s acknowledgements xiv List of abbreviations xv 1 Setting the scene

1

Introduction1 1.1 Change occurs at all levels 5 1.1.1 Phonetics and phonology 5 1.1.2 Morphology 8 1.1.3 Syntax 9 1.1.4 Semantics 10 1.1.5 Pragmatics 11 1.1.6 Change across different levels 13 1.2 Variation and change – two sides of the same coin 13 1.3 Evidence of change in progress 18 1.4 Attitudes to change 21 1.5 How this book is structured 23 Summary24 Further reading 24 Exercises25

2 Changes to the lexicon

28

Introduction28 29 2.1 Gaining words – lexical addition 2.1.1 Compounding 31 33 2.1.2 Affixation 2.1.3 Backformation 34 2.1.4 Conversion 35 2.1.5 Abbreviation 35 36 2.1.6 Acronyms 2.1.7 Blending 37 2.1.8 Commonization 38 2.1.9 Reduplication 38

vi

Contents 2.1.10 Borrowing 39 2.1.11 Sound symbolism 41 42 2.1.12 A final word on the processes 2.2 Losing words – lexical mortality 43 2.2.1 Obsolescence 43 44 2.2.2 “Verbicide” 2.2.3 Reduction 44 2.2.4 Intolerable homonymy 44 46 2.3 Etymology – study of the origin of words Summary47 Further reading 48 Exercises49

3 Changes to the semantics

52

Introduction52 3.1 Consequences of semantic change 54 3.1.1 Broadening 54 3.1.2 Narrowing 55 3.1.3 Shift 55 3.1.4 Changing values – amelioration and deterioration 55 56 3.1.5 Chain reaction changes 3.2 Why words change their meanings 57 57 3.2.1 Socio-cultural factors 3.2.2 Psychological factors 58 3.2.3 Linguistic factors 61 3.3 Regularity in semantic change – a more explanatory account 66 Summary69 Sources and further reading 70 Exercises70

4 Changes in sound structure

75

Introduction75 76 4.1 Phonological processes 4.1.1 Old sounds drop out – loss 77 4.1.2 New sounds appear 80 4.1.3 Old sounds are modified – assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis 81 4.2 Phonetic versus phonemic change 90 4.2.1 Phonetic change – changes in accent 90 91 4.2.2 Phonemic change – changes that alter the sound system 4.3 On exceptions in sound change 94 4.4 Why do sounds change? 97 4.4.1 Simplicity 98 4.4.2 Contact induced change 98 4.4.3 Structural pressure 98 100 4.4.4 Social change

Contents

vii

4.4.5 Frequency factors 100 Summary101 101 Further reading Exercises102

5 Changes in word structure

106

Introduction106 106 5.1 Reanalysis and actualization – reinterpretation of structure 5.2 Analogy – attraction to structure 109 5.3 Typology – change in morphological type 121 5.4 Why – explaining morphological changes 127 Summary130 131 Further reading Exercises131

6 Changes in sentence structure

134

Introduction134 6.1 Change in word order 137 6.1.1 Grammatical change is gradual 141 6.2 Typology and word order change 143 6.2.1 The contribution of Joseph Greenberg and others 144 6.3 Creating grammar 148 151 6.3.1 Case study – the evolution of not in English 6.3.2 Where is English negation heading now? 154 Summary156 Sources and further reading 157 Exercises157

7 The spread of change

162

Introduction162 163 7.1 Diffusion within the linguistic system 7.2 Spread in social structures – the speech community and the individual 167 7.2.1 Wavy, gravity, cascady . . . 168 7.2.2 Social factors 171 7.2.3 Social networks 182 7.2.4 Communities of practice 185 Summary186 Further reading 186 Exercises187

8 Languages in contact

189

Introduction189 8.1 Types of contact 190 8.1.1 Language maintenance 190 8.1.2 Language shift 192

viii

Contents 8.1.3 The creation of new languages 195 8.1.4 The linguistic Sprachbund – a special case of language convergence 201 202 8.2 Case study: Pennsylvania German and English in contact 8.2.1 English to Pennsylvania German – superstratum influence 203 8.2.2 Pennsylvania German transfers into English – substratum influence 204 207 8.3 Language death 8.4 Language planning and policy 209 8.5 The dangers of purism 210 Summary211 Further reading 211 Exercises212

9 Relatedness between languages

215

Introduction215 9.1 Languages, dialects and standards 216 9.2 Establishing genetic relationships 217 9.3 The family tree model 220 9.4 The wave model 222 9.5 Quantitative approaches to language divergence 226 229 9.6 Long-distance comparison and Proto-World 9.7 Reconstructing the past 233 234 9.7.1 Written sources as evidence of change 9.7.2 The comparative method 237 Summary243 Further reading 244 Exercises244

10 An end on’t

247

Introduction247 248 10.1 Five questions for any theory of change 10.2 Additional theoretical perspectives 253 10.2.1 Corpus linguistics 254 10.2.2 Historical pragmatics 256 10.3 Historical sociolinguistics 260 10.4 The rate of change – diversity and stability 264 266 10.4.1 The effects of new and emerging media 10.4.2 Social change 270 10.5 Where to from here? 272 Further reading 273 Exercises274

References277 Index288

Figures

  1.1   1.2   4.1   4.2   4.3   4.4   4.5   4.6   5.1   5.2   5.3   7.1   7.2   7.3   7.4   7.5   7.6   7.7   7.8   7.9 7.10   9.1   9.2   9.3   9.4   9.5   9.6   9.7   9.8   9.9 10.1

Change in apparent time in Ghazvin (an) 19 Percentage of do forms in various sentence types, 1400–1700 20 Complete merger 91 Partial merger 92 Primary split (split + merger in Old High German) 92 Secondary split 93 Secondary split in early English 94 The Great English Vowel Shift 99 Communication process (simplified) 107 The “wug” test 111 From fusional to isolating to agglutinating and back again 126 The S-curve of diffusion 165 Percentage of -s vs. -th in the third person present tense 166 The development of periphrastic do, 1400–1700 167 (a:) in Norwich 173 (r) in New York City 174 (ai) and (au) on Martha’s Vineyard, centralization index stratified by age 177 Martha’s Vineyard 40 years later 178 (ing) in Philadelphia 181 Devoicing of [ʒ] in Buenos Aires by gender and age 182 The expanded “dots-and-lines model”  184 Family tree of the McFly family (Back to the Future)220 Family tree for the Germanic languages (simplified) 221 Family tree for the Romance languages (simplified) 222 The Indo-European family tree 223 Wave model of diffusion 224 A wave diagram of the Germanic language family 225 The Nostratic family tree 231 A simple language family tree 238 A simple language family tree for the word ‘hand’ 238 The funnel view of language history 264

Maps

7.1 The Rhenish fan 8.1 Map showing location of Gurindji and Warlpiri

169 199

Tables

  1.1 Some formal correspondences between different Romance languages   1.2 The development of nasalized vowels in French, ca. 1200–1800   1.3 The inflectional forms of Early Modern English verbs   2.1 Examples of English borrowings into German   4.1 Compensatory lengthening in English   4.2 Medial consonant excrescence in English   4.3 Final consonant excrescence in German   4.4 Total assimilation in Italian   4.5 Palatalization in Russian  4.6 i-mutation in Germanic   4.7 Umlaut in German   4.8 Changes to the ‘stone’ paradigm   4.9 Some typical paths for lenition 4.10 Final consonant devoicing in German 4.11 Examples of dissimilation in English and German 4.12 Metathesis in English and German 4.13 Metathesis in Hanunoo  5.1 Māori passive formation   5.2 Analogy and irregular verbs in the history of English   5.3 Basic and past forms of [ai:t] verbs in English   5.4 Latin inflection and word order  6.1 World Atlas of Language Structures Online frequencies for Subject, Object and Verb   6.2 Word order correlations   7.1 Grimm’s Law (First Germanic Consonant Shift)   7.2 Variable pronunciations of -Vry words   7.3 Lexical stem of hoagie in Philadelphia telephone listings   7.4 Diffusion of hoagie to Pittsburgh from 1961 to 1966   7.5 Five types of variation   8.1 Pennsylvania German-English contact – direction of influence   8.2 Number of Aboriginal languages originally spoken in Australia   8.3 Comparison of the 2005 and 2014 National Indigenous Language Surveys   9.1 Lexical correspondences between different Romance languages   9.2 Comparison of four words in seven languages   9.3 Grimm’s Law

4 6 8 41 79 80 81 82 82 83 84 86 86 86 88 89 89 108 112 117 122 143 145 164 165 170 171 179 205 208 208 215 217 218

xii   9.4   9.5   9.6   9.7   9.8

Tables List of 100 basic words 227 Nostratic word list 231 Proto-World word list 232 Cognates in Romance languages 239 Sound correspondences for goat, dear, head, meat, dog240

Acknowledgements

We hope you will have as much fun reading this book as we had writing it! Usually, writing is a pretty lonely job, but working together as a team made this a really enjoyable enterprise. But even as a team, we had help from others, for which we are extremely grateful. Our heartfelt thanks go to Nadia Seemungal and Helen Tredget, our editors at Routledge, for their trust in our work, their advice, their patience – and those more or less gentle nudges. To our series editors, Bernard Comrie and Greville Corbett, we owe a special debt of gratitude. This book has benefited enormously from their comments on earlier drafts, and they have saved us from quite a few blunders. A special thanks to Felicity Meakins and Carmel O’Shannessy, who have been so generous in sharing their work on mixed languages in Australia. Thanks also to the students of Monash University and Universität Osnabrück for being such willing guinea pigs when it came to trying out our ideas about language change. In particular, we are grateful to Andrea Tompros, our student test driver for an early manuscript, for her help with style and language, and the creative artwork in Figures 5.1 and 5.2. We also appreciate the great help of Katrin Birgit Hänel and Tabea Jenner with formatting the manuscript and compiling the references. Last, but by no means least, our whole-hearted thanks also go to our families for bearing with us for so many months. There is a life after the book. And special congrats to Julius Bergs (age 7 years and 11 months) for finishing his first book three months before Dad finished this one.

Publisher’s acknowledgements

The author and publishers would like to thank the following rights holders for permission to reproduce copyright material: Map 7.1 by Hans Erren (2010) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift#/media/File:Rheinischer_faecher.png reproduced under licence CC BY-SA 3.0 Map 8.1 by Brenda Thornley, reproduced with kind permission of Felicity Meakins. Figure  9.6 from Robert McColl Millar (2015) Trask’s Historical Linguistics, Third Edition, Abingdon: Routledge. Reproduced with kind permission of Taylor and Francis Ltd.

Abbreviations

.ACC accusative .DAT dative .NOM nominative * reconstructed —>

process underway

>

historical process (change took place)

BCE

before the Christian era

C consonant CE

Christian era

COCA

Corpus of Contemporary American English (See http://corpus. byu.edu/corpora.asp.)

COP-PAST copula-past DEF definite GEN genitive LMC

lower middle class

LWC

lower working class

MMC

middle middle class

MWC

middle working class

NFUT non-future NML nominalizer NONPAST

not in the past

NP

noun phrase

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

PIE Proto-Indo-European

xvi

Abbreviations

pl plural poss possessive S subject sg singular Skr. Sanskrit TE-ASP tense-aspect TOP topic TRANS transitive UMC

upper middle class

UWC

upper working class

V

verb or vowel

VP

verb phrase

X

any syntactic function (e.g. object, adverbial)

1 Setting the scene INTRODUCTION Languages change – constantly, inevitably. Unfortunately, this is a little bit hard to see when you just look at present-day English for example. The language you use every day doesn’t change . . . Or does it? You’ll know the answer by the end of this book. Let’s start with a little experiment. There is a very famous English text about 1,000 years old, from the Anglo Saxon Chronicle.1 The text describes the arrival of dragons in northern England in 793: Ann. dccxciii. Her ƿæron reðe forebecna cumene ofer norðhymbra land. 7 þæt folc earmlic breʒdon þæt ƿæron ormete þodenas 7 liʒrescas. 7 fyrenne dracan ʒæron ʒeseʒene on þam lifte fleoʒende. ‘A.D. 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery, dragons flying across the firmament.’ You will probably recognize a word or two (like cumene ‘come’, land ‘land’ or dracan ‘dragons’), but it is very unlikely that you can read this original Old English text without any formal training – even though this is supposedly the same language you are reading right now! Let’s fast forward a bit. Compare the example above to the experience of reading a little bit of Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the most famous English poets of the later Middle Ages (he died in 1400). Chaucer describes a scene in which a woman who married five different men debates and laments the fact that apparently the Bible disapproves of such behaviour: “Thou hast yhad five housbondes,” quod he [Jesus], “And that ilke man that now hath thee Is nat thyn housbonde.” Thus saide he certain. What that he mente therby I can nat sayn, But that I axe why the fifthe man Was noon housbonde to the Samaritan? How manye mighte she han in mariage? Yit herde I nevere tellen in myn age Upon this nombre diffinicioun.

2

Understanding Language Change Men may divine and glosen up and down, But wel I woot, expres, withouten lie, God bad us for to wexe and multiplye: That gentil text can I wel understonde. (The Canterbury Tales, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue) “Now you have had five husbands,” he [Jesus] said, “But he who has you now, I say instead, Is not your husband.” That he said, with certainty, But what he meant thereby I cannot say; But I must ask, why the fifth man Was no husband to the Samaritan? How many [men] is she allowed to have in marriage? I’ve never heard it said in all my time How this number is defined; Men may divine and gloss up and down, But I know well, expressly, without lie God bade us to increase and multiply – That noble text I understand well.

The Chaucer text will probably look a lot more familiar and less confusing than the Old English text. And yet you would still need to have some training in Middle English or an amazing guessing ability in order to read and fully understand it. This is clearly not present-day English yet. Let’s move ahead another 200 years and read some Shakespeare, around 1600: BEATRICE I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick: nobody marks you. BENEDICK What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living? BEATRICE Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick? Courtesy itself must convert to disdain, if you come in her presence. BENEDICK Then is courtesy a turncoat. But it is certain I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted: and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart; for, truly, I love none.

Setting the scene

3

BEATRICE A dear happiness to women: they would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank God and my cold blood, I am of your humour for that: I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me. BENEDICK God keep your ladyship still in that mind! so some gentleman or other shall ’scape a predestinate scratched face. BEATRICE Scratching could not make it worse, an ’twere such a face as yours were. (Much Ado about Nothing, I.1) At last we have reached a point where the language looks a lot more like presentday English. It may still be hard to understand, but this is perhaps due to the style of the author rather than the language itself. Here you probably only have to guess the meaning of a few words and phrases (meet in meet food is an archaic word for ‘fitting’ or ‘convenient’, and humour in Shakespeare does not mean ‘banter, playfulness’, but rather refers to the theory of four body humours, or temperaments). In contrast to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, you should be able to get an idea of what is going on instead of just guessing a few words! So this little experiment shows nicely that languages change. English underwent some drastic and radical changes between ca. 700 CE and 1600 CE (a period of almost 1,000  years!). In fact, these changes seem to be so radical that some people would even question whether Old English is related to present-day English – which is also why some people prefer to call it Anglo-Saxon rather than Old English. The same can also be said about Latin and its “daughter” languages Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. All these languages go back to Latin as their source, or “mother language”. Hence, this is called the family of Romance languages, as Romance is derived from Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire, and not from romantic. But it is difficult to see the history and connections (relations) between all of these languages at first glance. The following example gives you a famous line from the Ten Commandments (“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”; Exodus 20:7, originally written in Hebrew) in Latin and in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese (and English as a gloss). Latin is usually considered to be the “mother” of these four modern “daughter” languages. The development of the daughter languages also probably took more than 1,000  years, just like Modern English.

4

Understanding Language Change

non adsumes nomen Domini Dei tui in vanum nec enim habebit insontem Dominus eum qui adsumpserit nomen Domini Dei sui frustra. French: Tu ne prendras point le nom de l’Eternel, ton Dieu, en vain; car l’Eternel ne laissera point impuni celui qui prendra son nom en vain. Italian: Non usare il nome dell’Eterno, ch’è l’Iddio tuo, in vano; perché l’Eterno non terrà per innocente chi avrà usato il suo nome in vano. Spanish: No tomarás el Nombre del SEÑOR tu Dios en vano; porque no dará por inocente el SEÑOR al que tomare su Nombre en vano. Portuguese: Não tomarás o nome do Senhor teu Deus em vão; porque o Senhor não terá por inocente aquele que tomar o seu nome em vão. English: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. (Exodus 20:7) Latin:

Just like with our English examples, some similarities between the different languages can be still be found, but many things have changed drastically. Latin seems to have changed a lot on its way to modernity. Table 1.1 gives you a first overview. Why don’t you try to find some examples for this table yourself? You might still think now that language change is essentially a matter of the past, something that affected languages more than 1,000 years ago, when we still had knights, Vikings, gladiators and so on. The fact that we can still read Shakespeare, but not Old English, even supports such a view. However, this is far from the truth. Languages are in a constant state of flux, today just as in the past – even though we might not always notice it. There are a couple of words that used to be very popular not too long ago in 20th century English: do you know what a church key is? In the 1960s before pop top cans, this was a special opener to puncture the tops of soda and beer cans. A fox in the 1970s was not only an animal, but also a sexy looking woman or man. On the other hand, nobody in the 1960s or 1970s knew the words DVD, google, or selfie. Pronunciation has also changed. Words like applicable and primarily used to be stressed on the first syllable: 'applicable and 'primarily. Today, we tend to stress them as ap 'plicable and pri 'marily. Many varieties of present-day English are currently changing from street to shtreet. And is it student or stjudent – or even shtjudent? Ask or aks? To cut a long story short, there is good evidence that English and all other Table 1.1 Some formal correspondences between different Romance languages Latin

French

Italian

Spanish

Portuguese

English (gloss)2

in vanum nomen adsumes

en vain nom prendras

in vano nome usare

en vano nombre tomarás

em vão nome tomarás

in vain name take

Setting the scene

5

living languages are still changing and will continue to do so. You will find many more examples for this throughout the book. We should emphasize, though, that languages do not change at a constant rate. As the overall history of English shows, there can be periods of speeding up and periods of slowing down. From the time of the dragon in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle through to the 17th century, and even the 18th century, changes were complex and rapid. As a consequence, people in, say, the 1700s could not read with ease the literature of three centuries earlier. The extract above from Chaucer would have presented difficulties, just as it does today. And language from a still earlier time prompted even Chaucer to make the observation: “[y]e knowe ek that in forme of speche is change” (‘you know also that in (the) form of speech (there) is change’), noting the “wonder nyce and straunge” (‘wonderfully curious and strange’) nature of early English words (in Troilus and Criseyde II, 22ff). And yet Modern English readers have little trouble reading texts of the 1700s. The language of Jonathan Swift or Jane Austen is stylistically different and has some unfamiliar looking vocabulary, but it is recognizably Modern English. The fact that languages change is a great concern to many people, and we find frequent complaints in the media that languages aren’t what they used to be. People mourn the loss of culture and language standards, especially in children and young adults. From this perspective, languages change (i.e. “decline”) because younger generations lack the competence, precision and strictness to speak their language properly. Kids are simply too lazy. Whether the advocates who see language as being in decline are right or wrong is a question we will discuss later on in this chapter.

1.1  CHANGE OCCURS AT ALL LEVELS Language is a complex phenomenon, and most linguists today agree that we need to distinguish between several layers or levels of linguistic structure: the sound level (phonetics and phonology), the word level (morphology), the sentence level (syntax) and the meaning levels (semantics and pragmatics). Language change occurs in all of these. Let’s take a look at some examples.

1.1.1  Phonetics and phonology Sound changes belong to the best studied phenomena of linguistic change. To give you just one or two examples from segmental phonology, i.e. phonology that looks at individual sounds and their features: In Old English, the two sounds [f] and [v] (as in feel and love respectively) never occurred in the same position in the word. We call this complementary distribution. So, [f] (a voiceless labiodental fricative) only occurred word initially and finally (or next to another voiceless sound), while [v] was used in the middle of words, between two voiced sounds, such as vowels. Thus, the Old English word for ‘dear, beloved’, lēof, was pronounced like [le:of], while lēofan, the plural form, was pronounced like [le:ovan]. Since the two were in

6

Understanding Language Change

complementary distribution we treat them as allophones of a single phoneme /f/. Today, however, they do occur in the same position, and they clearly distinguish meaning (as in feel and veal for instance). How did that happen? After the Norman Conquest in 1066, many words from Norman French entered the English language, among them words like veal, venison and even very. When they became part of English we all of a sudden find word-initial [v] (which did not exist before in Old English). And once [v] occurs word initially, we get minimal pairs like veal and feel, or very and ferry. English also lost final vowels in words like save, which introduced the voiced fricative word finally, so that it contrasted with the voiceless fricative; e.g. the noun safe [seɪf] versus the verb save [seɪv]. This means that [v] and [f] are no longer allophones but have become phonemes of English, or meaning distinguishing sounds. Another example comes from the history of French. Some vowels in French are pronounced with a nasal quality when they occur before the consonants n or m (in which case the consonants themselves are not pronounced): danse ‘dance’ [dãs],3 un ‘a, one’ [œ̴ ], vin ‘wine’ [vɛ̃], faim ‘hunger’ [fɛ̃], parfum ‘perfume’ |parfœ̴ ] etc. This, however, is a phenomenon that only developed slowly and gradually in the Middle Ages and beyond. First, we simply see a vowel followed by a nasal consonant (VN), then the vowel is nasalized (ṼN), then the nasal consonant is lost (Ṽ), so (VN) > (ṼN) > (Ṽ). Between 900 CE and 1300 CE, the first step occurred; i.e. vowels were nasalized. Between 1300 CE and 1600 CE alterna­ tive spellings suggest a lot of variability in the presence or absence of nasal consonants in this combination, so (ṼN) ≈ (Ṽ). In modern Standard French (from 1600 CE onwards), the nasal consonant is lost altogether (Ṽ). Second, this kind of sound change did not affect all vowels [ɛ̃, œ̴ , œ̴ , ɔ̃ ] at the same time. While they were all nasalized by the end of the 14th century, not all of them have lost their following nasal consonant. Table 1.2 summarizes the state of affairs for the different periods. Apparently, as we can see in Table 1.2, vin and maison were the first to show variability in having (or losing) their nasalized consonants. These seem to be the leaders of this change, and they were followed by the others. Between the 14th and the 16th centuries, all vowel-consonant combinations showed this variability, and they all lost their consonants by roughly 1700 CE. What this shows is that sound change can proceed very gradually and can actually take several centuries. Table 1.2 The development of nasalized vowels in French, ca. 1200–1800 (based on Sampson 1999)

a  vend ‘sell’ b  vin ‘wine’ c  maison ‘house’ d  humble ‘humble’

ca. 13th century

ca. 14th–16th century

ca. 17th–18th century

[vẽnt vãnt]

[vã(n)t]

[vã]

[v ĩn vẽ(n)]

[v ĩ(n) vẽ(n) vɛ̃(n)]

[vɛ̃]

[ỹmblə]

[ỹ(m)blə œ̃(m)blə]

[œ̃blə]

[mæjzõn mɛzũ(n)]

[mɛzõ(n) mɛzũ(n)]

[mɛzõ mɛzɔ̃]

Setting the scene

7

Grassmann’s Law A very famous textbook example for sound change is Grassmann’s Law. It was named after Hermann Grassmann, a 19th century German mathematician and linguist, who discovered that in Ancient Greek and in Sanskrit (the ancient language of India) the first of two aspirated stops (i.e. stops accompanied by some breathing noise) within a word loses its aspiration (the breathing noise). So, in the mother language of Sanskrit and Greek, Proto-Indo-European, *dhi-dhē-mi ‘I put’ or ‘I place’ with two aspirated stops (dh) turns into Sanskrit da-dhā-mi and into Greek ti-thē-mi with only one aspirated stop. Interestingly, this so-called dissimilation process can be used in historical linguistics to reconstruct earlier stages and changes in the language. So, Greek now has two different forms for ‘hair’: thriks in the nominative singular, but trikhós in the genitive singular. How is that possible? Both go back to forms with two aspirated consonants: *thríkh-s for the nominative singular and *thrikh-ós for the genitive singular. Why did the genitive change as predicted (and lose its first aspirated consonant), while the nominative behaved seemingly unruly and kept it? The answer is actually simple: the aspiration of *kh in the nominative is before s and was lost (with *kh-s > ks) before Grassmann’s Law kicked in. And since the new *thrík-s is not subject to Grassmann’s Law (it doesn’t have two aspirated consonants anymore, but only one), the forms are not affected by the law. So they only appear to be unruly in Modern Greek. In fact, however, all changes were completely regular. The same happened to all other words with similar structures (e.g. *thréph-s-ō ‘I will rear’ > thrép-s-ō, and *thréph-ō ‘I rear’ > tréph-ō, and many more).4

Suprasegmental phonology (phonology beyond the segment, i.e. beyond the individual sound, like rhythm, metre and stress) also undergoes change. We have seen some examples above where English words today are stressed in different positions: bal 'cony (old) versus 'balcony (new) or Carib'bean (old) versus Ca'ribbean (new). Note that the latter is still very much in flux, and most speakers are (still) very confused about where to put the stress. Both stress patterns are listed in the major dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (www.oed.com) and Merriam-Webster (www.merriam-webster.com), but where English stress is heading is towards the third last, or antepenultimate, syllable (so 'balcony won out and we predict Ca 'ribbean will too). If you are interested, you may want to check out the pronunciation of the word in Pirates of the Caribbean, the cruise company Royal Caribbean, Billy Ocean’s song “Caribbean Queen” and Bob Dylan’s “Caribbean Wind” – among many others. As we will see below, variation like this is at the heart of every language change process.

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Understanding Language Change

1.1.2 Morphology In order to show an example of morphological change we come back to almost present-day English. Remember Beatrice’s lines from Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing quoted above: BEATRICE Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick? The last word in the last line is hath, but we would expect Modern English has in that particular position. Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, still had -th for the third person singular present tense; this is an inflection (an affix that gives grammatical information). A favourite pastime of most linguists is to construct paradigms, i.e. tables which lay out sets of inflectional forms. The verbal paradigm for Early Modern English roughly looked as in Table 1.3. Table 1.3 The inflectional forms of Early Modern English verbs Singular

1st person 2nd person 3rd person

I sing you, thou sing-est / you, thou sing he sing-eth / he sing-s

Plural

1st person 2nd person 3rd person

we sing you sing they sing

This, in turn, goes back to the much more complicated verbal paradigms of Old English:

Singular

1st person 2nd person 3rd person

ic· singe þu singst he-, hı-t, he-o sing(e)þ

Plural

1st person 2nd person 3rd person

we- singaþ · - singaþ ge hı-e singaþ

Many of the verbal endings had been lost in the Middle English period already (the plural, for instance, is longer signalled by -aþ in Shakespeare’s time). Some other endings are still there (-st in the second person singular, -eth in the third person singular), but these are variable for Shakespeare; i.e. they don’t occur all the time, but only occasionally and not with all verbs. Wash-eth and teach-eth, for instance, are already gone for Shakespeare and have been replaced by wash-es and

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teach-es. And, again, variation is what underlies linguistic change. Ultimately, we lose the -th forms altogether so that in present-day English we only have -s for the third person singular and no inflection for the second person singular. Similarly, word formation, i.e. the creation of new words, is affected by linguistic change. According to Bauer (1994: 38), abbreviations like CD (‘compact disc’), CIA (‘Central Intelligence Agency’) and NATO (‘North Atlantic Treaty Organization’) were very rare in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We find only few counterexamples such as American Telephone and Telegraph, which became AT&T in the late 1800s, or situation normal all fouled up, which became SNAFU in 1941 or 1942. From the middle of the 19th century, onwards, however, we see a massive increase in these abbreviated forms (LASER comes from light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, TASER is Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle, and NSA/CSS stands for National Security Agency/Central Security Service). Bauer documents an almost six-fold increase in abbreviations in the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, from just 2 (or 0.4% of all new word formation types) in 1880–1913 to 13 (or 2.5% of all new word formation types) in 1939–1982.

1.1.3 Syntax An example from Modern German can help to illustrate changes on the syntactic level. Modern German is usually considered a verb-second language in main clauses; i.e. the verb always comes in the second position, no matter what is in the first position in the sentence (note that English looks very similar, but is actually Subject-Verb; i.e. the verb always follows the subject, but need not be in the second position). This is illustrated in (1.1a and 1.1b) below. (1.1)

a b

Coco Chanel erfand das kleine Schwarze. Coco Chanel invented the little black [dress] 1926 erfand Coco Chanel das kleine Schwarze. 1926 invented Coco Chanel the little black [dress]. ‘In 1926 Coco Chanel invented the little black dress.’

However, in Standard German subordinate clauses the finite verb comes last, as shown in (1.2). (1.2)

Es ist interessant, dass Coco Chanel das kleine Schwarze erfand. It is interesting that Coco Chanel the little black [dress] invented. ‘It is interesting that Coco Chanel invented the little black dress.’

Interestingly enough, recent informal spoken varieties of German show a variable pattern when the subordinate clause is introduced by weil ‘because’ or obwohl ‘even though’. (1.3a) shows the standard verb-final pattern, and (1.3b) illustrates the informal innovation with what seems to be an English word order, i.e. subject followed by verb, and possibly preceded by other material, such as weil and obwohl.

10 (1.3)

Understanding Language Change a

b

Hepburn wurde berühmt, obwohl Coco Chanel das kleine Schwarze erfand. H became famous even though CC the little black [dress] invented. ‘H became famous even though CC invented the little black dress.’ Hepburn wurde berühmt, obwohl Coco Chanel erfand das kleine Schwarze. H became famous even though CC invented the little black [dress]. ‘H became famous even though CC invented the little black dress.’

Here we see syntactic change in progress. German subordinate clauses seem to be gradually losing their verb-final order and aligning somehow with main clause word order (even though, strictly speaking, they are not verb-second). A number of possible causes for this change have been identified. Some scholars believe that having mixed word order in main and subordinate clauses is more difficult to acquire and process. Other scholars believe in English influences (note that the English and German subordinate clauses in (1.3b) are exactly alike). Some think that this kind of variation in word order is actually very old and fairly stable (Selting 1999; von Polenz 1999; compare Elspaß 2005); in other words, what we see today is not change but ongoing variability. Yet other scholars have claimed that the verb-second order in subordinate clauses began its life as a special, more subjective expression of speaker perspectives (e.g. Keller 2003). For them, the subordinate clause in (1.3b) expresses a more debatable, subjective reason for what happens in the main clause than the alternative in (1.3a). Whatever the right answer might be, we find variable word order in subordinate clauses, and this may be the ultimate source for change. We will come back to this question in our chapters on semantics and on syntax. A much less disputable example of syntactic change comes from English. Have you ever wondered where prepositions like before and behind and conjunctions like because come from? They actually stem from constructions like John is in front of/ at the back of something or Something is the cause of something else. In other words, these prepositions and conjunctions gradually developed out of perfectly transparent lexical material into some grammatical elements like prepositions and conjunctions. And the same happened to the Old English numeral ‘one’, ane. This, over time, turned into the modern indefinite article a and an, as in I have a dog. Again, something lexical became something more grammatical. This very important and pervasive process is called grammaticalization and will be the subject of intensive discussion in Chapter 6.

1.1.4 Semantics Some of the changes mentioned above may go unnoticed by many speakers. For example, most Germans claim never to have used or even heard of weil or obwohl with verb-second order in subordinate clauses as in (1.3b) above! This is usually very different for changes on the level of meaning, and semantics in particular, which are very often noticeable. Speakers often realize that words seem to change their meaning. English gay is such an example. According to the OED, it began its life around 1100 CE as a borrowing from Norman French, and it meant something

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like ‘happy, bright, cheerful looking, noble, excellent’. Later on, around 1600 CE, it also meant something like ‘hedonistic, promiscuous, dedicated to social pleasures’. The meaning ‘homosexual’ only came up much later, in the English of the second half of the 19th century. Many speakers today still know about the original meaning, for instance when they say things like this sentence by Jane Campion in the Village Voice: “There’s no prizes for being happy and gay in a noir movie – that’s failure” (OED, s.v. gay). Or consider the (American) Christmas song “Deck the Halls”: “Don we now our gay apparel. Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la! Troll the ancient Yule tide carol . . .” And yet most are aware of the changes that took place. Only think of the various new meanings of troll in this case . . . Similarly, English has two words for canines, namely dog and hound. Today, the former refers to any particular kind of the canine species, while the latter refers to hunting dogs in particular. In the Middle Ages, the situation was exactly reversed. Dogge was a particular kind of dog, like a large hunting dog (i.e. bulldog, mastiff, Great Dane), while hound was the general term for canines. This is still the situation we find in Modern German: Hund means ‘dog’, while Dogge means something like ‘Great Dane’. Salary is a word in English that was incorporated from Latin salarium. Salarium was the allowance of salt (Latin sal) for Roman soldiers (which could then be traded in for money). It obviously changed this meaning, and now salary does not have anything to do with salt, but simply means (regular) income. So, to cut a long story short, the fact that words change their meaning, become more positive or more negative, or just change their reference, is something that most people are quite aware of.

1.1.5 Pragmatics Changes of meaning in context, i.e. in pragmatics, are more difficult to detect, and many people don’t notice them. Some examples include swearing and the use of taboo words. While in the Middle Ages speakers of English felt very strongly about the use of religious terms (including, among others, I swear, Oh God!, Jesus!), these are less frowned upon today. Present-day speakers in many English speaking communities rather find words referring to body parts and bodily functions obscene (the F-word is certainly among the most famous examples, and so is the C-word). Current runners-up to this category are racial terms, and many speakers would rather be caught saying f . . . than n . . . . A second example from the history of English comes from address terms. In Middle English (Chaucer’s time) speakers had to choose between thou (second person singular) and you (second person plural). Two hundred years later, in Early Modern English (Shakespeare’s time), speakers did not choose between singular and plural when they used these pronouns, but rather between polite and impolite when talking to singular addressees. If somebody used thou they were signalling either solidarity (you were on a par socially) or social superiority (the speaker using thou towards the addressee was more powerful than the addressee). If somebody used you they were signalling social inferiority (the speaker using you towards the

Understanding Language Change

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addressee was less powerful than the addressee). But once social ranks were less visible and clear cut, speakers were sometimes unsure about which form they should use. So to be on the safe side they opted for the more polite, socially upward looking form – and used you. Eventually, thou was lost in this upward spiral of politeness. (The thou form was also a more demanding pronoun, since it required an extra ending on its verb. As Table 1.3 shows, the you form simply used the same ending that all the plural pronouns took. As English was in the business of getting rid of such endings, it suited speakers to dump thou for this reason also.) Another process that historical linguists investigate is pragmaticalization, i.e. the development of pragmatic markers out of other (usually lexical or grammatical) material. This is a very common process, and the same can be observed in English when you look at the history of like, for example, which developed out of a (lexical) verb (1.4) and an adverb (1.5) into some element that helps to structure the discourse of the speaker, for example as a “quotative” (1.6), which introduces quoted speech, much like inverted commas, or a careful hedge-like function that saves the speaker’s face when making a request (1.7). (1.4) (1.5) (1.6) (1.7)

I like Halloween. He is like his brother. And I’m like ‘You can’t go there, dude!’ Could I like borrow your lecture notes?

Obviously, like in English today has many different functions, some of which are lexical (1.4) and (1.5), while others are more pragmatic and discourse oriented (1.6) and (1.7).

Japanese demo One last example comes from Japanese. The conjunction demo has changed from a regular, connecting element meaning something like ‘even’, as shown in (a), into a clause-initial discourse marker, as shown in (b). In present-day Japanese it can also signal ‘changing the topic’, ‘opening the conversation’ or ‘claiming the floor’. a

kono

heya

no

denki

hiruma

demo

itsumo

tsuite-iru

this

room

GEN

light

day.time

even

always

turn.on:TE-ASP:NONPAST

‘The light in this room is always on even during the day.’ b

a,

demo

Aso

itta

n

dattara

jaa

ano

jooba

toka

wa

uma

ni

oh

but

Aso

went

NML

COP-PAST if

riding

well

horseback riding

like

TOP

horse

on,

‘Oh, but if you went to Aso, then, well, did you go horseback riding?’

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The development of demo is thus from less personal to more personal, or from ideational (lexical) to expressive, and is thus yet another example for pragmaticalization, i.e. the development of “extra” pragmatic material out of formerly lexical or grammatical elements.

1.1.6  Change across different levels What makes matters even more interesting (but also more complicated) is the fact that there is some interaction between these different levels, so that change on one level can trigger change on other levels. When, for example, phonetic erosion leads to the loss of final syllables, this often has consequences for both morphology and syntax, as (in the case of Germanic languages) final syllables are the place for inflectional suffixes (which signal grammatical functions and relations). When inflectional suffixes are on the way out, syntactic structures usually need to be adjusted (and fixed), so that it remains clear what these functions and relations in the sentence are. As we discuss more in Chapter 6, this is what happened in English. Old English was still very rich in inflections, and you could usually tell what the subject and the object of a given sentence were by looking at the inflection of the verb (which tells you if the subject is singular or plural, and first, second or third person, and how many objects there should be) and the inflection of the relevant noun phrases (this tells you which one is the subject, and which ones are the direct and the indirect object, if any). But final syllables and inflections are easily lost. They simply wear off! This is something we observe in many different languages. For simple phonetic reasons speakers tend to erode the pronunciation of word-final syllables. And if inflectional information is signalled in word-final position, this also gets lost on the way. As the old way of distinguishing subject and object is lost, new ways arise. The solution to the problem was word order, on the one hand, and prepositions, on the other. So instead of morphological inflections, present-day English signals grammatical function by word order and prepositions. Whatever stands in front of the verb is usually the subject, and whatever follows it are indirect and direct object, respectively. And prepositions help us, for example, to find and understand adverbials of all sorts.

1.2  VARIATION AND CHANGE – TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN As we have mentioned above, language variation and language change are intricately entwined – they are two sides of the same coin. Language change is thus not very different from evolution in general. Charles Darwin coined the idea that evolution basically rests on variation (or mutation) and selection (the infamous survival of the fittest). In language change, the story is not much different. In contrast to everyday beliefs, language is actually a very dynamic and variable activity. Just think about pronunciation. Hermann Paul, a very famous 19th century

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linguist, compared this to hitting the bull’s eye with an arrow. You know quite clearly what the word should sound like every time you want to say something. This is your bull’s eye. But no matter how hard you try there is no guarantee that you will hit it perfectly. Rather, you actually might miss it here and there. These are the teeny tiny differences that we experience in our everyday pronunciation. The fact that we miss the phonetic bull’s eye is hardly surprising, though. Our phonetic articulation system is essentially a muscular one. Pronouncing a word is like playing tennis or playing Bach’s Air on the G String on your violin. It will never quite sound the same twice, simply because you can’t control your muscles perfectly. If you could, you’d never serve a fault and never fail to hit that C sharp in the ninth bar. Similarly, you’ll never pronounce the word cat the same way twice. There will always be minuscule differences, and these are some of the sources of language variation. A second source, related to the first but also more noticeable, has to do with the fact that humans like to imitate. Countless studies in psychology and sociolinguistics have shown that we like to adapt (the technical term is “to accommodate”) to the people we talk to when we like them, and that, naturally, we dissociate if we don’t like them. Only think about your behaviour when it comes to accents and dialects. Many speakers catch themselves imitating (subconsciously) the accent of the people in their favourite holiday resort. This is another source of language variation. Similarly, we try not to sound like the people we don’t like. There is a nice little story about a linguistics professor from the south of Germany who was appointed to a professorship in the very far north. The two dialects (and cultures) are very distinct; northerners usually find it difficult to understand southerners, and vice versa. For independent reasons, this professor had a very hard time in the north, and he noticed that the more he did not feel at home, the more he used southern dialect features in order to show that he was not accommodating to an environment he didn’t like. Another source of language variation is “analogy”. Douglas R. Hofstadter, the famous author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, once described analogy as the fundamental core of human cognition (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8m7lFQ3njk). The idea is very simple: humans like to build analogies. We can see that in our children every day. For some kids at least, it’s clear that the past tense of teach is not taught but teached. And a German speaking child, upon hearing the church bells ring, might exclaim: Es hat geglockt!, lit. ‘It has belled’. The word geglockt from a verb glocken does not exist in German today. And yet the fictitious verb glocken (lit. ‘to bell’) in this case follows all the necessary morphological rules and makes perfect sense – even for adult speakers. So why shouldn’t the child try to use it? He or she probably does not know that the common word in this case is läuten as in proper Es hat geläutet! lit. ‘It has rung’), which makes another verb like glocken ‘to bell’ superfluous. And before you start laughing: what’s the plural of fungus? Hippopotamus? How many of you still say theses? Traumata? We will come back to this in Chapter  5 when we talk about morphological change. In any case, it seems intuitively clear that humans (both big and small) like analogies and that analogies can lead to

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language variation and thus also to linguistic change – the past of climb once was clomb, but climbed pushed out clomb, just as teached might well push out taught in the long run. Language acquisition is yet another point of entry for linguistic variation and change. It is quite obvious that children are not perfect copies of their parents, neither physically, psychologically, nor in terms of their language. The job of small children learning their native language is to decipher the endless stream of sounds they hear from the people around them, to identify the words and phrases, and to figure out what they mean and how they are put together. This job is usually done with the help of a logical process called abduction. Sherlock Holmes used abductive reasoning in his cases. For example, if the door is locked from the inside, but the window is open (on the fourth floor), if there is some brown-orange monkey hair clenched in the victim’s fist, and if the victim choked on a banana, we can assume that the murderer could have been the orangutan named Rodney that escaped from the local zoo two days ago. Note that the conclusion that Rodney is the murderer is not strictly logical or necessary. There may be other explanations for the open window, the brown-orange hair and the banana, but Rodney as the potential murderer seems like the most plausible explanation at this point. This, essentially, is abductive reasoning. You start from the facts and think long and hard about possible sources and mechanisms that could have led to this particular factual situation. But the same kind of reasoning can also happen very quickly and intuitively. This is what we find in first language acquisition (obviously, small children usually don’t think long and hard about the linguistic input that they get): children who hear members of their environment repeatedly uttering sentences in Subject-Verb-Object ordering might assume that this is the underlying grammatical rule. If the rule they assume is the same as the one that produced all these sentences, we get a perfect copy. Sometimes, however, the rules the kids develop might differ a little bit from those of the previous generations. These new rules then produce almost the same output as that of the previous generation, but every now and then these new rules might also lead to tiny innovations and to language variation. Yet another major source for language variation is contact in the widest sense, i.e. contact between different languages, but also between dialects and accents of the same language. (Note that distinguishing between dialects and languages is a particularly difficult problem. We will come back to this in Chapter 9.) Let’s begin with the first, language contact proper. Ever since language diversified in prehistoric times (which is a complicated story in itself; see Chapter 9), different languages have been in contact with each other. To be more precise: the speakers of these languages were in contact with each other. The possible outcomes of these contact situations are actually quite simple. First, nothing productive might happen. Speakers meet and depart again without any long lasting effects. But languages can also exist side by side, and for long periods of time; Evans (2012) describes the remarkable linguistic diversity that exists in New Guinea; the southern region alone (an area about the size of the Netherlands) contains about 40 different languages from between five and six unrelated language families.

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Sometimes one group of speakers becomes so dominant that the other group stops using their language. This is called language death, and unfortunately this seems to be the most common scenario in language history. The age of colonialism alone must have killed thousands and thousands of native languages in North and South America, Africa and Australia, and many are still endangered. Of the approximately 200 native North American languages still spoken today, more than two thirds count as endangered. As Chapter 8 describes, contact situations can trigger all sorts of changes. One language may incorporate linguistic material from the other, and lexical material is the most readily transferred. Scheler (1977) suggests that out of the ca. 500,000 entries in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, probably more than 350,000 words (70%) come from other languages such as Latin, French, Spanish, Hindi, Greek and many more. In tandem with the words, speakers may also incorporate sounds and linguistic structures, such as morphological patterns. When the first man-made object to orbit the Earth, the Russian Sputnik 1, launched in 1957, became vastly popular, it also popularized the Russian (and Yiddish)5 morphological pattern with -nik (a person who is connected to something). From 1957 onwards we thus find a ton of new English words created on that basis. The OED lists a few: muttnik, beatnik (both 1958), flopnik, puffnik, stayputnik, kaputnik (all 1968), protestnik (1965), computerniks (1973), conferenceniks (1989), no-goodniks, faroutniks, sickniks (all 1993). Finally, when two or more languages are in contact, the speakers of these languages may develop yet another interim language in order to be able to communicate. This new language is called a pidgin. Pidgins are typically very simple language used solely by adults for purposes such as trading. Most pidgins are created by mixing the lexicon of the “superstrate” (more powerful) language with some grammatical structures of the “substrate” (less powerful) language. The results are simple (but fully functional) languages. Most of these newborn languages quickly disappear again when the trading situation is over or when one group learns the language of the other, but some do survive. When pidgins are learned by children as their native language, these pidgins turn into creole languages. These creoles rapidly grow in complexity and develop all the features we know from already existing languages such as English, Latin, Mandarin and so on. Today we have more than 100 such creole languages spread all across the world (you can get an excellent first overview by checking out the online Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures, APiCS: http:// apics-online.info). So, one possible outcome of language contact can be the birth of a whole new language. Contact between different dialects or accents, or even just with other speakers, is another important source for language variation. In any given linguistic community we find regional differences in language use. Just think about your own language and what people “from the North”, “from the South”, “from the West” and so on sound like. When these different dialects come into contact with each other, linguistic features may spread from one variety of the language to the other. Essentially, the same can be found when any kinds of speakers are in contact. As we mentioned before, no one talks in exactly the same way, and every speaker is

Setting the scene

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characterized by a personal idiolect: his or her individual use of language. Some of these idiolects are easily noticeable, e.g. when somebody has a peculiar speech feature or likes to use certain remarkable phrases a lot. But even when we don’t notice it at first hearing, every speaker is characterized by particular features. As described earlier, when speakers talk to each other, they tend to accommodate or dissociate. Accommodation means that we (subconsciously) like to sound like the people we talk to, especially when we like them or when they are some kind of role model for us. Dissociation is what we notice when speakers (again, subconsciously) try not to sound like the people they talk to because maybe they don’t like them or do not want to be associated with them. We can accommodate and dissociate in very small, almost unnoticeable features like vowel quality, but also in larger and more noticeable domains such as whole accents, phrases, vocabulary and much more. It is quite obvious that this is a huge source for linguistic variation of any kind. Finally, one last, but important source of language variation is simply playfulness. Anthropologists and philosophers have sometimes characterized human beings as homo ludens, or ‘playing man’. The idea is quite powerful: humans love to play, and they need play in order to thrive and survive, and to organize their lives. It can be argued that we also love to play with language in the widest sense. “Play” in this case means that we like to invent new and fancy words, that we love to swear and curse, that we like hyperbole (exaggerations) of any kind. This can form the basis for linguistic change. Some very nice examples come from present-day English. Consider (1.8) and (1.9): (1.8) Rosa Luxembourg was a terribly nice name for a revolutionary. (COCA, The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders, 1995) (1.9) It is a sick board and worth every penny of your hard-earned cash. (2007, On Board, http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/05/ inverted-meanings-sick/) In (1.8) we find a terribly nice name. But terribly comes from terrible, and terrible means something like ‘very shocking and upsetting’. This, however, can’t be the intention of using terribly in (1.8). Rather, it means something like ‘really’ or ‘very’. The same happened in (1.9), taken from a snowboarding and skateboarding context. A sick board is not a board that is sick or used for being sick; it is ‘a cool, very good looking board’. Sick in this context does not mean ‘unwell’ or ‘ill’ but ‘cool’. This development of so-called boosters (elements used for emphasizing) from negative to very positive is a process that happens quite frequently, and it has to do with playfulness of language users. Speakers like to use words in novel ways to get attention, display their wit and prove their coolness. This in turn may give them social advantages. Keller (1994) even described this as an evolutionary advantage. He defines several maxims of successful language use, and one of them is, “Talk in such a way that you are noticed” (if you want to be noticed). This has been the topic of countless works of literature, from William Shakespeare (Benedick and Beatrice

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in Much Ado about Nothing) to Edmond Rostand (Cyrano de Bergerac, who wins his lady’s heart by writing powerful poetry, though he can’t show himself because of his big nose). It is one of the key elements in classic rhetoric. The powerful use of language convinces, or at least persuades, your hearers! So, in brief, using cool new lingo makes you the cool kid on the block.6 In any case, it’s a source for novelty and language variation. One final word of caution: in the previous section we have shown that language variation is an important prerequisite for language change. Most changes ultimately go back to variation. However, not all variation leads to linguistic change. Sociolinguists have clearly documented that in some social contexts and with some variables speakers do not accommodate or dissociate as we would predict. In English there are two ways of pronouncing words like dancing: the more standard [dænsɪŋ] and the less formal [dænsɪn]. The latter is also sometimes written as dancin’, and you can hear it very clearly in Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark”. This variability has been around for centuries. Jonathan Swift, for example, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, could rhyme: “See then what mortals place their bliss in! / Next morn betimes the bride was missing” (Phyllis, 1716, ll. 25–26). In the 19th century literary works of Charles Dickens both -ing and -in spellings can be found, and they are often used to distinguish working class from upper class speakers. In any case, the point is that this sort of variation has more or less been stable for many, many years, and there is no reason to believe that one form will oust the other any time soon.

1.3  EVIDENCE OF CHANGE IN PROGRESS As we have mentioned before, language change is not something that only happened in the past. It is happening all around us, all the time. We just have to keep our ears and eyes open. But this sounds much simpler than it actually is. Essentially, there are two different pieces of evidence we can look at when we study linguistics. The first is called change in apparent time; the second is called change in real time. Let’s begin with the first. When we study change in apparent time we assume that the kids of today will be the adult speakers of tomorrow, and whatever we witness in the younger generations could be new forms of the language coming in, i.e. incipient linguistic change. Figure 1.1 shows one such example. Modaressi (1978) studied Farsi as it is spoken in Tehran and in Ghazvin, a city about 150 kilometres from Tehran. One variable is (an), i.e. the raising of [a:n], to [o:n] or [u:n]. These new forms [u:n] and [o:n] are very popular, and speakers are apparently very well aware of this variable, since the new forms dramatically drop in frequency for the more formal speech styles (such as reading style, word list style and minimal pairs). What is interesting, however, is the use of this variable in the casual and careful styles in Ghazvin by two different age groups. Apparently, in both these styles the younger age group (aged 10–29) uses the new form somewhat more than the group aged 50+. Assuming that the younger group will keep this feature when they grow up, we may conclude that this is ongoing linguistic change, and that the new form is becoming more popular as

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Figure 1.1 Change in apparent time in Ghazvin (an) (based on Modaressi 1978) 80 70

% raised (an)

60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Casual

Careful

Reading

Word lists

Tehran 10–19

Tehran 20–29

Ghazvin 10–29

Ghazvin over 50

Minimal pairs Tehran over 50

younger speakers will promote its use and actually move towards innovative Tehran language use. This, in a nutshell, is change in apparent time. We take a slice of language at any given time (this is also called synchronic) by speakers from different age groups, and then project their synchronic behaviour into the future. While this method is generally well accepted and used in a large number of studies, there is also one crucial problem associated with it. This problem is called age grading. It is a well-known fact that children and teenagers speak differently from adults. Popular current (2016) language use by teenagers includes chirped, as in Ms. Hubble yelled at me for using my cell in class. Man, I got chirped! It means something like being told off very clearly. Another example is ship, as a verb as in I ship Brangelina so much, they are really cute! It means that you endorse and support this particular relationship (and this in turn makes you a relationshipper, or simply shipper, of Brangelina in this case). There is very little doubt that these phrases probably won’t make it till 2020, if that long. Many popular words and phrases simply disappear (just like church key and fox from the 1960s and 1970s, as mentioned above). The principle behind all of these examples is called age grading. Certain forms and expressions belong to certain age groups (and not just teenagers; there are also language forms that rather belong to senior citizens – would you expect teenagers to refer to their knickers?). Obviously, distinguishing between age grading and actual change in progress from an apparent time perspective can be very difficult, and sometimes even impossible. In the case of Ghazvin mentioned above, however, the evidence for actual change is still somewhat clear, with an age group that goes beyond the teenage years, and a fairly robust pattern that matches Tehran as a possible role model.

Understanding Language Change

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Real time is the second approach to studying linguistic change. In real-time studies, we take language samples from two different points in time (this is called diachrony) and compare the two different language stages with each other. Whatever is different from Time1 to Time2 must have changed in the time between. Figure 1.2 presents the results from a famous study carried out in 1953 by Alvar Ellegård. Ellegård investigated the development of do in English questions and negatives between 1400 and 1700 (we call this “periphrastic do”). In order to do that, he isolated four different contexts in which do could be used: Affirmative declaratives (statements):  I eat cheesecake vs. I do eat cheesecake. Negative declaratives:  I eat not cheesecake vs. I don’t eat cheesecake. Affirmative questions (interrogatives):  Eat you cheesecake? vs. Do you eat cheesecake? Negative questions:  Eat you not cheesecake? vs. Don’t you eat cheesecake? When you look at Figure 1.2 at least two things become clear. First, the use of periphrastic do increased on the whole from 1400 to 1700. Second, it did so at different rates for the different contexts. While the negative questions were very quick and reached 90% by 1600, negative declaratives were quite slow and only had about 35% do in 1600. What we see here is a study in real time; i.e. Ellegård took several slices of language at different intervals and compared them to each other. What we see is change happening in real time, over 300 years. The positive aspects of this are obvious: we don’t have to speculate what could happen in a few years, and whether Figure 1.2 Percentage of do forms in various sentence types, 1400–1700 (based on Ellegård 1953) 100 90 80 70

% do

60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1400

1500

1600

Negative Questions

Affirmative Questions

Negative Declaratives

Affirmative Declaratives

1700

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we see age grading or change in apparent time. On the other hand, we only get several snapshots of the language at different times and don’t see exactly what is happening in between. We can speculate how the language got from Time1 to Time2, but essentially all we have are two snapshots. Nevertheless, this is one of the most widespread and accepted methods of catching change in progress. And the smaller the intervals, the more details become visible, of course. On the other hand, we also should not forget that the majority of the world’s 7,000 or so languages are not written, and that our data hardly reaches back more than about 100 years! So studies in real time are pretty hard, and we have to rely a lot on linguistic reconstruction (our topic for Chapter 9).

1.4  ATTITUDES TO CHANGE As we have mentioned before, we do not always notice linguistic change. But when we do, many people actually do not approve. From a socio-psychological perspective, any sort of change often leads to worries, scepticism and even fears and anxiety. And language change is no different in this respect. In a famous sociolinguistic study, Milroy and Milroy (1999) have identified a so-called complaint tradition. This tradition seems to reach back centuries, and it comprises two different aspects, or complaint types. Type 1 complaints are rather “legalistic” and concerned with correctness. They “attack ‘mis-use’ of specific parts of the phonology, grammar, vocabulary” (1999: 31). Type 2 complaints are rather “moralistic” and “recommend clarity in writing and attack what appear to be abuses of language that may mislead and confuse the public” (ibid.). Both types of course interact and can feed into each other. What concerns us here is the fact that linguistic variation and change often lie at the heart of complaints of both types. First, many speakers disapprove of linguistic variation and rather expect linguistic question to have “right or wrong” answers. Try it for yourself: what is the past tense of the verb dive? Dove or dived? Both are perfectly OK. The former is preferred in North America, the latter in Great Britain. But educators of all kinds usually find this hard to accept. Germany does not have an official language academy that defines what is right or wrong in “Standard German”, but it has a dictionary which has almost academy status, the so-called Duden, named after its first author, the high school teacher Konrad Duden (1829–1911). Over the last 20 years or so, German orthography, and with it the Duden, has seen a large number of changes. Many of these changes called the language guardians to the fore. So, the word ketchup can be spelled as either Ketchup (old) or Ketschup (new). And what’s worse: it is either grammatically masculine der Ketchup or neuter das Ketchup. Also, paragraph can be spelled as either Paragraph or Paragraf. This kind of reform brought lots of protests in its wake. In a very popular weekly newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, we find comments such as Anything goes. Alt und Neu bestehen nebeneinander, viele Kann- und einige Mussbestimmungen weichen die Sprachwirklichkeit auf, unzählige Varianten kursieren – niemand weiß mehr, woran er ist.

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Understanding Language Change ‘Anything goes. Old and new coexist, many “can” and “have to” rules soften and blur linguistic reality, countless variants circulate, nobody knows right from wrong anymore.’ (http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-31699578.html)

Just to clarify: most of the variants which are now acceptable in no way endanger intelligibility or even bear the risk of ambiguity. It’s simply up to writers if they like Biographie or Biografie better. And yet the reactions to this kind of freedom in language use have been massive. And just as people usually don’t like variation of any kind, they also don’t approve of change. Many linguistic changes are perceived as decay, as a loss of standards, norms and values. According to Milroy and Milroy (1999) this kind of decay is usually seen in tandem with a perceived (though maybe nonfactual) decline of culture and tradition. For the complainers, speakers who don’t know how to spell correctly anymore, who use verb-second order in German subordinate clauses, who say “Peter his car” instead of “Peter’s car”, are also likely to be sloppy in other aspects of their lives, such as punctuality, politeness, precision or abstract thinking. So, for them, stopping linguistic variation and change and maintaining language standards is a direct contribution to the maintenance of culture and tradition. Needless to say, the job of linguists is not to be prescriptive in any sense; i.e. we do not evaluate whether particular changes are good or bad. Rather, linguists work descriptively and simply document whatever is happening in the language without evaluating this from a “right or wrong” perspective. For linguists, language is a natural (even if social) phenomenon, something that evolves and adapts and can be studied objectively. But for many in the wider community, language is more like an art form, something to be cherished and revered – and preserved at all costs. The second type of complaint mentioned above can also be affected by linguistic changes. In England from about the middle of the 16th to about the middle of the 17th century, we find a fierce debate about whether the English language should incorporate more Latin and Greek terms such as eximious ‘excellent, distinguished, eminent’ in order to increase its sophistication and expressive powers. Opponents of these “inkhorn terms” as they were known (the inkhorn referred to the inkwell made out of horn – the idea being that these words took up a lot of ink) argued that the English language was doing fine and that these clumsy and opaque new terms only led to confusion. Famous Tudor purist Sir John Cheke (1514–1557) claimed in 1557 that “our own tung should 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” (preface to Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation of The Courtier). Hostile responses to linguistic exotics continued even into the modern period, involving writers like Dickens and Gerald Manley Hopkins right through to the modern day conlangers (or constructed language users). All have sought to erase non-Germanic elements. Obviously, much of what has been said in the previous paragraphs is based on generalizations. At every point in time we also find the reverse, i.e. speakers who embrace variation and change as chances for development and improvement. So, for example, the inkhorn enthusiasts in the 17th century obviously asked for change,

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and so do many people surfing the internet today. In many online communities it’s a sign of wit, power and status to be able to play with language, to invent new words or to coin new phrases. And whoever comes up with the wittiest new forms wins. In these communities, maintenance and stability in the traditional sense are regarded as boring, old-fashioned and conservative. The only constant here is change and innovation. While this, at first sight, sounds very (post)modern and “internet generation”, we shouldn’t forget that similar phenomena can be found for almost any other time as well. Shakespeare “invented” more than 1,500 new words or constructions for the English language,7 and the slogan “Make it new” characterized the work of many modernist writers such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Hardly conservative and culture preserving. So, while it still seems fair to say that on average many people do not particularly like variation and change, it is also important to point out that there are other perspectives as well.

1.5  HOW THIS BOOK IS STRUCTURED The following 10 chapters will introduce you to all central aspects of historical linguistics, beginning with the lexicon and lexical changes. For most readers, these will be the most familiar, obvious kinds of changes. After that, we will walk you through changes in semantics and sound, word and sentence structure, respectively. Chapter 7 will then focus on how changes actually spread in a language, i.e. how they diffuse in the linguistic system across the different levels, but also how they spread in the speech community, from individual to individual. Chapter  8 looks at languages in contact and how change develops in these contexts. Chapter 9 will then go back in language history and present how we can establish relatedness between languages, i.e. how languages can be arranged in family trees and how these trees can develop over time. It introduces you to methods, problems and perspectives in reconstructing the past of a language. We only have written evidence for languages no older than about 5,000 years, at best. But language itself is probably at least 50,000 years old, maybe more. So what can we say about all the scarcely documented or even undocumented languages of our history? To conclude, Chapter 10 offers additional theoretical perspectives, i.e. insights from new developments in historical linguistics (note that the discipline itself is one of the oldest in linguistics!). In particular, we will focus on historical sociolinguistics, the sociology of language, historical pragmatics and language evolution. Finally, we will discuss some challenges and problems that may be new or particular for historical linguistics and language change in the 21st century. Some of these problems concern the rate of change, the media and the endangerment of language. Every chapter in this book contains some breakout boxes, just like the present one. These contain case studies or some extra, advanced material that challenges the more daring readers. Moreover, every chapter concludes with a summary of the most important terms and ideas, exercises and some further reading. We have tried to keep the additional references in the book to a minimum in order to increase

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readability. Needless to say, for every one of the topics discussed here you will find shelves and shelves full of studies. In the further reading section, we will try to introduce you to what we find the most relevant and/or accessible pieces of research that will guide you deeper into the heart of the matter. Needless to say, these suggestions are highly selective and subjective, and we can only encourage you to find further readings yourself.

SUMMARY This chapter introduced the two concepts of language variation and change. We established that change in language is something natural, constant and unavoidable. We saw that change happens at all levels of linguistic structure, i.e. in phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. It is crucially intertwined with language variation; i.e. most change goes back to language variation, but not all variation necessarily leads to change. This is why evidence for linguistic change can be hard to find. We introduced the two notions of apparent time (when we take younger generations to be the seeds of future change) and real time (when we study language at two or more points in time and compare the results, thus capturing linguistic change). In the discussion of linguistic variation, it became clear that language variation in turn is something natural. It goes back to language acquisition, contact, play, economy and other cognitive factors, such as analogy. However, we also pointed out that despite their ubiquity, language variation and change are often the object of public criticism. Many people (though not all) actually prefer black and white over shades of grey, and change is often associated with decay rather than simple development or even improvement.

FURTHER READING There are a number of excellent textbooks on language variation and change that introduce their readers to the key ideas and principles. Some of the gold standards are still Lyle Campbell’s Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (1st ed. 1998, now in its 3rd ed. 2013), Larry Trask’s Historical Linguistics (3rd ed. 2015, edited by Robert McColl Millar) and Terry Crowley’s An Introduction to Historical Linguistics (4th ed. 2010, with Claire Bowern). This last book is particularly interesting, since it presents not only a very hands-on approach but also tons of data from more “exotic” (mostly Austronesian) languages. A classic article is Weinreich et al. (1968). This paper is very long, with more than 100 pages, but it perfectly summarizes scholarship before the 1960s and it outlines the research program for modern studies in linguistic change. Despite its veritable age, many ideas presented here are still very topical. Milroy and Milroy (1999) as well as Watts (2011) are very readable key texts for all those who are interested in attitudes towards linguistic change, in the complaint

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tradition, and the mythology associated with the development of national standard languages. Articles in the journal English Today 102, Vol. 26: 2 (June 2010) are devoted entirely to topics on and around prescription. Keller (1994) offers a very philosophical, non-technical and inspiring new account of the whys and hows of language change. Drawing on the metaphor used originally in economics, he introduces the notion of the “invisible hand”, which can explain why changes in different individual speakers can actually gain momentum and move in tandem in the same direction.

EXERCISES 1  Examples of language change Identify and describe at least one linguistic change for every level discussed above (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics). You can do this for English (past and present), but if you want to increase the challenge, every example should come from a different language, so that in the end you will have discussed at least five different languages. 2  Features of pidgins and creoles Check out the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures, APiCS: http://apicsonline.info a How many pidgins and creoles have English as their lexifier (i.e. as the language that contributes the vocabulary to the mix)? b One of the English lexifier creoles has optional OSV (Object-Subject-Verb) word order: which one? c How many of the English lexifier creoles have modifying adjectives following their nouns? Is this the exclusive order? Give one example from APiCS data. 3  Age grading Identify 5 teenage words or phrases each from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and today (that’s 20 words in total). Have any of them survived? Have they made it into the OED? Look at the current ones: do you think they have a chance to survive? Why or why not? 4  Attitudes to language change Printer William Caxton, in his preface to the Eneydos (1490), describes how he came upon an old book in his bookshelf. It caused him to reflect upon changes that have occurred in English. I [. . .] toke an olde boke and redde therin / and certaynly the englysshe was so rude and brood that I coude not wele vnderstande it [. . .] And certaynly it was wreton in suche wyse that it was more lyke to dutche [= German] than englysshe I coude not reduce ne brynge it to be vnderstonden / And certaynly our language now vsed varyeth ferre from that whiche was vsed and spoken whan I was borne / For we englysshe men / ben [= are] borne vnder the domynacyon of the mone [= moon], which

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Understanding Language Change is neuer stedfaste / but euer wauerynge / wexynge [growing] one season / and waneth & dyscreaseth another season.

What is so striking about Caxton’s attitude to language change, especially compared to those described in this chapter? 5  Research essay: the relevance of dictionaries in the 21st century Write about the place of print dictionaries in modern times. Is it possible for these publications to keep up with the changes in vocabulary and the speed at which these changes are occurring? As part of your discussion consider the web based Urban Dictionary (http://www.urbandictionary.com), and describe its approach. What do you think might be the value of a dictionary that is regulated by volunteer editors and rated by site visitors? We suggest you go to http://www.ted.com/index. php/speakers/view/id/143 and also http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-Power-ofthe-Dictionary-Sus to hear a lexicographer’s view.

NOTES 1 The text comes from the 11th century; the manuscript here is British Library Cotton Tiberius B. iv. There are some letters here you won’t recognize: the consonant symbol (called “thorn”) and (called “eth”), which were later replaced by ; (called “wynn”), pronounced as [w]; (called “yogh”), pronounced as [j], [ç] or [x]; and the vowel symbol (called “ash”), which was pronounced like the vowel in ash. The symbol 7 stands for ‘and’. Take a look at the original manuscript at http://www.bl.uk/ learning/timeline/item126532.html 2 Note that English does not belong to the group of Romance languages, of course, and that it is only listed here for clarification. You probably wonder why the similarities between the Romance languages listed here and English are so great. This is due to the fact that English borrowed many words from Latin and French in the Middle Ages. 3 The funny symbols used here (and in the following chapters) are phonetic transcriptions based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), available at https://www.interna tionalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-chart. The squiggly line above the vowel, for example, shows you that the vowel is nasalized. 4 Unfortunately, the whole story is a bit more complicated. Ringe and Eska (2013: 136– 141) talk about this as a sound change that “has fragmented into several rather different rules” (137). The story itself is very illuminating, and it tells you a lot about the intricate details of sound changes generally. However, it might not be for the faint at heart because of its complexity. Ringe and Eska offer a very good and readable account, so we can only invite you to muster up courage and have a go at it. 5 The OED lists both a Russian and a Yiddish origin for the suffix, and some borrowings from the 19th and early 20th century (e.g. alrightnik). However, it is still fair to say that the Sputnik mission helped a lot in spreading the word. 6 The story is not that simple, unfortunately. While sociolinguistics has shown that “cool” language use in male speakers may indeed be attractive for female hearers, this might

Setting the scene

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only apply to male speakers, at least in certain communities. “Cool language use” in women might actually be a signal of power and strength, and may thus be unattractive for (traditional) male members of society. Give it a think. Well, strictly speaking, he probably did not personally invent them. But they are recorded in Shakespeare’s plays for the first time – which also counts for something.

2 Changes to the lexicon INTRODUCTION Words are the most observable part of any language, and people are generally fascinated by curious facts having to do with the ins and outs of the lexicon (or the vocabulary) of their language. There are websites devoted to the “most irritating words”, “favourite words”, “dead words”, “new words”, “peculiar words” and “­clichés” – and many other topics, all revealing people’s interest in vocabulary. There is always considerable media attention when dictionaries announce their word of the year. Articles flourish on the meaning of the winner, its origin, and even its worthiness of the award. There is nowhere near the same excitement with other aspects of the language; there were no breaking news stories when linguists announced developments affecting the conjunction because (e.g. I’ve been missing out on sleep because the “Breaking Bad” series or I missed the ending because I fell asleep). Dictionary editors are almost the new celebrities, answering questions like: What is the longest word in the language? Is there a word to describe someone who drinks their own bathwater? How many words do speakers know? And perhaps the thorniest question of all – when does a new expression enter the dictionary? Dictionary making was much more straightforward for early lexicographers, who sourced their new words almost exclusively from books. It was formal written language that typically made it into dictionaries. The words were written on cards each time a new instance of their usage was discovered, and when there was a substantial collection of cards, it could be established that a word was in general usage. So, these were largely respectable words, and anything else that managed to sneak through would be well and truly branded (originally with symbols such as the dagger (†), the double dagger (‡), the asterisk (*) and even the fleur-de-lis ( ), and later with more precise usage labels such as “low”, “(im)proper”, “ludicrous”, “barbarous” or “vulgar”, as appeared in Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary). These days, it is all very different. Lexicographers have to consider an array of different text types, including newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, menus, memos, TV and radio broadcasts and, of course, emails, chat-room discussions and blogs. And the approach today is more democratic and more descriptive, even though, as works of reference, dictionaries inevitably have an element of prescription (and dictionary users may interpret descriptive usage symbols or labels as normative, turning lexicographers – whether they like it or not – into censors). The internet, particularly social networking platforms, makes it much easier for dictionary makers to track a word and to test its currency, but it is also the trigger for huge numbers of new words to be created and the reason that they are taken up so

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quickly. Just like funny videos, celebrity gossip and other internet “memes”, within a matter of hours they have worldwide visibility. There are hundreds of neologisms specific to the internet – these include dignified specialist terms such as software, network, and interface as well as slang such as twitterholic, twaddiction, celebritweet/ twit and twitterati – to give a few of the “tweologisms” that Twitter has spawned. People love to play with language, and when communicating electronically they have free rein (with an alleged average of 500 million tweets each day, Twitter has considerable capacity not only to spawn new expressions but to spread them, as do Facebook, Instagram and other social networking platforms). So, how do we create new words? Rarely are they created from scratch, and it is hard to find examples of true coinages (new expressions that haven’t been built on pre-existing elements). The technical word quark is often cited as an example of a coinage. It first appeared in James Joyce’s book Finnegans Wake and was later taken over by physicists to describe some sort of elementary particle of matter. It’s not based on quark ‘the call of a gull’ and doesn’t seem to have any links with any previous existing word. Such examples are rare. Usually they involve proper names and so are peripheral to the language. But often there are lexical associations lurking in the background of even these coinages. Take Kodak. George Eastman, who came up with the name and the product, claims it is not based on any other word – the inspiration was simply his love of , which he described as “a strong, incisive sort of letter”. However, Eastman’s biographer, reports that this fondness probably came from his mother’s name Kilbourn, so the two appearances of this letter in Kodak are not entirely accidental. This chapter is concerned with etymology, the area of study that examines the history of the forms and meanings of words such as Kodak (not to be confused with entomology, the branch of zoology that studies insects). While Chapter 3 addresses aspects to do with the meaning of words, here we cover the major methods languages have of creating expressions. Though our examples come largely from English, we emphasize here that these processes are found in languages around the world, although there are usually differences in significance and liveliness when it comes to word creation in individual languages. We will also consider the other end of the life cycle of words – their disappearance.

2.1  GAINING WORDS – LEXICAL ADDITION These days dictionary updates comprise a hotch potch of sedate terms-of-art (pharmacovigilance ‘the monitoring of medical drugs after they have been licensed for use’ and in silico ‘(of scientific research) conducted by means of computer simulation’), boisterous slang (amazeballs ‘extremely good’ and FML ‘fuck my life’) and lexical frippery (spit take ‘an act of spitting out liquid while being drunk in reaction to something funny or surprising’ and douchebaggery ‘obnoxious or contemptible behaviour’). Some entries appear so newly minted you might wonder at the wisdom of the editors in including them at all (adorbs ‘adorable’ and ship ‘to endorse a romantic relationship’). But we know that these expressions have been scrutinized

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within an inch of their lives – they wouldn’t be there unless they “had legs” (to quote John Simpson, former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)). Small wonder people are so fascinated by words. People love creating new ones. In fact, a recent team of scientists has discovered that learning the meaning of new words can stimulate exactly those same pleasure circuits in our brain as sex, gambling, drugs and eating (the pleasure associated region called the ventral striatum). Neologasm says it all – defined by the Urban Dictionary as ‘the intensely pleasurable sensations generated by using, hearing or coining a new word or phrase (that doesn’t suck)’. Leximania starts in childhood and stays with us as we grow up. The majority of these creations are one-offs, spurof-the-moment and short-lived. But many people end up sending their inventions off to dictionary editors, in the hopes they might make it onto their lists. However, for this to happen there needs to be some indication of general usage. Telecrastination ‘the act of always letting the phone ring at least twice before you pick it up, even when you’re only six inches away’, glarpo ‘the juncture between ear and skull where pencils and pens are stored’ and sloovers ‘the remnants of soap too small to use, but too big to throw away’, like all of comedian Rich Hall’s creations, fill a need, but they haven’t yet made it – they remain sniglets ‘words that should be in the dictionary, but aren’t’ (another of Rich Hall’s creations).

Hothouse words and mountweazels Dictionary makers have also been guilty of leximania. “Hothouse words” are ghost words that have never really existed but are the creations of lexicographers. Many hothouse sprouts were cultivated in early English dictionaries, especially during the 17th century. How tempting for compilers to invent words, plop them into the dictionary and watch them grow. Perhaps they felt such erudite sounding words as anatiferous ‘producing ducks’ and decacuminated ‘having the top cut off ’ should exist, or perhaps they wanted to show off their knowledge of Greek and Latin. No doubt some were also planted to catch plagiarists. It was commonplace for lexicographers to pilfer entries from other works. In fact, Jonathon Green describes plagiarism as a “lexicographical ­necessity” – it wouldn’t make sense to start a dictionary from scratch. And once in the protective environment of a dictionary, these creations often survive. Authority after authority repeats the erroneous word until no one would dare doubt its provenance. Quite simply, it must be a word because it’s in the dictionary. Hothouse words are a type of “mountweazel”, the general term for fictitious entries in reference works, including encyclopaedias and even maps. The name comes from a famous bogus entry in the New Columbia Encyclopedia in 1975 for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel (an American fountain designer and photographer who accidentally blew herself up while researching an article for the magazine Combustibles). In the words of one of the encyclopaedia

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editors, “[i]t was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright [. . .] If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us” (New Yorker, 29 August 2005). From then on, mountweazel came to describe any sort of ‘ghost or false entry’. And it seems that modern dictionaries still occasionally use a mountweazel to flush out cheats. One famous made-up word, esquivalience, appeared in the 2001 edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary. The word was (appropriately) glossed: ‘the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities [. . .] late 19th cent.: perhaps from French esquiver, “dodge, slink away.” ’ In 1991 John Algeo completed a study of new words over a 50-year period (1941– 1991), sourcing his neologisms from the collection “Among the New Words” that appears each year in American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society. For each of the major types of word formation processes, he found the following percentage of new words: Type

Percentage

Compounding Affixation Shifting Shortening Blending Borrowing Creating from scratch

40 28 17 8 5 2 below 0.5

This study shows affixation and compounding as the major sources for the new words, and blending and borrowing to be insignificant. As we discuss these processes, consider whether you think Algeo’s breakdown still holds true. (And in the exercises we suggest you replicate the study and find out.)

2.1.1 Compounding Compounding is a word formation process that is found extensively in languages around the world; indeed, Laurie Bauer (1983) claims there is no known language that does not have compounds. The process involves the combination of two (occasionally more) free-standing forms; for example hot dog, dog-collar and neckbeard. In some languages this closeness is easy to spot because compounds are written as one word. But as these examples show, English compounds often appear as two words (with or without a hyphen). But you can still hear the “one-wordedness” because of the main stress on the first element. It is easier to illustrate this with an example that can occur both as a compound and as an ordinary string of two free words. Take hot and dog. We can combine them and put the stress on the first element only (we use underlining to indicate stress here) as in hot dog. In this case it has the

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quite specific meaning of a ‘frankfurter served in a long soft bread roll’. On the other hand, if we put stress on both parts as in hot dog, then it refers to any old canine quadruped that just happens to be hot. This example also illustrates a second property of compounds; the meaning is often more specific than just the sum of the two parts, and it may often also become figurative. A dog-collar, for instance, is not just the kind of collar that a dog would wear; it can also refer to the white collar worn by some ordained clergy. Some compounds have highly idiosyncratic meanings – bag lady, spaghetti western and black sheep. Again their unified meanings show that we are thinking of these expressions as single units. Often it’s the newer compounds, like air punch ‘act of thrusting a fist up into the air’ and side-eye ‘a side-long glance of disapproval’, that appear as separate words or hyphenated; well-aged compounds, like breakfast and cupboard, usually appear as single words. Many now write hotdog solid. While there are some general guidelines for how to write compounds, it remains a tricky (and often disputed) aspect of English. Neckbeard ‘growth of hair on a man’s neck’ is a recent word, but it is written solid. The semi-soft frozen dessert icecream has been around since the 1600s, but the parts are still normally separated using spaces or hyphens, as ice-cream or ice cream. Other languages are more consistent. In the German writing system the parts of the compound are joined to form one word (sometimes even with a connecting element between the parts, as in Verbesserungsvorschlag ‘suggestion for improvement’ from Verbesserung ‘improvement’ + s + Vorschlag ‘suggestion’). The “one-wordedness” of compounds also becomes obvious when we look at the way they behave in the grammar. For example, the compound still-life has a normal plural form (still-lifes) compared to the irregular plural of life (lives). Similarly, people would say jack-in-the-boxes rather than jacks-in-the-box, which means they are thinking of jack-in-the-box as a fused word. (Note how the heavy stress falls on the first syllable and the following parts are all squashed together: Jack-in-the-box.) Compounding has always been a major word formation process in Germanic; 1,000  years ago it was one of the most important sources of new lexical items for English, and there are some wonderful examples, especially in poetry (bān ‘bone’ + hūs ‘house’ = ‘skeleton’, brēost ‘breast’ + cofa ‘cove, chamber’ = ‘heart, affections’). New creations are still appearing: seagull manager ‘a manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything and then leaves’ (Urban Dictionary); hot mess ‘when someone’s thoughts or their looks are in a state of disarray, but they maintain an undeniable attractiveness’; humblebrag ‘a supposedly modest or selfdeprecating/critical statement but the actual purpose is to boast’.

The longest German word – a record set to be broken The opportunity for compounding in German makes for some very long words, sometimes known as Bandwurmwörter ‘tapeworm words’ (e.g. the kitchen device known as the Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher lit. ‘egg-shell-necessity-break-spot-causer’). Indeed, in his 1880 essay “The

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Awful German Language”, Mark Twain describes compounding as “one of the most notable features” of German; he concludes that “[s]ome German words are so long that they have a perspective”. One with a particularly impressive perspective is Germany’s officially longest word: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (lit. ‘cow-meat-labellingmonitoring-responsibility-delegation-law’). The word died when the law was repealed after the European Union lifted a recommendation to carry out tests on healthy cattle for BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the technical name for ‘mad cow disease’, and itself not a bad compound). In the Telegraph report of the news piece (27 July 2013), the journalist observed: “In theory, a German word can be infinitely long. Unlike in English, an extra concept can simply be added to the existing word indefinitely.” He’s correct about there being no theoretical limit to the length of German compounds. Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursachergerät shows Gerät ‘device’ tacked on the end, and we can keep doing this. But what about English? Certainly some varieties of English produce extremely complex clumps of words; chemical compounds and nasty lung diseases (e.g. pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis ‘a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine dust’), as well as compounds found in super-literate varieties like Bureaucratese (e.g. prototype crisis shelter development plans, occupational choice-vocational interest congruency). And in English, as in German, there is also no actual limit to the length of these “alphabetical processions” (Twain’s description). English has anti-missile missiles and even anti-ballistic missile defence countermeasures ‘strategic actions to evade anti-ballistic missiles’, but when a missile is deployed against anti-missile missiles, we have anti-anti-missile-missile missiles. And we can keep playing this game (as comics have shown), as long as we have one more missile than anti- (otherwise, there wouldn’t be anything to blow up). Theoretically, words and parts of words can combine and recombine in this way to form an infinite number of different words. German and English here illustrate the structural complexity and creativity that distinguish our communicative behaviour from that of animals. The infinite capacity to express and understand meaning is probably not found in the language of any other species (see Pinker 2000).

2.1.2 Affixation Affixation is a similar process to compounding except that it involves parts of words that can’t stand alone. They include prefixes that are added at the beginning (un-, mis- and re- as in unhappy, misfortune and reapply), suffixes that are added at the end (-ish, -ness and -ic as in blackish, happiness and linguistic) and (though rare) infixes that occur somewhere in the middle of the stem (Homer Simpson’s -mainfix in words such as edumacation, sophistimacated and viomalin – the inspiration

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for “Homeric infixation” probably comes from expressions like whatchamacallit and thingamabob). Affixes come and go. English has a long history of having fun with infixes and a very early example is -de- (originally mock French) in flibberdegibbet ‘evil spirit’, grizzledemundy ‘grinning stupid person’ and slubberdegullion ‘miserable worthless wretch’. But these words are now found only in literature, and the infix is no longer useful. In comparison, some other affixes become highly productive and achieve almost voguish popularity. The prefix Mc- has now severed all ties from the fastfood giant McDonalds to give us new (disparaging) expressions such as McJob ‘unstimulating, low paid jobs with few prospects’ (the first McCoinage), McBesity ‘fatness relating to the consumption of junk food’, McMansions ‘housing developments made up of large, cookie-cutter houses’, Baldy McMullet ‘mullet worn with very little or no hair on the front and sides’, McGarbage ‘waste created by disposable dishes, cutlery and packaging’, McBooks ‘quickly produced mass-market books’, McMovies, McShopping, McMedicine, McPrisons and even McGod ‘the god of TV evangelists’ (not all will survive, but the flourishing of such creations shows the success of the affix). Another new prefix, uber- ‘super, mega’ (from German), is churning out neologisms – ubergeek, ubermodel, uberfan and uberdork are just some. Some affixes have died out completely and survive only in relic form; and‘against’ is fossilized in a word like answer. Others may no longer be productive but survive intact in words in common usage; -th was once used to form abstract nouns like stealth, filth, wealth and truth. Still others appear to move in and out of fashion; the old suffix -dom was raised from the dead in the last century, and new forms are being created all the time: riddledom, filmdom, moviedom, blokedom, hackerdom, professordom, parentdom, stuffed-shirtdom and lawnmowerdom are just a few of the around 300 (currently appearing in lists such as Wiktionary). Some of these may be one-off creations (or “nonce” words), but they attest to the liveliness of the suffix.

2.1.3 Backformation Backformation is the opposite strategy to affixation. It can happen that words exist with prefixes and suffixes, but not without them – so speakers backform them (backform has been created in this way from backformation). Empath ‘person or being with the paranormal ability to perceive the feelings of another’ is a recent creation from empathetic. In two-player games (such as chess or backgammon), the word ply (from reply) is sometimes used for a turn that is taken by one of the players. This process has given English many of its standard words, especially verbs like burgle, shoplift, babysit, edit, afflict, enthuse, laze, aggress, grovel, televise, manhandle, eavesdrop, househunt and jell. In some of these cases, speakers have removed something they believe to be an affix (but it isn’t) to create the new word. A fairly recent example is the verb to verse (as in England is versing Australia), where speakers have reanalysed the word versus as the verb form verses. So they have removed what looks to be a verb ending to create a new verb. Such backformations are more likely to occur with very strongly entrenched patterns, and they also have the effect of filling an apparent void – if

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there is a noun butler then there should be a verb to butle (in fact there once was, but it didn’t survive). In the same way, the word to beg was created from beggar, the final -ar wrongly interpreted as the same -er suffix as in bake, baker (the word beggar comes from Beghard, a member of a medieval Christian brotherhood).

2.1.4 Conversion Conversion (or shifting, as it is labelled in Algeo’s chart) changes one part of speech to another without anything being added; for example the new verb to toilet-paper ‘to cover (a building, trees etc.) with toilet paper’. In English, conversion usually involves the major word classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. The most common conversions are: verb —> noun (a guess; a call; a think; a read; an ask); noun —> verb (to bottle; to bridge; to trash; to network; to leaflet); adjective —> verb (to better; to empty; to open; to total [a car]); adjective —> noun (a roast; a weekly; a regular; a given; a nasty). Conversion is extremely productive in languages like English because the basic form of words is identical and so they can move with ease between different classes. There are even examples of conversion from minor word classes like prepositions and conjunctions. The prepositions up and down can transform into verbs (to up the stakes / to down tools), nouns (on the up / to have a down on someone), adjectives (he’s up today / a down experience) and adverbs (to go up and down). Conversion is more difficult in languages whose words carry grammatical affixes. Though English and German are close relatives, German conversion is restricted on account of the fact that words have retained more inflections. The most common conversions involve creating nouns from basic verbs; for example the noun das Sprechen ‘the act of speaking’ from the verb sprechen ‘to speak’. Otherwise, affixation is the more common process; e.g. der Sprecher ‘the speaker’ and der Sprechende ‘the man who is speaking’.

2.1.5 Abbreviation Abbreviation covers truncated forms or clipped words. The Oxford Dictionaries “Word of the Year 2014” was to vape (from vapour or vapourize); it describes the action of inhaling and exhaling the vapour produced by e-cigarettes (or e-cigs). Sometimes shortened forms end up replacing the longer versions (e.g. mob for mobile vulgus ‘movable or fickle common people’, cab for cabriolet and bus for omnibus ‘motor vehicle for paying passengers’). But often the longer and shorter forms coexist as stylistic variants (vax alongside vaccine or vaccination), and with time the meanings can diverge, as has happened with (mobile) app versus (computer) application; old examples include hussy versus housewife, stroppy versus obstreperous, grotty versus grotesque. The use of the shorter colloquial forms in casual contexts often leads them down separate semantic tracks, thus creating two radically

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different words as the long and the short part company. Special cases of shortenings arise when initial unstressed syllables are lost (cos from because), and this can also give rise to separate words with very different meanings (fence – defence; cute – acute; squire – esquire; ticket – etiquette). Some shortened expressions involve other processes. Both adorbs (from adorable) and totes (from totally) show the addition of the diminutive (or hypocoristic) -s ending. Like other hypocoristic endings, such as the -ie in breakie ‘breakfast’ and -o in arvo ‘afternoon’ (the earmark of Antipodean varieties of English), the suffix suggests informality and a friendly attitude. It shows an expressive use of the original plural -s ending that first appeared in pet names (such as Legs, Susykins and Cuddles) and nursery creations (such as dindins and beddie-byes). It now tags many slangy creations like whatevs (from whatever), probs (< probably), awks (< awkward) and fabs (< fabulous), and makes regular appearances in internet slangs like LOLspeak (though often spelled , as in muahz ‘kisses’).

2.1.6 Acronyms Acronyms illustrate another kind of abbreviated expression, one that really took off in the 20th century (see Chapter 1). This time, words are formed only from the initials of other words – the word acronym comes from Greek acro ‘tip, point’ and onym ‘name’. Dictionaries are incorporating new examples of these words all the time: BOBO ‘burnt out but opulent’, YOLO ‘you only live once’, PAL ‘parents are listening’, POS ‘parents over shoulder’. Technically, for something to be an acronym the resulting word has to be pronounceable like other ordinary words in the language. Examples that are pronounced as strings of letter names such as KPC ‘keep parents clueless’, SMH ‘shaking my head’ and LMIRL for ‘let’s meet in real life’ are not acronyms but rather initialisms (or alphabetisms). Occasionally, acronyms are based on successive syllables of just single words, as in the oldies TV from ‘television’ and PJs from ‘pyjamas’. Other variations incorporate more of the words than simply the initial letters. This might involve, for instance, using the first consonant and vowel, usually to make the acronym pronounceable, as in the case the well-established acronym sonar from ‘sound navigation and ranging’. Some acronyms use even larger chunks. Something like modem takes the first syllable from the two words modulator and demodulator; hi-fi is something similar. These words fall somewhere between being acronyms and blends (which are coming up next). Hi-fi also smacks of a bit of wordplay (akin to reduplicated forms like bow-wow, hob nob and nit wit). Once they have been around for a while, acronyms lose their capital letters and enter the language as ordinary words, such as sonar. Even where this hasn’t happened, the original source words are usually forgotten – HIV stands for ‘human immunodeficiency virus’, yet people commonly refer to the HIV virus; compare ATM machine ‘automatic teller machine machine’ and PIN number ‘personal identification number number’. (Examples like PIN-Nummer in German have given rise to an acronym to describe the practice: RAS-Syndrom (Redundantes-Akronym-Syndrom-Syndrom ‘redundant acronym syndrome syndrome’), a joke that works equally well in English.)

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Backronyms There has been an interesting twist in the formation of acronyms in recent times. These expressions are backronyms (or reverse acronyms). WIMP and MACHO, for example, are technical acronyms. WIMP stands for ‘weakly interacting massive particle’ and MACHO for ‘massive astrophysical compact halo object’. Of course, it could be a happy coincidence that the initials in these phrases made for such apt and cute sounding words as WIMP and MACHO, but more likely the creators of these acronyms fudged and fiddled until they came up with the right sequences of words. A lot of reverse acronymy goes on in the names of organizations and agencies. A bunch of people might cook up a word that stands for something they want their group to be associated with, let’s say, HOPE. Then, on the basis of the letters that make up this word, they concoct a plausible sounding string of words that is also appropriate to their activities and concerns. In this case, it might be ‘Health Opportunities for People Everywhere’. Some linguistic cookery undoubtedly went on when the Microsoft Corporation announced a new program called Windows DNA standing for ‘Windows Distributed interNet Architecture’; there is no doubt they were deliberately cashing in on the famous initialism DNA (in this case, ‘deoxyribonucleic acid’). People have a lot of fun with this kind of reverse acronymy. Clearly the phrase A CYA Operation ‘a cover your arse operation’ was a deliberate pun on the US Central Intelligence Agency (the CIA).

2.1.7 Blending This process refers to the creation of new words from the combination of two (or occasionally more) existing words. The new portmanteau word then incorporates meaningful characteristics from both. While blending was an insignificant process in Algeo’s study, the process has taken off in recent years. Dozens of new portmanteaux are entering English on a regular basis, and blends like the following abound in lists of new words: listicle ‘an article on the internet presented in the form of a numbered or bulleted list’, zonkey ‘a hybrid (literally) of a donkey and a zebra’ and mansplain ‘(of a man) to explain something (usually to a woman) in a condescending way’. The nature of the mixing process is also changing. Rather than combining splinters of words, the newer blends tend to be more like vodkatini – a complete word with part of another. It might be that the front is intact, as in vodkatini and shoefiti (‘the practice of decorating overhead wires with shoes’). Many of the modern blends involve some sort of overlap, as in guesstimate ‘to estimate by guessing’. American economic and cultural expansion is now often described as cocacolonization. This is a clever fusion of part of Coca-Cola and colonization. Very occasionally, the full word appears in the middle of the blend. In the case of ambisextrous ‘bisexual’, the

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Understanding Language Change

word sex is squashed and blended inside ambidextrous. These words are somehow catchier and more playful because they overrun each other. Occasionally, the overlap is total, as in sexploitation ‘sexual exploitation’ and bagonize ‘to wait anxiously at the baggage carousel for luggage to arrive’, which retain both words intact. But more usually only parts coincide; affluenza ‘the disease of being too rich’ combines a bit of affluence and a bit of influenza (the part is common to both source words, affluence and influenza). In this way the blend echoes more effectively their individual meanings.

2.1.8 Commonization In Chapter 3 we describe special cases of semantic broadening, where proper names extend from a specific case and end up referring generally to the whole class of items. In terms of word formation, this is called commonization. Personal names frequently lose their capital letter and enter the general lexicon as household words, as in the mountweazels ‘fictitious entries’ mentioned earlier. There are the usual eponyms (< epi- ‘upon’ and onym ‘name’) such as cardigans and sandwiches from the Earls of Cardigan and Sandwich (in fact, English has amassed more than 35,000 such expressions), and new ones are appearing all the time, though they don’t always survive. When Lorena Bobbitt famously cut off her husband’s penis in June 1993 the verb to bobbitt suddenly appeared in newspapers around the world to describe this and similar events, and continues to appear (perhaps because the alternative depenistrate is a little less memorable). Peter Gilliver, the associate editor of the OED at the time, stated that “[i]f ‘bobbitt’ turns up in several different stories over a period of time, this suggests it should go in the dictionary” (cited in The Age, 7 February 1994, p. 11). The word hasn’t yet secured an entry but continues to make regular appearances in the media. There are also eponymous phrases that arise spontaneously in everyday language. Someone in a fringed rhinestone studded suit might be described as doing an Elvis. Most are short-lived, it is true, but their pervasiveness speaks to the value of names. Ours is a culture that promotes personal names. Brand names also provide a common source for new words. Google has been “verbed”; to google even refers to any search, not simply a Google search, so it illustrates both conversion and commonization.1 Place names also enter the language as ordinary words in this way. Jeans have their origin in the town of Genoa, where a type of heavy cotton fabric (resembling denim) was once made; denim itself derives from Nîmes, the name of a city in southern France (originally serge de Nîmes ‘serge (cloth) of Nîmes’).

2.1.9 Reduplication Reduplication is a repetition process where all or part of the stem of a word is reiterated, and the resulting form is a kind of compound. This is a peripheral process in English compared to some other languages (and we give examples from Māori below). Nonetheless, over the years it has produced some thousands of words, and

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occasionally new ones appear (cray cray ‘really crazy’ is a recent addition). In English, there are basically three types of reduplicated compounds. One involves repetition of the whole stem (goody-goody, hush-hush). Many of these are confined to nursery language (choo-choo, gee-gee). A second type involves the repetition of the rhyme. Sometimes both stems are existing words (brain-drain, tin-grin), but usually only one, or sometimes none, of the elements is independently meaningful (argy-bargy, artsy-fartsy) – it can happen that the words become obscure through sound change, or else they might simply drop out of use (willy-nilly derives from the expression will I nill I based on earlier verbs willen ‘want’ and nillen ‘not want’). A  third (now rather rare) type of reduplicative compound involves some sort of modification of the stem vowel (mish-mash, flip-flop). In many languages reduplication has emotional functions; the repetition is more expressive than ordinary speech. We repeat things to beef them up (I’m ok, I’m ok); this can be for emphasis, to get across a sense of conviction or urgency. But it gets more interesting than this. An example found more usually in American English (and inspired by Yiddish) is “schm-reduplication”. It produces expressions like school-schmool and fancy-schmancy, where the second part of the phrase is a nonsense word, beginning with the same cluster. It’s fully productive (almost any word can be cloned in this way), and the meaning is dismissive, the linguistic equivalent of a snort or a sniff; school-schmool means something like ‘school – who cares!’ English also has something called “contrastive focus reduplication” (Ghomeshi et al. 2004). You might say, “You mean he’s GONE gone” (there’s a heavy stress on the first instance of the repeated word, and it contrasts with the second mention). The question asked here is whether the person had actually gone for good, as opposed to just ducking out for a short while. The copied expression always points to the real or true meaning of the item referred to, and the expression can usually be rephrased using modifiers (instead of he’s GONE gone, you could say he’s really gone). Other languages are better known for their use of reduplication. Sometimes it relates more to the grammatical life of the language; in Māori, for example, some nouns lengthen the first vowel to indicate plurality (e.g. waahine ‘women’ from wahine ‘woman’). More usually, however, it concerns expansion in the lexicon. Partial reduplication of verbs can either strengthen the meaning (paki ‘pat’ becomes papaki ‘slap hard’ and pakipaki ‘applaud’; kimo ‘blink’ becomes kikimo ‘close eyes firmly’ and kimokimo ‘blink repeatedly’) or encode reciprocity (piri ‘stick, cling’ becomes pipiri ‘cling together’; patu ‘strike’ becomes papatu ‘beat each other’) (see Harlow 2007).

2.1.10 Borrowing The examples we’ve looked at so far have illustrated language internal processes; in other words, ways languages enrich their vocabulary by drawing on sources already available to them. Another way is to look to external sources – to expand the lexicon via what is usually called “borrowing”, the process whereby a language takes and incorporates some linguistic element from another language. As described in

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Chapter 1, lexical borrowing is the most usual, although any part of the grammar can be “on loan”. English is an enthusiastic borrower and has adopted material from as many as 120 different languages. German is one that has been making important contributions over many years. Recent borrowings include Kummerspeck (lit. ‘grief bacon’), a word to describe the excess weight gained from emotional overeating, and Fachidiot (lit. ‘subject idiot’) ‘someone who knows a lot about their special area but little else’. The newness of these borrowings is reflected in the fact that they haven’t yet lost the capital letter required by German. Compare them to golden oldies in the area of food and drink: noodle (< Nudel), pretzel (< Brezel), muesli (< Swiss German Müsli), Delicatessen (< Delikatessen), gummy bear (< Gummibär), schnapps, lager and of course the frankfurter and hamburger (adjectives/nouns formed from the place names Frankfurt and Hamburg). Sometimes an idea is borrowed, but not the actual word. English stole the semantics of the German Ohrwurm (lit. ‘earworm’) to describe that really annoying little bit of music that rattles around inside a person’s head, sometimes for days. This expression earworm retains the German idiom but converts it into English. This kind of borrowing where the meaning of a phrase is borrowed and expressed using existing words in the borrowing language is known as a calque (or loan translation). An earlier example is the expression power politics, which is a calque on the German word Machtpolitik, a compound of Macht ‘power, strength’ and Politik ‘politics’. Most of these lexical aliens have been naturalized – they fit the English sound and spelling system (e.g. no capital letter), and they have been integrated into the grammatical system (they take the English plural ending -s). Sometimes this assimilation process changes the loanwords beyond recognition. Hamburger is a good illustration. The first part of the word happens to correspond to a type of meat in English, and the word has been reinterpreted or “reanalysed” as a compound ham + burger (even though there is no ham involved). This false analysis has spawned many new compounds such as Aussie lamburger, eggburger, cheeseburger, chickenburger, steakburger and so on. The fact that English has expanded way beyond its original mother tongue countries has triggered a burgeoning of diversity in the form of hybrids, dialects, nativized varieties, pidgins and creoles, all influenced by the many different environments and languages it has come in contact with; this has opened up many more potential borrowing sources (for example the local vernacular languages, which may or may not be the first language of speakers of these contact Englishes). For example, mainstream dictionaries now contain words from Philippine English (such as carnap ‘to steal a car’ and presidentiable ‘a person who is a likely or confirmed candidate for president’), and also loanwords that have come via Spanish (estafa ‘fraud’) and Tagalog (barkada ‘group of friends’). To see more closely what aspects of words can be borrowed, consider some of the borrowings, this time from English into German, shown in Table 2.1. You can see that some of these borrowed words are used in ways that most English speakers wouldn’t even recognize; what the German call a mobile (or cell) phone shows a very different use for the adjective handy ‘useful’.

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Table 2.1 Examples of English borrowings into German What has been borrowed

Words

Translation

Form and meaning Form and meaning Form and (almost) meaning Form Form Meaning (=calque) Meaning (=calque)

crashen chatten Peeling Smoking Handy Liebe machen Seifenoper

‘to crash (of a computer)’ ‘to chat (online)’ ‘facial/body scrub’ ‘dinner jacket’ ‘cell phone’ ‘make love’ ‘soap opera’

2.1.11  Sound symbolism Finally we consider the creation of words that come about via some sort of sound symbolism. All of you can likely think of examples of onomatopoeic words; words like cuckoo, whoosh, cheep and plop, which all somehow echo their senses. It can also happen that speakers start to associate certain sounds or sound sequences with particular meanings, and these then can be used in the formation of new words when the patterns get extended. Such sound sequences are called phonesthemes. They occur either at the beginning of words (e.g. tw-, gl-, fl-) or in their rhymes (e.g. -ash, -ump, -itter). They symbolize a certain meaning, although it is often not easy to pin down exactly what this meaning is. Consider words that rhyme with stodge: splodge (‘a thick, heavy, or clumsy splotch’), podge (‘short, stout, thick-set’), wodge (‘a bulky lumpy mass’). Words with the -odge rhyme denote something solid, bulky or lumpy, and this has been the inspiration for new words such as stodge (the word that denotes a particularly thick, heavy, starchy, lethally fattening type of English food). It is a good example of how speakers manipulate language for their own ends. We could also include here imitative expressions such as ouch; in other words, those that convey the sort of involuntary noisy responses we make to express some sort of emotion. They include automatic noises like kerchoo, burp, hack, hiccup and so on. Such words start life being rather inadequate attempts to represent the actual sound being made; ha-ha, hardy-har, yuk-yuk, haw-haw and te-he don’t sound much like actual laughter. But over time, as these written forms become more and more familiar, they are conventionalized as ordinary vocabulary items. So, when we encounter ha-ha or haw-haw in a text, it seems a perfectly normal representation of laughter.2 Yackety-yak seems a perfectly good way to represent someone talking. These words then start functioning as ordinary nouns and verbs. For example They ummed and ahhed; She hemmed and hawed; He pooh-poohed my memo. Once these expressions develop their own spelling pronunciations, this removes them even further from the original noises they’re supposed to represent. Tut-tut and tsk-tsk don’t sound much like the curious clicking sound we make to express impatience or disapproval, and yet tsk-tsk now seems a reasonable way to represent this noise. What’s more, so completely do we come to accept these as somehow natural, they then become the actual noises we make. We might even say tsk-tsk when we’re ticking someone off.

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2.1.12  A final word on the processes Chapter 5 will discuss two important processes in morphological change: reanalysis (the reinterpretation of structure) and analogy (or attraction to structure). The focus in that chapter will be on the grammatical existence of words. But since both processes are major driving forces in the creation of new words, we also mention them briefly here. Speakers often reinterpret boundaries within words (= reanalysis) to give their structure more meaning. This can create new morphemes that then get extended to form new expressions (= analogy). We saw this already with the restructuring of hamburger. In what is sometimes referred to as folk etymology (see Chapter 5), the “correct” morpheme boundary is ignored and reassigned to where it makes most sense. The word bikini derives from the name of a Pacific Ocean atoll. The first part of the word happens to coincide with the prefix bi- in English meaning ‘two’, and of course the swimsuit happens to be made of two pieces. This is all the encouragement speakers need to start forming new creations like mankini, microkini, monokini, seaweed kini, macramé kini, Chanel’s eye-patch kini and even the dental floss kini (where the bikini bits are held together by something resembling the thread used to remove food from teeth). Kinis of all shapes and sizes now abound in lingerie catalogues, everything from the G-kini with minimal coverage to the more generously proportioned high-cut kini or hi-kini. Whether or not these new kini creations will survive is not clear; most will probably disappear. However, they nicely illustrate the kind of inventive restructuring and generalization that is so much a part of speakers’ wordplay. And many creations do endure. A clear example is helicopter, from Greek helic ‘spiral’ > and the root pter ‘wing’ (the -o- is a linking device). Of course English speakers wouldn’t know what to do with a word beginning with so they make the cut after heli-, giving rise to the shortened form copter, as well as compounds such as helipad, heliport ‘terminal for helicopters’ and gyrocopter ‘light single-seater autogiro’, hoppicopter ‘backpack helicopter’ and most recently hexacopter ‘unmanned helicopter having six rotors’. Reformations of this kind often result from an original blending process; if there are enough blended combinations, it allows the speakers to reinterpret and to restructure in the way we’ve just seen, and this gives rise to new morphemes (either words or affixes), which can then extend (via analogy) to become productive new affixes. For instance the -holic/-aholic/-oholic ‘addict’ suffix describes one who habitually consumes whatever the first part of the word denotes, as in chocoholic, footballaholic, golfaholic, newsaholic, junkaholic, icecreamaholic, potatochipoholic, beefaholic, bookaholic, sleepaholic and so on. The source for these new formations was 18th century alcoholic ‘pertaining to alcohol’ (alcohol + ic). The sense shifted in the 20th century to ‘person addicted to alcohol’, and in the 1970s this led to the blend formation workaholic/workaholism. Blends like these then allowed for the reinterpretation of -oholic as a suffix. Many new suffixes have evolved in this way: -athon originally from blends with marathon (e.g. swimathon, bikathon, telethon and showerathon, which denote events showing endurance and usually for charity); -gate originally from blends

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with Watergate (e.g. choppergate, nipplegate, dianagate and prisongate, which denote some sort of scandal); most recently -(a)licious originally from blends with delicious (e.g. babelicious, bootylicious, funalicious, partylicious and scrumptilicious, which denote something or someone very attractive). Particularly interesting from the perspective of analogy and reanalysis is the process by which phrases become set in the language, and eventually become new words; for example the nouns wannabe ‘poser, follower’ (from want to be) and druther ‘preference’ (from (I)’d rather), verbs to don (from do on) and doff (from do off   ), and even the creation of more grammatical words such as the conjunction because (from the prepositional phrase by cause). These are called amalgamations (sometimes also lexicalizations, though this label covers other types of word formation). We will be revisiting examples such as these both in Chapters 5 and 6. These amalgamations illustrate the reduction that also takes place in well-established compounds. Consider the condensed pronunciation of breakfast [brɛkfəst] (as in ‘breaking the fast’) and cupboard [kʌbəd] (‘board for cups’). Here the spelling has preserved the original compounds, but this is not always the case – only the real word enthusiast will be aware that nostril began life as a compound (Old English nosþyrel ‘nose thirl [= hole]’). Frequency is a driving force here (and we will revisit this theme in many parts of this book). More unusual compounds don’t show the same sort of reduction. Compare the full pronunciation of infrequent words such as handspike and handstroke with the more common handkerchief [hæŋkətʃif].

2.2  LOSING WORDS – LEXICAL MORTALITY We’ve just seen the many ways in which languages can extend their lexicon, but there are many ways they lose words too. Dictionary editors of course have to be aware of the endangered words. They need to make decisions all the time as to whether they classify a word as “archaic” or “obsolete” or even whether they’ll bother to include it at all. It’s a difficult decision – words may no longer be relevant for modern speakers; yet they are important for people reading texts of the past. Influential works of literature act rather like artificial life support systems for words that otherwise disappeared from people’s active lexicons, sometimes hundreds of years ago. Here are just some of the main reasons that words will drop out of use.

2.2.1 Obsolescence This is probably rather obvious – if objects, ideas and institutions no longer form a part of the speakers’ mental world then they will be forgotten. In areas such as food, lexical obsolescence is probably a matter of course. We no longer recognize medieval words like pottage (porridge-like dish of vegetables and/or meat), mortrews, buknade (pottages), civet (stew), frumenty, losyns (porridge-like dishes), rapey, doucetes (desserts) and letelorye (savoury custard). The tendency in those times to macerate, smash into pulp and spice food beyond recognition makes few of the dishes appealing to modern palates. Clothing shows a similar high turnover of

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vocabulary. Battle fashions have changed, and we no longer require medieval terms for armour like vambrace, rerebrace, crinet and peytral. (Of course such words can remain useful for members of “living history” societies.) Disappearing words often tell of societal change. Most of us have given up the habit of interpreting omens by the appearance of entrails or the behaviour patterns of birds, rendering words such as augury ‘divination’ and more specifically pyromancy ‘divination by fire’ and tyromancy ‘divining by the coagulation of cheese’ no longer terribly useful. The traditional vocabulary of sin and virtue provides a more immediately relevant example. As Geoffrey Hughes (1989) describes, words such as honour, virtue, temperance, modesty, chastity and virginity are by no means dead, but (driven by changing mores and attitudes) they no longer form part of people’s active moral lexicon.

2.2.2 “Verbicide” Examples like these also illustrate another fact of lexical life – words wear out. There are certain areas of our vocabulary, like terms of abuse, that are more prone to weakening than others. It’s no longer effective to insult someone by calling that person a slubberdegullion druggel or a fondling fop, a blockish grutnol or a grouthead gnat-snapper. Mangy rascal, drowsy loiterer, flouting milksop, base loon, scoffing scoundrel and ruffian rogue just don’t pack much punch anymore. Expressive words will become insipid, and alternatives have to be found. More recent disappearances include bounder, cad and rotter – even ratbag, rogue, rascal, scallywag and scoundrel (once highly offensive) are rarely heard. We see this in many areas of vocabulary. Speakers are always on the lookout for new, exciting ways to express themselves, and inevitably many expressions just fall away.

2.2.3 Reduction It seems that words have to have a certain amount of phonetic saliency if they are to function as a useful part of the vocabulary (what we are saying here refers to lexical words – grammatical words, such he, the and of, are by their nature short). As we will see more vividly in Chapter 4, sound change is generally reductive. Severe mutilation can reduce a word to a fragment of its former self, and it then simply drops by the wayside. Old English æ¯ ‘law’, ēa ‘river’ and īeg ‘island’ didn’t survive (except among Scrabble players who find knowledge of such words as ai ‘a three toed South American sloth’ quite handy). Interestingly, īeg got a new lease of life when speakers expanded the word to īgland, modern island (the here was introduced in the 1500s because people connected it to isle).

2.2.4  Intolerable homonymy It can happen that through change two originally distinct words come to have the same form but different meanings (= homonyms). Old English hrūm ‘soot’ collided with rūm ‘room’ after the [h] dropped off, and it subsequently dropped out of use. One of the most famous examples comes from Gascon (a variety of Occitan spoken

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in south-western France). It involves the Latin words gallus ‘rooster’ and cattus ‘cat’. In some rural dialects sound change meant that these two words ended up merging. Imagine the disastrous potential in a farming context – picture the poor farmer unable to distinguish whether a cat or a rooster had got into the hen house (see Hock 1991: 298). It can even happen that words with completely contradictory meanings collide in this way. Typically, speakers then end up replacing one of the homonyms. For example, in Old English there were originally two verbs lāettan ‘permit’ and lettan ‘stop, hinder’. Sound change left these two verbs homophonous: let ‘to permit’ and let ‘to stop’. The second let has now disappeared except for relics like without let or hindrance and let ball (in tennis). The same thing happened with Old English cleofian ‘to stick together’ (compare modern related forms glue and clay) and clēofan ‘to split apart’ (compare modern cleaver and cleft). Sound change left the one word cleave with either the meaning ‘to stick together’ or ‘to cut in half ’. The latter sense now predominates. For collisions to cause problems, the words must usually belong to the same sphere of ideas and occur in similar contexts. German arm ‘poor’ and Arm ‘arm’ are different parts of speech and have very different meanings; they are not likely to be confused. But very different contexts of use do not always ensure survival. In the case of taboo, homonyms of taboo terms will quickly disappear. The phonological collapsing of arse and ass in some varieties of English, for example, caused considerable problems for the animal now generally referred to as a donkey. The Early English word coney/cunny, meaning ‘rabbit’ (and rhyming with honey), dropped out of use when it collided with the tabooed female body part cunt. Words can even disappear if they sound a little too much like taboo words. Many single syllable words beginning with and ending in have disappeared from the English language. During the Victorian era we lost feck, meaning ‘efficiency’; feckless must have sounded different enough that it lingered a little longer. Typically, we will drop words like hot cakes if they sound too much like expressions that are offensive or embarrassing. Such is the power of taboo.

Some disappear for no good reason We’ve examined some of the reasons words drop out but have to admit that huge numbers of English words disappear for no obvious reason at all. Fnast ‘to snort’ bit the dust, as did all other words, such as fnese ‘to sneeze’. True, some words seem spectacularly useless (hothouse peristeronic ‘suggestive of pigeons’ and gymnologize ‘to dispute naked’), and we can perhaps understand why these didn’t endure. Others seem handier, like supernaculum ‘the act of drinking the very last drop from a glass or bottle’ and velleity ‘a sense of desire that doesn’t come with any action’. Over the years many seemingly useful expressions have disappeared without a trace: multiscious ‘knowing many different things’ and nod-crafty ‘with

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an air of great wisdom’; once people could have gome ‘wit, tact’, ruth ‘compassion’, ert ‘skill’ and list ‘joy’, they could also be wieldy ‘agile’. The symposiast ‘the banquet lover’, the wine-knight ‘one who drinks valiantly’ and the gastrophilanthropist ‘benevolent purveyor for the appetites of others’ might be conjubilant ‘filled with good cheer’ and with vitativeness and felicificability or ‘love of life’. English has lost many effective insults too: the buffleheaded booby, the cuddy clotpoll and clodplate, the jobbernowl jolthead and the noddy ninnyhammer. It is a fact of lexical life that words will wear out, some faster than others (insults will lose their wounding capacity, swearing its pungency, and slang its vibrancy). But like in the fashion industry, people want to change their language (especially vocabulary), just as they want to change the hemlines on the trousers and dresses they wear. There is a constant tug of war in language between people’s desire for new, exciting ways of saying things and the tendency for words and structures to become routine; this is most obvious in vocabulary changes, but as we’ll see later in Chapter 6 it also happens in grammar.

2.3  ETYMOLOGY – STUDY OF THE ORIGIN OF WORDS Etymology is the study of the origin and history of words. It’s a subject that fascinates most people – and it’s often full of surprises. Dictionary makers and dictionary users can have quite different ideas about how an expression has come into being. Many speakers have stories about the history of certain words, and they’re often shocked (even irritated) when they find no mention of these in the dictionary. Lexicographers do rain on people’s picnics with their cautious labels “of uncertain origin” or “etymology unknown”. The expression OK (or okay) is one that has spawned an extraordinary array of imaginative etymologies based on languages from all over the world. One even derives it from a boxing term KO (or kayo), an abbreviation for ‘knock out’. If the boxer wasn’t kayoed, then he was OK. A good story but there is no evidence, and the chronology is wrong – kayo appeared more than 80 years after OK. This time it seems the story that is best supported by documentary evidence and wins the approval of the dictionary makers is one that bases it on an acronym. OK originates from a jokey misspelling oll korrekt in the 1830s of the expression all correct. Compare other phrases like oll wright or OW. The majority of lexical creations don’t endure – so how do we explain those that do? Clearly they have to fill a need, but dictionary makers track thousands of new useful expressions every year and only a fraction survive. Why did the expression OK take off and not OW? It turns out that the prosperous creations often have mongrel origins; in other words, a number of influences come together to establish the meaning of the form and to secure its currency.

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It seems that OK was also used for many other jokey abbreviations, including out of kash, oll koming and oll konfirmed. But what really helped to popularize the expression was the fact that it was adopted as an election slogan by supporters of the Democratic candidate Martin Van Buren (1782–1862). Born in Kinderhook (New York State), he was dubbed Old Kinderhook, and his supporters then formed the Old Kinderhook Club or the OK Club to solicit money for campaigns. People’s elaborate etymological tales probably also have a place in the history of this word. West African, Greek, German, American Indian and French origins have been proposed for OK – even Scots och aye has been suggested as a likely source. The stories surrounding people’s favourite words might be phony, but if an expression captures the imagination in this way, it probably has a much better chance of becoming established and surviving. The term OK took off in the 20th century to become a truly international word. Etymological fallacies can have unfortunate consequences. In June 2003 a British Government minister was severely criticized for his use of the phrase nitty-gritty at a police conference because of its supposed racist overtones. He had told his audience apparently that it was high time to “get down to the nitty-gritty” in training officers. It seems that the expression nitty-gritty is prohibited in the British police service lexicon because people believe it to have originally been used in reference to those in the lowest reaches of slave ships. This etymology is false. There is nothing linking nitty-gritty with the early slave trade. It appears in fact to have entered English only sometime during the 1960s, probably via Black English and initially as a bit of popular music slang. Since the 1990s there have been similar controversies sparked by the use of the word niggardly. In 1999 an employee in the Washington, DC mayoral office, David Howard, told his staff that, in light of cutbacks, he would have to be “niggardly” with funds. Many connected this word with the taboo word nigger, and the uproar that followed resulted in Howard’s resignation. In 2002 Stephanie Bell, a fourth grade teacher at Williams Elementary School (Wilmington, Indiana), taught the word niggardly to her students. At least one parent wanted her fired. These examples are popular etymologies that have no linguistic basis. However, in issues to do with language, it often doesn’t matter what the linguistic facts ­suggest – what really matters to speakers is how they perceive their language to be. The reality that nitty-gritty and niggardly have absolutely no etymological connections with the N-word is of no consequence, and if people do make these etymological connections, then this will be the kiss of death for these words. Fuk ‘sail’ and feck ‘purpose’ had absolutely nothing to do with the F-word either, but that didn’t save them. And although country shows no sign of falling to the power of the C-word, coney [kʌni] ‘rabbit’ has disappeared.

SUMMARY This chapter has been all about changes to words. It has examined the various methods by which people expand the lexicon by creating new expressions, word formation processes such as affixation, compounding, acronymy, blending and folk

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etymology, conversion, backformation, wordplay and borrowing. Words are also disappearing and for all sorts of reasons – obsolescence (of ideas, objects, institutions and so on), sound change, intolerable ambiguity and taboo. Most of the time, speakers don’t realize a word is on the way out. Ironically, they only become aware of this when for some reason the word makes a re-appearance. The transmission of linguistic forms is sometimes reminiscent of the spread of thought contagions (or memes) – fads that spread from person to person within a culture. Expressions are particularly infectious, and successful ones disseminate rapidly through speech communities, especially virtual communities. Celebrity endorsement can help to propel them to success. The verb to dog didn’t take off until Shakespeare used it, and neither did to twerk until Miley Cyrus “twerked into history”. Perhaps we will now see a spike in the use of conscious uncoupling since Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin announced their wilful unyoking on 25 March 2014. Clearly social media helps to spread these linguistic cults and trends – within a matter of hours they can have a worldwide following. The internet gives them a cachet, a respectability. But the progression of change is much more exciting and revealing than the introduction of a few new expressions for reasons of fashion. One of the most exciting areas in historical linguistics now involves the research that looks at the social use of language and its role in language change, and this is something we focus on in Chapter 7. Vocabulary is the most unstable aspect of a language, and dictionary makers are constantly having to redraw the admission and exclusion boundary for marginal vocabulary items. Meh is a modern interjection to convey indifference; it was in use online in the early 1990s, but it was almost 15 years before it appeared in mainstream dictionaries. Yeah-no is about the same age, but it is still missing from most dictionaries. It is almost impossible for printed dictionaries to keep up with the protean nature of vocabulary these days – not just new expressions, but old expressions changing their appearance, their meaning and their grammatical behaviour, and this is all happening at breakneck speed. We live in interesting linguistic times.

FURTHER READING Specific treatments of English words and word formation are offered by Bauer (1983), Katamba (1994), Stockwell and Minkova (2001) and Carstairs-McCarthy (2002); and cross-linguistic perspectives are offered by Haspelmath and Sims (2010), and several new handbooks on word formation (e.g. Sˇtekauer and Lieber 2006; Lieber and Sˇtekauer 2011, 2014; Müller et al. 2015–16). If you are interested in specifically slang and the creativity of the lexicon, some recent studies include Adams (2009) and Coleman (2012); Kwon and Round (2015) deals specifically with phonesthemes. For historical accounts of English words see Hughes (1989) and Liberman (2005), and for an overview of etymology and the key debates we recommend Mailhammer (2014). Much has been written recently on the relevance of dictionaries in the 21st century. We suggest you log on to www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/view/id/143

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and also http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-Power-of-the-Dictionary-Sus to hear lexicographers Erin McKean and Susan Butler talk about the place of print dictionaries in modern times. Historical linguist Anne Curzan also appears on TED and talks about how and when words change: https://www.ted.com/talks/ anne_curzan_what_makes_a_word_real.

EXERCISES 1  English (or any other language you choose) – word formation processes Many websites devoted to new words have recently appeared for English (the OED, for example, updates four times a year and publishes lists of the new words each year). There will also be dictionaries of new words in your library. Consult any of these sources to come up with an example for each of the processes we’ve identified in this chapter for creating new words (examples could also come from your own slang, but make sure you explain them). Note: Give the word together with the process. You could choose examples from a language other than English; just make sure you explain these examples so that the word formation processes are clear (to a non-speaker). You might also consider word formation processes found across languages and how they differ in importance and liveliness. For example, take two languages (one can be English) and compare the strategies by which new lexical items are formed in each language. Outline any similarities or differences in word formation processes. Give plenty of examples (make sure you explain these examples so that the word formation processes are clear to non-speakers). Another way to go about this exercise is to examine product names; for example, go out and browse through the supermarket shelves and collect examples of product names that illustrate each of the processes we have looked at in this chapter. 2  Attitudes to lexical change In 1712 Jonathan Swift published what is his famous A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, of which the following is an extract. The English Tongue is not arrived to such a Degree of Perfection, as, upon that Account, to make us apprehend any Thoughts of its Decay: And if it were once refined to a certain Standard, perhaps there might be Ways to fix it for ever [. . .] I see no absolute Necessity why any Language should be perpetually changing; for we find many Examples of the contrary [. . .] But what I have most at Heart, is, that some Method should be thought on for Ascertaining and fixing our Language for ever, after such Alterations are made in it as shall be thought requisite [. . .] What Horace says of Words going off, and perishing like Leaves, and new ones coming in their Place, is a misfortune he laments, rather than a Thing he approves: But I cannot see why this should be absolutely necessary.

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Briefly (in around 300–350 words), describe Swift’s attitude to language change expressed here. As part of this discussion, include the goal that Swift sets up. How desirable is it? How practical? 3  Linguistic fossils When linguistic changes occur they often leave behind some sort of trace – a relic of the original set-up. Words don’t just disappear; there is typically something left over. This is what prompted the Dutch linguist Van der Tuuk to once describe language as “something of a ruin”. Modern languages are full of relic forms that we can use to reconstruct features of vocabulary (sometimes even sounds and grammar) from earlier times. The following words are historically compounds. Identify the elements from which each word was formed. (a) werewolf (b) cobweb (c) gossip (d) hatred (e) midriff (f) garlic (g) lukewarm (h) daisy (i) window (j) tenterhooks 4 Backformation a

b

c

The following words are the result of backformation. Investigate the etymology of these words, and identify whether the backformations involve a derivational or inflectional ending. (i) burial (ii) to burgle (iii) greed (iv) grovel (v) edit (vi) pea (vii) couth (viii) dishevel (ix) liaise (x) cherry Investigate the etymology of the following four words. Describe why the process of word formation that is common to all of them is really the opposite of backformation. Note: Give just one general statement here that applies to all four words. (i) bodice (ii) chintz (iii) quince (iv) news The English word incident is on a similar path of development, evident in the non-standard plural form incidentses. Why do you think this is happening?

5  Research project: word formation processes in English As we described in this chapter, John Algeo’s 1991 study showed affixation and compounding way out ahead, and blending and borrowing to be insignificant sources for new words in English. Your task is to determine whether this is still the case. Take a random sample of around 100 expressions; you could use the same source as Algeo (the “Among the New Words” publications), or you could select another means of collecting neologisms. If you have access to the OED online through your library, you will find on the homepage under “What’s New” links to lists of new words for different years. (Be careful to focus on brand new expressions, and not the new senses that established expressions have sprouted.) An even better source is the Oxford Dictionaries Online (http://oxforddictionaries.com/), since this dictionary is much faster to include the quirks and fads of the vernacular.

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Your report should be in connected prose, not bullet points, and should be approximately 1,000 words in length. A  good idea is to provide an appendix to include your findings (rather than have them in the body of the text).

NOTES 1 Interestingly, the Google corporation went through several lawsuits to protect its name from becoming a verb (http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/07/7198-2/), and finally established that even though google can be used as a verb, it is still not a generic (and hence unprotected) term but remains a trademark: http://www.forbes. com/sites/ericgoldman/2014/09/15/google-successfully-defends-its-most-valuable-asset-incourt/#48cfd57a3f05 2 However, there is considerable variation in the representation of laughter across cultures and languages; see http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/laughter-haha-hehe.419591/.

3 Changes to the semantics INTRODUCTION In Chapter 2 we saw that the lexicon is always changing – words disappear, while new ones are being created (or borrowed) all the time. Meanings too are in a constant state of flux. More than any other aspect of language, they are linked to the life and culture of speakers, and this can take expressions on extraordinary journeys. Attempts have been made to find patterns, even regular semantic principles of change, but words and their meanings are strangely volatile beasts and many defy classification. Once it was possible to starve from overeating, and you could eat pears from an apple tree. Lewd men could be models of chastity, girls could be boys, and so could harlots and wenches. It might surprise you to learn that grammar and glamour are historically the same word, as are cretin and Christian. The word brave once implied cowardice (an earlier meaning preserved in bravado). Enthusiasm was a term of mild abuse, while crafty and cunning were terms of high praise (so were daft and silly). Changes can be so striking that expressions can even come to mean the opposite of what they once meant (and we’re not talking here about the deliberately ironic use of words like wicked, vicious, sick, rancid, filthy and putrid to describe things that are exceptionally good). The original meaning of fast ‘not moving at all, fixed firmly’ (as in it stuck fast) sprouted the newer meaning ‘moving quickly’ (as in she runs fast). Our current understanding of black probably goes back to an earlier meaning ‘shining, white’ (making it historically related to words like bleach, blanch and even bald). In Australia and New Zealand if you barrack for a team you give them positive support and encouragement, but in the United Kingdom you verbally abuse and jeer at them. In their lifetime expressions can go through a number of different changes, which can end up taking them far from their original sense. Witness the various stages that an ordinary word like buxom has gone through (from Old English būgan ‘to bend’): ‘flexible, compliant’ > ‘obedient, meek’ > ‘obliging, kind, affable’ > ‘attractive, plump’ > ‘big breasted’. Many processes will interact to bring about such shifts, and a number of forces we go on to discuss would have been at work here, including euphemism and even sound symbolism (think of the number of related words that begin with – such as breasts, bosom, boobs, bouncers, bulbs, balloons, bazoomas and so on). But first we need to come up with an adequate understanding of meaning, and this is not easy. As Geoffrey Leech on page 1 of his book Semantics (1981) points out, “the word ‘meaning’ and its corresponding verb ‘to mean’ are among the most

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eminently discussable terms in the English language”. Entire books have been published on the meanings of meaning. In this chapter we adopt a fairly simplistic view whereby meaning is determined by the set of contexts in which a word occurs; hence semantic change will be any change in that set of contexts. So how does this occur? Meaning shifts aren’t usually abrupt – they happen gradually, via polysemy (‘multiple meaning’) and meaning associations. As the simple word glass shows, different meanings and different nuances of meaning can coexist for long periods of time, with new ones always ready to hop on board. (3.1)

a b c d e f g h

It was made of glass [= hard brittle substance] She drank the wine from the glass [= drinking-vessel] He looked in the glass and didn’t like what he saw [= mirror, looking glass] The image was formed by the glass [= lens] Even without a glass we could make out the ship [= telescope, spy glass] He saw the glass was rising [= barometer] You holding any glass [= high-purity methamphetamine] That pipe is total glass [= surfing term for the inside of a perfect break]

Over many years Old English glæs (first attested in the 9th century) has been sprouting new meanings and associations; we’ve only touched on them here. Last century also saw a new slangy verbal use (to glass ‘to strike someone with a (broken) glass or bottle’), and more recently sci fi has hatched a new verb meaning ‘to use high powered weaponry for mass destruction’ (as in planet glassing). Clearly, much of our understanding of this word will be determined by context – the linguistic, cultural and social settings all contributing to the intended interpretation. Words are not like math symbols with a fixed and constant designation. At any one time, they can hold a multitude of different meanings. Together with all the associated baggage that arises from our personalities and prejudices, these slip and slide around over time as language evolves and adapts.

“Tolerable friends” The meanings we carry around in our heads seem to us so natural and inborn. Yet, as Nick Enfield (2015) argues, since we aren’t telepathic and can never know for sure what goes on inside other people’s heads, we can only hypothesize what they mean by the words they use. True, we refine these assumptions along the way (not consciously of course) by being exposed to varied contexts and uses, but our word meanings remain hypotheses. It can happen that speakers in a community hold different ideas of what words mean. Drawing on the idea of “false friends” in second language learning (expressions in two languages that resemble each other but are wrongly assumed have the same meaning; for example German Fabrik means ‘factory’,

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not ‘cloth’), Enfield describes words as “tolerable friends” at best; in other words, speakers can have different semantic representations, but this mismatch never becomes apparent and doesn’t cause problems. For example, most people aren’t aware of the very different meanings that exist for the word instep. Many dictionaries have only the early meaning ‘the upper surface of the human foot between the toes and the ankle’ (Oxford English Dictionary definition). Some (usually older) speakers have this meaning, but most now understand instep as the underneath part of that section of the foot, and others take it to be the entire middle section, the top and underneath part (one of us recalls well a discussion some years back by the Macquarie Dictionary editors on exactly this point – and the thorny issue of when to include, or even privilege, a new sense). As Enfield writes, less frequently used words (such as instep) are more prone to this kind of variation, and because the contexts of use aren’t varied, speakers aren’t given the same opportunity to revise their hypotheses.

3.1  CONSEQUENCES OF SEMANTIC CHANGE Semantic changes have generally been classified into various types. The classification falls along two axes. First, there are three ways that words can change in sense (dictionary meaning): meanings can broaden, narrow or shift. Second, there are two ways that words can change in connotation (meaning association): they can deteriorate or elevate. As you might expect from the contradictory nature of these labels, the classifications have no actual explanatory value but are simply convenient ways to describe such changes. Here we’ve given examples only from English, but exercises at the end of the chapter give many more from a broad range of languages.

3.1.1 Broadening As the name suggests, words can expand their contexts and come to mean more than they did before: Old French ariver ‘to land, bring to shore’ (< Latin ad ‘to’ + rīpa ‘shore’) was the source of English arrive ‘reach’ and modern French arriver ‘come, reach, arrive’, and boucher (the word for the person who originally sold goat’s meat) gave us the butcher. In the 1700s, grog referred to ‘diluted rum’, but it extended to include ‘any spirits with water’ and from the 1800s to include ‘strong drink in general’ (and in Australian English it has gone one step further to mean ‘any kind of alcohol’). Interestingly, German Grog (hot tea with rum) retained something of its original meaning. Broadening commonly occurs when proper names lose their capital letter and enter the general lexicon as ordinary words: in Chapter 2 we described how the Earls of Cardigan and Sandwich were the inspiration for cardigans and sandwiches.

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3.1.2 Narrowing More usually, the contexts of words reduce, and so they come to mean less than they did before: a hound was ‘any sort of dog’, an apple ‘any fruit off a tree’, a girl ‘a young person of either sex’ (compare youth, which is currently restricting its application to ‘young male’), liquor ‘beverage of any kind’ (modern drink is heading in the same direction). Borrowed words often undergo changes of this kind. In Japanese, sake has a very broad meaning that includes ‘alcoholic beverage’ generally; in appropriate contexts, however, it can be used to denote specifically rice wine, and in English it has now narrowed to mean only that particular Japanese beverage.

3.1.3 Shift Time can also totally alter the contexts in which words appear. The term grog mentioned earlier was originally the nickname Old Grog given to British Admiral Vernon on account of his grogram cloak (grogram being a type of cloth); in 1740 the admiral ordered rum to be diluted with water to stop sailors intoxicating themselves, and the sailors dubbed the insipid beverage grog. Semantic shifts often open these nice windows onto cultures and attitudes in the past. Another illustration (also nautical) is the word noise, which has shifted its meaning from ‘sea-sickness’ to the current-day ‘intrusive sound’. These days, we don’t tend to think of the sound of seasickness, but as the wordsmith Eric Partridge (1961) pointed out in brilliant detail, it must have been incredible. Here you have to conjure up the unfortunate sailors in a tiny wooden vessel caught in the middle of a storm in the times of Ancient Greece. Imagine the din – the ship creaking, the wind howling, the waves battering the sides and, of course, the groans and moans of those poor wretches on board. The racket and commotion would have been considerable. Now the transition from ‘seasickness’ to ‘din, confusion’ and finally to ‘intrusive sound’ becomes quite plausible.

3.1.4  Changing values – amelioration and deterioration All sorts of social and expressive information attach to meaning, and this is connotation. Think of the different connotations surrounding the terms girl, woman, lady, chick, broad, madam, tart, bird and sheila. All could potentially be used of the same female person, but they have very different semantic nuances. Connotations arise from our experiences, beliefs and prejudices about the contexts in which words and expressions are used. Consequently, they vary between speech communities, even individuals within speech communities, and they can also alter radically over time. With time words can acquire both favourable connotations (= amelioration) and pejorative connotations (= deterioration). Amelioration can occur in two ways. First, unpleasant overtones can gradually erode away. Intensifying expressions, like terribly, awfully, frightfully and horribly, are particularly prone to this. These have lost their original strength and now mean little more than ‘very’; witness “contradictory” usages like awfully good and enormously small. Second, words can take on favourable overtones; they acquire a kind of “semantic halo” (to use novelist C. S. Lewis’ term). For example, the current

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egalitarian ideology has meant the elevation of terms like democracy and politician that previously were quite negative. But halos come and go (and sometimes they slip a little, as in the case of politician). In fact, it is more usual for words to take on negative overtones rather than favourable ones. Perhaps we are all inherently pessimistic. Certainly, we’re far more likely to look for the worst in things. We scold and disapprove far more than we applaud and admire. Bad news is always more interesting than good news. All this is reflected in the way words are so quick to take on negative meanings and associations. Weather refers to the condition of the atmosphere, and it can be bad or good; yet is it often used negatively (a broadcaster might report “We’re in for some weather”, meaning ‘adverse conditions’). You can see the same process at work with the cautionary label that is slapped on television programs: May contain language (most programs do, of course, but what’s understood here is bad language). The same process has shifted the meaning of temper. It was originally neutral, referring simply to an emotional condition or predisposition, but these days it has narrowed to mean a state of anger; in other words, temper has come to mean ‘ill temper’. Economics has Gresham’s Law: “Bad money drives out good”. Sociology has Knight’s Law: “Bad talk drives out good”. Linguistics has its own Law of Semantic Change: “Bad connotations drive out good”. Occasionally words climb out of the semantic abyss and take on positive associations once more. Consider the word attitude. Originally a technical term meaning ‘posture’, it shifted to mean ‘mental state/mode of thinking’ (that which is implied by the physical position). It then deteriorated – to have (an) attitude implied ‘a bad attitude’ or ‘an attitude problem’, something to be corrected by parents or teachers. But, of course, how you understand this expression will depend on your view of the world – neutral or bad concepts can become enviable qualities or sought-after things. These days, attitude is becoming positive again. Its combination of insolence and arrogance (with a bit of aggression thrown in) is touted as desirable, at least by some. Many groups and societies now seek to describe themselves as being “with attitude”. Interestingly, tude ‘a bad attitude towards someone’ seems to have picked up the tab (see http://de.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tude).

3.1.5  Chain reaction changes Sometimes a semantic change affecting a word can trigger changes to other words that are in some way semantically related or belong to the same semantic field. For example, jaw used to mean ‘cheek’, and cheek used to mean ‘jaw’, and as you saw in Chapter 1, hound ‘generic term for canine’ and dog ‘specific canine’ swapped places. The following shift affecting terms for ‘food’ presents a kind of “playing musical chairs” scenario: meat ‘all solid food’ > meat ‘flesh of animals’ flesh ‘animal tissue’ > flesh ‘tissue of humans’ foda ‘animal fodder’ > food ‘all forms of solid nourishment’ (and so replaces meat) A spectacular example of this kind of chain reaction change is provided by historical linguist Raimo Anttila (1989: 146–7); it involves Latin legal terminology.

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The vertical line here indicates the older meanings, and the angled line shows the shift to the newer ones: ‘trust’

‘damage’

‘guilt’

‘negligence’

damnum

noxia

culpa

casus

‘chance’ MEANING

fortuna

FORM

As you will see in Chapter 4, changes like these are rather like the sound shifts that affect whole vowel and consonant systems. In both cases the systems are left more or less intact; at least the same distinctions are maintained. As Anttila’s diagram nicely illustrates, only the form-meaning pairings here have changed.

3.2  WHY WORDS CHANGE THEIR MEANINGS There is a range of different factors that can bring about semantic shifts. We will concentrate here on four broad areas.

3.2.1  Socio-cultural factors Particular situations arising from the relationship between speakers and their world are common triggers for change. In the discussion below, we look at some of the most significant of these.

Social change Shifts in societal mores or attitudes typically have semantic correlatives. The budding self-awareness of the modern western individual is driving a number of lexical changes. Consider the meaning shifts that are currently taking place in words such as celebrity (‘a solemn (religious) ceremony’ > ‘a popular public figure’), charisma (‘divinely conferred power’ > ‘popular aura’), personality (‘pertaining to the person’ > ‘celebrity’), cult (‘system of religious worship’ > ‘popular fashion involving devotion to a person or thing’), image (‘representation of person/thing’ > ‘cultivated favourable public reputation’) and model (‘representation of person/thing’ > ‘ideal representation’ > ‘sexual clothes-horse’).

Language of special groups When ordinary language swipes words from specialist languages the effect is usually semantic broadening. The original narrow specification is lost, and the term expands its meaning. Epicentre comes from geology (where it refers to the true

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centre of a disturbance) – in ordinary language it is acquiring a more general sense of simply ‘centre’. The expression home in ‘to proceed towards, to focus attention on’ is aeronautical jargon of the early 1920s (although inspired originally by homing pigeons). Often the changes involve a shift of contexts. Quantum leap has come a long way from its technical origins (the increase in energy needed to make atoms jump from one state to another). When we describe someone as having gone ballistic (in other words, having exploded with rage), this gets the technical concept of ballistics quite wrong (when missiles go ballistic they don’t explode; they actually coast).

Subreption This is the process of external change – objects, ideas and institutions alter over time, but the names for them remain. It’s as if the expressions outgrow their original meanings (“old words in a new world”). These days we drink from glasses made of plastic and through straws made of paper or plastic. Light was once by definition the medium of visual perception, and the idea of invisible light was therefore nonsensical (a bit like a triangle with four sides or a round square); these days we have ultraviolet and infrared light, and the meaning of light has shifted accordingly. Despite the considerable and rapid developments in telephonics, we continue to dial numbers on our push-button phone, and we also hang up – though of course hanging up doesn’t have quite the same satisfaction as slamming down the receiver of a desk phone. Time will tell whether these words disappear or survive with shifted meanings.

3.2.2  Psychological factors There are all sorts of aspects of our mental make-up that we could consider here – we procrastinate, we exaggerate, we are suspicious of intelligence, we are pessimistic, we often underestimate the truth in certain circumstances and are given to understatement. All of these traits have repercussions for the meanings of words.

Prejudice The nasty habit we have of making preconceived (usually unfavourable) judgments about people or things is responsible for many changes in meaning. Slut in Chaucer’s time referred simply to ‘a woman of untidy habits’, but in a short period of time it had shifted to ‘a woman of a low or loose character’. Society clearly places very different values on male and female sexuality, and this is reflected in such changes. Untidiness gets linked to a woman’s sexual mores – if she’s messy, if she can’t keep a tidy house, then she’s clearly someone of “loose” character. Words like slut, slag, slattern, hussy, whore and more recently floozie, tramp and bimbo tell similar stories. In fact, there are hundreds of words that refer to women in a sexually derogatory way. Words for males are much more stable over time, and the result is a considerably smaller list of negative terms. They also don’t have quite the same disapproving sense of sexual promiscuity: even ostensibly pejorative terms like philanderer, flirt,

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rake, lady-killer, gallant, gigolo, stud and womanizer refer at the same time to virility and sexual prowess. They connote a Don Juan or a Casanova and have associations of gallantry (compare earlier squire of dames and roué).

Emotion Humans are natural born exaggerators, and hyperbole is a major driving force behind semantic change. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the constant renewal of boosting expressions mentioned earlier – something isn’t just good but awfully good or terribly good. Inevitably, such dramatic words wear out over time and become mundane. Alternative expressions then have to be found. Most have strong, even quite gruesome beginnings. Originally, when something was qualified with awfully, it would have communicated awe ‘divinely inspired terror, mixed with veneration’. This made it a very effective intensifier, but time bleached it of this energy and force, and by the early 1800s it meant simply ‘extremely’. Exaggerated use is responsible for the bleaching of words in many other areas of the lexicon; e.g. scallywag, rogue and rascal were once highly offensive expressions, and ratbag, once an appalling insult, now pales in comparison with its modern relatives scumbag, slimebag and dirtbag.

She was literally climbing the wall Extravagance is what is behind the shift in meaning of the word literally. In its core sense, literally still means ‘actually, without exaggeration’. The word signals that the phrase that follows is meant to be interpreted in its literal sense; in other words, its real or non-figurative meaning. If someone were to say, she was literally climbing the wall, we would understand that this person was actually going up a wall – no exaggeration. But these days a more likely interpretation is that the person was extremely anxious, almost frantic – and was figuratively or metaphorically climbing the wall (in other words, not climbing the wall at all!). Speakers are always on the lookout for ways of embroidering expression, and this kind of linguistic overkill has always been around and is well attested across languages. A word like literally is tailor-made as an intensifier, and in fact English speakers have been using it in this exaggerated way since at least the mid 1800s. One example given in the Oxford English Dictionary reads: “For the last four years, I  literally coined money”. Presumably, this person wasn’t actually manufacturing currency. This change has meant that literally has become its own opposite. At the same time, it means both ‘actually, not figuratively’ and also ‘not actually, figuratively’. So it joins words like fast and barrack, mentioned earlier. These are known as “contronyms”, or more colloquially “janus-words” (words with two faces). Opposite meanings can coexist quite peacefully, but only if they occur

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in such different contexts that there’s no chance of a misunderstanding. Blunt instruments are dull and not sharp, for instance, but blunt comments are pointed and very sharp. When you dust something, it frees it from dust – that is, unless you’re dusting for fingerprints or dusting a cake with icing sugar. In the case of literally, it is less clear that the opposite meanings can occupy the same space in a peaceful way. If we were to tell you that she literally fainted on the floor, you couldn’t be sure whether or not she’d actually fainted. In this case, we suspect that the older meaning of literally is doomed (compare German buchstäblich, which has shown the same transition).

There is also a kind of exaggeration via understatement. For example, in certain contexts people routinely underestimate the truth, and this can drive change. Take numerical expressions. Words for ‘pair’ or ‘couple’ frequently shift to something meaning ‘a few’. Current changes to a couple give us a clue. Someone announcing they’d had a couple of drinks would generally mean more than two, and for many people now a couple means ‘a few’ in most contexts. There are plenty of other situations too where people resort to understatement to avoid speaking unrestrainedly about certain topics. Since classical times, nasty verbs equivalent to die and kill have been avoided; instead, dead people curl up, they go to sleep or go on a journey – or they are described as simply having lived. Hence these verbs in many modern languages derive from verbs with much milder meanings: kill originally meant ‘to strike, hit’, and there is evidence to suggest that starve (which originally meant ‘to die’) also began as a euphemism with the meaning of ‘to grow stiff ’. There are many things in life that speakers and writers would rather not evoke too vividly, and this takes us naturally to the next motivation.

Taboo and euphemism When faced with the tricky problem of how to talk about things that for one reason or another we would prefer not to speak of, we create euphemisms – sweet sounding, or at least inoffensive, alternative expressions. But as Chapter 2 described, there are internal forces at work that ensure that euphemisms are doomed to be shortlived. Many simply wear out – like slang, insults and swearing, euphemism can also lose its power. But what usually brings down euphemistic expressions are the processes of narrowing and deterioration, as the taboo associations reassert themselves and undermine the euphemistic magic of the word. The next generation of speakers grows up learning it as the direct term, or worse. Clear examples are words for sexual activity like ejaculation, copulation, seduction, orgasm, intercourse, rape and erection. All were once quite general terms, but as soon as they were pressed into euphemistic service they quickly narrowed to the sexual sense alone. In 1666 Samuel Pepys wrote in one of his diary entries: “I could not but with hearty thanks to Almighty God ejaculate my thanks to him”. Old novels abound in breathless ejaculations. But these days, all senses of ejaculation, including the ‘short emotional

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utterance’, have been overwhelmed by the sense of ‘discharging sperm’. Once a word has acquired taboo or risqué senses, these come to dominate and eventually kill off all other senses. Seduce meant ‘to lead astray (originally a soldier or subject)’; interfere referred quite generally to a physical collision; liaison was a cooking term for the thickening of sauces. In these terms, the sexual senses now rule.

3.2.3  Linguistic factors Factors that drive semantic change can also come from elsewhere in the lexicon – in various ways, words can be influenced by the meanings of other words, or groups of words, that they hang out with or are related to in some way.

Contamination Meanings of expressions often shift because of associations picked up from other words that are connected in sound and/or meaning. Fortuitous is in the process of shifting its meaning from ‘by chance’ to ‘fortunate’, clearly on account of its proximity to fortunate. In the dictionary flagrant is still defined as ‘blatant, brazen’; yet, for many people it now describes ‘the way flowers smell’ (perhaps they see it as a blend of fl[ower] and [fr]agrant). In some cases the meaning changes to such an extent that the word actually comes to be its own opposite. Consider hoi polloi. Originally Greek for ‘the many’, the word was borrowed into English to mean ‘the masses’. But many English speakers report that they have the opposite meaning for this word, namely ‘aristocratic persons, the high-born’. This shift has come about through association with expressions like high, haughty and hoity toity. Curiously, hoity toity has itself undergone a similar shift. It derives from the reduplication of the now obsolete verb hoit ‘to behave boisterously’. Hoity toity originally described ‘riotous behaviour’, nothing like the meaning we have today. It then shifted to ‘snooty’ because people associated it with haughty. And now it is influencing hoi polloi in precisely the same way.

Sounds aren’t supposed to have meanings In Chapter  2 we described how phonesthemes are “meaningful” sound sequences that occur either at the beginning of words (tw-, gl- fl-) or in their rhymes (-ash, -ump, -itter). Although they symbolize a certain meaning, it’s often difficult to pin down exactly what it is. For example, the following words (mainly verbs) show a characteristic -ump rhyme and seem to denote ‘heavy fall’: bump, dump, crump, clump, flump, jump, plump (verb), slump, stump, thump. Others (mainly nouns) with the same rhyme denote some sort of ‘round protuberance’: bump, chump, clump, dump, hump, lump, mump(s), plump (adjective), rump, stump. Phonesthemes like these often encourage similar sounding words to shift their meaning (they encourage words to shift their sounds, too, but that is another story).

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Take twit, now meaning ‘fool’ (the meaning appeared in the 1930s). The word derives from a verb twit ‘to taunt’. So how do you get from the taunting meaning to the current-day meaning? True, someone who twits (is given to taunting banter) would be a twitter or a twit, and this kind of behaviour is perhaps also a little idiotic. So perhaps the earlier idea of ‘someone prone to twitting’ then slides to ‘annoying person’ or ‘fool’. But there are often many factors driving a meaning shift, and this particular one would have had considerable encouragement from a clash with similar sounding words. In the early 1900s, there appeared a couple of other words beginning with tw- and having similar meanings. There was the twerp ‘a silly, insignificant person’ (inspired perhaps by art critic and odd-ball T. W. Earp, once described by J.R.R. Tolkien as “the original twerp”), and twat, a word that originally referred to ‘vagina’ but in the early 1900s had been recruited, like many other bawdy body parts, to become a term of abuse. Now, when you get a couple of salient words that happen to be similar in form and in meaning, they can motivate meaning shifts elsewhere. It is as if speakers start to interpret certain clusters of sounds as meaningful. In this case, the tw- of twerp and twat acts as an additional trigger for the meaning shift in twit. And when the meaning changes, twit joins the gang of other tw- words to describe someone who’s a bit of a nincompoop.

Some shifts start life as something called a “malapropism”, where speakers mix up words because of similarities in pronunciation. An inappropriate word is used in place of another that resembles it in sound or spelling (there might be a vague similarity in meaning). The term “malapropism” comes from Mrs Malaprop, a character in Sheridan’s 18th century play The Rivals. The term as such is formed from French mal ‘ill’ + a ‘to’ + propos ‘purpose’. Mrs Malaprop had a chronic problem with words and was famous for coming out with outlandish examples like “as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile” (there usually wasn’t much inner logic to Mrs Malaprop’s malapropisms!). A famous political example occurred in 1974 when John Ehrlichman, assistant to the US president at the time, described John Dean, special adviser to the President, as “a piranha”. As one Washington newspaper editorial later noted, was he really suggesting that Dean was a particularly voracious South American freshwater fish, or did he mean a pariah, ‘a person rejected or despised’? Such mix-ups are commonplace in everyday language: mitigate for militate, prodigy for protégé, prostate for prostrate and economically depraved for economically deprived. They might be slips of the tongue, or they might be driven by linguistic snobbery – the desire to use a more impressive sounding word such as enormity instead of the more mundane enormousness. The result can be a significant shift away from the earlier meaning. Currently it looks as if the older meaning of enormity ‘wickedness’ is well and truly on the way out.

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It’s here that we are crossing over into the territory of the newly created eggcorn, itself an eggcorn for acorn.1 The term was coined by linguists Mark Liberman and Geoff Pullum, because they felt that examples like eggcorn weren’t handled by any of the already existing categories of language error. They’re idiosyncratic slips too, but they involve homophones or near-homophones, and, most importantly, they have a logic to them (which Mrs Malaprop’s mistakes don’t really) – coleslaw becomes coldslaw (it is a type of cold salad). The student who produced rope learning in place of rote learning probably had in mind expressions such as learn the ropes (more meaningful for him than the rarely used rote ‘mechanical manner’). Slips of the ear/brain can endure and bring about change. When eggcorns spread their wings and whole speech communities start using them, we move into the territory of folk or popular etymology. The line between these is admittedly rather blurred – think of folk etymology as involving triumphant eggcorns. Old English shamefast ‘modest, shy’ (lit. ‘restrained by shame’) was misinterpreted as shamefaced, and the meaning subsequently shifted to ‘embarrassed’ (something you register on your face). A more recent example is be on tenterhooks. This doesn’t make a lot of sense nowadays, because tenter, as the rack used to stretch woven cloth, doesn’t exist anymore. So some speakers have altered the word to tenderhooks. Remodelling tenterhooks to tenderhooks replaces an obscure word with something similar but more transparent, with the additional bonus that tender contributes a sense of ‘fragility’ and ‘sensitivity’, as might come of being in a state of painful anxiety. It will be interesting to see whether this eggcorn also endures.

Ellipsis American English fall ‘autumn’ derives from the old and longer phrase fall of the leaf. It is a poetic but rather cumbersome way to describe the season; so not surprisingly speakers abandoned the last few words, and the whole meaning of the phrase then got dumped into the remaining word fall, which itself came to stand for the season. Similarly, the word rifle was originally shorthand for rifled gun. This was a gun with a special “rifled” groove inside the barrel. There are many such examples. Private soldier was reduced to private; alarm clock to alarm; life sentence to life; underground railway to underground. Adjectives can also turn into nouns when they find themselves left behind in this way; for example, a daily paper becomes simply a daily, and a weekly magazine becomes a weekly. A more recent example involves bilateral agreement – a reciprocal arrangement between two political ­parties – it’s frequently described as simply a bilateral. These truncations can involve significant meaning shifts when expressions involving rhyming slang are shortened. Take, for example, rabbit (on), which derives from the longer rhyming slang version rabbit and pork (= talk). The meaning derives from the unstated word that rhymes with the last part of the phrase; for example, rabbit and pork equals talk. But time erodes the expression to rabbit, and the original significance disappears because the rhyme is clipped. The sense then transfers to the first part of the phrase, and the result is a meaning shift, in this case a striking one. The verb to rabbit on now means ‘to talk incessantly’. Other examples include

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brahms ‘drunk’ (< Brahms and Liszt  =  pissed), and berk ‘stupid person’ (Berkley Hunt = cunt; the current meaning of berk is mild compared with the meaning of the insult cunt, probably because berk is not widely recognized to be an end-clipping of Berkley Hunt).

Metaphor Metaphor (from Greek metaphorā ‘transference’) pervades language and without doubt is one of the most significant forces behind vocabulary change. When people use metaphor, they refer to one domain by using language expressions that are normally associated with some other domain. There is a transfer of meaning from one given context to another. This explanation of metaphor has strayed little from Greek philosopher Aristotle’s original account. As he put it back in the 4th century BCE, “[. . .] a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars” (Poetics, Chapter 22, page 2335; translated by I. Bywater). So it involves a kind of analogy, encompassing the comparison of two items where speakers see some sort of connection. Aristotle was probably the first to point to the ubiquity of metaphor. As soon as we open our mouths (or put pen to paper) we produce metaphors. But most of them are conventionalized – they are automatic. People talk generally about playing the game, lifting the game, giving the game away, levelling the playing field, moving the goal posts and so on, but, as with general expressions like aim and goal or even tackling a problem, the figurative sense has become the conventional meaning. Even with metaphors based on the specialist terminology of individual sports (like cricket, baseball, football and boxing), people are unaware they are extending a sporting term (people on a good wicket could also be described as having a fair innings, but others not so fortunate would be on a sticky wicket ‘facing a difficult situation’ – they might be caught out or stumped, if they are ‘non-plussed’ or ‘defeated’). When the expressions are learned by a new generation as the common everyday term, all the colour and emotional qualities fade. If the new meaning prevails and the metaphor dies out, the alteration is complete and a meaning shift has taken place. Expressions to do with seeing, hearing and touching often develop into mental state verbs (understanding, supposing etc.); for example I see and I hear you for ‘I understand (you)’ or He finally grasped it for ‘He finally understood’. In this last example you can see the jump from one domain (physical – taking hold) to another domain (mental – comprehending). In these cases we are no longer conscious of the metaphorical links. Time has pushed them below the level of consciousness. Often the imagery is well and truly buried, as in the verb comprehend. It too comes from something that means ‘to grasp, seize’, but this is a metaphor from long ago, and one that has been borrowed from Latin. Much of what we talk about is in terms of something else. Scratch the surface of many expressions, and you will find a dried-out metaphor of this nature. The last example illustrates an important type of metaphor – synaesthesia or association of senses (from Greek syn ‘together’ + aisthesis ‘perception’). It can involve transfers of all kinds – from sight and touch to intellect (as in the case of

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the mental verbs just given), from sight to sound, from touch to sound, from taste to colour and so on. When hot ‘having a high degree of heat’ took on the additional meaning ‘spicy’, it shifted from the area of touch to taste. Other words that changed in this way are cold, dry, smooth and coarse. The word faint has shifted from colour to sound – ‘pale, lacking clearness’ sprouted the later meaning ‘barely perceptible’. Dimension words like big, deep, thin and high transfer to both colour and sound. And they can transfer to taste too. Just look at current wine terminology that draws on images like big, full, deep, even, thick, flat and small. This is not only the stuff of great literature and poetry – it’s also the stuff of our everyday language. A close relative (perhaps even a subtype) of metaphor is metonymy, or change by association (from Greek meta ‘trans’ + onoma ‘name’). A word is extended to refer to something that is closely associated with the meaning of that word. Take the broadening examples we looked at earlier. Pavlovas (< Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova) and sandwiches (< the Earl of Sandwich) get their names either from the inventors or from people associated with the items in some way; champagne, burgundy, cheddar, cologne, denim and so on are all goods named after their place of origin. In Restaurantese, metonymy is commonplace (The chicken wrap wants a glass of white wine), and it is a favourite strategy for creating linguistic disguises (or euphemisms); spend a penny for ‘urinate’ (from the days when toilets cost a penny to access); go to bed and sleep with for ‘copulate’. An important kind of metonymy is synecdoche, or the relationship of part-forwhole (from Greek sunekdokhé ‘inclusion’); something is named on the basis of its most prominent or salient part; e.g. hand for ‘employed worker’, silver for ‘cutlery’ (originally made of silver), tit for ‘breast’ (denoting the most tabooed part of the breast – the nipple). Synecdoche is often exploited in abusive language, as in calling someone a prick, and can be used for humorous effect in nicknames (often with an ironic twist to them): Shorty (for someone really tall), Curly (for someone with dead-straight hair) and Blue or Bluey (for a redhead). Examples of metonymy and synecdoche differ from the earlier examples of metaphor in that they don’t evoke new associations but simply exploit those already existing between words that share a close logical relationship. But clearly all three are very close. You might think of metonymy and synecdoche as involving changes within the same semantic domain (involving “whole-for-part” and “part-forwhole” substitutions), and metaphor as involving changes across different semantic domains (though of course when speakers extend familiar concepts from their experiences to new purposes via metaphor, they are making associations).

“The penultimate super marathon” Often change involves a number of factors. Take penultimate; there is not much call for this word in everyday language, and this makes it vulnerable to change. Many younger speakers are now using it as an emphatic form of ultimate. Ultimate itself cannot be graded (very ultimate?). So, how does

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someone convey the idea that something really is matchless, the out-of-thisworld greatest? It seems penultimate is being recruited for this purpose. This is an interesting development because, if the change does take hold, it’s going to turn the orthodox meaning of penultimate on its head. In origin, penultimate comes from the Latin paene, meaning ‘almost’, plus ultimatus ‘last’, and penultimate means literally ‘almost last’. This new colloquial usage now takes it beyond last – to refer to something that is beyond all others. “It’s the penultimate super marathon” was heard on ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Commission) radio in September  2015. The person wanted to get across that this was the best of these ultra distance races, even though many of the listeners probably understood it to mean the second last event. Clearly exaggeration is playing a role here, and perhaps assisting this shift are also thoughts of pinnacles ‘high points’ and penthouses ‘luxurious apartments on top of high-rise buildings’ (so clang association). It might even be that the addition of a prefix simply provides extra weight. Compare what is happening to penultimate with the current use of the technical term epicentre (‘the place on the earth’s surface where an earthquake begins’). As described earlier, many now use it instead of ordinary old centre, especially if they want to convey the sense that important things are happening, as in He is at the epicentre of a drug ring. Enfield (2015) describes how changes might start off as alterations in the behaviour of individual speakers, but if a linguistic concept is useful, it will be “aired, and shared,” and result in a change in community-wide convention. Penultimate and epicentre are definitely words to watch.

3.3  REGULARITY IN SEMANTIC CHANGE – A MORE EXPLANATORY ACCOUNT A number of linguists have attempted a more general (cognitive) approach that lays the foundation of a general theory of semantic evolution with sets of “laws” outlining the most usual directions of change. One of the most influential linguists in this regard has been Elizabeth Closs Traugott (see Traugott 1982, 1985, 2003). While many had pointed out that words typically shifted their meanings from concrete to abstract, Traugott sought a more explanatory account. In various works she outlines examples of “lawfulness in semantic change” (an area usually thought to be rather lawless). On the basis of these, she claimed conclusions could be made about the nature of the mind. Her approach was therefore cognitive and contrasted with the socio-historical (or philological) approach that was developed in the 19th century. Because the focus of this traditional approach was on individual changes, little or no sense of regularity could emerge, making it difficult to establish whether there were any unidirectional forces at work. Traugott sought to focus on domains associated with conceptual structure and mental life in order to establish patterns of change. On the basis of

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this work, there has emerged a number of general claims about semantic change. We will touch on some of these here (but see Traugott and Dasher 2002 for a full account).

Space as a source of abstract terms [. . .] thoughts and sayings are, like sentences, conceived as objects in space that can be put in a row, stood on, or stood under, and transmitted. Since they can be put in a row, they are conceived as objects arranged on axes aligned with ourselves: particularly the front-back and the up-down axis. (Traugott 1985: 163)

There are all sorts of regularities in the directions words shift their meaning: the development of grammatical categories from body part terms which are used to express spatial concepts (head, back, face and stomach come to stand for spatial relationships such as ‘on’, ‘back’, ‘front’ and ‘in’); future temporal expressions like will often derive from words for ‘wishing’; some connective words derive from temporal expressions (e.g. when, while); mental state verbs derive from vocalizations (recall ‘remember’) and even visual perception (see ‘understand’). All show the characteristic shift from less to more abstract that is typical of semantic change. Here we will concentrate purely on source domains involving space. • Spatial meaning to temporal meaning The prepositions before and after started out in life as spatial words meaning ‘in front of ’ and ‘in back of ’; the verbs of movement go and come have acquired temporal meanings (e.g. I am going to sing). The spaces used seem to be restricted to axes that run front and back (as in before and after) or up and down (as in burn up, slow up, slow down etc.). • Spatial meaning to grammatical relation Grammatical relations refer to the functional relationships between constituents of a sentence; they hold between predicates (usually verbs) and associated arguments (noun phrases). These relations can involve concrete spatial activities like going from one place to another, but they can also involve less direct ones, like giving something to someone. English to has the meaning ‘towards’ but also expresses the indirect object relation (in They gave it to Alex it is as if Alex were a place, not a person); similarly, spatial of ‘from, out of ’ can express possession and belonging (the cover of the book); spatial by ‘close to’ expresses agency in the passive construction (in Kate was given a book by Alex, the idea of proximity is preserved in the fact that the agent (Alex) is thought of as closely involved in the event). • Spatial meaning to connective Connectives are used to express cohesion between clauses. For example, but derives from butan ‘on the outside of ’; notwithstanding ‘nevertheless’ has a more obvious spatial origin in not + against + stand; also transparent are connective expressions such as hereupon, therefore etc. As described in the quotation at the

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start of this section, it is as if speakers line up sentences and clauses just as they would line up objects in the real world. • Spatial meaning to mental verb In many languages, spatial activities give rise to mental verbs, such as those of understanding, supposing and deducing. Understand is transparent (from a verb ‘to step under’); suppose and deduce come from original Latin constructions with literal meanings ‘under + put’ and ‘down + lead’. • Spatial meaning to speech act verb Speech act verbs include those like assert, promise, command etc. that (given the right circumstances) not only name the action being performed but also are equivalent to that action (in other words, the act is accomplished by uttering the words, as in I assert that Fritz stole the sock). There have been some 275 speech act verbs identified for Modern English, and about 75% (including borrowings) originate in spatial terms: suggest (< Latin sub + gerere ‘under carry’) and insist (< Latin in + stare ‘stand upon’).

Other regularities Traugott talks about three functional components in language to explain general tendencies in semantic change (1985, modified from Halliday and Hasan 1976). The first (the propositional component) refers to the resources languages have for talking about something. The second (the textual component) refers to the resources languages have for creating cohesion. Finally, the personal (or expressive) component includes the resources languages have for expressing speakers’ attitudes or feelings about the event or situation that is the focus of the conversation. Over time we see a transition from propositional to textual to personal; i.e. as Traugott has described (p. 165), a shift from meanings that are “more verifiable in the world” (and therefore concrete) towards meanings relating to “the internal world of personal point of view, inference and belief ” (and therefore more abstract). Hence, a broad tendency is for meanings to become increasingly anchored in the speakers’ worlds, more and more inclusive of their point of view. This is also called subjectification, and we touched on this idea in Chapter 1. Many of the changes we have already discussed involve the increasing expression of speaker perspectives.

“Reading between the lines” So much goes on when words are used, with context and background providing all sorts of clues that go beyond core meanings. Addressees seek to extract all the interpretations possible from any message, often imputing meanings that may not match original intentions. So a word might start off having a particular meaning, but new ones are lurking in the wings, ready to hop on at any time. Take the simple conjunction since as an illustration. Its earliest recorded meaning is ‘from the time that’ as in Life has become dull since Fred left. But we “read between the lines”, looking for enriched meanings that are

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somehow relevant to the context of discourse. For some people, a temporal meaning implicates some sort of causal link between these two clauses (why else would someone say such a thing?) – for them, Fred’s leaving has something to do with life being dull. Implications can become so reliable and widespread that they then get conventionalized and become part of the actual meaning; since now has both temporal (‘from the time that’) and causal (‘because’) meanings, and the latter is on the way to prevailing. Compare the conjunction after, whose temporal meaning in some contexts can have a causal interpretation. (One of us recalls being surprised when some years back half the Structure of English class described after as a causal connector (rather than the more expected time connector) in the sentence Life became dull after they left – a good example of what Enfield has dubbed the “gap between mind and community”).

Clearly there are regularities involved here, but we still don’t know exactly when or even if a given change will occur. Typically there are a number of factors involved, and those deriving from the socio-historical setting often take words on surprising journeys. As we will see time and time again in this book, language change is never one-dimensional, and there are always networks of different intersecting pressures that influence languages at different times: psychological (the mental make-up of speakers), physiological (the production of language), systemic (the linguistic system with interacting components), social and political (the speech community and the individual, the socio-political environment), external (contact and borrowing) and so on. There are also human wildcard factors to consider; the cultural preoccupations of speakers can be powerful triggers for dramatic, and often unexpected changes, and not just in lexical change. We are not suggesting that changes are random, like whims of fashion, but they are complex, with contingent internal and external factors (systemic and speaker oriented) and snowballing effects – and perhaps even an element of chance.

SUMMARY This chapter introduced you to a number of types of semantic change: broadening refers to the expansion of the contexts in which a word can appear; narrowing refers to a reduction in the contexts in which a word can appear; shift entails the total alteration of the contexts. Connotations arise through our beliefs, prejudices and experiences; words can elevate and deteriorate. We also identified a number of forces for change: specialist languages can borrow from ordinary language, and terms from specialist languages can enter ordinary language; subreption is the process of external change – “old words in a new world”; social change will always have semantic correlatives; prejudice is a powerful trigger for meaning

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change, as are psychological factors like emotion and taboo; words can pick up associations from other words (e.g. in folk etymology and ellipsis); metaphorical change involves the transfer of meaning from one item to another which is somehow associated. We also identified a number of strong tendencies in semantic change, many involving cognitive processes, such as subjectification – where meanings take on more personal (e.g. moral) viewpoints. We can also predict that if a language has temporal terms, markers of grammatical relations, connectives, or mental or speech act verbs, then some of them will be derived from spatial terms. But never lose sight of the many factors that can coalesce to drive a word along a particular semantic path, and in a particular direction.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING Of the many introductions to semantics out there, the ones we recommend are Leech 1981; Allan 1986, 2001; Aitchison 2003; Cruse 2004; Loebner 2013; and on semantic change the various Traugott publications already mentioned (especially Traugott and Dasher 2002) and Enfield 2015. Euphemism is a topic you can follow up on in Allan and Burridge 1991, 2006, and for metaphorical expressions we recommend Lakoff and Johnson 1981, as well the timeless account offered by the 4th century Greek philosopher Aristotle (see his various descriptions in Poetics and Rhetoric; Aristotle 1984). For sound symbolism see LaPolla 1994. You can follow up contronymy in English in Karaman 2008; Lutzeier’s 2007 impressive three-volume dictionary of contronyms in German shows just how surprisingly widespread the phenomenon is.

EXERCISES 1  Part 1: identifying meaning shifts The following list shows the earlier and later meanings of words from a number of languages. Note that the earlier meaning is given in brackets, and the arrowhead indicates the change. State what type of meaning change(s) they illustrate: i.e. broadening (B), narrowing (N), deterioration (D), shift (S) or amelioration (A). a a couple ‘a few’ (< ‘two, a pair’) b  ake-sita (Japanese) ‘the following morning’ (< ‘dawning time’) c  albern (German) ‘silly’ (< ‘simple’ < ‘kind, gentle’) d  asita (Japanese) ‘tomorrow’ (< ‘the following morning’) e  bereaved ‘deprived by death’ (< ‘robbed’) f  billig (German) ‘cheap’ (< ‘just, adequate’) g  bird (< brid ‘little bird/chick’) h  boor ‘crude fellow’ (< ‘farmer’) i  callous ‘insensitive’ (< callus ‘hard skin’; compare thick-skinned) j  chap ‘fellow’ (< ‘customer’)

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coast ‘sea shore’ (< ‘side’) k  crust ‘job’ (< ‘outer part of the bread’) l  curly ‘difficult (of questions, problems)’ (< ‘disposed in curls or ringlets’) m  daft ‘crazy, foolish’ (< ‘gentle, mild’) n  Dirne (German) ‘prostitute’ (< ‘young woman’) o  discard ‘reject’ (< ‘throw out a card’) p  famikon (Japanese) ‘any video game console’ (< ‘the name for Ninq  tendo Entertainment System’) r  flibbertigibbet ‘mischievous person’ (< ‘name of a devil’) s  fond ‘affectionate’ (< ‘foolish’) t  fowl ‘barnyard fowl’ (< ‘bird’) u  Friedhof (German) ‘graveyard’ (< ‘enclosed plot of land’) v  frock ‘loose-fitting outer garment’ (< ‘monk’s loose-fitting habit’); frock ‘woman’s dress’ (< ‘loose-fitting outer garment’) w  fruition ‘completion’ (< ‘enjoyment’) x  garble ‘to mix up’ (< ‘to sort out’, originally sifting out of spices) y  gleichen (Pennsylvania German) ‘to like, be fond of’ (< ‘to be like, resemble’) z  go ‘move, travel’ (< ‘walk, travel by foot’) aa  grog ‘alcoholic beverage’ (< ‘rum and water’; compare English grog ‘rum and water’ < ‘nickname for Admiral Vernon (who wore a grogram cloak)’) bb  hayaku (Japanese) ‘immediately’ (< ‘rapidly’) cc  inquisition ‘persecution’ (< ‘investigation’) dd  joker ‘chap, fellow’ (< ‘one who jokes’) ee  hell (German) ‘clever’ (< ‘bright’; compare English bright) ff  laafe (Pennsylvania German) ‘walk’ (< ‘run’) gg  Marschall (German) ‘high military officer’ (< ‘stable hand in charge of the horses’) hh  Maul (Pennsylvania German) ‘mouth’ (< ‘mouth (of animals)’) ii  mischievous ‘playfully annoying’ (< ‘disastrous’) ll  nice ‘kind, considerate’ (< ‘foolish, senseless’) mm notorious ‘widely and unfavourably known’ (< ‘widely known’) nn  obnoxious ‘very objectionable’ (< ‘liable to injury’) oo  omoitatsu (Japanese) ‘resolve, plan to do’ (< omou ‘think’ + tatsu ‘stand up’) pp  pas (French) ‘not’ (< Latin passus ‘step’) qq  rort (originally Antipodean English) ‘act of fraud’ (< ‘jolly good time’) rr  saoul (French) ‘drunk’ (< ‘seized, possessed by anything’) ss  schmacke (Pennsylvania German) ‘to smell’ (< ‘to taste’) tt  sehr (German) ‘very’ (< ‘painful’; compare English sore) uu  shamefaced ‘embarrassed’ (< ‘fixed in shame’) vv  shiawase (Japanese) ‘happiness’ (< ‘a chance course of events’) ww silly ‘stupid, daft’ (< ‘happy, blessed’) xx  smirk ‘simper’ (< ‘smile’) yy  sugoi (Japanese) ‘wonderful’ (< ‘terrible’) zz  Tier (German) ‘animal’ (< ‘wild animal’) (compare English deer ‘specific ruminant quadruped with deciduous antlers’ < ‘wild animal’)

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4.1.1  Old sounds drop out – loss When we speak we take short cuts, often omitting unstressed vowels and dropping consonants: words like enough and escape are pronounced as ’nough [nʌf] and ’scape [skeɪp] (with the initial unstressed vowel omitted), vulnerable often

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loses its /l/ [vʌnrəbəl], and Wednesday usually gets two syllables /wenzdeɪ/. In English place names and personal names, the losses can be extreme: Salisbury / sɔlzbri/, Leicester /lɛstə/, Cholmondely /tʃʌmli/, St John /sɪndʒən/, Featherstonehaugh /fænʃɔ/, Woolfhardisworthy /wʊlzi/. Small wonder linguist Ron Langacker once described language as “a gigantic expression-compacting machine”! When reduced forms come to replace the full forms, even in formal or careful speech, they leave a lasting impression that might even be reflected in the spelling; in German, nouns that end with -el or -er regularly lose the vowel when a suffix is added (e.g. Himmel ‘heaven’ + -isch ‘ish’ > himmlisch). In English, we witness more and more instances of ’nuff, gonna and wanna even in written texts.

Sounds and their spelling in English When printing arrived in the late 1400s, English spelling started to settle down, though it took a few centuries to standardize. At the time when it started to regularize, the language experienced a number of significant changes. Many sounds changed their shape, and many disappeared altogether. As a result, English now has thousands of words spelled much as they were pronounced in Chaucer’s time. Most vexing are of course the silent letters in words such as write, right, sword, know and gnat – the bane of English language learners today. So whether or not spelling displays a change depends a lot on when it takes place. For example, English /w/ disappeared before /l/ sometime during the late medieval period. The word lisp comes from Old English wlispian, but by Chaucer’s time it was spelled lisp. Around the same period, English also lost /h/ from a number of other clusters (e.g. loud < hlud, ring < hring and neck < hnecca). Unlike a later change that saw /w/ disappear before /r/ (as in write), all these changes were early enough to be reflected in the spelling of words. As you can probably imagine, reductive changes occur more easily when people have no notion of the written word. If spelling is there to act as a reminder, pronunciation is less apt to change – the visual image of a word like government probably means we are less likely to pronounce it gubment. Writing acts a little like an anchor, slowing down the normal process of sound change, in some cases even reversing a change (e.g. often lost its /t/ during the 17th century, but it has made a comeback now through the pressure of spelling – [ɒftən]).

In the case of consonant loss, the disappearance is sometimes balanced by a lengthening of the neighbouring vowel (unless it’s already long, in which case it doesn’t change). The process is called “compensatory lengthening” – the time taken to pronounce the word ends up being about the same. Like the Cheshire Cat’s grin (the creation of Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), it is as if the consonant lingers on in the quality of the adjacent vowel.

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If you compare the English and German examples in the next table, you can see that English lost the original nasal before voiceless fricatives, and this then triggered a lengthening of the adjacent vowel (signalled here by a macron in the Old English). German preserved the original nasal-fricative cluster of the parent language (Proto-Germanic). Table 4.1 Compensatory lengthening in English Proto-Germanic

Old English

Modern German

Translation

*fimf, *fimfi *munþ*gans*kunþ-

f ı-f, f ı-ftig mu-þ go-s cu-þ

fünf, fünfzig Mund Gans kund

five, fifty mouth goose known (couth)

Nasal loss before voiceless fricatives is a common change and occurs in languages as diverse as the Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish), Ojibwa, Old Irish, Swahili and Yao (see Ohala and Busà 1995); as in the Germanic examples, the loss is accompanied by vowel lengthening (and often nasalization of the vowel as well). Vowel deletion is such a common change that it has spawned a number of impressive sounding labels to describe the loss of vowels from different parts of the word (some linguists have extended these labels to include also loss of consonants from these positions, which also seems sensible to us). To help you remember these names, we’ve applied the process to the labels themselves (these are in brackets): • Apocope (‘apocop’) involves the disappearance of the final vowel. Revisit The Wife of Bath’s Tale (or /ta:lə/) and notice how the final silent e’s in many of the Modern English words (such as tale and time) were pronounced; in other words, /ta:lə/ > /ta:l/ > /teɪl/; /tɪ:mə/ > /tɪ:m/ > /taɪm/. • Syncope (‘syncpe’) is used for the loss of medial vowels. These sorts of losses are significant because they can result in new consonant clusters; e.g. monks shows the syncope of two vowels: Old English munecas > monkes > monks /mʌŋks/. • Aphesis (‘phesis’) is the loss of an unstressed initial vowel, as in opossum > possum and esquirrel > squirrel. Change that involves the deletion of entire syllables is haplology (‘haplogy’); for example interpretative > interpretive; Englalond > England. As here, it typically involves consecutive syllables that are similar sounding. Both German and English show regular haplology when the addition of an affix creates successive similar sounding syllables; e.g. Zauberin ‘sorceress’ < *Zauber-er-in (compare English sorceress < *sorcer-er-ess). Back in the 14th century Chaucer might well have written humblely with three syllables, but nowadays we pronounce (and also write) this as humbly with just two syllables; in the same way, nobly, simply, idly and gently have all been cropped a syllable.

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4.1.2  New sounds appear The label “epenthesis” can refer to any process in which a vowel is added to a word (though it is occasionally used more generally for consonants too). The addition of sounds to the front of a word has its own special label, “prothesis”; for example, speakers of French and Spanish inserted a vowel at the start of initial sC-clusters, as in Spanish escuela ‘school’, estado ‘state’ and French école, état (< Latin schola, status); the equivalent English words you can see were borrowed straight from Latin (though we also have estate from French). Addition is a less common process than loss, and the motivation is quite different. Some languages show a preferred C(onsonant) V(owel) syllable structure, so vowels might be inserted to break up consonant clusters (especially awkward ones) to produce this optimal arrangement of sounds, e.g. non-standard pronunciations fillum /fɪləm/ for film, athelete /æθəlit/ for athlete and umbarella /ʌmbərɛlʌ/ for umbrella. Japanese took the word Christmas from English but requires CV syllables. Christmas, however, is CCVCCVC (the isn’t pronounced). So to fit this word into the language, Japanese inserted a few extra vowels: kurisumasu – which is perfectly CV CV CV CV CV. The process is very common in creole languages, e.g. Australian Kriol silip (< sleep) and balijiman (< policeman). Extra consonants can appear too, and this has a different label – “excrescence” – to distinguish it from vowel insertion. This motivation here is a mistiming, with extra sounds being inserted as the vocal organs move from one sound to another. To see how this change might happen, take a non-standard pronunciation somepthing /sʌmpθɪŋ/ for something. When you articulate the nasal /m/, your soft palate is lowered (so the air can escape through your nose). If you then raise the soft palate too soon, you will automatically insert a little /p/ and the word comes out as somepthing (it is voiceless because of the following /θ/). We associate examples such as this one with children, but precisely the same thing happened to empty (< Old English ǣmtig). Table 4.2 shows the fate of some Latin words in English and German, as well as some Germanic forms both languages share. You’ll notice only the English forms show the extra consonant (and note too how the inserted consonant agrees in place of articulation with the nasal and with the voice quality of the following sound).

Table 4.2 Medial consonant excrescence in English Latin

Modern English

Modern German

numerus camera

number chamber

Nummer Kammer

Old English

Modern English

Modern German

þunor þȳmel ganra

thunder thimble gander (compare gannet)

Donner — Ganre (earlier form)

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Wrong timing can also cause consonants to appear at the end of words. If the tongue goes back to rest position against the teeth ridge before articulation is complete, the result will be an extra /t/; it is as if speakers want to provide the ends of words with a more satisfying conclusion (and you can see this clearly in colloquial pronunciations nope and yep). German shows many examples of this; the following table is just a handful (and this time English is the less adventurous language). Table 4.3 Final consonant excrescence in German Old High German

Modern German

Modern English

ahsa habuh sac selp

Axt Habicht Sekt ‘bubbly wine’ selbst

ax(e) hawk sack ‘white wine’ self

This process is behind the shift from early English agains, middes and betwihs to against, (a)midst and betwixt (also the dialectal form varmint alongside vermin). Enhancing word endings with extra sounds in this way was once more common in English, but typically the phonetic afterthoughts didn’t survive: wonst, twyst, neist, acrost, margint and sinst > once, twice, nice, across, margin and since.

4.1.3  Old sounds are modified – assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis The phrase phonetic transcription [fəˈn̥ɛɾɪkotʃɹæ̃nˈskr̥ɪpʃn̩] showed the extent to which sounds can be modified in normal speech. More usually, they change their shape to become more like their neighbours (assimilation), but occasionally they change to become less alike (dissimilation). Certain combinations can cause sounds to shift about and appear in other positions in the word (metathesis). We will also look at lenition (or weakening), a shift that sees the strength of sounds diminish (e.g. consonants become more vowel-like). All these processes are ever present in ordinary connected speech and are reflected in the synchronic rules of languages; they are also common types of sound change.

Assimilation Sounds will change to be more like the sounds they hang around with – this is assimilation. The process is extremely common and is responsible for the majority of sound changes. In the word sink, for example, /n/ becomes velar /ŋ/ to be more like the following velar /k/. Reducing the distance between two sounds in this way means a smoother transition and less articulatory effort (but, as described earlier, economy of gesture is constrained by the need for intelligibility). Consonants vary along three parameters: place of articulation, manner of articulation and state of the vocal cords (i.e. voiced or voiceless), and they can assimilate according to one or more of these parameters. In the sink example, the nasal

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Table 4.4 Total assimilation in Italian Latin

Italian

Assimilation

factum doctor septem acceptus somnus domna subsulto absens

fatto ‘fact’ dottore ‘doctor’ sette ‘seven’ accetto ‘acceptable’ sonno ‘sleep’ donna ‘woman’ sussulto ‘leap’ assente ‘absent’

/kt/ > /tt/ /kt/ > /tt/ /pt/ > /tt/ /pt/ > /tt/ /mn/ > /nn/ /mn/ > /nn/ /bs/ > /ss/ /bs/ > /ss/

has assimilated in place of articulation. It is even possible for sounds to assimilate along all parameters (= total assimilation). Italian has clear examples where original Latin clusters have totally assimilated to become long (or geminate) consonants (see Table 4.4). In all the examples so far, sound segments have assimilated to a following sound; this is called anticipatory assimilation, and it is the more usual direction. However, sounds can assimilate to preceding sounds (this is known as lag). The following Icelandic changes are similar to the Italian except that they work in the opposite direction: finna ‘find’ < *findan; munn ‘mouth’ < *munþ-; gull ‘gold’ < *gulþ. (Compare Proto-Germanic *wulno > *wullo > Old English wull / Old High German wolla ‘wool’.) One type of assimilation is so common that it has its own name: palatalization. It most commonly affects consonants appearing before high front vowels and the palatal approximant /j/ (which is also produced by raising the tongue to the palate directly). It is what triggers pronunciations like /mɪʃə/ and /fɪtʃə/ in high-speed articulation of miss you and fit you, because speakers draw the /s/ of miss and the /t/ of fit towards the /j/ of you. But it also leads to long-term changes, such as the current pronunciation of words like nation, sure, measure, pleasure and so on. The spelling often gives a clue; e.g. the ti in nation shows the original /i/ which triggered the pronunciation /ʃ/. It is this same process that gave rise to the palatal phoneme /tʃ/ in chin (< Old English cinn /kɪnn/). Russian has spectacular examples of palatalization; as Table  4.5 shows, certain consonants become palatal when they occur before front vowels like [e] and [i]; the palatal sounds are bolded here, and the palatal quality is indicated by the raised j. Table 4.5 Palatalization in Russian Basic forms stol vkus dar dom bomba

Palatalized forms ‘table’ (nominative) ‘taste’ (noun) ‘gift’ (noun) ‘house’ ‘bomb’ (noun)

stol  je vkus jen dar jit ' dom jiʃko bomb jit

‘table’ (locative) ‘tasty’ (adjective) ‘s/he gives’ (verb) ‘cottage’ ‘s/he bombs’ (verb)

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All the examples of assimilation so far have involved immediately adjacent sounds, but it is also possible for non-contiguous sounds to assimilate. For example, Old French had the verb cercher /sertʃer/ ‘search, look for’ (from which English borrowed search); the expected modern form is /serʃe/, but instead we find chercher /ʃerʃe/. Distance assimilation between consonants is rare, but between vowels is more usual. It is generally called vowel harmony but specifically umlaut when the change is anticipatory, i.e. when vowels assimilate to those in a following syllable. Umlaut is found in many languages including the Germanic languages, Irish and Romanian (see Hock 1991: 66–68 for examples). English has only relics of the process in the form of irregular plural nouns such as mouse-mice, tooth-teeth, man-men and so on. They are all that remains of an earlier pronunciation rule (known as i-mutation, already mentioned in Chapter 1) whereby the stem vowel of the word harmonized with the vowel of the -i plural ending (see Table 4.6). As the table shows, when the ending (which triggered the change) eventually dropped off, we were left with a strange looking alternation that through later changes eventually became the modern mouse-mice. Umlaut is responsible for many unusual vowel alternations in Modern English; e.g. relic forms like old-eldereldest show the mutation that was triggered by the lost endings *-iro and *-isto. Similarly, the vowels in the second member of pairs like full-fill, food-feed, lie-lay, fall-fell and drink-drench are the result of assimilation with a palatal semi-vowel /j/ in the now lost causative suffix -jan (you can find more of these pairs in Emerson’s 1921 lavish account of vowel mutation in early English). In Modern German the umlaut pattern is much more entrenched than in English, to the extent that the vowel change brought about by umlaut has its own marker – two dots above the vowel. Vowels written as a, o, u and au become ä, ö, ü and äu (see Table 4.7). While umlaut is still alive in German, it is no longer the case that all high front vowels produce umlauted vowels, e.g. Amt ‘office’ —> amtlich ‘official’ (*ämtlich); umlauted vowels also show up in a wider range of environments (the trigger vowels aren’t restricted to high front vowels), e.g. the -er plural in Mann ‘man’ —> Männer. Umlaut illustrates one of the great puzzles for historical linguists – how (and why) do close siblings end up diverging in this way? In this case, why did umlaut bite the dust in English but not German?

Table 4.6 i-mutation in Germanic

Proto-Germanic Pre-Old English assimilation Old English Middle English Modern English Modern German

Singular *mu-s*mu-s /mu:s/ *mu-s /mu:s/ mu-s /mu:s/ mus /mu:s/ mouse /maus/ Maus /maus/

Plural *mu-siz *mu-si /mu:si/ *my-si /my:si/ my-s /my:s/ mis /mi:s/ mice /maɪs/

Mäuse /moɪsə/

/y/ = high fronted rounded vowel

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Table 4.7 Umlaut in German Basic forms

Umlauted forms

Mann /man/

‘man’

Stunde /ʃtundə/ gut /gu:t/ Not /no:t/ Gott /got/ Hund /hunt/

männlich /mɛnliç/ stündlich /ʃtyndliç/

‘manly’

‘hour’ ‘good’ ‘need’ ‘god’ ‘dog’

gütig /gy:tiç/ nötig /nø:tiç/ Göttin /gø:tin/ Hündin /hyndin/

‘kind’ ‘necessary’ ‘goddess’ ‘bitch’

‘hourly’

Orangutangs and pengwings Some of you might have come across references to Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice-over for the BBC documentary South Pacific, in particular the part where he repeatedly pronounces the word penguin incorrectly. It comes out as something like pengwing: So why are these woodlands so attractive to pengwings? A fresh water stream through the forest makes a handy highway for a parent pengwing heading home from a fishing trip [. . .] You can listen to the clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GnLD JAgrws. We are thrilled by this example because it illustrates this rather rare phonological process of long-distance assimilation. Ordinary assimilation is commonplace, but it’s much more interesting when non-contiguous sounds harmonize, especially consonants. You might find examples in the speech of young children (dog occasionally becomes gog for example), and in random slips of the tongue in adult speech, such as one of the authors’ recent fearsome phenomenom when she meant to say fearsome phenomenon (of course it didn’t help that there’s a double whammy of m’s here). Where you are more likely to get long-distance consonant harmony is where syllables are similar and the resulting form is almost a reduplication. Smorgasbord is sometimes heard as smorgasborg, and orangutang is now probably more usual than original orangutan. And now there’s pengwing. But these remain sporadic changes that haven’t yet made any long-term systematic impression on the language. Probably none of us is tempted by wingspang for wingspan or hangmang for hangman. The written word does slow down these sorts of changes, but orangutang does seem to have stuck – it’s been recorded since the word first entered the language in the 1600s (originally Malay orang ‘person’ + utan ‘forest’). In fact, the example is repeated

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over and over in linguistics textbooks because long-distance consonant harmony is so rare! Interestingly, there’s evidence that pengwings have been around for a bit too. You’ll find an entry in Urban Dictionary dating from early 2007 (http://www. urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pengwing&utm_source=searchaction). But will it endure? Well, it seems we like to turn words into rhymes (smorgasborgs and orangutangs), and in the case of pengwing there’s the added motivation that the remodelled worded nicely captures those rather rudimentary little wings so much a feature of the penguin – pengwing is apt. And then of course nothing beats celebrity – whether it’s the promotion of products or linguistic forms. The actor, whose beautiful and authoritative voice journalist Caitlin Moran once likened to “a jaguar hiding in a cello”, says pengwing (The Times, August 5, 2010). What’s more, none of those penguin experts working on the documentary ever challenged him! And in the special way the internet can make things happen, Cumberbatch’s gaffe has now a worldwide profile. There are even T-shirts to be had. Things are looking good for pengwings.

Lenition Lenition is the name given to the general weakening of sounds. Via this process, segments involve a reduced use of articulators, and they might be shortened – the end point of lenition is loss. Such changes occur when sounds find themselves in weakened prosodic positions. As we discussed in Chapter 1, the history of English shows the gradual erosion (or lenition) of grammatical endings (the stress shift in early Germanic to the initial syllable had left these endings vulnerable and prone to reductive processes). Two main changes took place: 1 /a, o, u, e/ > /ə/ The vowels reduced to the indeterminate weak vowel, and originally distinct endings like -an, -en, -on, -um became unclear; compare the pronunciation of Belgian and Belgium today. 2 /m, n/ > ø finally Final nasals dropped off. To illustrate, consider the stān ‘stone’ paradigm (based on Bynon 1977), shown in Table 4.8. As you can see, sound changes operate without any regard for grammar. The inflectional endings were seriously disturbed by these changes; the eventual loss of the final schwa meant that now only two forms survived: stone /stoʊn/ and stones /stoʊnz/.

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Table 4.8 Changes to the ‘stone’ paradigm

Nominative/accusative Dative Genitive

Old English sta-n sta-ne sta-nes

Forms after changes sta-n sta-ne sta-nes

Nominative/accusative Dative Genitive

sta-nus sta-num sta-na

sta-nes sta-ne sta-ne

Modern English stone stones (possessive) stones

Consonants can be described as stronger or weaker according to a number of different scales; they are particularly prone to lenition, especially when they are flanked by vowels and find themselves becoming more vowel-like. So lenition is often the fall-out of the very same assimilatory processes we’ve just discussed. Table  4.9 shows some fairly typical trajectories of more > less articulatory effort (adapted from McColl Millar 2015: 51). Table 4.9 Some typical paths for lenition Stronger > weaker

Articulatory effect of weakening

1 Geminate C > simple C 2 Stop > fricative > approximant 3 Stop > liquid > approximant 4 Oral stop > glottal stop 5 Non-nasal > nasal 6 Voiceless > voiced

less obstruction of airflow, reduced duration less obstruction of airflow, economy of gesture less obstruction of airflow, economy of gesture economy of gesture less obstruction of airflow through nasal cavity easier transition in the proximity of vowels

German offers another clear example of lenition. At the end of words speakers devoice stops and fricatives (think of this as a kind of assimilatory change with the voiced consonants assimilating to the voicelessness of the following silence), as shown in Table 4.10. We can date the devoicing to the medieval period, because of Middle High German spellings such as rat ‘wheel’ (versus rades ‘of the wheel’) and tac ‘day’ (versus tages ‘of the day’). Table 4.10 Final consonant devoicing in German Old High German

Modern German

Translation

tag /tag/ rad /rad/ hund /hund/ bad /bad/

Tag /ta:k/ Rad /ra:t/ Hund /hunt/ Bad /ba:t/

‘day’ ‘wheel’ ‘dog’ ‘bath’

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Weakening of unstressed grammatical words The following is a letter that one of us received from five-year-old Isaac Broadhead: My name is Isaac and I  am 5  years old. I  am learning to read and think there is something a bit funny about the English language. Can you tell me why words like ‘is’ and ‘as’ are spelt with an ‘s’ and not a ‘z’ – like they sound? Also, why the word ‘of ’ is spelt with an ‘f ’ and not the ‘v’ that it sounds like. Isaac’s complaint about the behaviour of is, as and of offers another example of lenition – and we could also throw into the mix other functional words such as was, has and his. These short grammatical words were all once pronounced with the voiceless sounds still preserved in the spelling (hence Isaac’s frustration), but via a weakening process typical of unstressed words, they became voiced (sometime during the 1500s). Interestingly, the original pronunciation of of is preserved in the related preposition off – both were simply variant pronunciations (compare with /wɪθ/ and /wɪð/). We might point out that if and us also used to have voiced variants (and still do in dialects of northern England), but the pronunciation ended up falling in line with the spelling.

Dissimilation Dissimilation, as the name suggests, describes how sounds change to become less like other sounds in the vicinity. The reason behind dissimilation is not clear, though some linguists attribute it to the fact that humans can find repetition of the same muscular activity problematic. You might have experienced the difficulty of repeating the same action over and over again (e.g. whether it’s stuffing envelopes, playing the same note over again or repeating a sound in a tongue twister like “In me, many an enemy anemone enema”, which has too many nasals) – suddenly you find yourself doing something weird, perhaps substituting a totally different action. Similarly, in a sequence of repeated sounds, we can avoid the difficulty by replacing one of the sounds (which is of course what often happens in tongue twisters). Dissimilation is behind the non-standard pronunciation /ɛksɛtərə/ for etcetera /ɛtsɛtərə/ (with added reinforcement coming from other words beginning with ex/ɛks/). The Modern German word for ‘six’ sechs is pronounced in the standard as /zeks/; the first of the two fricatives /xs/ has dissimilated to a stop /k/. The native dialect of one of the authors, however, has retained the original fricatives: /sexs/. Nasals and liquids (like /l/ and /r/) are more prone to this process than other sounds. For example, some English speakers dissimilate the second nasal in chimney —> chimley. The Russian word

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Table 4.11 Examples of dissimilation in English and German Original word

Modern English

Modern German

randon (Old French) rainson (Old French) cardamo-mum (Latin) peregrine (Latin)

random ransom cardamon (non-standard) pilgrim (compare peregrine ‘falcon’) purple purpure (heraldry term) marble —

— — Kardamom Pilger

purpure (Latin) marmor (Latin) tartoffel ‘potato’ (Old High German)

purpur Marmor Kartoffel

for ‘February’ fevral´ /f ʲevrˈalʲ/ (< Latin Februārius) shows dissimilation of the second /r/; something similar happens to English February (the first /r/ changes to /j/ as in Febyuary). As examples in Table 4.11 show, dissimilatory changes can involve preceding or following segments (though again anticipation is more common than lag). Here we have bolded the consonants that have dissimilated to highlight the rather unsystematic nature of the process. In English the second nasal in a sequence was changed to a nasal in a different place of articulation. In a sequence of /r . . . r/, English (and occasionally German) changed one /r/ to an /l/. German Kartoffel shows a more unusual dissimilation involving stops (the first /t/ > /k/). All of the above changes are sporadic (even successions of nasals and rhotics won’t regularly prompt dissimilation in this way). Only occasionally do you find examples of regular dissimilation. Recall our discussion of Grassmann’s Law in Chapter 1. Hermann Grassmann discovered that in a sequence of aspirated consonants, the first one lost the aspiration. So in the reduplicated forms for the perfect tense in Greek, the consonant was de-aspirated if the initial consonant was aspirated: the original form thi-thē-mi ‘I put’ (with a reduplicated prefix) became in Greek tí-thē-mi. While energy expenditure is difficult to measure, there is speculation that the motivation for this law is economy of effort – the fact that aspirated consonants require considerable respiratory exertion means that successive aspiration will be difficult and therefore pruned back.

Metathesis These days the pronunciation anenome is more common than the historically accurate anemone. The process that has switched the nasals around in this way is called metathesis (or sometimes jokingly methatesis). The cause is some sort of mistiming or miscoding, and it is common where difficult combinations of sounds are involved. English examples frequently involve those notoriously unstable sonorous consonants that have loomed large in many of the processes so far – liquids, rhotics

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and nasals; e.g. renumeration for remuneration, aminal for animal and emeny in place of enemy. Sometimes the switching leads to arrangements of sounds that better fit into patterns of existing words (compare anenome / an enemy; renumeration / numeral; aminal / criminal). But switching sounds doesn’t always ensure more straightforward pronunciations – not too many words seem to rhyme with emeny for instance (though for some speakers perhaps hegemony, and maybe even lemony). And sometimes both forms happily coexist: German has both the metathesized and original forms of the proper name Birgit/Brigitte (compare English Bridget); both crud ‘dirt’ and metathesized curd ‘coagulated milk’ continue in English, as do task and tax (originally variant pronunciations of the same word). This last example shows other typical shifters, namely s-clusters like /sk/ and /sp/: asterix often appears instead of asterisk; pasghetti instead of spaghetti. These forms can remain childhood errors, or one-off slips of the tongue, but when a number of speakers keep making the same sorts of adjustments, tongue slips can endure. Table  4.12 gives some examples in English and German where the slips (overwhelmingly r-metathesis) have survived and become permanent fixtures in one or both of the languages. Table 4.12 Metathesis in English and German Proto-Germanic

Modern English

Modern German

*þurih *horso*þridja*brennan/*brannjan *wops*aiskon

through horse (compare walrus ‘whale horse’) third (compare three) burn wasp ask aks (non-standard)

durch Ross Dritte brennen Wespe heischen (shows palatalization)

Metathesis is typically sporadic and not productive; however, occasionally the addition of morphemes can trigger a regular reordering of the segments. Hanunoo (Philippines) shows a regular switching of segments in numerals, as shown in Table 4.13. Table 4.13 Metathesis in Hanunoo Number ʔusa duwa tulu ʔupat lima ʔunum pitu

Number + ‘times’ ‘one’ ‘two’ ‘three’ ‘four’ ‘five’ ‘six’ ‘seven’

kasʔa kadwa katlu kapʔat kalima kanʔum kapitu

‘once’ ‘twice, two times’ ‘thrice, three times’ ‘four times’ ‘five times’ ‘six times’ ‘seven times’

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In the first example, the addition of the ka- prefix ‘times’ causes the /u/ to delete; the glottal stop then swaps places with the following consonant, as in ka+ʔsa —> kasʔa (but note that this does not involve other consonants (e.g. ka + tlu —> katlu).

4.2  PHONETIC VERSUS PHONEMIC CHANGE We can view sound change from two perspectives: the phonetic (the physical aspects of sounds) and the phonemic (the sound system). Phonetics gives us a way to describe the phones of languages such as English and German and how they differ; so it deals with unprocessed, raw sounds – or phones. The phonemic perspective considers the structure of sounds and how they function within a system; it identifies the meaningful sound units (phonemes or distinctive sounds) of a language and their variant pronunciations (or allophones).

4.2.1  Phonetic change – changes in accent Phonetic changes involve adjustments to the phonetic realization of a phoneme, or to the distribution of the allophones of a phoneme, but cause no disruption in the number of phonemes or in the relationships between them. The history of English shows a number of these phonetic changes. We have examples of alterations to the environments where allophones of a phoneme occur and examples where even the phonetic form of a phoneme has altered. These are simply pronunciation changes; they have no impact on the overall sound system. To illustrate, the oral and nasal stops /t, d, n/, which are now pronounced as alveolar sounds, were thought to have been dental stops; however, from around the time of Chaucer (about 1400), the articulation of these sounds started to move progressively further back in the mouth (see Anttila 1989: Chapter 4). Although the shape of the sounds has changed acoustically, this hasn’t done anything to change the phonemic system of English; /t, d/ still contrast with the other stops /p, b/ and /k, g/, and they distinguish the same words just as they did in Chaucer’s time. This is pure phonetic change and can be represented as follows: [t̪ , d̪ , n̪]  >  [t, d, n] The pronunciation of /r/ offers another example. The approximant that appears in many varieties of English is believed to have originated in a flap or trill, as in Scots English today (trills are sequences of rapid stops, with the tip of the tongue vibrating against the roof of the mouth; a flap is a single trill). Again this is just a simple change in pronunciation; nothing has altered in terms of the overall system. These examples involve the phonetic shape of a phoneme in all environments in which it appears, but changes can also occur in restricted environments. We know from spelling and from other sources (e.g. historical descriptions and modern dialects) that at one time speakers of British English pronounced /r/ wherever it appeared in a word. Ben Jonson, writing in 1640, said about r: “It’s the dog’s letter,

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and hurreth in the sound; the tongue striking the inner palate, with a trembling about the teeth. It is sounded firm in the beginning of the words, and more liquid in the middle and ends; as in rarer, viper” (Jonson 1640: 773). Sometime between 1600 and 1700, the pronunciation changed, and /r/ vanished except in positions where it appeared before vowels, e.g. her /hɜ/ sausage versus her /hɜr/ appetite. The distinction between r-less (or non-rhotic) and r-full (or rhotic) varieties is now one of the great divides in English dialectology. R-less dialects of English still have a phoneme /r/, but the rule for its pronunciation has changed: /r/ >  [r]  before vowels    ø   everywhere else This simply says: pronounce /r/ before vowels, but delete it everywhere else. These sorts of phonetic changes are going on all the time, but we don’t always know much about them, because they aren’t usually reflected in writing systems, especially if spelling is regularized.

4.2.2  Phonemic change – changes that alter the sound system We now turn our attention to the types of changes that lead to some sort of alteration in the phonemic system of a language. They fall into two broad types: mergers and splits.

Merger When two (or more) separate phonemes combine to become a single phoneme, this is known as a merger. The front rounded vowel /y:/ in Old English ended up unrounding and merging with /i:/. This is a complete merger; i.e. the change affects /y:/ and /i:/ in all environments. We can represent complete merging as in Figure 4.1. This simple diagram is a little misleading in that it suggests the original two sounds have merged into a different sound, whereas the resulting phoneme can be one of the original merging phonemes; i.e. either /x/ or /y/ (as the /y:/-/i:/ merger shows). Much more usual is a partial merger. This means that the sound change is conditioned; i.e. the phonemes merge only in certain environments and are kept distinct in others. We can represent it as in Figure 4.2. Figure 4.1 Complete merger /x/ /z/ /y/

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Figure 4.2 Partial merger /x/

/x /

/y/

/y/ (in certain environments)

In the Englishes around the world, there is a lot of vowel merging going on, especially in the environment before /l/. Currently, many younger speakers in New Zealand and Australia are neutralizing /e/ and /æ/ before laterals; for these speakers, shell and shall are indistinguishable. There is a parallel phenomenon for /o/ and /oʊ/, as well as /ʊ/ and /u/, so these speakers don’t distinguish doll and dole or fool and full. In New Zealand this merging is extending to /ɪ/ and /ʊ/, also before laterals, so that pill and pull are homophones (meaning that for some New Zealanders the /ɪ/ and /u/ vowels may also be indistinguishable, as in pill and pool).

Split Primary splits occur when allophones of a phoneme split off from that phoneme and merge with a different phoneme. So words that originally contained the same phoneme end up with different ones. In Old High German there was a fricative allophone of /t/ which merged (partially) with /s/ between vowels (e.g. Old High German ezzan > Modern German essen). So what we have is a re-alignment in the system of phonological contrasts (as in Figure 4.2 for partial merger). A similar example is something called Latin rhotacism. Pre-Latin had phonemes /s/ and /r/; a change caused /s/ to become /z/ between vowels, and later this shifted to /r/ (a prime example of lenition): flos ‘flower’ but flores ‘flowers’ (formerly floses). In other words, /s/ split into /r/ between vowels (thus merging with existing /r/) and /s/ everywhere else; no new phonemes results, but the distribution of /s/ and /r/ changed. With a primary split the overall inventory of phonemes doesn’t change; there is simply a reorganization of the phonemes (more occurrences of a particular phoneme, but no new phoneme). More interesting are secondary splits where a phoneme splits, but there’s no merging going – the split causes the introduction of a new phoneme. (As with a lot of this terminology, don’t ponder too much on the labels “primary” and “secondary” – they are not entirely clear.) This can be represented as in Figure 4.3. Figure 4.3 Primary split (split + merger in Old High German) /t/

/t/

/s/

/s / (between vowels)

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Figure 4.4 Secondary split /x/ /x/ /y/

What happens here is that there is a change in the conditioning features of allophones. To illustrate, we take the evolution of a new nasal consonant in English and German. Both languages currently have three nasal phonemes: Bilabial m

Dental n

Velar ŋ

On the basis of evidence from dialect variation, spelling, rhyme, early descriptions and our knowledge of sound change, we know the velar phoneme began life as a pronunciation variant of /n/, occurring only before other velar sounds (most of us pronounce pancake as /pæŋkeik/). In other words, /ŋ/ was simply an allophone of /n/. So an English word like sing was pronounced /sɪŋg/. The pronunciation rule was something like this: Early English and German pronunciation of /n/ /n/ —>

[ŋ] [n]

before velars {k, g} everywhere else

How, then, did the velar nasal acquire its new status as a phoneme? Sometime during the history of both languages, stops fell off the end of nasal+stop clusters. So the pronunciation rule was: /b, d, g/ —>

ø

after nasals (in final position)

It is this rule that accounts for the silent in lamb and climb, and the modern pronunciation of sing and long with final /ŋ/, not /ŋg/ (i.e. /sɪŋg/ > /sɪŋ/). English regional pronunciations of sing as /sɪŋg/ are relics of this earlier pronunciation, as are German dialect pronunciations of lang ‘long’ and jung ‘young’ with a final /k/ (compare relic English pronunciations nothink and everythink). Once /g/ disappeared from words like sing, the velar nasal (now in word-final position) came to be in contrastive distribution with the other nasals in this position – some, sun and sung now make a minimal group for English. The meaning contrast between these words depends entirely on the distinction between the nasals. As a relatively new phoneme, /ŋ/ shows a fairly restricted distribution; it can only appear at the end of syllables, either by itself (as ring, singer) or before

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velar stops (as in finger, sink). But borrowings like ngara ‘New Zealand lizard’ (from Māori) are helping it to spread its wings. As a final illustration, return to an example we gave in Chapter  1. While Old English did have voiced fricatives [v, ð, z] they weren’t independent phonemes. Speakers produced them automatically whenever the fricatives were flanked by vowels (e.g. if /f/ found itself between two vowels, it assimilated to the voicing on either side and became [v]). So in Old English there was a pronunciation rule that said: /f/ —>

[v] [f]

between vowels everywhere else

Recall that French borrowings like veal placed the voiced fricative into initial position, so that it contrasted with /f/ (feel versus veal). The loss of final vowels in words like save also had the effect of introducing the voiced fricative into final position. And so in this way /f/ split into two phonemes, /f/ and /v/, as shown in Figure 4.5. Figure 4.5 Secondary split in early English /f/ /f/ /v/

The separate status of /z/ and /ð/ as phonemes also came about because of changes occurring elsewhere in English. Modern pairs of words like grass/graze and bath/bathe show voiced and voiceless alternating final consonants. The final e in the spelling preserves the original trigger for voicing these fricatives. With the loss of these vowels, however, the fricatives suddenly found themselves word finally, contrasting with the voiceless set, e.g. grass /gras/ versus graze /greiz/; bath /baθ/ versus bathe /beið/. And so it was that English acquired its series of voiced fricative phonemes /v, ð, z/ to match the voiceless series /f, θ, s/. So you can see how the phonological processes that are going on all the time in ordinary speech can have a significant impact on the sound system. Fast speech phenomena like assimilation and loss can lead to the demise of phonemes but also the creation of new ones.

4.3  ON EXCEPTIONS IN SOUND CHANGE As we will discuss more fully in Chapter  9, an important principle of historical linguistics is the orderliness of sound change; in other words, the idea that changes such as the ones we’ve been seeing in this chapter are not capricious but regular. You might find this puzzling. Some of those examples of dissimilation and metathesis

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were anything but regular – and for the most part these sorts of changes are irregular or sporadic. However, the majority of changes are not of this nature. The absolute regularity of sound change, or what came to be known as the “regularity hypothesis”, was a major tenet of the Neogrammarian school of linguists (or Junggrammatiker ‘Young Grammarians’, to use their German nickname) in the late 19th century and remains a cornerstone of the discipline. These linguists even described them as sound laws (or Lautgesetze). Accordingly, the sound system of any language, as it developed through time, was subject to the operation of sound laws, which were understood to be absolutely regular in their operation, except where words deviate from their “proper” patterns under the influences of non-phonetic factors. Below are some of these nonphonetic processes that interfere with the otherwise regular outcome of sound change: 1 Analogical change (by meaning) Speakers perceive a similarity between two forms on the basis of meaning (no formal similarity) and then force the forms to be phonetically alike (it’s rather like extreme long-distance assimilation). For example, femelle changed to female on analogy with male; grine changed to groin on analogy with loin. Numerals are particularly prone to this sort of assimilation; for example, Latin novem ‘nine’ should be noven but was remodelled on analogy with decem ‘ten’. 2 Analogical change (by form) Analogical change can operate without any similarities in meaning, but purely on the basis of partial similarities in form; e.g. the reassignment of boundaries, as where the n of indefinite articles or pronouns is wrongly interpreted as belonging to the following noun. The word nickname comes from ekename (lit. ‘also-name’ or ‘additional name’). Since, in speech, there’s no difference between an ekename and a nekename, the n shifted across and attached to the following word (compare colloquial a nother from an other). 3 Folk etymology Folk etymology (as discussed in Chapter  3) is rather similar; this is where speakers misunderstand a word and render it into a more familiar looking form. Often the remodelling is semantically justified; e.g. bridegroom < brydguma ‘espoused man’ (compare German Braütigam) on analogy with groom. 4 Spelling pronunciation Spelling pronunciation occurs where speakers change the pronunciation of words to fit more closely with the spelling; the effect is the reversal of the sound change. Often usually receives a spelling pronunciation rather than the t-less pronunciation typical of the 18th and 19th centuries (compare soften and glisten). The English words sure and sugar show the palatalization you would predict from their history. Earlier, suit, consume and sue were similarly pronounced, but the non-palatalized pronunciations have been restored because of the influence of spelling. 5 Onomatopoeia All languages have words that imitate sounds. Vocabulary of this sort often resists otherwise regular sound change. For example, Middle English pipen (sound made by little bird chicks) should have become Modern English pipe /paip/ (as did the tube people use to smoke), but it remained peep (to better echo the chirping sound).

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Understanding Language Change 6 Taboo Irregularities can occur when speakers distort the pronunciation of words for reasons of taboo. For example, the vowel in ass ‘donkey’ didn’t change to /a/, as it did in words like grass, because it would have clashed with the bawdy body part arse /a:s/.

These counter-agents to regular sound change (such as the association processes driving analogical reformulations) operate without threatening the validity of sound laws as purely mechanical physiological processes. But there is still another aspect to this whole notion of the exceptionless sound laws that we need to explore here. Take the example given earlier of the Law of Latin Rhotacism: /s/ > /r/ between vowels It is a classic example of lenition; examples include forms like est/erit (present and future forms for ‘be’). Sound change is supposed to be exceptionless, but there are a number of famous exceptions to the law – Latin words that show /s/ between vowels. So why didn’t the following words change to fall in line with the others? rosa ‘rose’ causa ‘cause’ miser ‘miserable’ soror ‘sister’ The label “law” is misleading. A sound change is not so much a law (like the law of gravity) but more like a historical event – something that occurs “at a certain time in a certain language under certain conditions”. Edward Sturtevant in 1942 offered a rather interesting analogy here. He likened the Law of Latin Rhotacism to a fictitious historical event that he dubbed the Law of Waterloo: All Prussians six feet tall were killed in the Battle of Waterloo And he then proceeded to use this analogy to explain the apparent exceptions to Latin rhotacism. As he demonstrated, these do not fall under the conditions of the “law”. Like historical events, sound changes have a natural term, and Latin rhotacism was done and dusted by the 4th century BCE. After this time, a number of words like rose ‘rose’ were borrowed into the language (e.g. from Greek), and though they had intervocalic /s/, they weren’t affected by rhotacism – it was too late. To use Sturtevant’s analogy, they were Prussians naturalized after the battle. Apparent exceptions like causa ‘cause’ originally had geminate /ss/ (Old Latin caussa), and because geminate consonants are stronger, they could resist the weakening to /r/. Only later did they weaken to /s/. To use Sturtevant’s analogy, they were Prussians not yet born at the time of the battle. Slightly more complicated are the words like miser ‘miserable’ (and also caesaries ‘hair’). They didn’t undergo rhotacism because the following /r/ blocked the change

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from happening (recall that speakers generally don’t like too many liquids in the one word). To use Sturtevant’s analogy, they were Prussians under six feet tall and therefore not subject to the Law of Waterloo. This leaves us with soror ‘sister’ – why not sosor as predicted by the previous group of words? As you might have guessed, this time it’s the presence of the initial /s/ that allowed the change to sneak through. These were Prussians who were six feet tall, but their posture was stooped! Like many analogies, you don’t want to push this one too far. Nonetheless, it nicely illustrates two important aspects to sound change. One is that a sound change takes place at a particular time in the history of a language, and only then. So it’s like an event in history (or perhaps like an epidemic disease that works its way through a community and then peters out, as we will see in Chapter 7). Second, sound changes aren’t whimsical but regularly conditioned, and we can usually find principles behind groups of apparent exceptions. Words that enter the language later won’t undergo a previous change; other sound changes can obscure the full story; sound changes can even be thwarted by competing changes. And of course there are other factors we haven’t been able to consider here involving the progress of phonological changes, both socially and geographically (see Chapter 7).

4.4  WHY DO SOUNDS CHANGE? Over time sounds will vanish, brand new ones will appear on the scene, and old ones will change their shape. Why does this happen? The motives that have been proposed over the years to account for consonant and vowel changes are many and varied. Early theories linked sound change with changes in the anatomical structure of the organs of articulation; e.g. the Australian accent has been attributed to a national nose inflammation (through excessive amounts of pollen or hay), bad dentistry and even excessive alcohol consumption early on in the colony’s history. Ethnic character was another popular theory; e.g. a national inferiority complex, a free-wheeling and adventurous spirit and an outlaw heritage have all been put forward at some time to account for the Australian accent. Early linguists also argued that geographical and climatic conditions influence sound systems, especially the notion that somehow harsh climates produced harsh sounds (harsh sounds were never clearly defined, though “guttural” sounds were often implied). There is no shred of evidence for any these theories. Change is never one-dimensional. At any one time, languages are being influenced by a network of intersecting pressures that work to bring about change: physiological (the production of language), systemic (the linguistic system with interacting components), psychological (the mental make-up of speakers), social and political (the speech community and the individual, the socio-political environment) and external (contact and borrowing). Here we touch on just some of these factors.

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4.4.1 Simplicity All languages show sounds dropping out, merging or assimilating over time, and these sorts of changes do involve a lessening in muscular effort. They’ve been described as economy of effort, following the line of least resistance, human laziness, sloth – but the end result is also a more efficient, more streamlined production. So yes, many changes do result in simplification. However, it isn’t this straightforward. English speakers stopped pronouncing the /k/ in knee [ni:] presumably because it was easier to say it this way – so why didn’t German speakers do the same in Knie [kni:] ‘knee’? Simplicity also can’t account for the fact that many changes result in greater complexity; e.g. the English consonants /ð/ and /θ/ (rather rare sounds) evolved from simple stops. A change might also simplify one part of the language but introduce complications elsewhere. You saw earlier how many of the irregularities in Modern English grammar (such as was-were, foot-feet and wife-wives) were the fall-out of regular sound changes that occurred. In short, when sounds drop out or assimilate, this can contribute to greater complexity overall. Simplicity is a factor, but it can’t be the only one.

4.4.2  Contact induced change We’ve seen that when languages borrow words from outside, this can influence the sound system. Also important are substratum effects. Think of the Celtic-English contact situation, where the original inhabitants (Celtic speaking) adopted the language of the newcomers (English speaking). In such situations there is usually a period of bilingualism when the locals speak the new language but with some interference from their primary language. If some of these elements from the primary language are transmitted to later generations of speakers of the prevailing language, this is described as a substratum of that language. Typically the substratum modifies the phonology of the adopted language, and we look more closely at examples in Chapter 8.

4.4.3  Structural pressure Many sound changes occur that bring about greater symmetry in the vowel and consonant systems of a language. Consider the evolution of English consonants. Below we have reproduced a rough consonant inventory for the three major stages of English: Old, Middle and Modern. Compare the three systems and take note of the bolded new phonemes at each stage. Old English p t tʃ k b d dʒ g m n f  θ s  ʃ x h w l r j

Middle English p t tʃ k b d dʒ g m n f  θ s ʃ x h v  ð  z w l r j

Modern English p t tʃ k b d dʒ g m n  ŋ f  θ s ʃ h v ð z ʒ w l r j

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Each change has had the effect of bringing about greater symmetry within the system. Languages tend to line up their consonants in pairs – voiceless sounds are usually matched with voiced ones, and oral stops with nasal stops. While we can’t go as far as saying that all sound change brings about a more balanced sound system, many changes in English and other languages have either helped to fill gaps or eliminated them somehow. Good examples of structural pressure driving change are what are called chain shifts. It is well attested that a change to one vowel can affect the system overall. One vowel moves, and this sets off a kind of chain reaction, with neighbouring vowels all shifting in solidarity (presumably driven by the requirement for intelligibility). A famous example is what Danish linguist Otto Jespersen dubbed “The Great English Vowel Shift”: sometime between Chaucer and Shakespeare, the long vowels /i:/, /e:/, /ɛ:/, /a:/, /u:/, /o:/ and /ɔ:/ came to be articulated with a higher tongue position; /i:/ and /u:/ became diphthongs (these high vowels can’t rise any further without becoming consonants) (see Figure 4.6). Further changes then took place. In Shakespeare’s time the modern diphthongs in mice and house were more like the modern Canadian /əi/ and /əʊ/; /ɛ:/ and /o:/ later diphthongized to /eɪ/ and /oʊ/, and sometime during the 18th century the original mid vowel /e:/ (in meat) changed to /i:/.2 Middle English /i:/

Chaucer [mi:s]

/e:/

[me:t]

/ɛ:/ /a:/

[mɛ:t]

[na:mə] [hu:s]

/u:/ /o:/

[go:s]

/ɔ:/

[stɔ:nə]

Shakespeare [məis] [mi:t] [me:t] [nɛ:m]

Modern English [mais]

‘mice’

[mi:t] [mi:t]

‘meet’ ‘meat’

[neɪm]

[həʊs] [gu:s] [sto:n]

[haʊs] [gu:s] [stoʊn]

‘name’ ‘house’ ‘goose’ ‘stone’

Because it happened so early, it’s difficult to determine which was the rogue vowel here. One possibility is a drag (or pull) chain. One vowel moves, leaving a gap, and this has the effect of pulling another vowel in to fill the gap etc. Another possibility Figure 4.6 The Great English Vowel Shift

‫׀‬

i:

u:

e:

o: ε:

ɔ: a:

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is a push chain. One vowel invades the territory of another vowel, pushing it into the territory of yet another etc. Most evidence (by way of rhymes, spellings and borrowings) points to a pull chain, with /i:/ as the possible initial trigger (but the mystery is still, of course, why did this vowel move in the first place?). Southern hemisphere varieties of English are currently going through short front vowel raising relative to many British and American dialects (the second Great Vowel Shift; see Bauer 1992). For New Zealand English, historical evidence suggests a “push chain” effect; the already raised /æ/ vowel (in words like trap) of the colonial input in the 19th century then went on to influence the /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ vowels (in dress and kit). Australian English was going the same route; however, the past few decades have seen an about-face with vowels now moving in the opposite direction to the New Zealand change (in other words, they are lowering, not rising). Regional chauvinism is a major incentive for people to start highlighting their distinctiveness linguistically, and perhaps the strong rivalry between the two countries, combined with the substantial physical distance, is one reason for this unexpected reversal of sound change. This then leads us nicely on to social factors as motivators for change.

4.4.4  Social change Early linguists noted that social upheaval (epidemics, civil wars, revolutions, economic crises) appeared to go hand-in-hand with periods of dramatic linguistic change. For example, the Black Death coincided with a number of major changes that took place in English around that time. This was an epidemic that brought death on a scale comparable with a nuclear holocaust, and was made all the worse by a number of subsequent epidemics. Such devastation triggered mass emotional disorders and would have torn social networks apart. As we’ll see more in Chapter 7, it is precisely at such tumultuous times that variants are able to take off, spread and eventually embed themselves as long-term changes in the language system. It is as if changes are always lurking in the wings, but it is moments of social mayhem that enable them to catch on and flourish. With the massive social changes that are accompanying the current technological revolution, you might contemplate how the internet, in particular social media, is now changing language. On the internet people converse with each other in virtual communities just as they do face-to-face in real communities – except of course they are writing, not speaking. They are doing this to convey information, but never lose sight of the second important function of language – to define the gang. For members of virtual speech communities to express their identity (both personal and shared with other members of the group), they have to break away from the written standard and do their own thing. This is the ideal set-up for variation and change.

4.4.5  Frequency factors An important motivating factor for sound change is the frequency with which we use words and phrases. Indeed, we’ve already seen how aspects of our linguistic behaviour are shaped by repetition (e.g. frequency leads to the reduction of meaning). In

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particular, repetition has a profound effect on pronunciation. Individual words and strings of words that are common typically shorten over time (e.g. daisy began life as ‘day’s eye’). Reduction is most obvious in formulaic expressions like greetings and leave-takings; the ritualized string God be with you is ground down to bye. Pairs of words used frequently are also more likely to reduce; in normal rapid speech don’t you is pronounced as donchew [doʊntʃu] or even doncha [doʊntʃə]. There are a number of reasons repetition leads to the reduction of forms. One is that frequent or everyday words will often crop up in casual settings where short cuts and reductions are more tolerated – a lot can be taken for granted when you’re chatting with someone you know well in a familiar environment. Words of high frequency are also easier to understand, so listeners won’t require the same amount of phonetic detail. Reduction is also the result of the automation that follows from the repetition of articulatory movements. Linguists have shown that when gestures of articulation become automatic this triggers a reduction in the timing and magnitude of these gestures. The speed of execution automatically increases, the transition between sounds becomes more fluent, and the movements might even overlap. This is undoubtedly the motivation behind the extreme reductions we saw earlier with place names like Worcestershire (in 2015 the popular social networking site reddit ran a survey to uncover the most difficult words to pronounce – Worcestershire was at the top!).

SUMMARY In this chapter we reviewed the most significant phonological processes; these processes change the speech sounds we produce as we speak, but they can also have consequences for the actual sound systems of languages. Despite the fact that the majority are reductive, the imperative of intelligibility means that speech gestures don’t reduce to the point where sounds become unrecognizable. As phonetician Joseph O’Connor once put it, “[l]anguage does what it has to for efficiency and gets away with what it can” (1973: 251). We also touched on some of the motivating factors behind sound change. Typically involved is a complex network of different social, psychological and linguistic pressures – as well as external or foreign influences. Language is not governed by deterministic law-like processes, but it is not frenzied or anarchic either – order emerges from this complex interaction of factors.

FURTHER READING There are some wonderful accounts of sound change in some of the general historical linguistics books; in particular, we recommend Aitchison (2013), Campbell (2004), Crowley and Bowern (2010), Hock and Joseph (1996), McColl Millar (2015) and (for English) Bauer (1994); on the Neogrammarians and the 19th century contribution to the study of sound change, see Burridge (2013). Labov (1994) writes

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extensively on vowel shifts in varieties of English and also cross-linguistically; and on the pull chains and push chains see Martinet (1955). On the duelling forces of economy of gesture and the imperative of comprehensibility, see Lindblom (1983, 1990) and Zipf (1949). Lesley and James Milroy pioneered the work on modelling language contact between individuals; for their ideas about social networks and change see L. Milroy (1987) and J. Milroy (1992, 1993). On the motives generally that lie behind change see various chapters in Hickey (2003). Joan Bybee has researched the many different aspects of our linguistic behaviour that are shaped by repetition (see Bybee 2003).

EXERCISES 1  Phonological processes – synchronic variation in Modern English Explain and name the phonological processes that bring about the pronunciation of the following words. Try to think of at least one other example that illustrates the same process (in any language). a The non-standard pronunciation of family as fambly, youngster as younkster and chimbley for chimney. b The pronunciation /fɛbri/ for February and /tɛmpri/ for temporary. c The pronunciation of seven as /sɛbm/ and eleven as /əlɛbm/. d The non-standard pronunciation of the word diphthong /dɪfθɒŋ/ as /dɪpθɒŋ/. e A TV viewer’s complaint that the newsreader pronounced Italy as idilly. f The pronunciation of assume and presume as /aʃum/ and /prəʒum/. g The normal pronunciation of swoon and twice is /sw̥ uːn/ and /tw̥ aɪs/ (the empty circle under /w/ indicates the devoicing of the approximant. h Using appropriate phonetic symbols and descriptions, trace the series of changes that reduces (in fast speech) the pronunciation of Did you have a good weekend to /dʒævəgʊdwigɛn/. Name each of the processes involved. i The personal names Dwight and Dwayne are often pronounced with a vowel between [d] and [w]. j The pronunciation of hospital as hostipal. 2  Phonological processes – diachronic change in English Explain and name the phonological processes that are behind the changes in the following words. Try to think of at least one other example that illustrates the same process (in any language). a Proto-Germanic *emna- > ev(e)n and *heman- > heaven in English. b The Italian colonella ‘little column’ > Modern English colonel /kɜrnəl/ or /kɜnəl/. c Kriol is an English based creole spoken in northern parts of Australia. Explain (with labels for the processes) how the English word afternoon /aftənun/ has become Kriol apinum.

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d Kriol [ʃarap] < English shut up; [palɪɟɪman] < English policeman (/ɟ/ = voiced palatal stop). e The transitions Old English hlāfdige > lafdi > lady and Old English hlāfwēard > hlāford > laverd > lord. f Old English Sunnendæg > Sunday. g Proto-Germanic *samftō > sōfte > soft. h Anglaland ‘the Land of the Angles’ > England. i Old English eahtatyne [axtətin] and eahtatig [axtəti] > eighteen and eighty. j Old English mommele > mumble. 3  Phonological processes – languages other than English Explain and name the phonological processes that have triggered the pronunciation of the following words. a Proto-Germanic *emna- > eben; *heman- > Himmel in German. b Czech /pta:k/ ‘bird’ > /pta:tʃek/ ‘little bird’ (-ek = the diminutive suffix). c Swedish: /æ:dəl/ ‘noble’ versus /æ:dla/ ‘noble (definite)’; /vakker/ ‘pretty’ versus /vakkra/ ‘pretty (definite)’. d German: /buntə/ ‘colourful’ (attributive) and /bunt/ ‘colourful’ (predicative) versus /bundə/ ‘league’ (dative) and /bunt/ ‘league’ (nominative). e The pronunciation changes in Turkish when the accusative suffix is added: /dip/ ‘bottom’ versus /dibi/ ‘bottom (accusative)’; /ʃɛrit/ ‘tape’ versus /ʃɛridi/ ‘tape (accusative)’; /grup/ ‘group’ versus /grubu/ ‘group (accusative)’. f German Superintendent > Superintend ‘Superintendent’; Bewundererin > Bewunderin ‘admirer (feminine)’. g In Fore /pone/ ‘banana type’ becomes /to bone/ or /to βone/ ‘another banana type’; /kune/ ‘netbag’ becomes /to gune/ or /to ɣune/ ‘another netbag’ (explain the alternative pronunciation). h The pronunciation of Yoruba verbal prefixes: /ba/ ‘hide’ versus /mba/ ‘is hiding’; /fɔ/ ‘break’ versus /mfɔ/ ‘is breaking’; /kɔ/ ‘write’ versus /ŋkɔ/ ‘is writing’; /lɔ/ ‘go’ versus /nlɔ/ ‘is going’; /wa/ ‘come’ versus /ŋwa/ ‘is coming’. i French: /pətit ami/ ‘little friend’ and /gʁoz ami/ ‘big friend’ versus /pəti ~/ ‘big boy’. gaʁso~/ ‘little boy’ and /gʁo gaʁso j Pre-Old Irish */magl/ > Old Irish /ma:l/ ‘prince’; Pre-Old Irish */kenetl/ > /kene:l/ ‘gender’. 4  Historical development of sounds in English Below are four different versions of the Lord’s Prayer taken from different periods in the history of English. Examine each version and answer the questions that follow (the answer for each question requires about a paragraph). Old English text, ca. 1000 Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum si þin name gehalgod tobecume þin rice

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Understanding Language Change gewurþe þin willa on eorþan swa swa on heofonum urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us to dæg and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele. Soþlice Middle English text, ca. 1400 Oure fadir that art in heuenes, halewid be thi name; thi kyngdoom come to; be thi wille don in erthe as in heuene; yeue to vs this dai oure breed ouer other substaunce; and foryeue to vs oure dettis, as we foryeuen to oure dettouris; and lede vs not in to temptacioun, but delyuer vs fro yuel. Amen. Early Modern English text, ca. 1611 Our father which art in heauen hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdome come. Thy will be done, in earth, as it is in heauen. Giue us this day our daily bread. And forgiue us our debts, as we forgiue our debters. And lead us not into temptation, but deliuer us from euill. Amen Modern English text Our Father, who art in heaven, May your name be kept holy. May your kingdom come into being. May your will be followed on earth, just as it is in heaven. Give us this day our food for the day. And forgive us our offenses, Just as we forgive those who have offended us. And do not bring us to the test. But free us from evil. Amen

a Take five words from the prayers above that illustrate Langacker’s description of language as “a gigantic expression-compacting machine”. Name and describe the changes that have taken place. b Give two Old English consonant clusters (not double (or geminate) consonants) that are no longer in the modern language or are disappearing. Illustrate with examples from the prayer.

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c Using words from relevant versions of the prayer to illustrate, describe the changes that affected the velar nasal consonant in the Middle English/Early Modern English period. d Using words from relevant versions of the prayer to illustrate, describe the changes that affected fricative consonants in the Middle English period. e Describe the system for the use of the letters and in the Middle English prayer. (There are enough clues in the prayer, but this might also require some research on your part.) f Take a word from the prayer and track its changes from Old to Modern English; in a general statement, describe how the pronunciation of this word has changed. 5  Research essay Write an essay (approx. 1,000 words) that explores the following quotation from Ronald W. Langacker (1977: 106). Your bibliography should have at least five references. It would not be entirely inappropriate to regard languages in their diachronic aspects as gigantic expression-compacting machines.

NOTES 1 We have rendered the sound spelled here as a schwa when in final position, but bear in mind that at this time these vowels were on the way out (think of Modern English tale /teɪl/, which would have been pronounced /ta:lə/). Poets like Chaucer could play with this feature to accommodate matters of rhythm and metre. 2 We’ve had to simplify the changes considerably here, and there are a number of dialectal complications and competing shifts that account for anomalies in the modern language (e.g. words like great and steak didn’t go on to shift to /i/).

5 Changes in word structure INTRODUCTION Morphology is concerned with word structure and word formation. On the one hand, it deals with inflectional morphology, i.e. the creation of word forms, such as book (singular) versus book+s (plural). Books is not a new word, and it would not get its own entry in the dictionary. Rather, it is just a new form of the word (or lexeme) book. On the other hand, morphology also looks at how lexemes are built through processes such as affixation (e.g. possible and im+possible), compounding (e.g. wall + paper = wallpaper), clipping (refrigerator > fridge) and so on. Both of these domains of morphology are affected by linguistic change. Inflections and inflectional systems develop over time, and so do word formation patterns. For example, in Chapter 1 we mentioned the loss of inflectional morphology in English between 1000 and 1500 CE. In Chapter 2 the focus was on morphology as it relates to word formation (the creation of lexemes). In this chapter we now shift the focus once more onto the grammatical life of words (the creation of word forms). Over the last 150 years or so, inflectional morphology has received considerable attention in historical linguistics and language change theory, and most of this chapter will deal with this. In particular, we will be concerned with three major aspects of morphological change: reanalysis (the reinterpretation of structure), analogy (or attraction to structure) and morphosyntactic typology (the shift of languages from one grammatical type to another). We will conclude with some explanations for morphological changes, mostly based on psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, and the usual summary, exercises and further reading.

5.1  REANALYSIS AND ACTUALIZATION – REINTERPRETATION OF STRUCTURE Language is communication between speakers and hearers. Speakers have certain thoughts in their heads and encode these into words and sentences. These words are transmitted through air, on paper, electronically or visually to the “hearers”. Hearers in turn have to perceive these words and sentences and decode them in their heads. Figure 5.1 shows a simplified visualization of this process. Needless to say, the whole act of communication is a lot more complicated and involves different contexts for sender and receiver, and also “noise” (i.e. additional material not part of the transmitted information) inside the speaker’s head (other stuff you’re thinking about while speaking, for example), inside the hearer’s head (other stuff the hearer is thinking about while listening to you) and in the channel (e.g. background noise or ads that get posted next to your email message).

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Figure 5.1 Communication process (simplified) ENCODING

DECODING

IDEA

MESSAGE DECODED

Internal Noises

Internal and Semantic Noises

External Noises

As we mentioned in Chapters 1 and 3, this encoding and decoding do not always happen perfectly. The thoughts in the speaker’s and the hearer’s heads are not identical. This applies both to the message itself (you are not a mind reader and don’t know exactly what the person you are talking to you has in mind) and to the form of the message. Part of decoding the message is to (re-)construct the original grammatical form. One very simple example from syntax would be the sentence John kissed Mary. The speaker encodes this as John [subject] kissed [verb, past tense], Mary [object]. The job of the hearer is to understand the sentence by decoding (or parsing) this as efficiently as possible. And in the ideal case, the hearer parses this as John [subject] kissed [verb, past tense], Mary [object] and arrives at roughly the same interpretation. But this is not always the case. Here’s one example of what can happen when speakers and hearers are not on the same page with their language structures. It comes from word formation. The English word apron comes from French naperon ‘small table cloth’ and was borrowed in the 14th century as a napron (compare the related napkin/nappy). Apparently, in the 15th or 16th century, this structure led to confusion, and we find both a napron (old) and an apron (new). It seems as though some speakers thought that the word is apron, preceded by the indefinite article an! So, owing to this ambiguous sound structure, speakers and hearers could not be sure if the head noun was actually napron (which requires a single vowel a as the indefinite article) or apron (which requires the vowel-consonant sequence an as the indefinite article). Eventually, they seem to have settled for the new form, an apron, the word that we use today. The same happened to adder (and a number of other words, such as umpire). Adder started its life as Old English nadder ‘snake, serpent, viper’ (Modern German still has the cognate Natter). Between the 14th and 16th century, we see a nadder gradually turning into an adder. As you saw briefly in Chapter 4, Modern English

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nickname shows the opposite process: Middle English (about 1300 CE) had an eke name ‘an additional name’ (eke comes from Old English eaca ‘an increase’). In the 15th century, this turned into a nekename. Note that this involves not one but two “misinterpretations”! On the one hand, the consonant of the indefinite article was seen as part of the head noun; on the other hand, the independent word eke was reinterpreted as part of the head noun name, i.e. ekename instead of eke name. This process is called reanalysis (or metanalysis, or rebracketing – unfortunately, there are many different names), and it is one of the most fundamental mechanisms in linguistic change. It has been successfully applied in the explanation of morphological and syntactic change, and in grammaticalization (see Chapter 6). Roughly, reanalysis can be defined as a process that changes the actual (underlying) linguistic structure without necessarily affecting the visible or audible surface manifestation of that structure. So it presupposes ambiguity in linguistic structures, or at least some uncertainty about the underlying structure of a given utterance. Strictly speaking, reanalysis itself is not necessarily visible in the output. When speakers/hearers reanalysed a nadder as an adder, the sound structure [ənædər] remained more or less the same. But reanalysis is usually followed by what we call actualization, i.e. the gradual surfacing of the new reanalysed structure. This, then, is the point where the new structure becomes visible and it is clear that something must have changed underneath (e.g. when saying two adders, without the n, or writing ). This usually goes in tandem with a third aspect, sometimes referred to as “extension”: the new and reanalysed structure spreads to other contexts and establishes itself as a new, more generalized pattern. So, the whole process usually involves three individual steps: REANALYSIS  ACTUALIZATION  EXTENSION

The Polynesian passive A very famous example of this process can be found in the development of the passive in Polynesian languages. Consider the Māori forms in Table 5.1, which we have roughly glossed as ‘active’ and ‘passive’. Table 5.1 Ma-ori passive formation Active mataku fau neke hopu inu tohu awhi

Passive ‘to fear’ ‘to tie’ ‘to move’ ‘to catch’ ‘to drink’ ‘to point out’ ‘to embrace’

matakuria faufia nekehia hopukia inumia tohungia awhitia

‘to be feared’ ‘to be tied’ ‘to be moved’ ‘to be caught’ ‘to be drunk’ ‘to be pointed out’ ‘to be embraced’

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When you look at this table, you would probably say that the Māori passive is quite complex because it’s formed by a range of different suffixes (-ria, -fia, -hia, -kia, -mia, -ngia, -tia). This is also how Māori speakers view this aspect of their language (and you could compare it to the various suffixes for English plural forms, such as hat-hats, child-children, ox-oxen, foot-feet and so on). In fact, this complexity has arisen because of reanalysis. Originally the passive suffix was -ia, and all of the active forms in Table 5.1 ended in consonants. But speakers stopped pronouncing the final consonants (which speakers are wont to do) – so matakur became mataku, and fauf became fau and so on. What happened then was that speakers reanalysed the structure of the passive forms by shifting the morpheme boundary: so matakur-ia > mataku-ria; fauf-ia > fau-fia and so on (compare the plight of English nadders, naprons and nicknames in the previous discussion). This ended up making things a whole heap more complicated. Nowadays, when they form passives, speakers have to choose from many different (and totally unpredictable) passive endings (whereas once it was simply -ia). This is a good example of how a simple sound change (final consonant deletion) can make things a lot more complicated for the grammar (something we touched on in Chapter 4 and return to in a moment). The usual pattern in language change is that another change steps in to help clean up the mess. What appears to be happening now in Māori is that the -tia suffix (the most common ending) is spreading its wings. It’s become a kind of default ending, so that when verbs are coined or borrowed they will take -tia. This suffix will probably oust the others eventually, and regularity will be restored. It’s the process that has helped popularize -tia that we now turn our attention to.

5.2  ANALOGY – ATTRACTION TO STRUCTURE Analogy is – arguably – one of the most powerful cognitive capabilities available. Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of the famous and award winning Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), eloquently described it as “the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition” (“Analogy as the Core of Cognition” is the title of Hofstadter’s 2006 talk; this can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8m7lFQ3njk). Raimo Anttila, a well-known historical morphologist, was just as poetic when he characterized it as “the warp and woof of cognition” (Anttila 2003). Analogy is commonly understood as a very simple mathematical equation: a : b = c : d (a is to b as c is to d) Or, in more everyday language terms: foot is to toe as hand is to finger: foot : toe = hand : finger

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Given analogical thinking, we can now solve these equations with ease: 3 : 4 = 9 : x where x = 12 shoe : foot = x : hand where x = glove This is commonly understood as proportional, four-term analogy. It is interesting to note now that Hofstadter in particular points out that this is certainly one (small) aspect of analogy, but that, for him, analogy is a much more general and powerful process. In his 2006 talk he defines analogy making as “the perception of a common essence between two things” (ibid.; compare our discussion of metaphor in Chapter 3) where “the perception of a common essence” is not something metaphysical and mysterious but takes place in one’s current frame of mind, and “things” refers to “mental things” or mental representations. This broader view allows us to gain a more encompassing and psychologically plausible view of analogies. Instead of just focusing on tiny, mathematical (proportional, four-term) analogies, analogical thinking is seen as something much broader and can encompass frames, scripts, stories and so much more. In that sense, analogies don’t just exist out there (as many people think) but analogy making is a truly remarkable cognitive capacity, a dynamic, fast paced, fleeting process. We’ve already seen some examples of analogy at work in word formation (Chapter 2) and in phonology (Chapter 4) – but what does it have to do with the more grammatical life of words? In this chapter we will see that analogy making is one of the most powerful capacities of speakers and hearers when they deal with the morphology of their languages. Arguably, analogy making drives many of the changes we see. This has been shown very impressively in child language acquisition. As early as 1958, the psychologist Jean Berko Gleason designed her famous “wug test”. She presented several children with the drawing of a little animal (like the one we show in Figure 5.2). And she said something like: “Look, this is a wug [wʌg]” (note that the word did not exist in the English language and the children had never heard it before). Then she showed them another picture, this time with two animals of the same type. And she told them something like “There are two of them now. There are two ______”. And the children replied, without hesitation: “wugs” [wʌgz]. How did they do that? They did not know the word, and nobody ever told them about the rules of English plural inflection. The answer is simple. They perceived similarities between what they had already experienced and what they now encountered, and they used analogical thinking to come up with the answer! So, for example, they might have perceived a similarity between wug and bug, and thus abduced (a kind of backwards reasoning, see Chapter 1): bug : bugs = wug : x where x = wugs Note that this is not necessarily the only answer. The “correct” plural of wugs could have been something else, for example wag, as in one wug, two wag (since the word does not exist we can make up any plural form we like!). But this alternative plural form is something they could not have guessed. Even these small children already used the power of analogical thinking to explore the morphology of their native

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Figure 5.2 The “wug” test (based on Gleason 1958)

This is one wug.

Now there are two of them. There are two

language. Also, note that they did more than just add “plural -s”. The plural morpheme in English has a fairly large number of allomorphs, or concrete realizations (in other words, different pronunciations). Only consider the difference you hear in cats [kæt-s], dogs [dɒg-z] and foxes [fɒks-ɪz]. So the regular, phonologically conditioned forms include [ɪz] after stem final sibilants (hissing sounds) such as [s, z, ʃ, ʒ], voiced [z] after voiced sounds, and [s] after voiceless sounds. And there are a number of more or less irregular, lexically conditioned patterns such as mouse-mice, child-children, sheep-sheep and so on that you can’t predict but simply have to learn. The patterns that get extended in analogy are usually the live, or productive, ones. So out of this complex of rules, children who produced wugs [wʌgz] picked the “right” form; i.e. they analysed the input wug in such a way (with a word-final voiced consonant) that they arrived at a “correct” analogy with similar words. In other words, they created [wʌg-z] and not [wʌg-s] or [wʌg-ɪz]. Quite an accomplishment, considering that nobody ever tells you about these things when you’re three years old! Analogy can make paradigms and forms simpler in that it reduces the number of allomorphs (or forms) for a given paradigm. Recall from Chapter 1 that paradigms are sets of different word forms (such as am, is, are, was, were for the verb to be). Here’s just one example: English used to have a large number of irregular verbs that have three different forms for the present tense, the past tense and the past participle. Some of them still exist in present-day English, like see, saw, seen. These contrast with the regular verbs that only have two forms for present tense, past tense and past participle: the simple present (kiss), past tense (kiss-ed) and past participle (also kiss-ed).

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Analogy now turns irregular verbs into regular ones. Examples include strive, strove, striven, which is now for many speakers strive, strived, strived; help, holp, holpen, which is now help, helped, helped; and climb, clomb, clomben, which is now climb, climbed, climbed. And there even used to be laugh, low, laught (or laughen), which is now laugh, laughed, laughed. All in all, we estimate that out of ca. 300 irregular verbs in Old English, about 150 underwent change and became regular. Table 5.2 summarizes some of these developments (but note that this is also simplifying the whole story a bit, as there may be additional analogies, sound changes and other change processes involved). Table 5.2 Analogy and irregular verbs in the history of English Modern

Earlier

strived stepped climbed laughed crept helped yielded

strove-striven stope-stapen clomb-clomben low-laught (laughen) crope-cropen holp-holpen yold-yolden etc.

Old French offers another illuminating example (based on McColl Millar 2015: 101). In Old French, the verb aimer ‘love’ had two different stem forms: one with ai- (in the singular and third person plural) and one with a- (in the first and second person plural). Analogical levelling has now led to a regularization and levelling of the paradigm, so that Modern French only has stem forms with ai-, even in the first and second person plural. Old French 1 sg aim 1 pl amons 2 sg aimes 2 pl amez 3 sg aimet 3 pl aiment

Modern French aimons aimez aiment

You may be tempted to think now that analogy always leads to regularity and transparency in the morphological system by eliminating all those irregular and unpredictable forms. In many cases, this is true. But there are some counterexamples where analogy is the source of irregularity and allomorphy in a given paradigm. Consider the past tense of dive. Is it dived (regular) or dove (irregular)? If you are from the United States, you probably opt for dove. If you are from the United Kingdom, you probably go for dived. As a matter of fact, the traditional, old past tense of dive is dived. The Oxford English Dictionary has its first entry of dove from 1855, whereas dived goes back to the Middle Ages. So irregular dove was probably created in the 19th century, maybe in analogy to other irregular (and well-established) patterns like drive-drove or ride-rode. Similarly, arrive has a non-standard past tense arrove, and squeeze sometimes has squoze, though these obviously never made it into the major varieties of English.

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As we have said before, analogy is one of the strongest forces in linguistic change, and perhaps even in human cognition. Nevertheless, it should also have become clear that analogical changes are somewhat random in the sense that we never know when analogies will be created and which forms will be affected. Why was holp eliminated in favour of helped, but not bought in favour of *buyed (admittedly buyed does exist, but it is comparatively rare)? Why is it climbed today but not *drived? On the other hand, though we never know exactly when and where analogy will strike, we know that analogical levelling usually leads to greater regularity in the linguistic system (for some exceptions, see above). Paradigms are usually a lot simpler after analogical levelling. With sound change it is exactly the opposite. Sound change is mostly highly regular and predictable (see Chapter 4), but it often causes irregularities in the linguistic system. In Chapter 4 we touched on the famous sound change of i-umlaut in the pre-Old English period, the vowel harmony rule that caused the regular plural forms for mouse, goose, tooth and many more to change into what we know today as irregular plural forms: mice, geese, teeth. What happened was that all these words had a highly regular plural form in -iz. Sg mu-s go-s to-θ

Pl *mu-s-iz *go-s-iz *to-θ-iz

(note that * here means that the form does not exist in any documents, but had to be reconstructed)

Now the high front vowel [i] of the plural in the second syllable changed the quality of the vowel in the stem. These vowels were fronted (an example of distance assimilation). Sg

Pl

mūs

*mȳs-iz *gø̄s-iz

gōs tōθ

*tø̄θ-iz

In a next step, the final syllables were eroded and lost, and the front rounded vowels were unrounded. Sgold/new

Plold

mūs

gōs tōθ

Plnew

mȳs gø̄s

>

tø̄θ

>

>

mīs

gēs tēθ

Finally, all these underwent a massive sound change (part of the Great Vowel Shift, as we outlined in Chapter 4), i.e. a raising of all long vowels. Sgold mūs gōs tōθ

Sgnew

Plold mī s

>

maʊs gu:s

>

tu:θ

>

gēs tēθ

Plnew >

maɪs gi:z

>

ti:θ

>

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And what we get eventually are two word forms in the paradigms which appear to be highly irregular (mouse-mice, goose-geese, tooth-teeth and so on). But what caused these irregularities were highly regular and perfectly predictable sound changes. This phenomenon is known as “Sturtevant’s paradox”: Analogy is irregular but causes regularity. Sound changes are regular but cause irregularity. As an important mechanism in linguistic change, analogy has received a lot of attention in the linguistic literature. Scholars have offered numerous accounts of how it works and, more importantly, how it can be constrained. In other words, they have tried to find out when it happens and which direction it usually takes. Jerzy Kuryłowicz, a well-known Polish historical linguist of the 20th century, intensively studied analogy as a factor in linguistic change and came up with six rules, or “laws”, that help us constrain and understand analogical changes. Kuryłowicz used the metaphor of rain, gutters, sewers and pipes to illustrate his understanding of analogy: We cannot actually predict when it will rain. The rain, like analogical change, is not a necessity. It happens, or it doesn’t, but when it rains, the water can take predetermined paths defined by gutters, sewers and pipes, and we can pretty much say what will happen when it does rain. These gutters, sewers and pipes in some sense are Kuryłowicz’s “laws”. We’ll look at each of these six rules in turn.

Kuryłowicz No. I: a complex morphological structure (a so-called bipartite marker) tends to replace simpler (isofunctional) morphological markers We can generally distinguish between simpler morphological structures that only have, for example, one grammatical suffix (e.g. dog – dog+s) and more complex grammatical structures that have, for example, both a grammatical suffix and a change in pronunciation (e.g. German ‘dream’ Traum [traum] (sg) – Träume [trɔɪmə] (pl), which shows both a change of its vowel (au [au] > äu [ɔɪ]) and a suffixation with -e [ə]). As a tendency in analogical change, simpler structures are usually replaced by more complex structures. One textbook example for this comes from German plural formation:

Old High German Modern High German

Sg gast boum Gast Baum

Pl gest-i boum-a Gäst-e Bäum-e

‘guest’ ‘tree’ ‘guest’ ‘trees’

In German, the plural of gast developed more or less predictably: the word-final vowel [i] led to a raising of the mid-word vowel [a] to [ɛ], represented in Modern German by the umlaut spelling . The word-final vowel [i] was then weakened to a so-called schwa [ə], a very common process in most languages. The unsurprising result was the bipartite (double) marker for the plural with a change of

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the mid-word vowel and a suffix. What is surprising is the development of BaumBäume. The Old High German boum-a (with a single plural marker -a) should have developed regularly into *Baum-e (again, with a single marker) since the word-final -a would not have influenced the mid-word vowel here. But what we actually find is a change of this mid-word vowel into äu [ɔɪ] in analogy to other plurals like Gäste and a weakening of -a to schwa [ə]. The result is a complex, bipartite marker that we did not expect – and an example for Kuryłowicz’s tendency No. I. However, there are also a number of counterexamples which illustrate that this is really only a tendency, and nothing like a law (such as the law of gravity). One example where a complex marker is replaced by a simpler one is the plural of English brother. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, before the end of the 16th century broðor, broþeren, breþeren and the like were the only available plural forms (with one strange exception, a text called Laʒamon’s Brut, a Middle English poem written around 1200, which also has broþeres). After 1600 brothers became the regular form (and brethren took over another function; see Kuryłowicz’s Law No. IV below). Here, obviously, a complex marker with a vowel change and suffix was replaced by a simple, regular marker in analogy to other regular markers – a clear counterexample to Law No. I. Another counterexample can be seen in past tense forms like stope, which got replaced by stepped (see above). One can argue that stope is not morphologically more complex than stepped, which means that one simple marker is replaced by another simple marker, and not by something more complex as predicted by Law No. I. Does this mean that the “law” is not valid? Not quite. It doesn’t appear to be a law in the strict sense of the word (a fact that applies universally). The law of gravity, for example, does not allow for exceptions and counterexamples. As a tendency, however, Kuryłowicz’s “law” is revealing, and even though it does not capture all changes, it helps to explain at least some of them. And it is interesting to think about why some changes don’t follow our predictions! We can search for opposing forces, disturbances of any kind, and we also need to look at the other “laws” and how they interact with each other. Historical linguist Hans Heinrich Hock (1991) has also suggested ignoring the letter of this law but accepting its spirit: “forms which are more ‘clearly’ or ‘overtly’ marked tend to be preferred in analogical change” (p. 212). As a broader concept, “overt marking” captures more cases than either “bipartite” or “complex”.

Kuryłowicz No. II: analogical changes are from a “basic” form to a “derived” form of the word; the relationship between the two is a consequence of their “spheres of usage” Law No. II sounds very complicated at first, but it actually claims two very simple things. First, the two forms must be related as basic and derived in order to be susceptible to analogy. So the past tense of dive can be built on analogy to drive, i.e. drive:drove, and thus dive:dove. Drive and drove are basic and derived forms of the same word, and so are dive and the new dove. This usually does not happen with unrelated pairs of words, for example “drive (verb) relates to hive (noun) as drove (verb) relates to X”, where X is *hove (noun). The latter does not exist, and it is not

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the plural of hive, of course. In other words, drive and hive do not form a pair of basic and derived forms and therefore cannot give rise to other analogous pairs. The second part of Law No. II is slightly more complicated, partly because Kuryłowicz used the somewhat mysterious term “spheres of usage” here. But again the idea is simple: patterns which are more common and which are used more often in creating new words or word forms are more likely to be used as models in analogy than others. In other words, creating a plural in English with the suffix -s is a lot more common than any other pattern. Therefore, brethren was ousted by brothers, which was created on analogy to this very common pattern. It is very unusual to find the opposite; e.g. a word like sister with its plural sisters is very unlikely to have its plural replaced by something like *sistren1 or the like, simply because the pattern for the latter is a lot more infrequent and unusual. Of course, the early example of dove is exactly of this type, and would appear to be working in the opposite direction. But here we can say that this was influenced by a whole group of verbs in -ive, including drive-drove, strive-strove and thrive-throve (which is where this “sphere of usage” proviso comes in – the influence of this bunch of verbs was strong enough to pull dive in their direction). But just like Law No. I, Law No. II also has its problems and exceptions. What, for example, is the direction of the levelling of the verb ‘choose’ in English and German? ‘choose’ Infinitive 1st person sg past tense 1st person pl past tense Past participle

Old English ce- ozan ce- as curon (ge)coren

Old High German kiosan ko-s kurun (gi)koran

Modern English chose the infinitive as its model for the analogy and dropped all other forms in favour of it, so that cēas and curon became chose, and (ge)coren became chosen. Modern German picked the plural forms as models and now has küren (basic), kor (1st person singular past tense), koren (1st person plural past tense) and gekoren as the past participle. In other words, kiosan and kōs were levelled out in favour of the other forms. This actually means that in German derived forms served as models, not basic forms, as Law No. II would lead us to expect. Other real problems for this law are cases of backformation, where what is affected is the basic, not the derived term of the proportion. For example, Modern English pea is the result of a backformation from an original singular pease (as in the “pease porridge hot” nursery rhyme). When -s became the standard plural marker, some nouns already ending in a final consonant [-z] were mistaken for plurals. This is certainly analogy at work, but it is in the opposite direction from the usual; it’s the creation of a simple form on analogy to cases where a complex form and a simple form exist together. Again linguists have suggested a useful adaption of this second law which would allow for these backformations without throwing out the law. For analogy to take place, the two forms making up the first part of a proportion must be related by a productive morphological process. Take the past tense forms of the English verbs in Table 5.3.

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Table 5.3 Basic and past forms of [ai:t] verbs in English Basic

Past

write fight cite

wrote fought cited

Only cited represents a productive process of past tense formation – and it shows the one pattern that will extend into new situations. We can understand the language learner who says I writed or I fighted, but not the one who comes out with I wrought, I cought or I fote, I cote as potential past tense forms of write, fight! These made-up past tense patterns do not have the capacity to extend by analogy. And there is yet another problem for this law, and this has to do with the effects of frequency. While we expect the more common, more productive pattern to be dominant, in American English regular (and common) dived was ousted by the less common dove on the basis of verbs in -ive like strive-strove, drive-drove and thrivethrove, as mentioned above. So, every now and then (and for some complex and maybe unknown reasons) we see changes in the opposite direction, with rare forms or patterns winning out.

Celebrity endorsement For some time now English has been regularizing peculiar plurals like leafleaves. The plural of cliff is no longer cleves but cliffs, for example. And while leafs hasn’t got there yet, forms like silver leafs (a kind of white poplar) and the Canadian Maple Leafs (the ice hockey team) show that the regular plural has snuck (sneaked) in the back door. One noun, however, has gone against this path of change, and that is dwarf. It might sound older, but dwarves is actually a new form. In Old English the word was dweorg [dweorx] (so ending in the same consonant as Scottish loch). Over time, [x] either dropped out or shifted to [f], as it did in words like trough, laugh and also dwarf (in this case the spelling reflects the shift). This change happened long after we’d lost the voicing rule that turned [f] into [v] between vowels. Hence, the plural of dwarf was always dwarfs, pure and simple. Tolkien chose dwarves, however, even though as a philologist he knew this was historically wrong. He has a note to this effect in the beginning of The Hobbit, where he writes, “In English the only correct plural of dwarf is dwarfs, and the adjective dwarfish. In this story dwarves and dwarvish are used.” These forms have an antiquated ring to them, and this must surely be the reason that he chose dwarves to describe the ancient people in his tales (even though in Lord of the Rings Tolkien offers a different explanation). The popularity of Tolkien’s writing will probably mean that archaic forms like elves, elvish, wolves and, indeed, the late arrival dwarves will not be regularized to elfs, elfish, wolfs and dwarfs but will remain as an earmark of the fantastical.

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Kuryłowicz No. III: if there are words which are put together (as stem and affix), and if this is transparent, these will serve as a model for other, non-transparent combinations of stem and affix McColl Millar (2015: 105–6) cites an example from Basque to illustrate Kuryłowicz’s third law. In Basque we find the locative case ending -n to mark words that somehow have to do with place. Examples include heme-n ‘here’ and etxea-n ‘at home’. The question word non/nun ‘where’ consists of the stem no/nu- plus the locative ending -n. This can combine to form an indefinite structure nonbait/nunbait ‘somewhere’. This, however, is unusual because it no longer ends in -n. It seems that in some western varieties of Basque nunbait changed into nunbaiten, so that the locative ending -n is reattached and transparency is restored. This law has received only little attention in the literature. One reason for this could be that these processes are comparatively rare and examples are hard to find. And while it can account for those rare cases where more basic forms are affected by change, there are plenty of counterexamples or at least phenomena which cannot be clearly identified with respect to this law. So, for example, how do we explain that German and English moved in completely different directions with their analogical changes on the forms of cēozan/kiosan (see above)?

Kuryłowicz No. IV: when a form is subject to analogy, the new (analogical) form takes over the main function or meaning of that word, and the old form can still be used in a secondary function In contrast to Law No. III, this law has been widely discussed, and there are numerous examples to illustrate how it works. Take the plural of the word brother, for example. As we mentioned before (see Law No. I), up until the 16th century, the plural form(s) for brother were broðor, broþeren, breþeren and many, many more, but only very rarely something like broþeres. The (regular) plural form brothers began to appear in the late 16th century. While Shakespeare, who wrote his plays around 1600, still used brothers and brethren as synonymous, the former quickly took over later in the 1600s. The older form brethren, however, did not disappear. It came to be used as a special plural with a particular (secondary) function “in reference to spiritual, ecclesiastical, or professional relationship” (OED, s.v. brother).

Kuryłowicz No. V: if a language has “the choice” between losing a more important grammatical distinction and a more marginal one, it will give up the marginal one Consider the following forms and changes in Latin and early and later Iberian Romance. Latin ‘bread’ Nominative (“subject”) Accusative (“object”)

Sg panis panem

Pl pane-s pane-s

Changes in word structure Early Iberian ‘bread’ Nominative (“subject”) Accusative (“object”)

Sg panes pane

Pl panes panes

Later Iberian ‘bread’ Nominative (“subject”) Accusative (“object”)

Sg pane pane

Pl panes panes

119

In the development of early Iberian the special singular nominative form panis underwent some sound changes and turned into panes. It thus became indistinguishable from the plural forms; the accusative singular form lost its word-final consonant and turned into pane. Later Iberian rectified this situation, and the nominative singular changed into pane through analogy with the accusative form. In terms of a four-way analogy we could say panes (nom, pl) : panes (acc, pl) as X : pane (acc, sg) where X = pane. This is unexpected considering the laws we have discussed so far: why would the accusative be more basic? This becomes clear when we consider the alternative. If pane had been changed to panes, the whole paradigm, or group of words, would have become indistinguishable. But the change came at a price. When panes (acc, sg) changed to pane it became indistinguishable with regard to case (so whether it’s available as subject or object). What we gain is a reestablished number distinction, and we can’t confuse the nominative singular with any of the plural forms, as was the case in early Iberian. Now it can be argued, considering Law No. V, that the number (singular-plural) distinction is more important or basic than the case distinction. If this is true, then the law would lead us to expect that the case distinction (nom-acc) is given up in the singular in order to (re-)establish the more important number distinction. Law No. V can count as fairly well established and uncontroversial. The only real problem is that we do not have a definition of what counts as more basic. Is it the number distinction on verbs (singular or plural) or the person distinction (first, second, third)? These are questions that can be debated and discussed empirically, so that we “only” need to check what we observe more often in the languages around the world.

Kuryłowicz No. VI: Analogy can work across language (or dialect) boundaries; for example, a native word may be subject to analogy on the basis of a non-native word, especially if that non-native word comes from a prestigious other language or variety McColl Millar (2015: 106) cites another nice Basque example, this time from derivational morphology, to illustrate Law No. VI. He states that Basque has a highly productive suffix -tasun, which makes abstract nouns, so bakar ‘lonely’ turns into bakartasun ‘loneliness, solitude’ and eder ‘beautiful’ turns into edertasun ‘beauty’. But Basque adopted a large number of Spanish words with Spanish suffixes like -dad and -dura. And Spanish is often regarded as the more prestigious language of the two. As a consequence, some speakers began to produce some new, mixed formations like bakardade ‘solitude’ and ederdura ‘beauty’, with a mixture of Basque

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stem and Spanish suffix. Just like Law No. IV, Law No. VI is also a widely accepted tendency in analogical change, though examples are not that frequent. In sum, we can say that Kuryłowicz’s six laws offer an interesting and controversial attempt at constraining and explaining certain patterns in analogical change. As we have said before, these could be the gutters, pipes and drains that channel the water after the rain. But predicting when and where it will rain remains difficult, if not impossible. Some of these “laws” (like Nos. I, II, IV and V) are less controversial and more “powerful” than others (with lots of examples and fewer counterexamples), while Laws No. III and VI are more problematic. It is probably fair to say that as long as we see all of these as tendencies (stronger or weaker) rather than actual laws of nature, these patterns uncovered by Kuryłowicz can be very illuminating and instructive.

Man´czak’s tendencies Kuryłowicz was not the only one who pondered on the laws and regularities of analogical changes. The Polish linguist Witold Mańczak was another prominent 20th century scholar who worked on the problem. He formulated nine hypotheses, or “tendencies”, in response to Kuryłowicz’s “laws”. For reasons of space, we can only list them here without any discussion. We strongly encourage you to compare these to the “laws” developed by Kuryłowicz. Can you see any correspondences between Mańczak’s tendencies and Kuryłowicz’s laws? Where do we find contradictions? Think about possible examples for these tendencies. 1 Longer words are usually reshaped on the model of shorter ones, except in inflectional paradigms. 2 Changes in word stems (e.g. vowel changes in the stem of word) are usually lost rather than introduced. 3 Longer inflections are often remade on the model of shorter ones, unless these are a “zero” affix (no marking) and a strong, clear marker. 4 Zero endings (no marking) are usually replaced by some visible marker. 5 Endings with only one syllable are usually replaced by endings with more than one. 6 The form of the indicative (factual) mood is usually the basis for reshaping the other moods (e.g. the imperative (commands, prohibitions) and subjunctive (unreal thoughts wishes, hopes)). 7 The form of the present tense is usually the basis for reshaping the other tenses (past, future). 8 If a geographical noun and a common noun differ only in their inflection (but are otherwise similar), the geographical (local) cases will be the traditional, archaic ones, and the non-geographical (non-local) ones the innovations. 9 If a geographical noun in a paradigm is changed owing to analogy, the starting point for that change usually lies in the local cases.

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5.3  TYPOLOGY – CHANGE IN MORPHOLOGICAL TYPE How do languages get their job(s) done? Remember, one of their jobs is to communicate messages between speaker and hearer, like “who did what to whom when and how” (as in Andrea tickled Helena this morning with a feather). Andrea in this case would be described as the subject, tickle as the predicate (in the past tense), Helena as the object, this morning as a temporal adverbial and with a feather as an adverbial of manner. How do languages make clear which of these is the subject, and which is the object, or the adverbial? Subject, object, predicate and adverbial are also called syntactic functions. English mostly does that by word order. First comes the subject, then the verb, then the object. The girl kissed the boy reports of a female human kissing a male human. If you turn this around you get The boy kissed the girl, and you get a male human kissing a female. If you were a native speaker of Latin, that problem would not exist. In Latin, ‘boy’ is puer, ‘to kiss’ is bāsiāre and ‘girl’ is puella. However, Latin has many grammatical word forms which change depending on what you want to say. So if the girl should be the subject (that does the kissing) she takes the so-called nominative inflectional marker (simple -a in this case: puella). The boy would then be the object (and gets kissed) and so needs the so-called accusative inflectional marker -um: puerum. And to make matters even worse, the verb needs to have the right tense, person and number marking, in this case -vi-t, so bāsiāvit. And the resulting sentence is puella bāsiāvit puerum (note that Latin did not use articles such as the in the same way as English does). If you want the boy to kiss the girl, you need to change all that, and puer needs to be in the nominative (no change), and puella needs to be in the accusative with -am: puellam. And so you get puer bāsiāvit puellam. We can summarize this as in Table 5.4. Word order in English has to be relatively fixed, simply because you cannot distinguish between subject and object when you just look at the forms. Latin morphology may be a bit more complicated, but it allows for much more flexible word order. So in Latin it makes no difference in meaning if we turn the words around: The girl kissed the boy  = puella bāsiāvit puerum

= bāsiāvit puella puerum



= bāsiāvit puerum puella



= puerum puella bāsiāvit



= puella puerum bāsiāvit



= puerum bāsiāvit puella

Note that the Romans actually did like some orders better than others. In this case they would have preferred puella puerum bāsiāvit, with S(ubject), O(object), V(erb). But all the other orders were also possible and can be found here and there in Latin texts. In English there is also some flexibility (the boy the girl kissed . . . is

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Table 5.4 Latin inflection and word order Subject (nominative)

Object (accusative)

Verb

‘boy’

boy / puer

boy / puerum

‘girl’

girl / puella

girl /puellam

kissed / ba¯ sia¯ vit kissed / ba¯ sia¯ vit

The girl kissed the boy – puella ba¯ sia¯ vit puerum The boy kissed the girl – puer ba¯ sia¯ vit puellam

possible), but saying that these options are equally possible and that English speakers only “prefer” SVO would be stretching it a bit. To cut a long story short: a brief comparison of languages like English and Latin shows that these two languages do their job in different ways. English employs word order to tell you who did what to whom, while Latin prefers inflections. Both of them are equally functional; i.e. neither of them is in any way better than the other – they only use different means; in other words, they are built in different ways. This fact was recognized a long time ago, in 18th and 19th century philology and philosophy, by eminent German scholars such as August Wilhelm Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Schlegel and Humboldt suggested that we could divide languages into different categories, depending on how they did their job. The actual distinctions they proposed are a little bit complicated, but roughly we can say that Latin is a great example of what can be called a fusional language, i.e. a language that signals syntactic functions (subject, predicate, object etc.) and relations (what belongs to what in a sentence) by complex inflectional (grammatical) word forms. Our example of puella puerum bāsiāvit illustrated the idea of syntactic functions, and example (5.1) below shows the idea of syntactic relations. Note that, unlike English, Latin does not require that words which belong together also stand together. So they can be separated by other words. What you need to do is check for the inflections. These are marked in the second line of the example (the so-called gloss) by a little dot plus some abbreviation. So, “.acc” stands for accusative, “.nom” for nominative and so on (you will find a list of abbreviations at the beginning of this book). This allows you to read and understand foreign languages even if you don’t speak them. (5.1)

Parvam fɪ-lia mea daughter.NOM my.NOM Little.ACC ‘My daughter does not love the little cottage’

casam cottage.ACC

no-n amat. not loves.

Note that parvam ‘little’ and casam ‘cottage’ share the same inflection, accusative, which normally marks objects of all kinds. Similarly, both filia and mea are both marked for nominative (which is often used for subjects). We know that a verb like amat (infinitive amāre ‘love’) requires a subject (the one who loves) and an object (somebody or something that is loved). And when we put all of this together, we see that mea filia (‘my daughter’) can only belong together and act as the subject, while parvam casam

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‘(the) little cottage’ also belongs together and forms the object, even though parvam and casam are separated by other words. What would change if we told you that mea is the nominative form but meam is the corresponding accusative form, as in (5.2) below? (5.2)

Parvam Little.ACC

fɪ-lia daughter.NOM

meam my.ACC

casam cottage.NOM

no-n amat. not loves.

The translation is very different. It is no longer ‘my daughter’, because filia is still in the nominative, but meam is not – it’s accusative now, so they can’t belong together. Instead, meam unites with the other accusative elements in the sentence, parvam and casam, leading to ‘my little cottage’. So the new translation is ‘(The) daughter does not love my little cottage’. This is what inflections and fusional languages can do for you. The important point to remember is that with many inflections, the individual morpheme carries more than one function; the different functions are “fused” into the morpheme. The inflection -at on the verb amāre ‘love’ tells you that this is present tense, indicative, active, third person and singular: that’s five functions in one! Inflectional morphemes in fusional languages can have a number of (different) functions; sometimes it’s five or more, and sometimes it’s only one. Latin, Armenian, French, Russian and many other languages show that kind of structure. A second type of language that can be distinguished from fusional languages is the so-called isolating language. Good examples of this type are Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese. The following sentences from Chinese (adapted from Language Files 165) should illustrate the idea: (5.3)

(5.4)

(5.5)

tán [w�ͻmən We play ‘We are playing the piano’

piano

[w�ͻmən We ‘We played the piano’

tán

ga¯ ngtçín

play

piano

[ta¯

dǎ

s/he ‘S/he beat us’

beat

w�ͻmən] we

ga¯ ngtçín]

lə] past

As you can easily see here, every single “word” or morpheme has its own function or meaning (e.g. there is no past tense form for the verb play but rather the invariant verb plus an independent past tense marker). Also note that the pronoun [wɔ̌mən] ‘we’ does not change when it is used as the object, as in (5.5). In English, you have to change we to us for that. In Chinese, it is just the word order that tells you if ‘s/he hit us’ or ‘we hit him/her’. In English, you can count on word order and different pronoun forms for that (but note, as we mentioned earlier, that English speakers generally also have to rely on word order). And Latin has all these complex inflections for that job. So, in some sense, Chinese is a little bit like English in

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its dependence on word order, but it is even more extreme in this respect in that it hardly marks any grammatical features at all. But it is also not 100% pure in this typological categorization as an isolating language. The formerly independent plural “word” [mən], for example, seems to have turned into a morphological plural “marker”, like an inflection. We will return to this below. A third common type of language is the so-called agglutinating language. Examples include Finnish, Nahuatl and Swahili, among many others. The set of examples in (5.6) below illustrates such an agglutinating language, in this case Swahili (from Language Files 167). (5.6)

[ni-na-soma] [u-na-soma] [a-na-soma] [ni-li-soma] [u-li-soma] [a-li-soma] [ni-ta-soma] [u-ta-soma]

I-present-read you-present-read s/he-present-read I-past-read you-past-read s/he-past-read I-future-read you-future-read

‘I am reading’ ‘you are reading’ ‘s/he is reading’ ‘I was reading’ ‘you were reading’ ‘s/he was reading’ ‘I will read’ ‘you will read’

Agglutinating languages appear to be morphologically rather straightforward. Every (invariant) morpheme has only one meaning, and they are all attached (“glued”) rather loosely to their stem. In the case of Swahili, there are invariant pronoun forms (ni = ‘I’, u  =  ‘you’, a  =  ‘s/he’) and invariant forms for the tenses (na = present, li = past and ta = future). And all you need to do is glue them together! And we are willing to bet that you can already speak a bit of Swahili now: how do you say ‘s/he will read’ in Swahili? Note that both fusional languages and agglutinating languages have inflections. In fusional languages, inflections tend to have more than one function (which means that words can be rather short), whereas in agglutinating languages inflections typically only have a single function, so that they tend to pile up and can give you pretty long words. If we compare the Swahili example ‘s/he read’ with, say, German (which is fusional) you will see the difference: German las ‘read (past)’ includes (1) the idea of reading is taking place; (2) the event takes place in the past, (3) the subject is third person; and (4) the subject is singular. In a prototypical agglutinating language, each of these four meanings would have clearly identifiable parts, but in las we can’t draw clear boundaries in this way. Moreover, change any of these meanings, and the verb takes a different form (e.g. ‘s/he reads’ in German is liest). A good description of fused (unsegmentable) words like las is “portmanteau morph” (here you have to picture a bag with multiple compartments). There is one last type that we need to look at briefly – the so-called polysynthetic language. The term “synthetic” describes those languages whose words usually contain more than one morpheme (so it includes both inflectional and agglutinating languages). So polysynthetic languages belong to the synthetic type, but they are rather extreme examples. Yupik, an indigenous language in Siberia and Alaska, presents one such example (5.7) (Mithun 2001: 38):

Changes in word structure (5.7)

kaipiallrulliniuk kai -pia -llru -llini -apparently be.hungry -really -PAST ‘The two of them were apparently really hungry’

-u -INDICATIVE

125

-k -they.two

In (5.7) you can see one single word – kaipiallrulliniuk – expressing one single sentence in English, ‘The two of them were apparently really hungry’. This is obviously an extremely complex structure and can be taken to represent the other end of the spectrum, with isolating languages at the simpler end. Again, this is not to say that one of the two languages is less elegant, efficient or perfect. All existing languages by definition fulfil their function(s), and they all do their jobs, albeit in different ways. In a polysynthetic language like Yupik, many different morphemes (and what other languages would treat as independent words) are integrated into one single word. This single word then is a whole sentence. The results can be very opaque and impressive for the non-native speaker. A final word of caution seems in order before we turn to questions of linguistic change. So far, we have given the impression that there are ideal languages out there that clearly belong to one type or the other. This is not so. There are very few, if any, languages out there that clearly and only belong to the fusional, (poly) synthetic, isolating or agglutinating type. Most languages fit a type to a matter of degree – Swahili is not a purely agglutinating language, just as Mandarin Chinese is not purely isolating, and neither Latin nor German is purely fusional. For all these languages we find exceptions. So one could argue, for example, that the invariant pronoun ni ‘I’ in Swahili marks not only first person but also singular (the first person plural pronoun is wa). This would mean that ni has not one but at least two functions. We saw that Mandarin Chinese showed traces of inflections, and some words in Latin never change. So, in a nutshell, this is a question of degree, rather than of “yes” or “no”. Languages tend to belong to one type or another. And they seem to be in constant flux, as we will see in the next section. How do these different morphosyntactic language types relate to linguistic change? Schlegel, Schleicher, Humboldt and many others saw some evolutionary development behind these different types. They assumed that isolating languages (e.g. Chinese) gradually evolve into agglutinating languages and then into fusional languages (which were sometimes, erroneously, also seen as superior to the other types). The whole idea of a change in language typology was refined by the hypothesis that this kind of change could be cyclical, i.e. proceeding from isolating to agglutinating to fusional and back to isolating, starting all over again. This is visualized in Figure 5.3. As we will see more in Chapter 6, a striking theme running through the story of English is the unrelenting erosion of grammatical endings and the shift to a more isolating structure. Functions carried out by the -er and -est on adjectives are being taken over by more and most (e.g. more beautiful has evicted *beautifuller); possessive -s, past -ed and plural -s are also endangered. Some of the more recent

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Figure 5.3 From fusional to isolating to agglutinating and back again

Fusional

Isolating

Agglutinating

changes in Chinese appear to be shifting it in the direction of agglutination. Traditionally, the first person pronoun was wŏ, no matter whether plural or singular. But now we seem to find that men has turned from an individual word into a suffix, so that we see wŏ ‘I’ versus wŏmən ‘we’ (see examples (5.3) to (5.5)). Similarly, the formerly independent lə (the past tense marker) seems to have turned into a completed-action suffix: qù ‘go’ versus qùlə ‘went’. Scholars of Chinese have also noticed the acquisition of agglutinating features in the area of word formation. Banfi and Arcodia (2008: 202) give the example of the noun forming suffix -shēng/sheng from the abbreviation of a compound (e.g. īshēng ‘physician’; compare English -gate from Watergate). Similar changes in word formation and compounding lead us to believe that Chinese is gradually turning into an agglutinating language (though it’s still a long way before it looks like Turkish or Swahili). Dixon (1997) also proposes a cyclical development of language from fusional to isolating to agglutinative and back to fusional. In his discussion, Dixon uses the elegant metaphor of a clock to illustrate this. Fusional languages could be placed at 12:00, isolating languages at 04:00 and agglutinating languages at 08:00. Thus, it becomes immediately clear that when languages move between these different times (and types), they show a mix of different structures and rarely can be found in their pure forms. Dixon claims that Early Chinese, for example, could have been at 03:00 as it was mostly isolating but still showed some fusional elements. Classical Chinese would then be at 04:00 and Modern Chinese (mostly isolating but on its way to becoming agglutinating; see above) around 05:00. Classical Egyptian, Dixon says, is one language that has gone full circle: from fusional through isolating to agglutinating and back again in about 3,000 years. But how do languages move from one type to another? When they move from fusional to isolating, languages develop simpler morphology; i.e. they lose morphological (inflectional) information and develop independent and autonomous elements that now encapsulate the different grammatical pieces of information that were formerly coded in inflectional morphemes. During the move from isolating to agglutinating these independent elements are fused again, i.e. glued onto the lexical material in the sentence. Note, however, that each of the elements still carries its

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particular piece of information independently. When languages finally move from agglutinating to fusional, we see the merger of different and independent grammatical markers into one single complex inflectional affix. There are many reasons for these apparently dramatic changes: language contact, erosion through performance, and expressivity, to name but a few (we discussed many of these in Chapters 1 and 4). Nevertheless, it is important not to forget that changes such as these do not have to occur (some languages are stable over a long period of time) and that, if they do, this can be a very long-term process that can easily stretch out over several millennia. There are some counterexamples, such as English, which seems to have moved from fusional to almost isolating in less than 1,000 years. But this seems to be a rare case of rapid development when we look at the broad picture, and undoubtedly language contact had a role to play here (inflections, as you will see in Chapter 8, are generally the casualties in any contact situation).

5.4  WHY – EXPLAINING MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGES In this final section we need to briefly talk about the reasons for morphological change. Why do inflectional systems change? Why do languages shift in their typology? As we have just mentioned, one of the most important reasons, probably, does not lie in the morphology of language(s) but in phonology. The vast majority of languages code grammatical meaning in suffixes, i.e. in little markers that follow the stem, as we have seen above in English and Latin. (The World Atlas of Linguistic Structures Online list 406 languages that use predominantly suffixes in their inflectional morphology versus only 58 that are predominantly prefixing; Dryer 2013.) The problem is that the ending of a word is very susceptible to erosion, i.e. the loss of phonetic material (speakers often don’t pronounce the endings of words very clearly, as we have seen in Chapter 4). For example, in informal spoken German, the two words hast Du [hast du] ‘have you’ are often fused and pronounced as hasse [hasə]. In informal spoken English, we find expressions such as gonna and wanna. We saw in Chapter 4 how with time phonetic erosion eliminates a lot of wordfinal sounds, and this is where grammatical meaning is usually encoded. If a language goes down that path long enough, it might lose its means to signal syntactic functions and relationships through grammatical inflections. As a consequence, it makes a lot of sense to find another means to do the job, for example word order. And this is what we see when a language like Old English (strongly synthetic) turns into Modern English (which is a lot more isolating). We return to this topic in Chapter 6 when we focus more on syntactic change. A second reason for morphological change of the kind discussed here is also of a very general nature. This has to do with frequency and exposition. It’s a fairly well established fact in cognitive psychology that human cognition is very susceptible to how often it is exposed to something. To put this more simply: it makes a huge difference for your cognitive processing if you encounter something only once or a million times. This is also true and important for language. We can generally

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distinguish between high-frequency and low-frequency items. There is no clear definition for when some linguistic item is low or high frequency, but we can trust our intuitions in this matter. Just look at what could be the ten most frequent words in English:  1 the  2 be  3 to  4 of  5 and  6 a  7 in  8 that  9 have 10 I It is immediately clear that these are fairly short, monosyllabic words; that they come from the Germanic word stock; and that they are grammatical rather than lexical. Compare these to some words that we would classify as low-frequency items: galactophorous ‘bearing or carrying milk’, mulct ‘fine, penalty’ and truckle ‘a small barrel shaped cheese’. The likelihood that you have heard these words before (or will ever see them again) is comparatively small. But what does that have to do with morphology? On the one hand, high-frequency items are more often affected by phonological erosion, and we touched on this in Chapter 4. This is, of course, very plausible. Only think about your favourite teddy bear, the one you touched and played with several times a day – he’d be the one with the threadbare fur. Similarly, the words that you use very often will be more likely to erode phonetically. One nice example could be and. You can use the full form [ænd], but in many cases speakers opt for shorter forms, such as [æn], [ən] or even just [n] (as in Guns N’ Roses). But even though these high-frequency forms tend to erode a little bit faster, they are less likely to be affected by other factors, such as analogy or language contact. This is due to the fact that high-frequency items are more deeply entrenched in the mind (again, you are less likely to forget your favourite teddy bear or confuse it with another one). One example is the plural of child: children. This is clearly a high-frequency item, and yet there are practically no examples of regular childs in present-day English. So we can expect phonetic erosion of children but not analogical change and regularization. Low-frequency items, on the other hand, are usually not subject to erosion; i.e. they don’t wear out that much. Rather, these are more often affected by analogical changes! In Chapter 1 we asked you what the plural of fungus is. No doubt, this should be a low-frequency item for most speakers (unless you are a biologist specializing in mycology). This means that we don’t readily know the answer to questions like these and therefore tend to reach for some analogical pattern: one bus, two buses = one fungus, two funguses. The actual plural is fungi – but this is not very deeply entrenched for most of us. So even if we have heard that before, we may have forgotten about it. You

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could have built another analogy with words like syllabus-syllabi of course, but this would require that you know these words and use them at least occasionally. Note that this problem is not just about nouns. We could also ask for the past tense of verbs like thrive or plead (throve or thrived? pleaded or pled?), and again, if you don’t remember the past tense forms for these rather infrequent verbs, you look for analogical patterns. In sum, while high-frequency items are more affected by phonological erosion, they are less likely to be subject to analogical change. Low-frequency items are less likely to wear out but are rather subject to analogical change.

Tokens versus types What we have just discussed for high- and low-frequency items also applies to patterns, of course. In this case we need to distinguish types and tokens in language. Tokens are quite simply the actual number of items that you find in a given utterance. Types, on the other hand, only count each form once and so help us to identify the underlying patterns. Consider the famous example (5.8) below. (5.8) A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

(Gertrude Stein)

How many types and tokens do we find here? There are 11 words here, and we count all of them as tokens; so the number of tokens is simply 11. But how many types? How many different words? We see a (4 times), rose (4 times) and is (3 times). Each of them is counted only once, so that we find 3 different words, or types. Now consider example (5.9): (5.9) Johnny sings in the choir, Mary plays in a band, and their father draws excellent pictures. Again, there is the question of how many tokens and how many types we find in (5.9). If we just look at the words, the answer is very simple: 21 tokens and 20 types (only in occurs twice). But if we ask for morphological patterns, matters are somewhat different. How many verbs do we have in (5.9)? Three: sings, plays, draws. And how many different types of verb inflection? Only one, the famous, regular third person -s. But we encounter this type of inflectional morphology with three different tokens (sing-s, play-s, draw-s). This gives us a broad database and a good chance to recognize the pattern (or type). Now compare (5.10) and (5.11): (5.10)  Johnny plays the guitar, Mary plays the piano and their father plays tennis.

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Understanding Language Change (5.11)  Johnny sings in the choir, Mary can play the piano, and their father won a gold medal in figure skating.

At first sight, (5.10) and (5.11) seem very similar, but as databases they are actually very different. In (5.10) we have 13 tokens, in (5.11) we find 20. Look at the verbs again. In (5.10) we find plays, plays and plays: 3 tokens which are exactly the same. They also exemplify the pattern of third person -s, of course, but they are not as “impressive” as the 3 different tokens in (5.9). In (5.11) we find sings, can and won: 3 different tokens but also 3 different types! We have third person -s on sing-s, no visible inflection on can, and a past tense form (without -s or even -ed) in won: 3 different patterns, i.e. 3 different types make it very hard to discern a pattern here. Let’s try to connect these findings with our ideas on frequency effects, outlined above. The more often we see a pattern (a type instantiated with different tokens), the more likely we are to recognize this as a pattern, and the more likely we are to use it as a pattern when we build our words. In other words, a high type frequency (or better: many tokens with the same type) fosters analogical thinking. A high token frequency as such helps to establish the token but not necessarily the type, or pattern.

SUMMARY In this chapter we discussed some principles and mechanisms in changes in inflectional morphology. We considered reanalysis and actualization as major mechanisms of change when hearers encounter certain linguistic structures and try to decode them. The idea behind reanalysis is that grammars in the minds of speakers and hearers do not always match perfectly, and that “misunderstandings” in the widest sense can lead to change, which can then be seen only in actualization (when the outputs differ). We then considered analogy as a major force in language and cognition. After a discussion of the mechanism itself and of analogical thinking more generally, we elaborated on ways to constrain this idea. We followed Kuryłowicz with his idea that analogical change could be like rain: you never know when and where it will happen, but there are pipes, drains and gutters which can help you predict where the water might flow (though this is also not infallible, as we saw). After our critical discussion of Kuryłowicz’s six “laws” of analogy, we finally turned to language typology and how different languages can use different means to express the same ideas. We discussed the venerable distinction between isolating, agglutinating and fusional languages and how languages can move from one type to another. In the last section of this chapter we talked about some of the reasons for morphological change, and we particularly highlighted language economy as one of the factors, next to the equally important frequency effects.

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Generally, we can say that morphology seems to be one of the most complex and interesting problems in linguistics and linguistic change, not least because it plays such an important role for many languages and is intricately connected to almost every other linguistic level, from phonology through syntax and semantics to pragmatics.

FURTHER READING Dixon (1997) introduces you to some ideas on linguistic typology, typological developments and the large-scale developments we find not just in languages but also in language. Hock (1991), especially Chapters 9 and 10, is perhaps not an easy read for the beginner but provides a very interesting and comprehensive introduction to analogy, and a fair treatment of both Kuryłowicz and Mańczak. Bybee (2010) is an extremely smart, interesting and readable up-to-date introduction to frequency effects in language and language change – another must-read. Greenberg (1960) calculated the ratios of the number of morphemes over the number of words for different languages and is a useful reference for morphological typology; see also Lyons (1968) and Haspelmath and Sims (2010). We briefly mentioned grammaticalization here (i.e. the development of grammar out of lexical items) and take it up in more detail in the next chapter. If you’re interested in following it up now, we recommend Hopper and Traugott (2003), which was one of the first textbooks ever to discuss the omnipresent and (to this day) highly controversial process.

EXERCISES 1  Morphological typology Where on Dixon’s clock would you place Modern English? Give your reasons for your assessment. 2  Morphological change in English Trace the history of elder versus older in English and discuss your findings. (Hint: Check out the history of the words in the OED.) 3  Morphological change in German In Modern German, there is some confusion about the “proper” past tense of some verbs, while others show no such variability. This is illustrated in the following table. backen hacken weben leben preisen

buk? — wob? — pries?

backte? hackte webte? lebte preiste?

‘bake’ ‘chop’ ‘weave’ ‘live’ ‘praise’

132 weisen gleichen weichen fragen tragen

Understanding Language Change wies glich? wich frug? trug

— gleichte? — fragte? —

‘show/point’ ‘resemble’ ‘give way’ ‘ask’ ‘carry’

Can you guess what the older and the newer forms of the variable verbs are? Where does this variability come from, and does it follow our predictions? The irregular past tense frug seems to be pretty rare today (in contrast to glich). Can you speculate why this is the case? 4 Analogy Analogy can affect a number of different linguistic phenomena — phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and even orthographic patterns can be generalized in this way. With examples drawn from any part of the language, briefly discuss why it is that analogy is very often described as some kind of tidying up or pattern neatening process. 5  Research project: degrees of morphological complexity It is possible to calculate the degree to which a language is isolating by taking a sample of continuous text and working out the number of morphemes over the number of words – the lower the ratio, the more isolating the language. A ratio of 1.0 would be an ideal isolating language, and agglutinating and fusional languages would show a higher morpheme-to-word ratio. Modern English at 1.68 is much more isolating than Old English at 2.12 or Sanskrit at 2.59. The ratio for polysynthetic Greenlandic is a whopping 3.72 (Greenberg 1960 calculated these ratios; see also Haspelmath and Sims 2010: 5–6). Your task here is to take English and one other language and calculate how much morphology they have; in other words, the degree to which they are isolating. a Select comparable texts across the languages, and take around 300 words of running text. b Calculate the ratio of morphemes to words. c Compare your findings and describe how the two languages differ. Plot them along a continuum of isolation. d The figures are average ratios over running text, but languages are often relatively isolating with respect to certain classes of words and agglutinating/ inflecting with respect to other classes of words. Hypothesize how different your figures might be if you could calculate the ratios over all the words in the language, counting each word only once. e Can you describe the effects of style on this exercise? Would you expect different results if you had selected, say, a piece of more formal writing? f With examples, describe how English has characteristics of all three morphological types (isolating, agglutinating and inflecting). Give examples

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to suggest how it is losing its morphology and becoming more isolating. (Some of you might be brave enough to take a sample of Old English to calculate the ratio of isolation.)

NOTE 1 In fact, sistren was around in Middle English but was eventually ousted by sisters; there was no sign of it by the late 16th century.

6 Changes in sentence structure INTRODUCTION For a long time, historical linguistics concentrated mostly on phonological and morphological changes (as we discussed in Chapters 4 and 5). Historical grammar, more particularly syntax and syntactic theory, was a relatively neglected area. However, from the late 1960s onwards, together with the growth of influential general theories of syntax have also come studies in the historical principles and processes governing syntactic change. Indeed, research in this area has become extensive and now encompasses a wide range of very different frameworks, including Chomskyan linguistics and “universal grammar” (e.g. Lightfoot 1998; Crisma and Longobardi 2009), typology (Miller 2010; Ledgeway 2012), construction grammar (Traugott and Trousdale 2014; Barðdal et al. 2015) and grammaticalization theory (Fischer et  al. 2000; Hopper and Traugott 2003). This chapter focuses on two theoretical perspectives of grammatical change: namely the typological perspective and grammaticalization. Because morphology and syntax interact so closely, some of our discussion here draws on concepts already introduced in Chapter  5. Change often involves both these aspects of language, and the blended label “morphosyntax” is a useful cover term that captures this relationship. In fact, grammatical change can also include change at the phonological and semantic levels. Recall our account of typological shifts: fusional > isolating > agglutinating > fusional and so on. Here we see the interplay of morphosyntactic as well as phonological and even semantic processes. To move from fusional to isolating, languages develop simpler morphology; they lose morphological information (inflections). To move from isolating to agglutinating, such independent elements must now be fused again. And from agglutinating to fusional, we see the merging of independent grammatical markers into one single complex (inflectional) affix. All this happens via the sorts of reductive phonological processes we examined in Chapter 4, working together with semantics and morphosyntax. And we will see other examples of this interaction later in this chapter.

Doing historical syntax is hard It is worth pointing out that much of the early neglect of historical syntax had to do with the practical difficulties of carrying it out, and mostly this arose from the lack of adequate documentation of earlier stages of languages. As Labov once famously wrote, “[h]istorical linguistics may be characterized as the art of making the best use of bad data” (1982: 20). Even for well-recorded languages (and they are in the

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minority), empirical evidence can be lost or damaged, the scripts illegible and the orthography difficult. Such deficiencies are especially problematic for a grammatical investigation because we are faced with hundreds of different constructions and categories – the chances of accidental gaps and discontinuities in the data are very real. In contrast, sounds can be listed, and because of the finiteness of phonological inventories, descriptions can be gained of lost phonological systems sometimes on the basis of even a very limited corpus (though of course recovering spoken styles of the past from textual records comes with its own host of difficulties). Added to the problems is the difficulty of making grammaticality judgments without recourse to native speaker intuitions, especially when you come across constructions that are of low frequency. Consider the following actual example of a subordinate clause (the so-called linking relative) from modern conversational English. (6.1)  I’m taking them to Kangaroo Ground, which hopefully they won’t have too much culture shock over there. These linking relatives are rarely encountered in spoken corpora (collections of spoken and/or written texts), but researchers can evaluate sentences and grammatical constructions that occur rarely (or perhaps not at all) in their text collections by asking native speakers for grammaticality judgments, for example via surveys. Of course, where a construction occurs sporadically in early texts and then gains currency later on, we can assume that this represents an innovation in the language (and probably reflects the conservatism of the written language with respect to the spread of the change). However, the chance of an early “performance error” is also a very real one. At best we might assign it marginal grammatical status. Equally, it is impossible to say with any confidence that a certain construction type is ungrammatical (that it does not exist) just because it isn’t present in the data. We call this the lack of negative evidence. If you didn’t find a linking relative in your corpus of Modern English it would be a gap in the data. Here is another example. These days we can make an offer for something by using a very much reduced question. Instead of saying, “Would you like some coffee?,” we can just say, “Coffee?” with a rising intonation. When you check the major corpora of English (try it for yourself at http://corpus.byu.edu/corpora.asp), you will find that this mostly occurs with food, drinks and drugs. Does this mean that we can’t use a reduced question to offer anything else? Absolutely not. It is perfectly natural to say, “Handout?” when offering a handout, or “Towel?” when offering a towel. So if we were to claim, on the basis of our corpus findings, that this is not possible, we’d be very wrong. True, a structure that cannot be found in one billion words of text may well be ungrammatical – but it may well be quite grammatical too. So corpora can only give you positive evidence; with negative evidence (or a low degree of likelihood) we need to be much more careful. This is of course precisely the problem we have in historical linguistics. All the data we have is necessarily corpus data. We can’t go back in time and ask native

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speakers if some structure is acceptable or not. Even worse, most historical corpora are fairly small and limited in scope. While modern corpora of English, for example, easily go beyond half a billion words, many historical corpora hover around one to two million words of text. So it becomes even more difficult to say what sentence structures could have been ungrammatical at a certain point in time. Again, we have to rely on statistical likelihood, and because we need so much more data to do historical grammar, there is always a very real chance of gaps. Another wrinkle is that grammatical structures are governed by both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, including the vagaries of style. Think of the array of syntactic patterns you might expect in different text types such as personal letters, biblical sermons, drama, legal documents and so on. So to gain an accurate picture of the relative chronology of any changes, investigations of grammar ideally draw on text material that is as homogeneous as possible over the time span selected (comparable genres, authors and even thematic material). Stylistic matters do not pose the same problems for phonology. As Romaine (1982) discusses, phonemes are largely independent of factors like style. The occurrence of phonemes is governed by language alone, so that a relatively small sample, regardless of stylistic considerations, will yield typical results for any phonemic investigation. Compare the occurrence of word order patterns, which is governed by both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors like style (i.e. involving positive choice). The fact is, the more language conditioned a feature is (independent of extra-linguistic factors such as stylistic factors), the more random its frequency is likely to be and therefore the smaller the sample needed. A study of the history of word order patterns will require a much larger sample than the historical study of any sound system. Unfortunately, for most languages this is unattainable, and the conclusions we draw regarding their early syntax are all the more uncertain for it. Gothic provides the earliest continuous text in a Germanic language and offers a good illustration of this. The surviving evidence of Gothic (thanks to Wulfila the Visigoth) exists in fragments of a Bible translation from the 4th century. From this, much definitive work has been carried out on the phonological system of the language, but little can be said about its grammatical system, in particular its syntax – all the more because the text is a close translation of the Greek. When a new manuscript page was discovered on 23 April 1971, it sent waves of excitement through the world of historical linguistics. But while it shed additional light on the inflectional morphology and provided some new lexical items, it could add nothing to the knowledge of Gothic syntax.

Standardization When languages change this creates fuzziness – a murky time when the new expressions and constructions fall into a kind of linguistic no man’s land. They’re not clearly “misuse” but for some speakers not yet “use” either. If asked, many native speakers of Modern English would find linking relative

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clauses peculiar, and they probably would reject sentences like (6.1). The difficulties are compounded because of standardization – a process that forces languages into tidy classificatory systems with clear boundaries as to what is and is not acceptable. And this standardization process causes additional difficulties for historical linguists. Imagine you’re conducting a long-term study of English syntax from Old English to modern times. You would try to minimize the interference of stylistic considerations by choosing texts with little stylization and literary ambition, and keeping the texts as uniform as possible over the selected time span. These texts would show some striking changes over this period. One is the shift from flexible word order to grammatically controlled SubjectVerb-Object word order (which we discuss below), and another is the marked increase in syntactic complexity (lots of subordinate clauses). But how can you be sure that these changes aren’t simply the symptom of an emerging autonomous prose style; in other words, the fall-out of the transition from the organizational principles of unplanned discourse (characteristic of speech) to the more elaborated code typical of planned discourse (characteristic of writing)? Writing conventions (even ones that are just emerging) will always restrict what we can observe. In the case of English, the emergence of the standard language and the effects of a growing literary tradition, together with increasing literacy, have meant that written texts that once would have provided clues about early forms of speech are no longer as revealing. In short, there is always greater uncertainty about conclusions made for syntax than for phonology or morphology. No finite corpus of utterances, no matter how large, will provide material for a full description of the syntax of a language at some earlier stage of its development.

6.1  CHANGE IN WORD ORDER Shifts in the ordering of sentence constituents (or what is usually referred to as word order change) offer an example of a systematic and far-reaching type of change that influences the behaviour of whole classes of words and affects the fundamental syntactic organization of a language. The history of English is a good illustration of this kind of significant transformation. Old English showed considerable flexibility in the ordering of its basic constituents. In fact, all logically possible arrangements of subjects, verbs, objects and other trappings appeared during that time. But this doesn’t mean that word order was free. Old English represents a time of expressive word order, where the placement of elements was controlled by information structure and other contextual considerations (e.g. given versus new information, what the speaker considers important,

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what s/he wants to emphasize and what s/he assumes the audience already knows). By contrast, English today demonstrates what can be termed grammatical word order. As described in Chapter 5, the fixed ordering of items functions syntactically to indicate clause types and the grammatical relations within them (such as subject and object); in a sentence like the queen loved the king, it is the constituent ordering that tells us who is the lover and who is the lovee. The following sentences show the possible word order variation documented for Anglo-Saxon times. To make things straightforward, we have considered only the ordering of the subject (=S), the main verb (=V) and everything else (=X), and we have highlighted the verb strings in each example. All examples are taken from a collection of 10th century Old English leechdoms ‘medicines’, covering everything from hangover cures and advice for the removal of unwanted hair to remedies against monstrous nocturnal visitors and the bites of mad dogs.1 Such medical and medico-magical texts are useful for an investigation of syntax. Being technical prose with little in the way of literary ambition, they provide some of our best evidence of a living, breathing speech community at that time. Main clauses showed predominantly verb-second order (i.e. SVX and XVS). (6.2) and he and he.NOM ‘He coughs up infected blood’

ut out

bræcƥ breaks

wurmsig purulent.ACC

bloð blood.ACC

(6.3) ƥanne wite ƥu then know you.NOM ‘Then you know for certain’

gewyslice certainly

Although Modern English word order is fixed SVX order, there are relics of earlier XVS (as in 6.3). Today, subject-verb inversion has a lively (even mock dramatic) effect, which speakers and writers still love to exploit. Here’s an actual example: (6.4)  Out will come beef dusted with Japanese pepper, fingers of salmon with dill sauce and all that rocket in olive oil. (Grand Bouffe, Good Weekend Age Magazine 16/2/96) A number of other minor orders appeared in Old English; these include verbthird (XSV), verb-initial (VSX) (which was a more expressive order often found in vivid prose) and verb-final or near-to-verb-final order (SXV(X)). (6.5) ƥone mon ƥu man.ACC you.NOM that.ACC ‘That man you might cure completely’

meaht might

gelacnian cure

æltæwlice completely

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(6.6) gewitaƥ he sona soon go they NOM ‘They (= the warts) will soon disappear’

aweg away

ƥus ƥu thus you.NOM ‘Thus you will understand it’

scealt shall

(6.7) hit it.ACC

agitan understand

(6.8) yfelum deaƥe he death.DAT he.NOM evil.DAT ‘He shall end his life by an evil death’

his his.ACC

lif life.ACC

geændaƥ ends

Basically, verb-final order had a linking function and was common in coordinated clauses in sequence (recall, the symbol 7 stands for ‘and’; it was one of the Tironian nota ‘signs’, from the shorthand conventions developed by Cicero’s scribe Marcus Tiro). (6.9) nan

þing

forswoligon

ne

mæg

and he.NOM easily no ‘[. . .] and he is not able to swallow anything easily’

thing

swallow

NEG

may

[. . .]

7

he

eaþelic

Subordinate clauses showed dominant verb-final (SXV) or near-to-verb-final order. The order here is the consequence of the same cohesive function as in linked main clauses (as in 6.9); in other words, verb-final signalled clauses that were bound contextually to other clauses. (6.10) Gif men his wamb his.NOM belly.NOM if person.DAT ‘If a person’s belly [lit. ‘to a person his belly’] is sore [. . .]’

sar sore

sy be

[. . .]

It was also possible to find subordinate clauses with something closer to the modern ordering of the subject and the main verb in sequence (SVX). (6.11) Gif him if him.DAT ‘If he [lit. ‘him’] is elf possessed [. . .]’

biƥ be

ælfsogaƥa elfsucked

[. . .]

As an interesting aside, the subject in both (6.10) and (6.11) shows dative marking, so not the expected marking of subjects (which was nominative). In Old

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English you could indicate that entities weren’t wilfully involved in an event by placing them in the dative case, instead of the expected nominative case. Relics of this construction are examples like me thinks. Old English differed from Modern English also with respect to the ordering within complex verb units; in other words, where there was a main verb and one or more non-finite verb forms. In the following example, you can see that the main verb, meaht, is in second position, and the rest of the verb unit, gebetan, comes later in the clause. This construction is sometimes called the “verbal brace” because parts of the verb form a kind of brace or bracket around the other clause constituents: (6.12) ne meaht hwaeƥere not might however ‘Yet [you] cannot cure [it] completely’

aeltaewlice completely

gelacnian cure

All of these verb-final features of Old English are the fall-out of earlier times when verb-final ordering was more widespread. Evidence from early Germanic dialects strongly suggests that the neutral, unmarked order for both main and subordinate clauses in the parent language, Proto-Germanic, was verb-final. Verb-final ordering has left only a handful of remnants in Modern English. There are some fixed expressions such as With this ring I thee wed, as well as compounds like typeset, bloodshed, leasehold, roll call and woodcut that show fossilized OV order (with someone setting the type, shedding blood and so on; we’ve bolded what would have been the verb here); by comparison, compounds such as pickpocket and pastime with VO order are much less usual. Clearly English has undergone a major shift in word order. As the modern translations here show, word order is now rigidly SVX. So why abandon this earlier flexibility in favour of a system of grammatically rigid ordering? As touched on briefly in Chapter 5, this change has traditionally been attributed to the loss of morphological markers (the case system) – something is obviously going to have to replace a collapsing inflectional system if basic grammatical functions are to be signalled reliably, and fixed word order is one such remedy. But it is not a straightforward matter of one system disappearing and then the other stepping in to fill its shoes. A more likely scenario is this: the gradual erosion of morphological markings (through phonological processes) begins to take place, creating a need for some form of grammatical change, if the language is to remain an effective vehicle of communication. Increasing reliance on word order then renders these endings redundant, and this hastens their demise. So intricately linked are the processes that it probably doesn’t make much sense arguing for cause or symptom here. But we emphasize, as we have on other occasions, that language change is never onedimensional, and the explanation for it isn’t either. There are undoubtedly many different interlocking factors involved here, which would also account for the different chronologies we find in the Germanic languages. Behind this shift to SVX word order would have been a network of different intersecting pressures: psychological,

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physiological, systemic, social, political, external (contact and borrowing) and so on. The complexity of changes of this nature is something we return to in Chapter 10.

6.1.1  Grammatical change is gradual For a long time, scholars believed that grammar is a black and white, binary matter. Either some change took place, or it didn’t. But we find more and more evidence that grammatical change can also be gradual, i.e. that it can start with a few words and constructions, then gain momentum, so that more words and constructions are affected, until it runs out of steam. There are close linguistic relatives of English that preserve some of the earlier verb-final tendencies of Proto-Germanic. Modern Dutch and German, for example, have SVO (verb-second) word order, but conservative SOV order remains in these languages as a marker of subordinate clauses. Here’s an example from Dutch: (6.13) a Hij he

zegt say

dat that

hij he

een a

auto car

koopt buys

‘He says that he buys a car’

Main clauses have also retained the “verbal brace” – only finite verbs have moved to second position in the clause, while all non-finite verbs remain in final (or nearto-final) position, forming a kind of bracket or brace around all other constituents (shown here by the bolding): b

Ik heb I have ‘I have bought a car’

een a

auto car

gekocht bought

We would expect verb placement to eventually fall in line and SVO order to generalize to all clause types. In both these modern languages, certain material, principally adverbials (or what might be termed “afterthought material”), can appear after the verb in subordinate clauses, and to the right of the end brace in main clauses, and we give examples of this in Chapter 8. From what we know about the nature of syntactic change, these kinds of violations of verb-final order are like the “thin end of the wedge”, undermining and eventually destroying the OV remnants in these languages. This is what Naro and Lemle once referred to as “sneaky diffusion”. As they nicely describe it: Syntactic change tends to sneak through a language, manifesting itself most frequently under those circumstances in which it is least salient or noticeable. This sneaky diffusion occurs along several distinct dimensions simultaneously until eventually the whole language is entrapped. (1976: 237)

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In Chapter 7 we see examples of this kind of “sneaky diffusion” in phonological change – a handful of words are affected at first (usually the frequent ones), and the change then gathers momentum before it peters out. Grammatical changes are subject to the same gradual dispersal.

“Sneaky diffusion” in English The erosion of grammatical endings is a striking theme running through the story of English. Of the rich inflectional system of Old English, there remains only a tiny group of eight survivors. Two are the -er and -est endings that create the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives. Typical adjectives are gradable, which means they take part in the three-term system – something is tasty, tastier or tastiest. However, not all adjectives can take these endings, and the group that does is becoming smaller. Phrases with more and most such as more tasty and most tasty are pushing out forms like tastier and tastiest. Rather than a clean takeover, however, we find the usual variability associated with language change. But it is not random. Typically, adjectives of one syllable retain the endings (e.g. bigger/biggest). Adjectives of three or more syllables have lost the fight completely and require more and most (*beautifuller and *beautifullest sound awful). Adjectives of two syllables are in flux – some take the endings, some don’t, and some go both ways, and not all speakers agree (compare simpler/simplest versus more simple/most simple). Adjectives with -ly (e.g. costly) are at the forefront of the change, whereas adjectives with -y (e.g. tasty) are lagging. But there is a lot of variation (see Bauer 1994: Chapter 3; Peters 2000). Shakespeare’s horrider and certainer sound odd to us now. But what about wickeder versus more wicked, or quieter versus more quiet – they seem somewhere in between. In Shakespeare’s time double constructions were commonplace – forms like more larger and most unkindest where speakers had a bob each way. And though they are still heard today, by the end of the 17th century they had become linguistic outlaws; perceived as tautological, they were condemned by the rules being laid down for the standard language. It is conceivable all inflections will disappear with time, replaced by freestanding (or analytic) structures (such as more and most here). We’ve seen that languages do change typology according to a kind of cycle. Fusional languages become less fusional and tend towards a more isolating structure; isolating languages tend to move towards agglutinating languages, which in turn tend to move towards the fusional type. However, it’s difficult to know for sure what will happen. We can take note of what we imagine to be changes underway in the language, but we can never be certain they’ll run their full course. Predicting linguistic change can be one of the trickiest (most tricky?) tasks confronting historical linguists.

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6.2  TYPOLOGY AND WORD ORDER CHANGE We’ve already seen that because all languages of the world show a range of similarities and differences in their structure, it is possible to set up language types, that is, groups of languages classified according to the features which they have in common and which in turn differentiate them from other languages. These are typological classifications, and they have been enormously important for historical linguists because they help to define parameters for potential change. Chapter 5 looked at groupings based on morphological structure (isolating, agglutinating, fusional). Here we consider another central typological classification built on the basic (or unmarked) ordering of the major constituents S(ubject), V(erb) and O(bject). Of all the six mathematically possible word order combinations (SOV, SVO, VOS, VSO, OVS and OSV), the majority of languages fall into one of three: SVO, SOV or VSO. Of these, SVO and SOV are the most frequent, and VSO the least frequent. The three other logically possible orders, VOS, OSV and OVS, are unusual – it is rare to find the object preceding the subject. A factor here is likely to be the greater saliency of the subject as the topic of a sentence, which places it more naturally in initial position (it’s more important and interesting to know WHO did WHAT to WHOM than WHOM was something done to by somebody . . .). This would also explain the strong tendency towards SVO as an alternative order in VSO languages. Thanks to the World Atlas of Language Structures Online (Dryer 2013), we can give you an idea of the relative frequency of these six orders here. The figures provided in Table 6.1 are based on declarative main clauses in which both the subject and object are nouns (not pronouns), as in The boy read the book. Typological classifications may or may not coincide with genetic classifications that are based on shared inherited features (see Chapter 9). Languages belonging to one genetic family can show vastly different word order typologies. Welsh, for example, is a distant relative of English, but true to its Celtic origins has a basic word order pattern of VSO. German and English are close relatives, but we’ve just seen that they differ typologically. German has split word order: SVO in main clauses and SOV in subordinate clauses. Russian is also related to English, but it has flexible word order – while SVO Table 6.1 World Atlas of Language Structures Online frequencies for Subject, Object and Verb

Total:

Order of Subject, Object and Verb

Representation

Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) Verb-Object-Subject (VOS) Object-Verb-Subject (OVS) Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) Lacking a dominant word order

565 488 95 25 11 4 189 1,377

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is more usual, all possible permutations of S, V and O are grammatical. On the other hand, we can find typological homogeneity between genetically diverse languages. English shares basic SVO ordering with a number of genetically related languages like Norwegian, French and Greek, but also many unrelated languages like Malay, Thai and Mali. This is something we come back to in greater detail in Chapter 9. Language change is what produces these mismatches between typological classifications and genetic classifications. A language’s basic type is just as prone to the process of change as any other aspect of the language (and a good illustration is the fact that the three dominant patterns, SVO, SOV and VSO, are all represented in the languages that have descended from Indo-European). A decline of SOV order in the world’s languages is due to the fact that many languages of Continental Europe and Africa have undergone the same shift from SOV to SVO type (see, for example, Hyman 1975 for Niger-Congo). Hence, typological similarities between genetically unrelated languages can be because the languages have moved in the same direction. Such changes can be the result of “forced change” (or language change through contact; see Chapter 8). A striking example of this is the shift in Amharic from basic VO to OV type as a result of contact with Cushitic. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to distinguish between this type of change and a case of parallel but independently motivated change. For example, what role did contact with SVO French play in the increasing VO character of early English? Perhaps all we can say is that contact with French simply accelerated changes that were already well underway.

6.2.1  The contribution of Joseph Greenberg and others It was during the 1960s that the American linguist Joseph Greenberg wrote his famous essay “Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements” (1963). This approach, and those it inspired, used typology and typological universals to account for existing syntactic patterns and their historical development. Greenberg examined selected grammatical features (for the most part word order patterns) from 30 languages of the world. He divided these into the three basic types mentioned earlier – SVO, SOV and VSO. Data in his research showed correlations between certain word order patterns and other grammatical properties. From his findings, he listed 45 implicational universals of the type – “If a language A has feature F1, then (with more than chance frequency) it also has feature F2.” For example, his Universals 3 and 4 read: Universal 3:  Languages with dominant VSO order are always prepositional. Universal 4: With overwhelmingly greater than chance frequency, languages with normal SOV order are postpositional. Implicational statements of this sort seek to establish constant relationships between different grammatical features of language. They represent near-universals, tendencies based on those properties which emerge from the data as being the statistically predominant ones, and against which patterns of change may be studied.

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After Greenberg’s work appeared, there were a number of proposals that sought to account for these word order correlations by appealing to the existence of a basic ordering of elements to which all languages naturally conform. The work of two linguists in particular exemplifies this position, namely Winfred P. Lehmann and Theo Vennemann. Both linguists reformulated Greenberg’s original classification into only two types: OV and VO. On the basis of his findings, they made one overall generalization that correlated the position of all sentential elements to the relative ordering of the verb and its direct object. Those languages conforming to either OV or VO type in their word order patterns were therefore described as typologically “consistent” (or “harmonious”) and those that did not as typologically “inconsistent”. A  consistent VO language, for example, would show patterns in which the items in the A column in Table 6.2 precede those in the B column (consistent OV languages would naturally show the reverse of these patterns). According to this schema, then, English is an inconsistent VO language by showing some noun phrase patterns harmonious with OV type (except for relative clauses and prepositional genitives that follow their head nouns and therefore conform). Modern Romance languages like French and Italian are more consistently VO by placing most modifiers after the noun: French un livre vert (lit. ‘a book green’) versus English a green book (note that there is some variation in the Romance languages, as we go on to discuss). Both Vennemann and Lehmann offered structural principles (“the principle of natural serialization” and “the structural principle of language”, respectively) to account for the correlations they drew from Greenberg’s data. Roughly, these principles work this way: constituents in the A and B lists have the same status as, respectively, heads and modifiers (or dependents) of traditional and more recent linguistic theory (for example, in the cross-categories central to X-bar theory). What we have here, then, is a level of “pure type”. Pure OV and VO languages represent a consistent implementation of the modifier-head relationship. This then

Table 6.2 Word order correlations (based on Vennemann 1974 and Lehmann 1973) A

B

Verb auxiliary modal verb preposition noun noun noun noun noun comparative adjective

Object main verb main verb adverb noun demonstrative genitive numeral relative clause descriptive adjective standard of comparison

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has historical application – the pressure to conform to this basic ordering is viewed as strong enough to initiate change. Accordingly, structural changes are explained as being goal driven (teleological). The ordering relationship between the syntactic patterns in both the verb phrase and the noun phrase and the fact that they exhibit parallel developments are therefore explained by both linguists in terms of direct analogy; that is, the modifier stands in precisely the same relationship to its noun as the complement or object stands to the main verb (Modifier : Noun :: Object : Verb). As we go on to discuss, some linguists now give a processing explanation for the harmony – the reduced cognitive load that comes with consistent ordering. According to both linguists, only a change in verb position (brought about through language contact, for example, or the breakdown of a case system) could trigger a typological shift. Their account allowed for a considerable delay between this initial change and later “harmonic” changes in other phrase types, to account for inconsistent languages like English. The shift in English from OV to VO is complete, but the noun phrase ordering remains principally that of Modifier-Noun. The appearance of a prepositional possessive with Noun-Genitive order (e.g. cover of the book) that is pushing out the older inflectional possessive (e.g. the book’s cover) is therefore a predictable move towards greater typological harmony. Similar is the development of NounAdjective ordering in French – the handful of aberrant common usage (so highly visible) adjectives (like grand ‘large’ and petit ‘small’) that usually appear before the noun can be explained as remnants of the OV type that characterized early Romance. More recently, researchers have been greatly developing both the field of typological universals and their dynamic application. While these developments take us way beyond the scope of this book, we should say something briefly about later attempts to refine and further clarify the original implicational universals and also find a rationale for them. Early problems were not so much with the typological approach itself, but rather with the misuse of it. Greenberg’s initial statements were extremely cautious, based only on the data from his sample of 30 languages. For example, he found only one verb phrase pattern implicationally related to a noun phrase pattern, namely the correlation between VSO order and Noun-Adjective order. Subsequent research (e.g. Dryer 2011) has confirmed the absence of any connection between the order of object and verb and the order of adjective and noun. While there does exist a strong correlation between Verb-Object order and adpositions (prepositions versus postpositions), there is nothing to justify the move to correlate the ordering of all sentence constituents to the head-modifier ordering as just described. Moreover, Greenberg’s initial statements were largely unidirectional; e.g. OV order is a good predictor of a case system (Greenberg’s Universal 41), but a case system doesn’t predict OV order, nor does the lack of a case system imply VO order. There is no justification to reformulate all correlations as bidirectional (as in Table 6.2). Finally, there is no evidence to suggest that only verbs can motivate change. Many languages show changes in the noun phrase to have occurred prior to any changes in the verb phrase; for example, Germanic shifted to prepositions while it still had OV syntax, as did Latin (see Lockwood 1968: Chapter 7 on the development of prepositions in German; Miller 1975 on the shift from post- to prepositions in Latin).

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Problematic cases Word order typologies assume the viability of categories like subject, verb, object, noun and adjective as basic linguistic entities of all languages. They also assume the viability of basic word ordering in natural language. Such basic orders do not exclude the possibility of other word orders. English speakers can deviate from basic SVO order if they want to highlight a particular part of the message; for example, fronting elements is a common strategy for emphasis, as in Salted licorice I adore! (OSV). Such variation on basic ordering relates to factors to do with information flow (the communicative function of sentences) and affects more particularly the positioning of the verb and its arguments and not the ordering within other phrasal categories like noun phrases and prepositional phrases. But sometimes it’s not easy to decide on what is basic. We’ve seen that the English possessive construction allows two possible orders: Noun-Genitive and Genitive-Noun (the cover of the book versus the book’s cover). Which of the two is more basic? True, we can use frequency, in terms of both language use and grammar; markedness (for instance, a marked construction may have a specific meaning associated with it); and also historical considerations to help decide the question of basicness. But, even so, there are times when these criteria conflict, and consequently no order emerges as being truly basic. Dryer (1997) also points out that the six-way word order typology (SVO, SOV etc.) represents a clause type that is really rather rare in ordinary spoken language, and he suggests that a more useful typology would be one based on the relative position of the object and verb (OV or VO) and of the subject and verb (SV or VS). This would give a four-way classification: OV/VS, OV/ SV, VO/VS and VO/SV. But there are also many languages that just don’t seem to fit into this schema at all – those with flexible or free word order, for example. For most Australian languages (such as Yulparija and Dyirbal), it is theoretically possible for words (even words belonging to the same notional phrase) to appear in any order with no grammatical significance. While an analysis of discourse may reveal word order preferences based on thematic organization (considerations of topic and focus, for example), it is still not possible in these languages to distinguish a basic ordering. Just as problematic are those languages whose functional categories S and O don’t work in the same way as in other languages; for example, ergative languages where the subject of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb. There are also those that show ellipsis of these categories; for example, many languages, from diverse families, don’t require explicit subjects. Work is now being done to accommodate these sorts of differences (see, for example, Croft 2001).

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Greenberg’s initial sample of 30 languages was small and also geographically and genetically biased. Later research has been doing much to expand the sample; the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a massive database of structural properties of language, including different word order features and the correlations among these features. Linguists such as Hawkins (2002, 2004) and Dryer (1992, 2011) have also attempted a more explanatory account of these universals, examining them from a performance perspective. The claim is that dominant word orders and harmony arise from innate processing mechanisms, the forces involved in the production and comprehension of language. Finally, since an important trigger for languages to change their word order is contact with other languages, much work has been done of late to understand the nature of contact induced change (see Chapter 8), and therefore also the forces that are at work to shift a consistent language into an inconsistent state. We have spent some time on this approach because it was a real turning point in the study of diachronic syntax. Its synchronic framework in the form of these word order universals offered linguists a means of linking together a number of changes, at the same time giving them meaning by showing them to be part of some overall long-term trend, that is, towards consistency of type. In short, it allowed a theory of syntactic change to emerge. There is no doubt that certain word order patterns “go together”, and languages do seem to motivate changes favouring these patterns – even the greatest critics of the approach don’t dispute this. However, the intersecting pressures that work to drive languages in particular directions (psychological, physiological, linguistic, social and cultural) operate against regular and utterly predictable changes, and these so-called universals will only ever be statements of likelihood or tendency, holding X% of the time. Moreover, there will always be exceptional cases precisely because languages find themselves in the middle of a shift. As many linguists have said to their students, “shift happens”. So schemas for word order changes aren’t following prescribed courses determined by absolute universals or rigid “laws”, but there are preferred pathways of change. Typological universals point to these preferred pathways, and they give us a good idea of what constitutes likely and unlikely changes. Think again of Kuryłowicz’s “gutters of change” (discussed in Chapter 5).

6.3  CREATING GRAMMAR Most speakers are very aware of change happening to the vocabulary of their language, and many also notice changes to pronunciation. However, few realize that languages are also constantly renewing their grammar. So where do grammatical elements come from? Germanic languages like English and German developed their own class of verbs indicating past tense with some sort of dental suffix (English played and German spielte) – where did this suffix come from? And what about other tense and aspect markers, articles, conjunctions, pronouns and so on? Where we know the history of grammatical bits and pieces, they have grown out of ordinary words – everyday lexical items (those concrete items that relate

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to different aspects of human experience). In the case of English -ed and German -te, these suffixes emerged from a verb meaning something like ‘do’. So played was originally akin to play + did. The creation of grammar is something called grammaticalization, and linguists studying it examine the lexical sources that give rise to grammatical forms and constructions, as well as the changes that take place as the items become more grammatical. And, as we will be seeing, these changes involve a parcel of closely synchronized processes happening at the phonological, semantic and grammatical levels. There are two major mechanisms involved in grammaticalization – reanalysis in the first place and extension (or analogy) in the second place. As you saw in Chapters 2 and 5, both are important concepts in the explanation of lexical and morphological change. In this chapter our focus is on syntax, but the changes often involve alterations to word structure as well. It isn’t easy (or useful) to separate morphology and syntax, especially when it comes to the creation of grammar. Recall that reanalysis is the process whereby a form comes to be analysed in a different way. It involves the development of new structures out of old structures and can have far-reaching implications for the grammar of a language – it can even be the trigger for the rise of a new grammatical category. Colloquial French offers a clear illustration of the process at work. And you’ll see now just how closely morphology and syntax act together. Similar to English, French generally forms many questions by reversing the pronoun subject and the verb. The following is an example: (6.14) Statement: Question:

Il vient. ‘He is coming’ [usually [ivjɛ̃]] Vient il? ‘Is he coming?’ [usually [vjɛt̃ i]]

A basic rule of French pronunciation is that final consonants are deleted unless there is a following vowel. So, as in this example, sounds suggested by the spelling are silent – the subject pronoun il ‘he/it’ is phonetically reduced to [i], and the -t verb ending of vient is unpronounced in the statement [ivjɛ]̃ ‘He is coming’. However, when the word order is reversed for a question, the rules of French pronunciation (liaison) result in the phonetic re-appearance of the [t] in [vjɛt̃ i] ‘Is he coming?’. It seems that in the minds of many French speakers, this stream of sound [vjɛt̃ i] has been reanalysed, and the sequence -ti- has been interpreted as a marker indicating that a question is being asked (compare the English speaker who misinterprets ice cream as I scream). (6.15)

Je I ‘Did I know?’

savais knew

ti? question particle

Via reanalysis, we have here the creation of a totally new grammatical marker. Its immediate ancestor is a -t ending of certain verbs and i (the reduced form of the

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third person pronoun) – there’s been a boundary shift, and these two forms have squished together to form the new marker for yes-no questions (for all persons). It will be interesting to watch the progress of this question marker (as yet it remains regional and has made no inroads into the standard language). Only reanalysis can lead to the creation of new grammatical structures. Yet analogy is also hard at work in changes in this part of the language. It involves the generalization of types of linguistic structure. As we saw in Chapter 5, it essentially takes a new pattern (like the question particle ti) and spreads it around. Moreover, being overt, analogy provides the evidence, for both speakers and linguists, that a change has taken place (as in the reanalysis example we’ve just seen for French). The development of a new infinitive clause marker in Pennsylvania German offers a paradigm example of these dual forces of reanalysis and analogy at work. As the following reconstructed chain of events shows, many different structural aspects can be affected in the process – here constituency, hierarchical structure and category membership. Consider the following example (6.16): (6.16) [Es is ungweenlich [fer de It is unusual for the ‘It’s unusual for John to read difficult books’

John]] John

[harti hard

Bicher books

zu to

lese] read

The original clause boundary would have occurred after the fer phrase with fer de John ‘for (the) John’ forming a prepositional phrase that was part of the main clause, and the complement clause signalled by the infinitival marker zu. The close logical relationship existing here between the complement of the preposition and semantic subject of lese ‘read’, John, comes to be expressed by reanalysing fer as a conjunction (or complementizer) heading a new subordinate clause. The boundary shifts, and the prepositional complement is reanalysed as the subject of the infinitive. Once this stage has been reached, the fer-clause can be moved to appear in sentence initial position as in (6.16’). (6.16’)

Fer de John harti Bicher zu lese is ungweenlich ‘For John to read difficult books is unusual’

As the prepositional force of fer weakens and it expands into more and more constructions, it shifts from the status of a prepositional-like element to a complementizerlike element, eventually taking over from zu. With further generalization, the fer-clause can extend to appear after adjectives, nouns and verbs that would not otherwise take the preposition fer. The (understood) subject of the infinitive verb is no longer restricted to an original prepositional complement. (6.17)

Ich hab net’s haez I have not.the heart ‘I haven’t the heart to say he shouldn’t’

fer for

saage say

er he

sol should

net not

Changes in sentence structure (6.18)

Ich bin ledig I am tired ‘I am tired of waiting so long’

fer for

so so

lang long

151 waarte wait

It is precisely this same development that has taken place to give rise to the English complementizer construction for . . . to, as well as the German infinitival construction um . . . zu ‘in order to’. In both these cases the prepositions (for and um ‘around’) + NP originally belonged to the main clause but were later reanalysed as part of the infinitival construction. Consider the following Middle English example from Chaucer (from Harris and Campbell 1995: 62): (6.19)

[It is bet for me] [to sleen my self than ben defouled thus] ‘It is better for me to slay myself than to be violated thus’

The pronoun me was syntactically part of the constituent for me, but at the same time it functioned as the logical subject of the infinitive to sleen ‘to slay’. With time the boundary shifted, and the prepositional complement was reanalysed as the subject of the infinitive. So it’s a boundary shift, such as we saw with the French and Pennsylvania German examples (and the phonetic equivalent would be the change from mine Ed > Ned; an ekename > a nickname, as described in Chapter  5). The reanalysis is now evident in the Modern English version, where the whole clause can be fronted: (6.19’) [For me to slay myself] [is better than to be violated thus]

6.3.1  Case study – the evolution of not in English A good example to illustrate grammaticalization involves developments that have taken place to produce the English negator not, and its journey from Old English ne-a-wiht ‘not-ever-anything’. This is a change that involves both the morphology of the negator and also its placement syntactically. In fact, as is typical of these changes that give rise to new constructions, there is a parcel of closely interrelated processes occurring at the grammatical, semantic and phonological levels. Old English negated by placing a negative particle ne before the finite verb, but often this was supported by one or more additional negative words, and we saw this in the earlier example (6.9), repeated here. (6.9)

[. . .]

7

he

eaþelic

nan

and he.NOM easily no ‘[. . .] and he is not able to swallow anything easily’

þing

forswoligon

mæg

thing

swallow

may

By Middle English multiple negation was the norm, with two (and often more) negators present.

152 (6.20)

Understanding Language Change þere nys noþynge þat so sone there not-is nothing that so soon þe hed as wyne the head as wine ‘There’s nothing that damages the head as quickly as wine’

smyteþ smites

with with

grevaunce grievance

During this period, original ne-a-wiht ‘not-ever-anything’ became the favoured reinforcer, and together with preverbal ne emerged as the normal expression of negation. This is sometimes called “embracing negation” because these two negators snugly wrapped themselves around the verb: hyt ne swellyþ noght ‘it not swells not’. Eventually preverbal ne disappeared, and single postverbal noght/not established itself as the preferred negator (of course multiple negation remains robust in nonstandard varieties today: I don’t know nothing). (6.21)

þe rede cale suffers the red kale suffers ‘The red kale doesn’t allow the wound to heal’

noght not

þe the

wonde wound

hele to-heal

If we jump to the 16th century things are looking more familiar. (6.22) I would not that you should observe a certaine houre, either for dinners or suppers. One and the same order of diet doth not promiscuously agree with all men. Drinke not above four times.

At this time there are still some different negative patterns, as the third example shows. In Modern English we need the support of do here; i.e. Do not drink. Although auxiliary do was available to speakers at this time, it wasn’t until much later that it became obligatory in negation (if no other auxiliary was present). The origin of this do is disputed, and it won’t concern us here – suffice to say that it is another example of grammaticalization at work, its source being the lexical verb do ‘to make, perform’. The rise of “dummy” do has been a significant development in English negation (and it's something we investigate in Chapter 7). To summarize, we can view the remodelling of English negation as an orderly progression through three clearly identifiable (but overlapping) stages: (Stage 1) preverbal ne > (Stage 2) embracing ne-not > (Stage 3) postverbal not In what has become a classic account of negation, Otto Jespersen (1917) suggested that the changes for English were cyclical in nature, and since then most linguists have referred to this kind of negator renewal as “Jespersen’s Cycle”. Crosslinguistic studies show that the change is extensively attested and in a wide range of languages well beyond Germanic (and of course is potentially more widespread given that poorly documented examples of single negation could have evolved via

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precisely such a pattern of erosion and creation). Jespersen’s Cycle of negation is a paradigm case of grammaticalization. We can describe the different types of intertwined changes that have taken place as follows. All are predictable changes associated with the making of grammar.

•  Semantic changes With grammaticalization words lose their more concrete lexical meanings and take on much more general or abstract meanings. And the more general they become in their meaning, the more frequently they’re used. The full expression ne-a-wiht shifted from the literal meaning of ‘not-ever-anything’ to a general expression of negation. You can compare some of the extra reinforcing expressions we find in Modern English negation: I don’t care a bit, which shows the start of this kind of generalization, as bit derives from the lexical item bite (and would originally have strengthened verbs of eating).

•  Phonological reduction When words become more grammatical they typically become unstressed; consonants and vowels reduce. Put quite simply, the words shorten. Bit with its short vowel already shows signs of this kind of reduction. In the case of not, what was formerly a three morpheme item (ne+a+wiht) is now an unsegmentable unit not and -n’t in normal speech. In most rapid speech, in fact, not even disappears entirely. Like the “Cheshire Cat’s grin” only the shadow remains in the form of nasalization, for example, can’t be done [k~a:bidʌn]! So grammatical morphemes can reduce to such an extent that all of their segmental phonemes disappear, a process Jim Matisoff has appropriately dubbed “cheshirization” (see Hopper and Traugott 2003: 157). In Chapter 4 we saw how repetition leads to the reduction of form; since grammatical words are used more often than lexical words, it follows that frequency of use will cause them to shorten. Note how all the grammatical elements of English are little. They are also the less informative parts of a message, and for that reason too they don’t need to be long (there exists in language an iconic relationship between informativeness and size, the theory being that this correlation comes about through the pressure of communicative efficiency; compare Zipf ’s law).

•  Structural changes Grammatical words can’t be stressed, they can’t be modified and we don’t move them around for special focus as we do lexical words. As they become fixed in position and as they reduce in size, they become increasingly dependent on surrounding material, eventually even fusing with it. The development not > -n’t nicely shows this transition. But note that there is a continuum from free-standing to bound morphology, and somewhere between an independent word and an affix lies a class of morphemes known as clitics (based on the Greek verb meaning ‘to lean’). In

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speech, clitics “lean on” neighbouring words (just like -n’t leans on verbs) – not able to stand on their own but not yet an affix. content item > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix

Jespersen’s Cycle of negation French also offers a clear-cut example of Jespersen’s Cycle of negation. Here’s a reproduction of Jespersen’s original 1917 schema (with English alongside for comparison): French (1) jeo ne dis (2) je ne dis pas (3) je dis pas (4)

English ic ne secge I ne seye not I say not I do not / don’t say

The following summary of the changes spells out the dual forces of reanalysis and analogy at work: 1 Negation is by preverbal ne. 2 Verbs are optionally strengthened with postverbal nominals (such as pas ‘step’, mie ‘crumb’, goutte ‘drop’). 3 The nominal pas ‘step’ (originally confined to motion verbs) is reanalysed as a negator (reanalysis). 4 Pas is extended to verbs having nothing to do with movement (analogy). 5 Pas is reanalysed as the obligatory concomitant of ne (ne-pas). 6 Pas is now the obligatory negator (ne has been reanalysed as optional). We only know that reanalysis has taken place (stage 3) because of stage 4 (analogical extension). This then makes the reanalysis at stage 6 possible.

6.3.2  Where is English negation heading now? From original ne-a-wiht ‘not-ever-anything’, clitic n’t is an impressive illustration of our love of compacting, reducing and obliterating boundaries. In fact, recently there have been some forensic linguistic cases triggered by a barely vocalized negator. One of the most famous is detailed by the forensic linguist Roger Shuy, who had to testify that the defendant actually said I wouldn’t take the bribe, rather than I would take the bribe, as was being claimed (see Hitt 2012, who discusses other examples of forensic linguistics at work).

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Linguists Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Traugott (2003), who work in the area of grammaticalization, emphasize the perpetual tug of war between, on the one hand, creativity and expressiveness (i.e. speakers’ introduction of new and innovative ways of saying things) and, on the other hand, routinization (i.e. speakers’ tendency to reduce the speech signal – compacting, reducing, obliterating boundaries – as in Old English ne-a-wiht ‘not-ever-anything’ > noght > not > -n’t). Given the significance of negation, Modern English -n’t is clearly ripe for renewal. The sources for new negative markers are relatively restricted. Willis et al. (2013) outline three main options. Most commonly, negators arise from nominal minimizers, or what are sometimes termed “accusatives of smallest measure” such as we’ve just seen with pas ‘step’. Also widespread are inherently negative pronouns and adverbs such as nothing, nowhere, never, at all and so on. A third option is similar to the first, except the strengthening marker is some sort of clause-final resumptive negator, such as the simple interjection no (e.g. I didn’t do it, no) or an ordinary sentential negator (e.g. I didn’t do it, no way), which is then reanalysed as part of the clause. Change is typically marked by rivalry between variant forms, and in Modern English there are a number of contenders for the job. One is the adverb never (lit. ‘not ever’), which in Englishes around the world is used as the general expression of negation: I never ate it ‘I didn’t eat it’. Another candidate involves a group of concrete nouns used to express minimal quantities when combined with negation. They are typically emphatic, for example I didn’t drink a drop; He didn’t get a spot of praise; I couldn’t walk a step; I didn’t eat a crumb; It didn’t hurt a bit; I don’t give a damn. We could include here the highly colloquial ones, such as bugger all and jack all, and even the flourishing of expressions that occur after I don’t give, like a rat’s (arse), a toss or a fig. All of these are reminiscent of the early days of not, and any one could potentially evolve into a negative marker (though the taboo quality of the colourful ones probably means they are unlikely to ever gain the currency needed to start the grammaticalization ball rolling). There is nothing intrinsic about their meaning that predicts their development into negators, but it is rather the way they combine with negators in discourse that determines this particular development. Any one could start expanding its contexts. A likely contender is bit. It is already showing signs of semantic and phonological change and has started to generalize into other contexts, no longer being confined to verbs of eating, as in examples like It didn’t hurt a bit (compare a crumb, which can only be used with verbs of eating: *It didn’t hurt a crumb).

Post-sentential not Another interesting development in modern informal spoken English (since the 1990s) is a form of post-sentential negation as in “What a totally amazing, excellent discovery . . . NOT!!” (a quote from the movie Wayne’s World, which helped to popularize the expression). These sorts of colloquial constructions

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often provide the basis for real change, but in this case the positioning of not is an obstacle. Negative markers typically precede the elements they negate, with preverbal placement as the norm for standard clausal negation. There appears to be something natural about the preverbal placement of the negative particle with evidence from second language learning and child language to support this (Dahl 1979: 96–97). Such constraints on the positioning of negators suggest that an innovation like post-sentential negation is never likely to convert to a change. The reason for negation to come early is probably obvious. It seems a good idea to delay such a crucial part of the message as the negative element . . . NOT! And of course this is exactly what stranded not plays on. It’s a brilliant example of what is called a “garden-path sentence” – one that lures the readers into a false interpretation. So while post-sentential negation has been around for more than 20 years (surprisingly long for a piece of teenage lingo of this kind), constraints on the positioning of negation suggest it is not a serious contender for general negation but will remain playfully ironic – though its recent take-up by adults has seen it disappear as a fashion item of teenspeak (we will talk some more about the role of teenagers in the propagation of linguistic change in Chapter 7).

SUMMARY We opened the chapter by looking at some of the difficulties facing linguists interested in studying grammatical change, difficulties that go some way to accounting for the relative neglect of historical syntax. But times have changed, and a flourishing of general theories of syntax has brought with it a flourishing of insights into the historical principles and processes governing sentence structure. One area where considerable advances have been made is in word order change, and we used the history of English to illustrate the kind of significant transformations these changes bring to the overall structural organization of a language. Our initial focus was on typological and universalist approaches, in particular the area of word order typology and implicational universals. This approach has provided the necessary basis that hitherto had not existed for the description and evaluation of syntactic change in language and has encouraged many more studies in this field. This schema offers a means of linking together a number of changes, at the same time giving them meaning by showing them to be part of some overall long-term trend; that is, towards consistency of type. We then shifted our attention to the mechanisms driving grammaticalization, namely the twin forces of reanalysis and analogy. Reanalysis modifies actual underlying representations and brings about significant rule changes. It is the

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development of new out of old structures and is an important mechanism for the creation of grammar. Analogy does not bring about rule change but involves the generalization of types of linguistic structures and only has the effect of modifying the surface (rule generalization). But by being overt, it provides the evidence that grammaticalization has taken place (i.e. new grammar has been created). Grammaticalization doesn’t occur without either of these mechanisms. We started this chapter rather bleakly, but we hope we have now left you optimistic about future research in historical syntax. Much like Tolkien’s cauldron, its story continues to bubble away – continually being enriched and improved by ongoing research that we’ve only been able to touch upon here (though see Chapter 10). The development of strong synchronic theories of syntax has meant big advances in our understanding of the whys and wherefores of historical syntax – the mechanisms of the changes and their causes. Moreover, with progress in technology it is now much easier to log and classify changes that have occurred and that are in progress. Vast improvements in corpus design are providing massive digitized collections of texts (from early and more modern periods) that are annotated and searchable, and historical evidence better suited to the study of language change is now more readily available. Despite the bleak beginning, we have every reason to be optimistic about future research in this area.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING For a cross-linguistic account of syntactic change across a wide variety of languages see Harris and Campbell (1995). It’s in this book that you will find details of the development of the English complementizer for-to; and for German and Pennsylvania German see Börjars and Burridge (2011). Our discussion on word order typology and change was drawn from the following books: Comrie (1989); Croft (1990); Greenberg (1963); Hawkins (2002, 2004); Mallinson and Blake (1981); Vennemann (1974); and Lehmann (1973). Grammaticalization is now a hot topic, and there are some excellent accounts around: see Heine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer (1991); Hopper and Traugott (2003); and the papers in the journal Language Sciences 23 (2001), a special issue devoted entirely to this topic. Bybee (2003) looks specifically at the role of frequency. And for those specifically interested in the diachronic aspects of negation, we recommend Willis et al. (2013) and Van der Auwera (2010).

EXERCISES 1  Word order Revisit Table 6.2 and investigate the word order patterns in Japanese, Turkish and Spanish and decide how consistently these languages fall into one typological category.

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2  Short-answer questions – English and other languages a The English based creoles Bislama and Tok Pisin (spoken in the Pacific) have evolved a new verbal suffix, illustrated below: dring ‘to be drinking’ marit ‘to be married’ giaman ‘to be lying’

dringim ‘to drink (something)’ maritim ‘to marry (someone)’ giamanim ‘to deceive (someone)’ (< early slang gammon ‘humbug, rubbish’)

i

Describe the form of this suffix and its function. Hypothesize how it developed. ii This suffix appears on new verbs entering the language (e.g. Bislama imel-im ‘email (someone)’). However, there is a group of common usage verbs, such as save ‘know’ which regularly appear without any suffix. How might you explain this aberrant behaviour? b Some linguists argue that grammatical change is goal driven; in other words, languages develop grammatical categories (such as future marking) because they need them. Outline one reason why this cannot be the case. Give an example to support your answer. c Examine the following examples, and explain why (iii) is ungrammatical. i Fred’s going to university ii Fred’s going to/gonna go to university iii *Fred’s gonna university. d In Kriol (spoken in northern Australia), gotta has a variety of functions. Two are illustrated in the following examples:

If you kick him here you gotta kill ’im. ‘If you kick it there, you will kill it’ One big plate gotta three little candle ‘A big plate with three little candles’



Explain the grammatical functions of gotta in these examples and name the change that is illustrated here.

e Briefly explain linguist T. Givo´n’s catchphrase “Today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax” (1971: 413). Support your discussion with examples. f How might structural pressure cause a language to change? Give an example of change that has been caused by structural pressure. g Examine the following examples from the Niger-Congo language Ewe (taken from Heine et  al. 1991), and describe the developments that have occurred to the word for the body part ‘back’: é-pé 3SG-POSS é 3SG

megbé back le Is

xo house

fá be cold á DEF

‘His back is cold’ megbé behind

‘He is at the back of the house’

Changes in sentence structure é 3SG

no stay

é 3SG

kú die

é 3SG

tsí remain

megbé behind

le be

159

‘He stays back’

é-megbé 3SG-behind    ‘He died after him’

megbé behind

‘He is backward/mentally retarded’

3  Grammatical change in Pacific Creoles – Tok Pisin In creoles such as Tok Pisin, verbs are typically unmarked for tense. Depending on the context, Mi kam can mean ‘I am coming’, ‘I came’ or ‘I will come’. If necessary, speakers can add extra sentence modifiers such as bin or bai to indicate either past or future time: Mi bin kam ‘I came’ and Bai mi kam ‘I will come’. Increasingly, it is becoming normal to include this sort of information, even when it is clear from context, and Tok Pisin now has a range of temporal, aspectual and modality particles (usually preverbal). Some of these are listed below. bai/baimbai (future) bin (past) laik (proximal future) klosap (inceptive – specifies the beginning of the action) pinis (perfect) save (habitual) stap (continuous) inap (ability) ken (permission) mas (necessity) a Briefly describe what is happening in the language. Your answer should include phonological, semantic and grammatical details. What sort of overriding change is illustrated here? b Give an example of this type of change that has occurred/is occurring in English or in any other languages you are familiar with. 4  Historical development of English morphosyntax Below are four different versions of the Lord’s Prayer taken from different periods in the history of English. Examine each version and answer the questions that follow (the answer for each question requires about a paragraph). Old English text, ca. 1000 Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum si þin name gehalgod

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tobecume þin rice gewurþe þin willa on eorþan swa swa on heofonum urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us to dæg and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele. Soþlice Middle English text, ca. 1400 Oure fadir that art in heuenes, halewid be thi name; thi kyngdoom come to; be thi wille don in erthe as in heuene; yeue to vs this dai oure breed ouer other substaunce; and foryeue to vs oure dettis, as we foryeuen to oure dettouris; and lede vs not in to temptacioun, but delyuer vs fro yuel. Amen. Early Modern English text, ca. 1611 Our father which art in heauen hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdome come. Thy will be done, in earth, as it is in heauen. Giue us this day our daily bread. And forgiue us our debts, as we forgiue our debters. And lead us not into temptation, but deliuer us from euill. Amen Modern English text Our Father, who is in heaven, May your name be kept holy. May your kingdom come into being. May your will be followed on earth, just as it is in heaven. Give us this day our food for the day. And forgive us our offenses, Just as we forgive those who have offended us. And do not bring us to the test. But free us from evil. Amen a

Examine the morphology in the Old English version and give an example from the nouns in the prayer to illustrate the inflectional richness of the language. In a general way explain what these inflections are doing (i.e. you don’t need to give the specifics of the inflections).

Changes in sentence structure b c

d

161

Generalize about overall trends that were underway in the language from the Old to the Modern English period with respect to these inflections. Support your answer using the example of the verbs from the prayers. Compare the Old, Middle, Early Modern and Modern versions and (using examples from the prayer) briefly find examples to support the changes in negation described in this chapter. Include how negation as represented in the contemporary version differs from negation in current-day conversation. Compare the Middle English version with the Early Modern English version. Is the Middle English prayer more like the Old English version or the Early New English version in its grammar? Give two reasons (with examples from the prayers) to support your answer. (*Don’t include negation.)

5  Research essay – is “grammaticalization theory” really a theory? Argue the extent to which recent scholarship on grammaticalization corresponds to “The Emperor’s New Clothes” or to a “Great Leap Forward” (Campbell and Janda 2001: 93). Critics of grammaticalization (see the papers in a special issue of Language Sciences 23, 2001) argue that it is simply a handy cover term for a variety of linguistic changes (such as “semantic bleaching” or desemanticization, extension, phonological erosion and reanalysis) that can apply independently of one another and in all sorts of situations; in other words, grammaticalization has no independent standing and certainly no explanatory power. Others (such as Heine 2003) argue in favour of its theoretical status because they see it as offering an explanatory account of how and why grammatical forms arise and develop. Assess the fundamental aspects of grammaticalization and determine whether or not there is something that corresponds to “a theory of grammaticalization”.

NOTE 1 The leechdoms were collected and edited by Oswald Cockayne in 1865; all three volumes are now digitized and available online: https://archive.org/details/leechdom swortcun01cock.

7 The spread of change INTRODUCTION How does something new spread through society, from one person to the next? A closer look at the outbreak and spread of diseases may be somewhat unpleasant, but it is very instructive. The Bubonic Plague (aka the Black Death) struck Europe in the 14th century. Responsible for this horrible, deadly disease was probably the bacterium Yersinia pestis, transmitted by flea bites. The bacterium originated in Asia and reached European seaports in the 14th century (note that by then the plague had already wiped out large parts of the populations of China, India, Syria, Mesopotamia and Armenia). The story goes that in 1347 the trading city of Caffa in Crimea was under siege by the Mongol Army. After it became clear that the city was almost undefeatable, the besiegers decided to catapult the corpses of people who had died from the plague into the city. In the face of this, traders from southern Italy immediately fled by ship – and, unknowingly, took the plague with them to Sicily, from where it spread in no time all over Europe, leading to an appalling death toll of 75–200 million people across Europe and Asia within a few years. In some macabre sense, we can call this a very successful disease. Compare this to the current outbreak of Ebola in parts of Africa. Again, this is a horrible, deadly disease, caused by the Ebola virus and at least as infectious as the plague. But while the number of fatalities in the affected areas is still tragically high (there are about 12,000 reported fatalities so far), it does not reach the magnitude of the plague, and the disease has not yet spread widely beyond these regions. There is even a good chance that it will be controlled in the very near future. So, in some sense, we can call this a failed disease. These examples are about the spread, or, better, the diffusion of innovations. At some point in time, something new came up and it caught on; in other words, it spread through society (or, in the case of fails, obviously did not spread). We can see exactly the same phenomenon in linguistic change. A given innovation (for example a new word like chick lit ‘literature for female readers’) may or may not catch on. If it does, we can see it spread through society, from speaker to speaker – like some flu outbreak. So linguistic forms can spread through society from speaker to speaker, like germs. But when, why and how does a given innovation spread? Why do some fail? Have you ever heard the word crapulous? It comes from Latin crapula ‘intoxication’, and in the 1500s it meant something like ‘hung over’ or ‘feeling sick because of excessive eating or drinking’ – a helpful word, especially if you actually feel crapulous, but it did not catch on and thus died out (note that our presentday word crap has nothing to do with crapulous. Crap probably comes from Latin crappa ‘chaff ’ and the Middle English cropper/crop.)

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At the same time, linguistic innovations may also spread through the linguistic system itself. If we want to stay within the disease frame for a second, we might say that a contagious rash not only spreads from one person to the next but may also spread across your body. The latter could be compared to spread in the linguistic system. Imagine somebody introduces a change to the sound system: a new sound might be added, an old sound might be lost, or perhaps the context of use of a given sound changes. As described in Chapter 4, there is good reason to believe that Old English was rhotic, i.e. that speakers of Old English pronounced words like bēor ‘beer’ and sar ‘sore’ with an [r] after the vowel: [be:ɔr] and [sa:r]. Obviously, many varieties of present-day English (at least in England) have lost this [r] after vowels (but kept it elsewhere). Only consider Received Pronunciation (RP) in England beer [bɪə] and sore [sɔ:], but run [rʌn] and break [breɪk]. There are many words in the English lexicon that have in their spelling after a vowel. What happened to them? Did they all lose postvocalic [r] at the same time? Or did some of them go first, and others follow gradually? What we often observe in such cases is called lexical diffusion, or the gradual spread of change through the lexicon of a language. In the following sections, we will take a careful look at the diffusion of changes both in society and in the linguistic system. Let’s begin with the latter.

7.1  DIFFUSION WITHIN THE LINGUISTIC SYSTEM How do changes spread within the linguistic system? Before we try to answer such a seemingly simple question, we need to distinguish between the different linguistic levels of phonology, morphology and syntax. The patterns of diffusion might be different for the different levels. Let us begin by looking at phonological change. How does a change in the sound system affect the vocabulary of a language? There seem to be two possibilities: it could either be lexically abrupt and affect all items that can be affected simultaneously, or it could be lexically gradual and affect only some items at a time. The former can be exemplified when we look at one of the most widely discussed sound changes in historical linguistics: Grimm’s Law, or the First Germanic Consonant Shift. This shift, named after the 19th century scholar Jakob Grimm (the elder of the two Grimm brothers, who became famous for their fairy tales), took place when Proto-Germanic1 developed out of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), probably more than 2,500 years ago. Essentially, this shift turned voiceless stops into voiceless fricatives, voiced stops into voiceless stops, and voiced aspirated stops into voiced stops or fricatives. The results are the differences we see today between the Romance languages (Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Latin, Sanskrit etc., which mostly still have unshifted PIE consonants) and the Germanic languages (German, English, Dutch, Danish etc., which mostly have new, shifted consonants). This is summarized in Table 7.1. The Neogrammarians (a group of scholars of language and linguistic change in the 19th century) claimed that Grimm’s Law affected all words simultaneously.

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Table 7.1 Grimm’s Law (First Germanic Consonant Shift) Proto-Indo-European (PIE) /p/ /t/ /k/

/b/ /d/ /g/ /bh/ /dh/ /gh/

Proto-Germanic

English cognates

*pisk, Lat. piscis *peter, Lat. pater *treyes, Lat. tres *tu, Lat. tu *korn, Lat. cornus *kemtom, Lat. centum

/f/

fish father three thou (Middle and Early Modern English) horn hundred

*d hewbu *dva, Lat. duo Skr. *dant *gno-, Lat. gnoscer e

/p/ /t/

Skr. *bharati Skr. *bhra-ter Skr. *dhwar Skr. *gha-ns Skr. *ghost

/b/

/ð, θ/ /h/

/k/

/d/ /g/

deep two tooth know (pronounced with a /k/ in Middle English) s/he bears brother door goose (German Gans ) guest

Wherever there was a /p, t, k, b, d, g, bh, dh, gh/ these got shifted to /f, ð, θ, h, p, t, k, b, d, g/, respectively. So for the Neogrammarians sound change is lexically abrupt. Note that we do not know this for sure; in other words, this is only a hypothesis, and there is little concrete evidence for this lexically abrupt shift. But assuming the regularity of sound changes such as Grimm’s Law proved to be very important for the reconstruction of undocumented historical language stages and languages (see Chapters 4 and 9). The Neogrammarian rule that sound change is lexically abrupt remained almost unchallenged for several decades. From about the middle of the 20th century, however, scholars began to discover phenomena which cast some doubt on this idea. Their studies quite often go back to one of the early critics of this principle, Hugo Schuchardt. “Rarely-used words drag behind; very frequently used ones hurry ahead. Exceptions to the sound laws are formed in both groups” (Schuchardt 1885: 58). Jean Aitchison asks us to consider the following brief text: A cursory glance at the newspapers suggests that adultery is on the increase in this century. If you think slavery has been abolished, go and look at the factory at the end of the road. Every mother will tell you that nursery schools are a mixed blessing. (Aitchison 2013: 88) The text contains a number of words that can have variable pronunciations: cursory, adultery, century, slavery, factory, every and nursery. These words can either have a schwa [ə] in their middle [sleɪvərɪ] or drop it [sleɪvrɪ]. Would you drop the

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schwa in all cases? Or in none of them? Betty Phillips, an expert on frequency effects in language, tested this in her class at Indiana State University. These are her results. Table 7.2 Variable pronunciations of -Vry words Word

Celex*

Schwa-less

Schwa-ful

every factory nursery slavery adultery cursory

9,788 1,064 580 134 107 32

22 (85%) 18 (70%) 19 (73%) 10 (40%) 15 (58%) 9 (35%)

4 (15%) 8 (30%) 7 (27%) 16 (60%) 11 (42%) 17 (65%)

(* = a general database with raw word frequencies)

There seems to be some correlation between raw word frequency (in CELEX, for example) and the amount of schwa-deletion. The more frequent the word generally, the more often schwa is lost, and vice versa. The very frequent word every is affected 85% of the time [ɛvrɪ], while the very infrequent cursory is only affected 35% of the time [kərsərə]. What this amounts to is that changes can also happen one item at a time, or, in other words, they may be lexically gradual! What we see in these contexts is the famous S-curve of diffusion, shown in Figure 7.1. The graph in Figure 7.1 roughly looks like the letter S. It shows how innovations begin to spread slowly at the beginning (just a few words are affected), then begin to catch on, with rapid changes in many words, until they finally peter out, so that most of the words that could be affected, or even all of them, show the change. This curve is very famous in a number of disciplines such as physics, chemistry, medicine, politics and economics. Most sorts of innovations, from germs to technology and fashion, actually show this kind of diffusion.

Percentage

Figure 7.1 The S-curve of diffusion

Time

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Figure 7.2 Percentage of -s vs. -th in the third person present tense (based on Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 220) 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1410–1459

1460–1499

1500–1539

1540–1579

1580–1619

1620–1659

1660–1681

Changes in morphology can happen in very similar ways. Only consider the development of “third person singular s” in Early Modern English, e.g. sing-s versus sing-eth, which we already mentioned in Chapter  1. This is summarized in Figure 7.2. Figure 7.2 shows a remarkable similarity to the S-curve presented in Figure 7.1. So, in general, it seems as though the overall development is lexically gradual and follows the S-curve of diffusion, with a slow start (until about 1579), followed by a rapid spread from 1579 to about 1659, when the curve begins to peter out. Ogura and Wang (1996) zoom in on this development and try to identify some of the generalizations underlying this pattern of diffusion. Are there any words that change earlier on? Are there others that are more conservative and lag behind? What Ogura and Wang find is that first we need to distinguish between verbs that end in sibilants (“hissing sounds” such as [s, z, ʃ, ʒ] etc.) and those that don’t. Words that end in sibilants tend to be slower in adopting the -s suffix, mainly for phonotactic reasons – perhaps it is somehow harder or awkward to pronounce kiss-es rather than kiss-eth (just as we don’t use friendlily as the adverb of friendly – the repeated sound pattern feels weird).2 Within the group of words that do not end in a sibilant, high-frequency verbs (such as make or come) tend to change earlier than low-frequency verbs (such as endeavour or prevail). However, once infrequent verbs start to change, they are much quicker to complete the change than the frequent verbs, so that we find a time (around 1640–1710) when infrequent verbs have already completed the process and some frequent verbs still show some forms with -th. Similarly, the two most frequent verbs, have and do, begin to change early but show variability between -s and -th forms for the longest time. This goes to show that morphological changes can also spread through the lexicon, not unlike phonological changes, and that the changes do not necessarily affect random words but may be constrained by factors such as frequency, phonotactics and the like.

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Figure 7.3 The development of periphrastic do, 1400–1700 (based on Ellegård 1953) 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1400

1500

1600

1700

Negative Questions

Affirmative Questions

Negative Declaratives

Affirmative Declaratives

Last but not least let us look at the diffusion of syntactic changes, taking again an example from Early Modern English. In this case, we will look at the introduction of periphrastic do, i.e. the (new) use of do in questions and in negative sentences. In a seminal study, Ellegård (1953) showed that this innovation did not affect all syntactic environments at once. Periphrastic do was first introduced and spread most quickly in negative questions (e.g. Don’t you like cheesecake?), followed by affirmative questions (Do you like cheesecake?). Negative declarative sentences (e.g. I don’t like cheesecake) were considerably slower. At around 1600, about 75% of all affirmative and negative questions were formed with do, but only 35% of all negative declaratives showed the new pattern. These, however, quickly caught on during the next 50 years or so. Affirmative declaratives (e.g. I do like cheesecake) never really caught on. The whole development is summarized in Figure 7.3. So, syntactic changes can also gradually spread through the linguistic system. Phonological and morphological changes can gradually spread through the lexicon, i.e. from word to word, and syntactic changes can gradually spread through various syntactic contexts. Needless to say, not all changes spread through the linguistic system. The sporadic phonological changes we looked at in Chapter 4, such as metathesis (e.g. aks – ask), usually do not spread through the lexicon, and neither do some word formation patterns such as abbreviations or blends. Similarly, some syntactic changes seem to occur in fairly isolated contexts, or they affect the whole syntactic system at once.

7.2 SPREAD IN SOCIAL STRUCTURES – THE SPEECH COMMUNITY AND THE INDIVIDUAL Let us now look at how innovations can spread through the linguistic community. As we have pointed out before, a linguistic innovation that does not spread is exactly

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that: an individual innovation, but not change. The investigation of the diffusion of linguistic features in geographical and social space has to reach out and include ideas, methods and findings from other disciplines such as sociology, (social) geography, social psychology, migration studies and urban studies, among others.

7.2.1  Wavy, gravity, cascady . . . One very old, but still popular model of linguistic change describes the diffusion of new features as concentric waves, spreading out from a centre of origin and becoming progressively weaker the further they move away from the centre. One textbook example for this is the so-called Rhenish Fan, a very interesting patterning of linguistic features in the Rhineland area around Cologne and Düsseldorf in the North-West of Germany. Pre-Old High German (the German language before ca. 750 CE) had three different plosives, */p/, */t/, and */k/, in words such as [dorp] ‘village’, [apəl] ‘apple’, [dat] ‘that’, [ik] ‘I’ and [maken] ‘make’. During the High German Consonant Shift (between ca. 200 and 500 CE), High German started replacing these with /f/, /pf/, /s/, /ç/ and /x/, respectively: [dorf] ‘village’, [apfəl] ‘apple’, [das] ‘that’, [iç] ‘I’ and [maxen] ‘make’. This replacement started in the South of Germany and spread northwards. For the largest part of Germany, in the mid and easterly regions, there is a dividing line today (a so-called isogloss) that runs roughly from Düsseldorf to Berlin which distinguishes between the High German pronunciation in the South [dorf, apfəl, das, iç, maxen] and the Low German pronunciation in the North [dorp, apəl, dat, ik, maken]. In the West, however, in the Rhineland area, the story was a lot more complicated. Not all forms shifted at the same point in space. So there is one isogloss that starts far in the south that distinguishes between [apəl] (north) and [apfəl] (south); another one around Trier, a little further north, that divides between [das] and [dat]; next comes a line near Aachen and Bonn a little further north that distinguishes between [maken] and [maxen], [dorp] and [dorf|. Last but not least, even further north, we find a fourth line to divide the area between [iç] and [ik]. The whole situation is summarized in Map 7.1. In the case of the Rhenish Fan, the wave began somewhere in the South, and in extending northwards it progressively lost its strength, so that not all features were spread in all regions. As mentioned above, the idea of a wave-like pattern of diffusion is fairly old and goes back at least to Schmidt (1872) or even Schuchardt (1868 and 1870). While some people saw this as a counter-movement to the very influential family tree model (see Chapter 9), most of the discussions today now emphasize the compatibility of the two models. The long-term development of languages comprises both of these complementary aspects, so that languages can both develop independently (in a tree-like fashion) and in interaction with each other (a pattern with several overlapping waves). In 1974 the British sociolinguist Peter Trudgill suggested some important modifications to the wave model of diffusion. He called this the gravity model of diffusion and argued that the spread of changes must be intricately tied up with communication between speakers. The more speakers interact, the more likely it is

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Map 7.1 The Rhenish Fan: 1 Dutch (West Low Franconian), 2 Limburgian (East Low Franconian), 3 Ripuarian Franconian, 4 and 5 Mosel Franconian, 6 Rhenish Franconian (adapted from Hans Erren 2010 after Georg Wenker 1877, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift#/media/ File:Rheinischer_faecher.png CC BY-SA 3.0)

el Iss wi makt

1

(5)

ik ich 2

Uerdingen Benrath

maken machen 3 Bad Honnef

Dorp

Bad Hönningen

Dorf 4 op

auf

St. Goar 5 6

dat das

Speyer appel apfel

that changes will be passed on from one speaker to the next (this idea actually goes back to Bloomfield (1933), who discusses the density of communication as the basis for the wave model). Trudgill now introduced the idea that geographical distance and population size are two measurable predictors for the spread of innovations. Linguistic changes are promoted and spread through the more densely populated centres (centres of gravity, if you like). What we then see is that changes do not radiate uniformly, wave-like, from one place or origin, but rather jump from one centre to the next, before and while they spread into the areas around these centres. Trudgill was able to show this with the two English cities of London and Norwich, and the countryside surrounding these places. One current change in England is

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(or maybe was, this study is now more than 40 years old!) the dropping of initial h in words like hotel, ham, heel and so on. This change had its origin in the vernacular varieties of London. From there it first seems to have spread to Norwich, the next biggest population centre in East Anglia, about 150 kilometres (or 100 miles) to the North-East. From there we see gradual, perhaps wave-like diffusion into the surrounding countryside. If the original wave model had been at work, we would have expected the strongest changes around London, the centre of origin, and then a gradual petering out while the innovation spread across the countryside, with considerable less intensity in Norwich. This, however, is not the case. The centres of gravity, London and Norwich, show the most widely advanced changes, while the countryside between these places is lagging behind. The reason for this is all too plausible: on the one hand, we see more interaction between speakers in the bigger cities, the centres of gravity, and thus a greater likelihood for change. On the other hand, there is a considerable number of speakers commuting to London from Norwich every day. The London innovations can travel with the commuters and can thus spread in Norwich without necessarily affecting the places in between the two cities.

More linguistic diffusion American sociolinguist William Labov gives another example of linguistic diffusion that illustrates this principle (http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/ Papers/PCM.html). Note that Labov refers to this as the cascade effect, rather than the gravity effect, but essentially it is the same phenomenon. Labov studied the spread of food terminology in the 1950s, 1960s and beyond in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia (two large cities in Pennsylvania, on the East Coast of the United States). First, he noted that the term hoagie became generalized in Philadelphia shortly after the Second World War as the term for a particular large sandwich (today usually referred to as a sub in many places). He simply checked entries in the Yellow Pages’ restaurant section in Philadelphia and found the distribution shown in Table 7.3. Table  7.3 clearly demonstrates that hoag(ie) was well established by the 1950s in Philadelphia food terminology. It can be found in the city and to some extent in the surrounding areas even on today’s dialect maps. For some Table 7.3 Lexical stem of hoagie in Philadelphia telephone listings

1945 1950 1955

hogg-

hoog

hog-

hoag-

submarine

3 10 4

1

1 2 6

1 47

1

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Table 7.4 Diffusion of hoagie to Pittsburgh from 1961 to 1966

Grab’n Go Pizza Pat’s Pizzeria Village Pizza Campiti’s Don Pizzeria Luigi’s Pizza Frank & Betty’s Pizza Shop Aspinwall Pizza/Augie’s Hoagies Mac Tony’s Nationwide Luara’s Restaurant & Pizza Brookline Pizza Arudy’s Pizza/Famous Hoagie Total listings in Restaurant section

1961–2

1962–3

1964

1965

1966

H #

* # H # *

S H H # * H

S H H H H H H H

S * H *

75

91

68

75

H H H H H H 93

H = hoagie; S = sub(marine). * = listing, no ad; # = ad, no mention of H or S.

curious reason, hoagies in Philadelphia became closely associated with pizza restaurants, at least after the 1960s, and listings containing the word hoagie were then mostly found in the pizza section of the Yellow Pages. Interestingly, hoagie is also a very widespread term in Pittsburgh. So Labov then compared the Pittsburgh Yellow Pages. Table 7.4 shows what he found. The term hoagie seems to have established itself in Pittsburgh’s restaurant scene from 1962 onwards. Village Pizza was the first and most consistent user of the term, and many shops such as Frank and Betty’s Pizza Shop, or Mac Tony’s Nationwide, followed suit. It can be speculated that Village Pizza must have played a very prominent and influential role in the city. Eventually, the term hoagie got established as a hallmark of Pittsburghese – but we do not see it diffused between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh as predicted by the wave model. Rather, the term seems to have jumped from one big city to the next (even though there is a considerable distance between the two of about 300 miles (500 kilometres)).

What we see today are both patterns. On the one hand, there is gradual, wave-like diffusion around certain points of origin, though maybe slower and less pervasive than originally thought. At the same time, gravity or cascade effects are operative. These lead to the jumps that we can observe in many other cases.

7.2.2  Social factors There is a huge list of social factors that have been investigated in connection with the origins and diffusion of linguistic changes: social class, age, gender, ethnicity,

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income, education, faith, sexual orientation and many, many more. We won’t be able to discuss all of these here. Let’s concentrate on the most widely (and sometimes even hotly) debated factors: social class, age and gender.

Social class Social class is a very complex sociological construct, and it would be hard to do full justice to the concept in only a few paragraphs. (Levine (2006), Breen and Rottmann (2014) and Grusky (2014) provide interesting and helpful sociological surveys. One of the key problems is that class and cultural context are intricately intertwined so that universal principles which apply to all cultures and societies are hard to identify.) Suffice it to say, for present purposes, that the class or social stratification system in most “western” societies and cultures (Great Britain, America, Canada, France, Germany etc.) is immensely complex and in constant flux. Classifications that were helpful in the 1960s and 1970s (when modern sociolinguistics was born and began to use the concept of class widely) do not apply anymore, and certain historical generalizations are no longer valid. In the 1950s, for example, class membership could partly be identified by asking informants about their family background: working class parents usually meant working class children, middle class parents brought up middle class children etc. Working class usually meant basic education, while the middle class could attend better schools and perhaps even go to university. This has changed in many societies. There are some changes that make straightforward historical equations (like “lower class parents equal lower class children”) difficult, if not impossible today. As an example: Labov in his famous department store study in New York City in the 1960s simply assumed that people who worked at Saks on Fifth Avenue represented a higher social class than sales clerks at Macy’s, who in turn were higher up the ladder than those at Klein’s – a low-price department store (Labov 1972). The bottom line of this discussion is that whenever we read about social class, or perhaps even use the term, we need to be very careful what it means, and we need to be aware of the context in which it was or is used. Having said that, what are some of the factors that traditionally make up class membership (you don’t get a membership card at birth or graduation, so we need to establish this independently)? As mentioned before, class membership is usually associated with education, occupation, income, family background, place of living, type of housing, frequency and type of travel, and the like. Most studies in the past distinguish between lower, middle and upper classes, and various subdivisions within these groups. The following two diagrams present two studies that correlate linguistic variation with social class and style. Figure  7.4 presents another study by Trudgill in Norwich (1974). The variable investigated is the pronunciation of words like class, last and dance. These could either be pronounced with a back vowel like [da:ns] (imagine a very British, Hugh Grant-like pronunciation) or with a front vowel like [dæ:ns] (imagine a more American pronunciation). The latter is associated with lower class speakers. In this study (see Figure 7.4) speakers could score points for their pronunciation of (a:).

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Figure 7.4 (a:) in Norwich (based on Trudgill 1974) 200 180

Index of raised (a:)

160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 Casual

Careful LWC

MWC

Reading UWC

LMC

Formal

MMC

The more often they pronounced this like [æ:], the higher their score. Trudgill tested this in four different styles: casual speech, careful speech, reading style and formal (word list) style, and with five independently established social groups: lower working class (LWC), middle working class (MWC), upper working class (UWC), lower middle class (LMC) and middle middle class (MMC). Figure  7.4 shows you the results. Predictably, the higher the social class, the more back [ɑ:] we find; the lower the class, the more fronted [æ:] speakers use. Interestingly, however, this hardly changes with style. So, even if speakers are made aware of the fact that their language is being recorded and tested, they do not shift towards the more overtly prestigious, standard pronunciation. They still produce front [æ:] with a remarkable frequency. We can call this stable variation; i.e. language variation in the community does not seem to be going anywhere. The lower social classes seem to be happy with the fronted [æ:], while the higher social classes keep their back [ɑ:]. If there were any ongoing changes, we would expect something to happen when we shift styles, because speakers then perhaps want to use the more prestigious form (or sound more local and use the fronted form). But we see nothing of that sort. Compare this to the situation in Figure 7.5. This is taken from Labov’s study of (r) in New York City in words like car, floor, beer or burn, i.e. in the syllable coda. The (r) less pronunciation ([ka:], [flɔ:], [bi:ə], [bɜ:n]) is associated with the lower social classes; the higher the score here, the more speakers use (r) in these cases. We find three styles (casual, reading and formal) and six social classes: upper middle class (UMC), MMC, LMC, UWC, MWC and LWC.

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Figure 7.5 (r) in New York City (based on Labov 1972) 90 80 70

(r) in %

60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Casual UMC

Reading MMC

LMC

Formal UWC

MWC

LWC

The results of this study are very different. On the one hand, we can generally say that the higher social classes tend to use more (r). This fits in with our prediction. But in contrast to Trudgill’s Norwich study, we find that all classes change their linguistic behaviour radically when they shift styles. The more formal it gets, the more (r) is being used in all social classes. So, speakers seem to be very aware of the value of (r) and consequently use it more often when it really counts. Most importantly, however, we can see that the LMC speakers seem to overtake the UMC in their formal style. How is that possible, and what does it mean? Let us assume that the UMC is like a linguistic role model for the LMC. Sociologically speaking, members of the LMC can be characterized as socially mobile aspirers, as people who have just left behind the working classes and who have now set their eyes on a better life. And one way to distinguish themselves from the working classes is by adopting a linguistic marker that shows their social superiority. The MMC feel no such need for such an extreme move since their distance to the lower classes is already wide enough. The LMC as social aspirers, however, seem to overdo it. They use (r) more often in certain (conscious) styles than do their role models, the UMC. We thus get the striking crossover pattern in Figure 7.5. But what does this mean for linguistic change? Here we do not find stable variation, but a highly dynamic situation. A linguistic variant that was typical for a certain social class, or style, spreads and diffuses into the language of other social classes. In this case we find a pattern that is called change from above, since the change (and pressure) originates from higher social classes using overtly prestigious forms. And this is one important pattern for the diffusion of linguistic changes, especially when varieties of a language move towards the overtly prestigious standard.

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Note that the reverse is also possible. We then call this change from below. This is what happens when changes originate in informal language use, or in lower social classes, and diffuse “up the social ladder” or into more formal styles. Montreal French, for instance, saw the rapid replacement of generic on ‘one’ by tu ‘you’ (as in one can never be sure versus you can never be sure). Laberge and Sankoff (1980) and later Thibault (1991) found that this change was part of a massive restructuring from below which first replaced former generic nous ‘we’ with on and then with tu. Speakers are usually aware of changes from above (since these are often discussed or even prescribed in the education system and the media), while changes from below often fly below the radar and do not get noticed by speakers. Labov (2006: 203) even said that, in hindsight, it might have been better if “change from below” had been called “change from within” and “change from above” had been called “change from without” to show that the former usually happens within the linguistic system, without reaching the level of social awareness, while the latter is imposed on the linguistic system owing to outside factors (such as prestige and language contact) and is thus mostly visible to speakers. Note, however, that the dividing lines between these two sometimes get blurred, and that changes from below can also reach the level of consciousness and social awareness. In those cases speakers and the linguistic community are faced with the dilemma of having to decide whether they are willing to accept the “new” variant into the mainstream (standard) system, or not. If they do, it may even become subject to a change from above mechanism. We might be witnessing such a change in present-day (North American) English. Many speakers subconsciously shift their pronunciation of [s] in words like street, strong, store and restaurant to [ʃ], i.e. shtreet, sthrong, shtore and reshtaurant. Very few people are actually aware of this pronunciation. At the same time, we are witnessing not only a spread of the new pronunciation (both as lexical diffusion and in the speech community), but also a gradually increasing awareness. If you search for “shtreet” and “shtrong” on the internet, you will find a number of examples and discussions. It is hard to predict whether the palatalized [ʃ] variants will ultimately win and will become the prestigious standard pronunciation, but this is certainly not unlikely.

Age Another interesting factor to look at regarding the diffusion of linguistic innovations is age, not in the least because many innovations take place during childhood, the teenage years and early adulthood. Only think about the creative potential of youth language with new words like shan ‘unfair’ (UK), peng ‘looking good’ (UK), mupload ‘mobile upload’ (US), fungry ‘fucking hungry’ (US) or deso ‘designated driver’ (nominated as word of the year for 2015 and the fall-out of a drinking culture in a law abiding society) (AUS). But do these words actually spread? Do other (adult) speakers adopt them? Or do teenagers at least keep using them throughout their lifetime? In many cases, they don’t. There is a variety of language that is specific for teenagers. In the public this is often dubbed “teenage slang”, but in linguistics we would rather refer to it as an agelect, i.e. a “dialect” depending on

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age. And just like teenagers, middle-age adults often have an agelect, and so do senior citizens (although the latter two are less noticeable than the special language of teenagers). If such an agelect (or some of its features) is really only specific for a certain period in the life of speakers and does not spread beyond that, we call this age grading. Examples for this would be the use of “teenage slang words” such as the ones we just discussed. These mostly drop out of use after the age of 20 or 25, and they never get adopted by adult speakers. Similarly, teenagers show a tendency to use more non-standard forms, such as ain’t or multiple negation. This might not be exclusively limited to teenagers, but we usually see a peak in use between the ages of about 12 and 20. A third and last example comes from Canadian English. Many Canadian children grow up with US television and, accordingly, pronounce the letter z as one would in the United States [zi:] (this is also the pronunciation you would hear in the various Sesame Street alphabet songs). But once they grow up, most of them seem to drop this usage, align with the adults in Canada and instead use the Canadian pronunciation [zɛd]. Let’s suppose age grading did not happen. In other words, whatever you said in your youth would stay with you forever. What would be the consequence? The obvious consequence would be change. If there is some innovation in youth culture and this does not go away when teenagers turn into adults, we see actual linguistic change in the community. This could be called “generational change”. So one generation introduces and keeps something that the previous generations did not have. Imagine there is a young generation of Canadians who decide to keep the [zi:] instead of changing to [zɛd]. In that case, there would be a high likelihood that Canada would also become a [zi:] country eventually. Another example would be the use of the word geil in Modern German. Originally, this meant ‘sexually aroused (animals in particular)’ or ‘prurient’. In the 1970s and 1980s, teenagers and young adults began using this to say ‘cool’, ‘attractive’, ‘highly desirable’. Expectedly, adults frowned upon this (“wrong”) vulgar use of this (“dirty”) word. Today, almost 40 years later, geil is quite a frequent word in informal spoken language and is used by teenagers and adults alike. Some people still consider it vulgar, but it can even be heard on TV and in pop songs, for example Die Fantastischen Vier’s “Zu geil für diese Welt” ‘Too cool for this world’ (1993) or Deichkind’s “Leider geil” ‘Unfortunately cool’ (2012). It appears in yellow press headlines (“So geil wird die WM” ‘That’s how cool the championship is going to be’) and in advertisements (“Geiz ist geil” ‘Tight is right/ Being stingy is cool’). These would have been absolutely unthinkable 40 years ago. One big problem in language change studies is to distinguish between age grading and linguistic change in apparent time. The latter rests on the assumption that whatever we see in a younger generation today will be the community language of the future. In other words, if teenagers show other linguistic structures than their parents, this might indicate linguistic change. But what if these structures fade away when the teens grow up? Looking back in history, this is fairly easy to distinguish since we can trace actual changes (or successful innovations) and can identify the individual trends or generations that started a particular change. In history we can study change in real time and don’t have to make assumptions or predictions on the basis of a synchronic state of affairs.

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Apparent versus real time But what about today? Synchronic studies, i.e. studies looking at changes in apparent, not real time, are sometimes faced with the dilemma of having to distinguish between teenage language use, and real change. Let’s look at one example. In 1961 Labov studied the language of the people who lived on Martha’s Vineyard, a small island off the coast of Massachusetts. In particular, he was interested in the pronunciation of the two diphthongs [ai] as in time and [aʊ] as in house. His 69 informants pronounced these diphthongs either more like [ai] and [au], as in General American, or more centralized like [əi] and [əu]. In order to represent these differences, he calculated a centralization index. The higher this index, the more speakers centralized their diphthongs to [əi] and [əu]. While there are many complex social factors at work here, let us focus on age as a variable. Figure 7.6 represents Labov’s results, stratified by age. Something seems to be going on here. The group of 31–45-year-olds has by far the highest centralization index; i.e. they are the most frequent users of non-standard [əi] and [əu]. The younger generation does not follow this trend (for very complex reasons that we cannot go into here), and the older generations also show lower frequencies. How can that be explained? Labov makes two suggestions. The older speakers could have had higher centralization values earlier in their lives (let’s say in the 1930s), which have then progressively declined to the point that we see today. This would be the effect of age grading, and we would suspect that the generation of 31–45-year-olds in this study would show a similar decline and exhibit lower centralization Figure 7.6 (ai) and (au) on Martha’s Vineyard, centralization index stratified by age (based on Labov 1972) 100 90 80 70 60 (ai)

50

(au)

40 30 20 10 0 14–30

31–45

46–60

61–75

75+

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scores in the 1990s, i.e. 30 years after this study was carried out in the early 1960s. This would mean that this is not an example of linguistic change, but rather of age related language use. Alternatively, what we see in the people age 31–45 could be a sign of linguistic change. The older people maybe never had high centralization scores, and what we see here is an innovation by the 46–60-year-olds, which caught on in the following generation (31–45). If this innovation does not fade away, but maybe spreads further across the generations, we see actual change (in apparent time). How do we know? How can we distinguish between these two explanations? There are two ways. On the one hand, we could try to find earlier records from the 1930s to see if centralization was popular. If it was, we may suspect age grading, because these speakers would now, in the 1960s, have lower scores. Luckily, such records do exist. Between 1931 and 1944, 412 speakers were recorded and analysed for the new Linguistic Atlas of New England. When Labov looked at these historical documents he could find little to no centralization, which led him to conclude that age grading in this case seems unlikely. Still this is no positive proof for ongoing change, but it points in this direction. Another way to provide positive proof for any changes is to go back to Martha’s Vineyard several years later and to see what happened with these two variables in the language of the Islanders. Pope et al. (2007) is one such study that replicates Labov’s study as closely as possible, only about 40 years later. Figure  7.7 presents the results of this new study, along with Labov’s original findings. The data in Figure  7.7 suggests that we do see changes in real time, rather than age grading, although perhaps only for (au). The overall rate of Figure 7.7 Martha’s Vineyard 40 years later (based on Pope et al. 2007) 1.8 1.6 1.4 1.2 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 [tʃ] and [ʌ] —> [ɔ] (e.g. just is pronounced as [tʃɔst]). To summarize both directions of influence, we can arrange the patterns of influence into two reverse hierarchies of increasing and decreasing strength respectively, shown in Table 8.1.6 Table 8.1 Pennsylvania German-English contact – direction of influence Phonological Grammatical Lexical

Influence E —> PG weak strong very strong

Influence PG —> E strong weak very weak

Why is it that we find precisely these patterns of interference? Genetic or typological considerations are not much help here. Although they predict that the similarity of the linguistic systems would facilitate changes, they cannot explain why interference seems sensitive to the different levels of grammar and why, in particular, the reverse hierarchies exist when we compare the direction of influence. Consider the child language experience and the order in which different linguistic levels are learned (see McLaughlin 1984). Intonation and stress features are the first to be acquired and are therefore the most deeply secured features. These and segmental features (vowels and consonants) are acquired during a child’s first three years. The acquisition of grammatical features continues until much later, during the early school years, and vocabulary of course continues to be acquired throughout one’s lifetime. It is not surprising, therefore, that the most deeply anchored speech habits are the ones we find most readily transferred from a first to a second language in a language shift scenario. Sometimes a distinctive intonation is all that remains of a previously bilingual speech community. And to consider the other side of the coin, it is also not surprising that these deeply embedded phonological features are the ones that show the greatest resistance to influence in a maintained language. Both types of contact, borrowing and substratum induced influence, can result in grammatical changes – so why do we find grammatical transfers from English into Pennsylvania German and not the other way around? During the early school years, children have not yet stabilized their Pennsylvania German grammatical structures, and they are vulnerable to English influences at this time. Socio-historical studies of change have shown that linguistic innovations have a much greater chance of taking hold in a language if they attract no attention and no resistance from speakers (see the discussion in Nadkarni 1975). Pennsylvania German is not standardized and has no written form; people are used to variation and are tolerant of it. Conversely,

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there are many factors working against the transference of Pennsylvania German features into their English. Significant here is the way English is acquired in the formal school setting. There is considerable prescriptivism with a strong emphasis on “proper English”, and outside of school the children’s experience of English is within formal contexts only; i.e. in contact with outsiders and as a written language (recall the diglossia of this speech community). There would be little in the way of “imperfect learning”.

The special case of discourse particles When it comes to those elements that have some kind of discourse regulating function, Pennsylvania German draws heavily on English. There is a striking number of English discourse markers that have been fully integrated into the language. These include actual transfers such as well and loan translations (or calques) such as ennigweg < anyway. These markers have been borrowed along with the English functions: Pennsylvania German well appears before surprising information, answers to questions and self-repairs; ennigweg signals a shift of topic (often to an earlier topic). Similarly, native markers have adopted functions akin to the equivalent English discourse marker – weeschte ‘you know’ emphasizes common ground between the players. (8.6)

Er war nett weeschte arrig reich he was not you-know very rich ‘He wasn’t you know rich but he was well-to-do’

awwer but

er he

war was

well-to-do well-to-do

In contrast, there are very few Pennsylvania German discourse/pragmatic markers in the English of these speakers. So why draw on English in this way? As in the case of the lexical borrowings, need is not the answer, and neither is social prestige. Matras (1998) has argued that these kinds of borrowings are highly automaticized and gesture-like. Rather than being social triggers, they are cognitively motivated. He claims that bilingual speakers will cut down to just one set of these items, and this set will always favour those that belong to “the pragmatically dominant language”. The notion of a pragmatically dominant contact language is an interesting one here. This is a speech community that tries to maintain its isolation and limit its interaction with the outside world, but the reality is that it has to do business with the English speaking majority in order to survive. So this gives English considerable clout, especially as the language of literacy – no small wonder some people perceive English as a “killer language”. But we need to keep in mind that, in contrast to a real killer, English never had any intention to “kill” any other language.

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8.3  LANGUAGE DEATH As earlier described, one unhappy outcome of language contact is language loss, where multilingual speakers of small, indigenous or minority languages abandon them in favour of the socially dominant language of the wider community and/ or the nation-state. This situation is now usually referred to as language death. Of course, some people describe languages like Latin and Old English as dead languages, but these languages didn’t die – they simply altered their structures over time as a result of natural evolution. Alongside the Classical Latin of the late Roman Empire (this was a kind of Standard Latin), there were vernacular (or colloquial) varieties of Latin that were spoken in various parts of Europe. These colloquial Latins then evolved into modern-day languages such as French, Italian, Catalan and Spanish. So Latin metamorphosed into these Romance languages (and you can find a family tree for these languages in Chapter 9). In this section we are talking of the complete disappearance of a language, something that can cause a good deal of pain for people who find themselves unable to speak their ancestral languages – and additionally painful because it is strongly associated with other experiences of cultural trauma and community breakdown. Around the world, languages are dying and at distressing rates – American Indian, Celtic, Austronesian and Australian Aboriginal languages, to name just a few. Even in those places where local languages appear healthy, the high status of bulldozer languages such as English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi and Indonesian suggests their survival is precarious. Creole languages, such as Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea and Kriol in Australia, are also threatening many of the indigenous languages in those regions; paradoxically, these creoles themselves are threatened by their superstrate (or lexifier) languages (those that originally contributed most of the creole’s vocabulary). Social pressures brought on by increased formal education and emphasis on schooling can cause creoles to gradually move more and more in the direction of the socially dominant language. For example, English based creoles like Tok Pisin and Kriol might become more and more like Standard English. It is a kind of “language suicide”, although its more official title is decreolization – through convergence and borrowing the creole moves closer to the status variety of the language. UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has identified language survival as a high priority. According to some estimates, the linguistic monopolies created by the expansion of English and other national languages will see more than half of the world’s roughly 7,000 languages disappear this century – some predictions are as grim as 90% (and others even grimmer): “English is even being promoted by many governments in countries where English is nobody’s first language, and nearly all nations promote their national language at the expense of minority and migrant languages” (Bradley and Bradley 2002: xii). To illustrate how dire the situation is for some language groups, consider the devastating effect of English on Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. Before English speakers settled in Australia, the country was remarkably diverse linguistically. Table 8.2 shows the approximate numbers of Aboriginal dialects, languages and language families at the time of earliest European contact.

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Understanding Language Change Table 8.2 Number of Aboriginal languages originally spoken in Australia Language families Languages Dialects

26–29 200–250 500–700

Table 8.3 Comparison of the 2005 and 2014 National Indigenous Language Surveys Language status

2005

2014

Change

Languages still spoken Severely or critically endangered Spoken by all age groups

145 110 18

120 100 13

25 languages 10 languages 5 languages

For Australian indigenous communities, language contact, with the accompanying imposition of colonization, has brought about wholesale extinction of many languages. As Table 8.3 shows, only around 120 of the original 200–250 languages remain today, according to the National Indigenous Languages Survey published in 2014. Even the remaining robust languages are under threat, despite vigorous efforts being made to maintain them. Only 13 have more than 500 speakers, and five languages have fallen out of this category in the last ten years. It has been estimated that the number of surviving languages might decline by as much as 50% in the next 20–30 years, as the most critically endangered languages lose their last speakers. Over and over again, we see this pattern of language spread leading to language shift and then language loss. And consider what we lose when these languages disappear. Crucial parts of peoples’ social and cultural identity vanish. For linguists, important linguistic systems disappear forever – and who knows what else vanishes with those dying words and constructions. Wisdom unique to these linguistic communities becomes extinct with their languages – Evans (2010: xviii) describes it as the “looming collapse of human ways of knowing”. This might involve knowledge connected, say, with the environment and its flora and fauna – knowledge that could well have scientific value for the development of new materials, drugs and foods. There are important implications here for historical linguistics, since during language loss significant changes take place. As speakers forget forms and constructions, they might lose them altogether or change them to something closer to those in the language they are in the process of shifting towards. Similar changes happen to the sound system, as speakers drop phonological contrasts and rules. Consider again the Pennsylvania German speech community. We’ve only looked at the religiously conservative groups (the so-called horse and buggy people), where the language is thriving. For these speakers, language has a deeply religious significance, and this works to safeguard its survival. Amongst the more modern groups, however, language proficiency ranges from fully competent speakers to real “semi-speakers” (speakers who have forgotten or have never learned much of the

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language). But even the most proficient speakers aren’t teaching their own children Pennsylvania German, and language death seems inevitable here. The dying language of these groups shows particularly rapid and numerous changes. They involve major reduction or “stripping away” of morphological complexity such as case levelling, collapse of gender and number distinctions, and reduction of tenses – in general, a movement towards greater isolating structure. Compared to the language of fully competent speakers, the language of semi-speakers appears in a greatly reduced form. Of course, as we’ve seen, these are the same sorts of processes that affect robust languages, especially in a contact situation, but language death and these sorts of grammatical developments are intimately connected, and the changes are more rapid and more drastic.

8.4  LANGUAGE PLANNING AND POLICY Language planning and policy is a large area within sociolinguistics that tackles problems within speech communities. It includes the work linguists do to assist communities to stop or reverse the decline of a language or even to revive one already extinct with no native speakers. All over the world communities are crying out for support to help document and maintain their language in the face of probable extinction, and many linguists are now involved in some way in fieldwork, language documentation and language revival. Unlike the linguistic changes we’ve been considering elsewhere in this book, we are now looking at changes that arise out of deliberate intervention (by educators, policy makers and linguists) to alter either the languages themselves or the ways in which their speakers use them. This is one of the few areas where linguists cheerfully admit to being prescriptive. There are different aspects of language planning – and all aspects can of course be highly political: 1 Status planning deals with selection (of the language variety to be promoted as the standard), as well as attitudes towards alternative varieties and the political implications of these choices. 2 Corpus planning deals with the codification of the linguistic features of the standard and requires the production of grammars, dictionaries, textbooks of instruction and other prescriptive literature; for example, it involves the development of orthographies (i.e. introducing or changing a writing system), and this includes the alphabet, spelling, punctuation, accentuation and capitalization. Another aspect of corpus planning concerns modernization – the expansion of the lexicon to incorporate terms for modern artefacts, activities and concepts that are otherwise referred to by code-switches or borrowings from outside sources; sometimes this practice is motivated by linguistic purism, a desire to prevent the language from being swamped by lexical aliens (and when communities seek to revive or revitalize traditional languages, modernization can be a hot topic).

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3 Acquisition is part of the language planning process in which institutions (usually a national, state or local government body) seek to influence which language(s) will be used as the medium(s) for instruction (this can be from primary schools through to universities); obviously, this process can alter the status and level of prestige of a language, and might even reverse a situation of potential language shift. Clearly, the decisions made around policies in these areas can go on to affect language status. They can also have a major impact on language vitality, even determining which languages are nurtured and thrive, and which are neglected and decline.

8.5  THE DANGERS OF PURISM Speakers don’t generally like their languages to change (see Chapters 1 and 10), and in situations where languages are battling for their lives, speakers can be particularly sensitive to change. In this situation, one very real danger is a tendency towards purism; in particular, an unrealistic insistence that the current-day language reflect the norms of the past, and that the endangered language remain uncontaminated by outside elements. Again this is where Pennsylvania German is instructive. As seen earlier, the language of the religiously conservative groups shows considerable evidence of convergence to English in its structure, and of course the incorporation of English loanwords is commonplace. But the absence of purist attitudes in this community is striking, and this bodes well for the future of this language. Speakers constantly remark on the variation and change they see in their language, often commenting wie Englisch as mir sin ‘how English we are’. Despite an isolationist philosophy, a desire to be abgesandert vun die Welt ‘apart from the world’, this intrusion of English into Pennsylvania German is never criticized or judged harshly. In this case structural compromise is a sign of health, and the absence of resistance will enhance the chances of the language’s survival. This is not to belittle puristic attitudes – the desire to keep a language pure and free of elements from dominant languages such as English is understandable, especially in a situation of potential language shift to the dominant language. Moreover, linguistic purism does seem to be something that is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. But puristic attitudes can be a real barrier to natural, healthy change, change that all languages need if they are to remain viable and versatile tools for a society. And in a language endangerment context, they can have the disastrous effect of discouraging younger speakers, who feel they don’t speak an authentic form of the language, for example the “proper” Māori or the “proper” Irish that older speakers in the community are insisting on (again, see Chapter 10 on the myth of purism and related effects). The result can be that younger people give up altogether (see Dorian 1994). Linguistic straightjacketing hardly ever works, but it can have serious repercussions for a language under threat. Many communities have shown the improved wellbeing that results from efforts to reconnect individuals and families to their culture and to relearn or at least

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learn about their languages. But successful language revitalization does not mean retaining the original structural complexity of the heritage language. This lesson is an important one for language maintenance and revival programs – the language revived in the present can never be the same as it was in the past.

SUMMARY Contact induced change refers to the process whereby a language takes and incorporates some linguistic element from another language. This can involve any part of the grammar, but the most readily transferred items are lexical (so content rather than grammatical words). However, the extent of the influence will always be affected by the nature of the contact and what can be rather unpredictable social attitudes. There are two different contact scenarios: (1) When we have a situation where the original inhabitants adopt the language of the newcomers, there is usually a period of bilingualism when they speak the new language but with some interference from their primary language. If some of these elements from the primary language are transmitted to later generations of speakers of the prevailing language, this is described as a substratum of that language. Typically, the substratum affects the phonology of the adopted language, but generally little in the way of lexical influence takes place. (2) When the newcomers are linguistically absorbed into the indigenous population, the influence of their respective languages is typically most obvious in the lexicon, although it can affect other parts of the grammar as well. This is described as superstratum influence. Both types of contact, superstratum and substratum, can result in the transfer of grammatical features. Convergence occurs in cases of widespread and stable bilingualism and can involve mutual interference, where features get shared by the converging languages. The result is typological homogeneity (i.e. the languages become very similar in structure). In some cases structural changes can be so extensive that languages can no longer be regarded as genetically related to the rest of their former language family; these languages include contact varieties like pidgins, creoles and mixed languages.

FURTHER READING A number of books focus on the linguistic outcomes of contact, including MyersScotton (2002), Clyne (2003) and Winford (2003). For general information on contact languages and contact induced changes, see Thomason and Kaufman (1991), Thomason (1997) and Siegel (2008); contributions to the 2003 Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Vol. 23) focus on various themes to do with language contact and change. You’ll find a vast literature on specifically pidgins and creoles; recent works include Baptista (2005), Singler and Kouwenberg (2008) and Velupillai (2015). For

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specifically mixed languages, see Matras (2000) and Matras and Bakker (2003). For more on cross-creole structures, we recommend the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online (Michaelis et al. 2013; available online at http://apicsonline.info); on the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis, see Bickerton (1981, with a new 2016 edition available for download from Language Science Press @ http:// langsci-press.org/catalog/book/91, 1986). The discussion on Gurindji Kriol comes from Meakins (2013a, 2013b), and that on Light Warlpiri from O’Shannessy (2005, 2015). Domingue (1977) put the original case for Middle English as a creole. On aspects of code-switching see MyersScotton and Jake (2009), and on the Pennsylvania German-English contact see Burridge (2007). Much has been written on language endangerment and the fragile state of minority languages; see, for example, Nettle and Romaine (2000), Zuckermann and Walsh (2011) and Evans (2010).

EXERCISES 1  Word order change Revisit what was written about English and German constituent order in Chapter 6 (in particular what we described as the “verbal brace”). Describe the order of the major constituents in the following examples from Pennsylvania German, and compare it to that of English. How would you characterize the influence of English here? a

Mir hen alsemols heemgemacht we have before homemade ‘We used to have homemade icecream here.’

b

Er hot besser g’fielt wann er sich gut hewe he has better felt if he self good hold ‘He used to feel better, if he could get a good grip somewhere.’

c

No verblatz ich weil then burst I because ‘Then I’ll burst, because I’m completely stuffed.’

ich I

eiscream icecream

bin am

g’hat had

hot has ganz totally

kenne can

do here

aeryets somewhere arrig very

vol full

2  What borrowings can tell us Borrowings may give us information about the technological or scientific status of the speakers of languages in contact with others. In this chapter we described the borrowings into English from American Indian languages and Australian Aboriginal languages. Contrast these borrowings with those from Arabic: alchemy, alcohol, algebra, alkali, cipher, nadir, zenith, zero. What do you notice about the connotations of these different sets of borrowings, and what do they tell us about the relationships between the languages and the cultures of their speakers? (If you can, add to these lists of borrowings into English.)

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3  Australian Kriol The following two questions relate to Kriol, a variety of creole spoken by more than 20,000 speakers in the northern parts of Australia. Part 1: The features of Kriol State how the vocabulary and grammatical features of each sentence below differ from those of Standard English. Identify which of these features might be found in more colloquial varieties of English. (Note that close translations have been supplied, with grammatical morphemes in capital letters.) a Wi bin mekim big ampi PAST make+TRANS(ITIVE) big humpy we ‘We made a big humpy [= hut, shelter]’ b I bin faindim im PAST find+TRANS him/her/it I ‘I found him/her/it’ c Im kukimbat dat kanggaru that kangaroo he/she cook+TRANS+CONTINUOUS ‘S/he is cooking that kangaroo’ d Mi na laikim go la kul NEGATIVE like+TRANS go LOCATION school I ‘I don’t like going to school’ e Dat san blo mai sista im lib la my sister he live LOCATION that son POSSESSION ‘My sister’s son lives in Sydney’ f Im blakpala he black+ADJECTIVE MARKER ‘He’s black’ g Dey bin go indid PAST go TAG QUESTION they ‘They went, didn’t they?’ h An’ mela new teacher gotta come come and our new teacher FUTURE ‘And our new teacher is going to come’ [mela = several of us excluding you] i Dad did get two turtle DO get two turtles Dad ‘Dad got two turtles’ j E bin wipeim gotta tissue PAST wipe+TRANS with tissue he ‘He wiped it with a tissue’

Sydney Sydney

Part 2: Language endangerment In Australia many people, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, consider Kriol varieties to be a threat both to Australian indigenous languages and to Standard English. Why do you think they believe this – and are they correct in their view?

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4  Pidginization/creolization and processes of language change Describe the kinds of changes that take place in the creation of pidgins and creoles. How do these compare with (a) normal internal historical processes and (b) external change (i.e. the “forced” changes associated with language contact)? 5  Research essay Take a language that has a considerable number of loanwords from other languages (e.g. Japanese from Chinese and English; Indonesian loans from Arabic, Sanskrit and Dutch; loans from French, Dutch, German, Latin and Greek into English etc.). Begin with a list of 50–100 loanwords. Study the way in which foreign words are adapted to the native linguistic system (phonologically, grammatically and semantically). Also indicate what information the loans give us about the nature of contact between the two languages.

NOTES 1 We should emphasize that there are other hypotheses regarding the emergence of pidgins and creoles (for example, some maintain that creoles emerge as second language varieties of the superstrate, or lexifier, languages, and not out of pidgins); see the discussion in Winford (2003), Siegel (2008) and Velupillai (2015). 2 Many thanks to Felicity Meakins for allowing us to use this map; the cartographer is Brenda Thornley. 3 Naming these languages is controversial; we have adopted Corbett and Browne (2009)’s use of “Serbo-Croat” as a cover term for Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian. 4 Naturalness overlaps with “markedness”. Features are said to be natural if they are unmarked across languages (e.g. have a wider distribution and are acquired earlier than other features); we expect change to shift languages from a less natural to a more natural state. 5 The creator of the term “diglossia”, Charles Ferguson, originally applied it to the patterned use of formal and colloquial forms of the same language (for example by speakers of Swiss-German or Arabic), but in a later work he extended the term to describe a similar distribution between two different languages (see Ferguson 1959). 6 The overall patterns of influence here are similar to those recorded by Rayfield (1970) for English-Yiddish contact.

9 Relatedness between languages INTRODUCTION The previous chapters have focused on linguistic change. We now turn our attention to the question of genetic affinity and how we might uncover the linguistic relationships that arise as a consequence of change. To set the scene, go back to a suggestion we made in the first chapter. Remember our example from the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:7) in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese as well as Latin (the “mother” of these four modern “daughter” languages). English again only serves as a gloss. Here’s a snippet: Latin: French: Italian: Spanish: Portuguese:  English:

Non adsumes nomen Domini Dei tui in vanum Tu ne prendras point le nom de l’Eternel, ton Dieu, en vain Non usare il nome dell’Eterno, ch’è l’Iddio tuo, in vano No tomarás el Nombre del SEÑOR tu Dios en vano Não tomarás o nome do Senhor teu Deus em vão Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain

Clearly there are a number of lexical, even grammatical, resemblances here, and Table 9.1 gives a sample. Table 9.1 Lexical correspondences between different Romance languages Latin

French

Italian

Spanish

Portuguese

English (gloss)

non nomen Dei in vanum

ne nom Dieu en vain

non nome Iddio in vano

no nombre Dios en vano

não nome Deus em vão

not name God in vain

The similarities here are remarkable. How can we account for them? First, these languages may have influenced each other. So one language may have borrowed material from the other (as we discussed in Chapter 8). This is certainly true for French and English. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, English borrowed many Romance words such as vain. But a word like name is a problem. Yes, there is the Latin word nomen, but there is also Old Frisian nama, Old High German namo, Old Saxon namo and Old Irish ainm. All these appear to be related somehow. And yet it seems implausible that they are all borrowed from other languages. The alternative

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explanation is that these languages are somehow related, that they go back to the same root, and that this is how their commonalities arise.

9.1  LANGUAGES, DIALECTS AND STANDARDS Before we explore the idea of relationships between languages we need to discuss what languages actually are. Most people seem to take the notion of “language(s)” for granted. Yes, there are French, Japanese, Inuktitut, Walpiri and Navaho. But what if we zoom in now? What about English English and American English? Are these two languages, or two dialects of only one language? Bavarian and Dutch are equally incomprehensible to a speaker of High German – are both independent languages? Or dialects? Why is Dutch considered a language of its own and Bavarian a dialect of German? The decision is, eventually, arbitrary. Back in the 1940s, the wonderful Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich claimed, “A language is dialect with an army and a navy” (at the Yiddish Scientific Institute Conference, 5 January 1945). What he was trying to say is that there are no linguistic grounds for calling one variety a language, and another one a dialect. Linguistically speaking, Dutch could be a dialect of German, and Bavarian an independent language. Matters get even worse when we consider what are called dialect continua, i.e. fuzzy boundaries between dialects. Here speakers in communities located close-by can understand one another (perhaps they live in neighbouring villages), but speakers located at the geographical extremes of these continua cannot. So near the German and Dutch border, German speakers using their own “home-grown” varieties can communicate better with their Dutch neighbours than with German speakers in the South of Germany, who speak southern varieties of German. So where does German end and Dutch begin? There’s so much variance and indeterminacy here that any attempt at dividing up such a continuum on the basis of purely linguistic criteria (like mutual intelligibility) is problematic. Most of the time, languages shift very slowly and gradually. The boundaries and language borders that we put up are mostly political, cultural and arbitrary. Our modern notion of “language” is closely tied to linguistic standards. We believe that there is some Standard English, or German, or Japanese, which in itself defines the language as such. From a linguistic point of view, this is not exactly true. All standard languages are abstractions across idiolects, sociolects and dialects, and most of the boundaries between languages are politically and arbitrarily, rather than linguistically, defined. If we take the Dutch-German border and its dialects in detail, there is no natural cut-off point where we can say that German stops and Dutch begins. The political border between the two countries is the linguistic border as well. We find the same gradual dialect diffusion between Hessen (the German state to the north of Bavaria) and Bavaria itself. For political reasons alone we recognize Bavarian as a dialect of German, and not as an independent language. So, the definition of a language is closely linked to political and cultural questions. But it is also a question of linguistic history, as we will see in the next sections.

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9.2  ESTABLISHING GENETIC RELATIONSHIPS Let’s assume that languages (and dialects) are somehow related, like family – we would expect parents, brothers and sisters, cousins and other distant relatives. How do we know who is related and who is not? And how do we know whether we are dealing with a close brother or some long lost cousin? One of the easiest ways is to simply compare the vocabulary of a set of languages. Take a look at Table 9.2. Table 9.2 Comparison of four words in seven languages

‘house’ ‘mouse’ ‘louse’ ‘out’

English

German

Dutch

Danish

Swedish

Italian

Arabic

[haʊs] [maʊs] [laʊs] [aʊt]

[haʊs] [maʊs] [laʊs] [aʊs]

[hœʏs] [mœʏs] [lœʏs] [œʏt]

[hu:ʔs] [mu:ʔs] [lu:ʔs] [u:ʔð]

[hʉ:s] [mʉ:s] [lʉ:s] [ʉ:t]

[kasa] [tɔpo] [pidɔkkjo] [fwori]

[bajt] [fa:r] [qamla] [xa:ridʒan]

Five out of these seven languages show remarkable similarities, while two stick out. The words for ‘house’, ‘mouse’, ‘louse’ and ‘out’ are almost identical in English, German, Dutch, Danish and Swedish, but they appear to be very different in Italian and Arabic. This leads us to suspect that these five languages may somehow be related to each other, but not to the other two languages. On the basis of the vowel sounds, we might even go further and hypothesize that English and German are more closely related to each other, as are Danish and Swedish; Dutch could be somewhere in the middle. So one might say that English and German, and Swedish and Danish, appear to be sister languages, and that the two pairs are something like cousins. Unfortunately, it is not that easy. It is not enough to simply compare words in languages. If we just did that we would arrive at some very strange conclusions. For example, the word for ‘eye’ in Modern Greek is μάτι [ˈmati], and in Malay it is mata [mata]. Does this mean that Greek and Malay are related? The problem here is that Greeks have never been in contact with Malay speakers (who live more than 5,000 miles, or 8,000 kilometres, away). So we can exclude borrowings here, but we can also exclude historical relatedness for the same reason. There is simply no evidence in history that Greeks and Malays go back to the same roots. But we do have this kind of evidence for German, Dutch, English, Danish and Swedish. When we compare languages in this way, an important concept is the symbolic nature of words. Excluding sound symbolic expressions (like clang, jangle and woosh), there is no natural or necessary connection between the shape of a word and its meaning, and this means we can rule out the possibility that patterned regularities are fortuitous. What are the chances that speakers of different languages will independently arrive at the same or similar sound patterns to represent the same object or concept? Certainly, coincidental similarities do arise (as between Malay and Greek), but literally hundreds of sets like those in Table 9.2 permeate the vocabularies of German, Dutch, English, Danish and Swedish, all showing the same systematic similarities. This cannot be accidental.

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So the tricky aspect of comparing languages in this way is identifying the actual “cognates” (related words with a common origin); in other words, weeding out the loans and the chance similarities. Generally, it is better to look for resemblances in basic, common vocabulary, such as that for body parts, family relations or nature. These tend not to be borrowed (though there are occasional exceptions, as we saw in Chapter 8). The premise here is that basic (culturally neutral) words are more resistant to borrowing, and it is these that are trusted when it comes to establishing genetic relationships. When loans occur, they do need to be identified. Onomatopoetic words aren’t helpful either, even if they are rarely borrowed; because they imitate natural sounds in some way, they may be similar (like English cockadoodledoo, German kikeriki and Japanese kokekokko), and not because of a common origin. Finally, it is always good to start with words that are obviously similar, but it is also important to go beyond that stage and consider pairs of words that show little or no similarity. Perhaps you can find a sound change rule that links two words in a systematic fashion? Consider Latin quinque, Greek pénte, French cinq, Italian cinque, German fünf, English five and Icelandic fimm. Greek and Icelandic hardly look similar: pénte versus fimm! And yet they are cognates and go back to the same root: Proto-Indo-European (PIE) *penkwe. How is that possible? Recall Grimm’s Law outlined in Chapter 7. Table 9.3 summarizes the changes. Table 9.3 Grimm’s Law Proto-Indo-European

Germanic

(voiceless stops) p, t, k

became

(voiced stops) b, d, g (breathy voiced stops) bh, dh, gh

became became

(voiceless fricatives) f, θ, x (h) (voiceless stops) p, t, k (voiced stops) b, d, g

So the PIE */p/ regularly turned into /f/, hence fünf, five and fimm (note that we are focusing here on the initial consonant only). When we looked at sounds in Chapter 4, we mentioned that a cornerstone of historical linguistics is that changes are not erratic but regular. This means that words like PIE *penkwe represent relationships between form and meaning that are carried into the daughter languages (if items are retained), even where drastic sound changes have occurred. However, we also mentioned at the time that there are non-phonetic forces working against the operation of regular sound change. Latin quinque is the fall-out of one such force – quinque should be pinque, but via a kind of long-distance assimilation, earlier pinque changed to quinque because it was affected by the numeral quattuor ‘four’. Numerals are particularly susceptible to this kind of “contamination” (English four should begin with [wh], but it changed in anticipation of the following number five – another nice example of analogy at work!). When we look at the other early Germanic languages (e.g. Gothic fimf, Old High German fīmf, Old Saxon fīf ), we can suspect that, in Proto-Germanic, the mother of the Germanic languages, the word for ‘five’ must have been something like *fimf.

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Recall our discussion of compensatory lengthening in Chapter  4. When the [m] was lost in Old Saxon and Old English (but not in German), the preceding vowel was lengthened, hence fi:f. Long [i:] underwent the Great Vowel Shift in the later Middle Ages and was turned into a diphthong [ai]. The result is Modern English five [faiv]. So, to cut a long story short: words can be cognates even if they don’t look very similar! We need to consider regular sound changes that can relate them to each other. And we also need to consider the historical background for the evidence that the supposedly related languages actually did have a chance of coming from one and the same root. Again, it’s like looking at families. Because somebody has red hair, like all the members of the Smith family, this does not automatically mean that this person is related to the Smiths. We need to find historical (genetic) evidence that this person can in fact be related to the Smiths in some way.

Problems for the regular operation of sound change Throughout history people have attributed supernatural powers to names, and naming taboos can occasionally cause problems for historical linguists because personal names might be common words or derive from common words. Simons (1982), for example, describes how on Santa Cruz (part of the Solomon Islands), there is a taboo against using the name of certain relatives (by marriage). Names consist of a common word (normally with a gender marking prefix). So if a man’s mother-in-law is called ikio (i- ‘prefix to female’s name’, kio ‘bird’), he cannot use the common word kio to refer to birds. The effect of this is that something like 46% of the everyday vocabulary is potentially taboo for some people on Santa Cruz; on the island of Malaita, this figure is as high as 59%. Euphemisms are thus created via the methods we described in Chapter 3: semantic shifts of existing words, circumlocution and also phonological modification. Sounds turn up in odd places; they mutate unexpectedly. Words are often funny looking. (Here you might compare the situation where the urge to swear in polite company drives an English speaker to spontaneously change fuck to fudge.) There is also a high rate of borrowing, even among core vocabulary items that are not generally borrowed. Under normal circumstances, why would speakers need to take kinship terms or pronouns from another language? Yet, in this context even basic vocabulary of this kind cannot be relied on to remain stable. Extensive borrowing and taboo induced remodelling make it difficult to determine the chronology of linguistic changes that have occurred. Irregular sound shifts have the effect of accelerating vocabulary differentiation between genetically related languages and can create a false impression of long divergences, in some cases even hiding genetic connections.

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9.3  THE FAMILY TREE MODEL One of the ways in which we can represent relationships between languages (or family members) is by developing a family tree. Family trees can show us parents, children, grandchildren, cousins, uncles, nephews and all other possible relations. But they also seem to assume that, like any other tree, there is a common root to all of the family members. One such family tree is given in Figure 9.1. This is the family tree of the McFly family from the Hollywood blockbuster Back to the Future. In Figure 9.1 we can see that Marty McFly (the hero of the movie) is related to George, his father, and that he also has kids, Marlene and Marty Jr. His grandfather is Arthur McFly, and he has a large number of uncles and aunts (Milton Baines, Sally Baines, Toby Baines, Joey “Jailbird” Baines . . .). With such a family tree we can easily see who is more closely related to whom. So, for example, there is the McFly lineage and the Baines lineage. David and Linda McFly are obviously more closely related (as brother and sister) than David McFly and Sally Baines (as nephew and aunt). Figure 9.1 Family tree of the McFly family (Back to the Future) Harold McFly

Seamus McFly

Martin McFly

Maggie McFly

William Shawn McFly

Sylvia McFly

?

Sam Baines

Arthur McFly

George Douglas McFly

David McFly

Jennivere McFly

Linda McFly

Milton Baines

Lorraine Baines

Martin Seamus ‘Marty’ McFly

Marlene McFly

Jennifer Parker

Marty McFly Jr.

Sally Baines

Stella Baines

Toby Baines

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Figure 9.2 Family tree for the Germanic languages (simplified) *Germanic

*North Germanic East Norse

Swedish, Danish

*East Germanic

West Norse

Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese

Gothic

*West Germanic High German

Modern German

Modern Low German

Low German

Yiddish

Modern English

Flemish, Dutch Frisian

Let us apply this idea to languages. In Figure 9.2 you can see a more or less standard family tree for the Germanic languages. On the right hand side of Figure 9.2, we can see the West Germanic branch of the family that sprouted the modern languages High German, Yiddish, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, Low German and English. This seems to reflect our initial thoughts on the relatedness of German, Dutch and English on the one hand, and that of Danish and Swedish on the other. This West Germanic group is separated from the North Germanic languages and dialects, such as Icelandic, Norwegian, Faroese, Swedish and Danish. The West and North Germanic languages can be distinguished from the East Germanic languages, such as Gothic. Note that this group has died out, so that we can only talk about historical documents here and reconstructed forms (as we mentioned in Chapter  6). We should emphasize that we have considerably simplified the tree here. Like actual families, the reality is more complex, and you will find there are many different and considerably more complicated versions of the Germanic family around. We can now reiterate this process and look at other large trees, such as that for the Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Latin . . .). Their (once again simplified) tree is given in Figure 9.3. Just like with the Germanic languages, we can see that the Romance languages can be divided into eastern and western Romance languages. The eastern part comprises Romanian and Dalmatian, while the western part comprises Italian, on the one hand, and French, Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese, on the other. These all seem to go back to Continental Romance, which can be distinguished from the dialects spoken in Sardinia, though both go back to Latin. If we push further back now, we see that both Germanic and Romance languages ­actually are related somehow. This is what we discussed in Chapter  7 when we talked about Grimm’s Law and the First Germanic Consonant Shift that separated

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Figure 9.3 Family tree for the Romance languages (simplified) Latin

Classical Latin

Vulgar Latin

Continental Romance Eastern Romance Romanian

Sardinian dialects

Italo-Western Romance

Dalmatian

Proto-Italian Western Romance

Italian dialects French

Gallo Romance Ibero Romance

Occitano Romance Occitan

Spanish

Portuguese

Catalan

the Germanic languages from the Romance languages. Simplifying a lot, we might say that the Romance languages and the Germanic languages form one group, together with many other families, such as Hellenic (Greek), Anatolian, BaltoSlavic and Indo-Iranian, to name only a few. In other words, in such a model we can show that Modern German is historically related to Sanskrit, Hindi, Polish, Russian, Portuguese and Icelandic! The comparative method (buttressed by grammatical and other evidence) has been used to classify the world’s languages into groups and subgroups. We now have numerous established language families in addition to Indo-European. These include (among many others) Austronesian (languages throughout the South Pacific and Southeast Asia and into Madagascar); Sino-Tibetan (a large family of languages spoken in East and Southeast Asia, and including the Chinese, Burmese and Tibetan languages); the Finno-Ugric language family, assumed to include Hungarian as well as Finnish and Estonian); Uto-Aztecan (languages of the western United States and Mexico); and Pama-Nyungan (the major genetic grouping of Australian languages). The number of language families is a matter of hot debate, in particular how many of these families can be grouped into even larger ones, as we go on to discuss.

9.4  THE WAVE MODEL As we mentioned briefly in Chapter 7, a number of scholars haven’t always been convinced by the family tree model as a way of describing the development of languages – not only does it fail to accommodate the fuzziness of language and dialect boundaries, but it also cannot capture the fact that languages (related or otherwise)

Croaan

Bulgarian

Polabian

Sorbian

Old Persian

Avestan

Slovenian

Macedonian

Serbian

Slovak

Belarusian

Old Church Slavonic

Ukrainian

Russian

East

South

Slavonic

talic

Kurdish

Czech

Polish

West

BaltoSlavonic

Marathi

Old Prussian

Latvian

Lithuanian

Balc

Hellenic

Farsi

Albanian

Bengali

Armenian

Pashtu

Ossec

ranian

Tocharian

ndoEuropean

Hindi

Sanskrit

Lycian

Lydian

ndic

ndo- ranian

Hite

Anatolian

Figure 9.4 The Indo-European family tree

Gothic

East

Norwegian

Swedish

Danish

celandic

North

Germanic

German

Yiddish

High

West

Afrikaans

Flemish

Dutch

English

Frisian

Low

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may through contact continue to influence each other over time. Trees like those we gave earlier give the impression (a) that languages split off from a common mother language by regular (sound) changes, (b) that the split between (daughter) languages happens instantaneously and decisively, and (c) that there is little or no contact between languages. So, they are rather abstract models of linguistic change. But is this really how languages evolved? A much more realistic scenario would be that dialects gradually move away from each other. Every dialect develops its individual innovations, and they all begin to group into new (standard) languages. The same applies to the Germanic languages. There was no big bang that divided the Germanic languages into Dutch, German and Danish. Rather, we would expect that dialects evolve slowly until we eventually see our modern standard languages. As we mentioned before, there is no natural cut-off point between the dialects of Dutch and German at the border. This national (and linguistic) border is purely political, cultural and arbitrary. For this reason, Johannes Schmidt in 1872 suggested a very different way of looking at language variation. His idea was that languages develop in waves rather than trees. Imagine a pond, and a quiet, peaceful surface of water. When somebody throws in a stone (a linguistic innovation), waves ripple concentrically through the pond. When a second stone is thrown in (another innovation), a new set of waves develops, which interacts with the previous waves. The same happens with a third stone. And so on. Every stone is linguistic innovation that can create at least one new language, but that can also affect the languages around it. Figure 9.5 shows such an abstract diagram.

Figure 9.5 Wave model of diffusion (based on Schmidt 1856)

Innovation A

Innovation B Innovation C

Innovation D

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Figure 9.6 A wave diagram of the Germanic language family (McColl Millar 2015: 173), reproduced with permission of Taylor & Francis

McColl Millar (2015: 174) uses this model to describe the development of the Germanic languages (Figure 9.6). This diagram may look very confusing at first, but it is actually quite simple. He identifies 26 innovations that happened in one or more of the Germanic languages. High German, for instance, is characterized by

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the High German Consonant Shift (we discussed this in Chapter 7). This innovation only applied to High German; it did not spread to other dialects or languages. Similarly, Gothic alone is characterized by a change from /fl-/ to /θl-/. Now consider innovation 12: the loss of dental fricatives /θ, ð/. This happened to a number of languages: High German, Low German, Frisian, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Dutch, but not English, Icelandic and Gothic. And sometimes innovations come in bundles: innovations 2, 19, 21 and 22 characterize English and Frisian, but not the other Germanic languages. Wave diagrams like the one in Figure 9.6 are obviously very different from the tree diagrams discussed before. Rather than assuming that a given language split from a mother node at one point in time and developed independently from then on, it takes into account that languages and dialects are in flux and in contact with each other. Innovations don’t necessarily split off one language from the next. They may happen across languages and dialects, and they may lead to a dynamic re-grouping over time. Nevertheless, Figure 9.6 still gives an accurate picture of what tree diagrams represent: the Scandinavian languages somehow group together, as do the West Germanic languages. Gothic sticks out as the most unusual Germanic language, and English and Frisian also maintain their special status (some have argued for an Anglo-Frisian sub-branch on the Germanic tree on the basis of shared features between Old English and Old Frisian). So, in this respect, Figure 9.6 is really not unlike the earlier Figure 9.2, but it is less a priori and top-down, and rather works with changes across time, including those resulting from inter-language contact. So why don’t we drop tree diagrams altogether and focus on wave diagrams instead? Wave diagrams might be more realistic about actual developments, but they are a lot worse when it comes to the representation of historical developments, and reading them is a lot more complex. So, for example, it is very easy to tell which language came first in Figure 9.2. You simply move “up” the tree to find the mother node. This can’t be done in a wave diagram. Tree diagrams can be seen as the abstract summary of what wave diagrams show. It is thus not surprising that most historical studies today use trees to present genetic relationships. Nevertheless, we should not forget that actual language histories are a lot more complicated than this.

9.5  QUANTITATIVE APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE DIVERGENCE Much of what we have described in the previous sections stems from research that is more than 100  years old. More recently, with the advent of computing power and research into DNA genetics, researchers have become increasingly interested in quantitative aspects of language. But, in fact, one of the earliest attempts at quantifying linguistic typology and diversity was glottochronology. The essential idea is that we can somehow pinpoint the date when a language split off from its ancestor languages. For that, we first need a basic word list, i.e. words that each and every language should have (such as I, bird, blood and so on), but that are more or less culture free. There is a so-called Swadesh list (named after Morris Swadesh) that lists the top 100 or 200 words of basic vocabulary. Note that slightly

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different versions exist, for numerous reasons (it is, after all, quite hard to decide which words are “culture free” and which are not!). Table 9.4 is therefore only one example of such a Swadesh word list. The procedure then is quite simple. You pick two languages and check whether the words on the list are phonetically similar or not. So, Latin manus ‘hand’ is more similar to Spanish and Italian mano than to English hand, which in turn is more closely related to German and Dutch Hand, or Swedish hand. The words that are similar enough are deemed cognates (on some caveats, see above), and the more cognates you find, the shorter the distance in time since they separated. If you find few similar words (or cognates) on the list for two languages that are probably related, it is more likely that they split long ago. If they share lots of similarities, they also share a lot of history. Table 9.4 List of 100 basic words   1  I (1 Sg)   2  You (2 Sg)  3  we  4  this  5  that  6  who?  7  what?  8  not   9  all (of a number) 10 many 11 one 12 two 13 big 14 long 15 small 16 woman 17 man 18 person 19  fish (noun) 20 bird 21 dog 22 louse 23 tree 24 seed 25 leaf 26 root 27  bark (of tree) 28 skin 29 flesh 30 blood 31 bone 32  grease (fat) 33 egg 34 horn

35 tail 36 feather 37 hair 38 head 39 ear 40 eye 41 nose 42 mouth 43 tooth 44 tongue 45 claw 46 foot 47 knee 48 hand 49 belly 50 neck 51  breasts (female) 52 heart 53 liver 54  drink (verb) 55 eat 56  bite (verb) 57 see 58 hear 59  know (facts) 60  sleep (verb) 61 die 62 kill 63 swim 64 fly 65  walk (verb) 66 come 67  lie (recline) 68 sit

  69  stand (verb)  70  give  71  say  72  sun  73  moon  74  star   75  water (noun)   76  rain (noun)  77  stone  78  sand   79  earth (soil)  80  cloud   81  smoke (noun)  82  fire  83  ash(es)   84  burn (verb)   85  path (road)  86  mountain  87  red  88  green  89  yellow  90  white  91  black  92  night  93  hot  94  cold  95  full  96  new  97  good  98  round  99  dry 100 name

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In order to determine the time when languages split, we also need to assume that there is a constant rate of retention through time. The assumption has been that languages will retain about 86% of the words on the 100 word Swadesh list in 1,000 years; conversely, about 14% of the 100 word list will be lost every 1,000 years. From this follows a fairly simple equation that helps us determine a split date, or the “time depth” of a given language. In this formula, T is the time depth, or time since the split in millennia; C is the percentage of cognates; and r is the expected retention rate (86%).

T = log C/2 log r

So if a language still has 60 out of 100 possible cognates, this means that T = 1.77/3.87  =  0.46. This means a time depth of 460  years, or, in other words, the language split off from its parent 460  years ago. With only 20 cognates left, T = 1.3/3.87 = 0.33, or 330 years. Needless to say, there are a number of problems with glottochronology, beginning with the assumption that we can determine a culture-free basic vocabulary that all languages should have. Most importantly, we find that many languages actually borrow words from other languages even for basic concepts from the top 100 list: grease, mountain and person are not native English (or Germanic) words but are borrowed from French, and skin might come from Old Norse. If we look at the 200 word Swadesh list, the results are even worse, and we find lots of words borrowed from other languages. The problem is that borrowed words may or may not look similar to the words in the other language, but they do not belong to the particular language we are gauging, and therefore they skew our results. There is, of course, something like a basic word list, and concepts which are more universal than others. But, nevertheless, even this list is not without problems. Languages may have more than one word for every concept on the list – which one do we choose? Is it small or little? Is it come or arrive? And what if two concepts on this list are represented by only one term? Some languages do not distinguish between bark (no. 27) and skin (no. 28). So, in a nutshell, there are a number of problems with any list of basic words. Other difficulties arise with the rate of retention and loss. Icelandic is known to be very conservative and has a much higher retention rate than English, for example. So how can we be sure about the 86% retention rate? Moreover, few languages have a documented history going back more than a couple of hundred years; so how can we be so sure that they tend to replace 14% of their vocabulary? In sum, we can say that glottochronology was a good first step in the right direction, but that it is highly controversial in many respects. It is thus no surprise that scholars soon began looking for alternatives. These new approaches sometimes work with Swadesh-like word lists, but apply much more sophisticated computational methods and algorithms in order to establish relationships between languages. Sometimes, scholars try to go beyond the word list approach and include other features that can be shared by languages and dialects. This is particularly interesting and helpful when languages and dialects influence each other after they have split from the mother languages. Campbell (2013: 447–492) gives an excellent overview on current methods and ideas.

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9.6  LONG-DISTANCE COMPARISON AND PROTO-WORLD If we go back to the family trees developed in section  9.3 above we see that an important part of this model is the idea that languages and language groups can be traced back to their roots, the parent languages from which they split off at one point in time. So all Romance languages (Italian, Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese . . .) go back to their mother language, Latin. Similarly, all Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Gothic . . .) go back to their mother language, Proto-Germanic. Both Proto-Germanic and Latin (or rather Proto-Italic) again go back to their mother language, PIE. Here they are joined by their sister languages, Indo-Iranian, Anatolian, Armenian, Albanian, Tocharian, Balto-Slavonic and Hellenic. Proto-Germanic probably developed in the fifth century BCE, and with PIE we are already looking at a time depth of about 7,000 years. In other words, linguists are attempting to reconstruct languages and language developments that happened more than 7,000 years ago and for which we have no material evidence (in a moment we will look at some methods of reconstruction). The same can be said, in one form or another, about the other language families: Uralic, Altaic, Afroasiatic, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian and so on. It is perhaps even possible to draw a map of the world’s languages at 10,000 BCE. This alone is a remarkable achievement. But it also leads us to another interesting question: where do these language families come from? There seem to be two possible answers. Either they also go back to a common ancestor, the mother of all languages, or they developed independently. Let us begin with the latter idea, the independent development of language families in several different places. This would explain the sometimes fundamental differences we see around the world. Superficially at least, it seems that an isolating language like Turung, spoken in North-East India, has little to no commonalities with a polysynthetic language like Tiwi, spoken in Australia. Consider the following two sentences (thanks to Stephen Morey and Alice Gaby for these examples) (don’t worry about the grammatical terminology in the Tiwi example – you just need to take in that all this is captured in one word): (9.1) dai 3 that ‘then (they) would tie thread’

naa 3 possessive

rii  2 thread

git 1 tie

(9.2) ampiniwatuwujingimajirranirningiyangurlimayami a-mpi-ni-watu-wujingu-ma-jirrakirningi-angurlimayi-ami 3MINS.F-NPST-LOC-MORN-DUR-COM-LIGHT-WALK-IPFV ‘She is walking over there in the morning with a light’

Languages can code information in very different ways, as we saw in Chapter 5. In a ground-breaking and hotly debated article, Evans and Levinson (2009) show that linguistic diversity is far greater than we used to think and that there is hardly

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any feature that is common to all languages. This would fit in nicely with independent developments all over the world (a multiple origin scenario). However, there are problems with this idea. First, no matter how superficially different the languages of the world are, their fundamental building principles still seem to be surprisingly similar. As trivial as it may sound, it is important to acknowledge the fact that most, if not all, known languages have consonants and vowels, words and word classes, perhaps even syntactic phrases and certain syntactic rules. Note that this does not automatically mean there is something like an innate universal grammar in Chomsky’s sense. Evans and Levinson claim that languages have developed these properties independently, out of general biological and cognitive principles. For example, as we saw in Chapter 6, many languages have a consistent head ordering. This means that if a language has verbs followed by objects, it is also likely to have prepositions before their nouns (and not after). Alternatively, when a language has objects occurring before their verbs, it also tends to have postpositions, i.e. following their nouns. Does this constitute a language universal that languages cannot have developed independently? No, not necessarily, since a consistent ordering of head modifiers in a language reduces the processing effort for speakers and hearers and should thus be favoured on the basis of general cognitive properties. The correlation might also be the fall-out of grammaticalization (pre- and postpositions often develop from verbs, and thus they keep their order with respect to the noun phrase; another source is head nouns in genitive constructions). So, in sum, both the enormous diversity in languages and their similarities could be explained with multiple origins, combined with evolutionary pressures from biology and cognition. But, alternatively, we might also think about one common ancestor. This would be in line with what we know about our biological evolution, where the most widely accepted proposal says that humans, Homo sapiens, developed somewhere in East Africa around 195,000  years ago and began to spread all across the world about 110,000 years ago (the so-called Out-of-Africa Hypothesis). If we want to link this with language evolution, we would have to assume that some form of protolanguage must have developed before Homo sapiens left Africa. In that case, the migrants took this common protolanguage with them, and we would expect numerous innovations in all parts of the world, which ultimately led to the diversity we see today. But we would also expect some retention, leftovers that are common to all languages. But is there any linguistic evidence for this? Can we go back more than 10,000 years and look at the languages, and language families, that led to Indo-European, for example? In 1903 the Danish linguist Holger Pedersen suggested that such a macrolanguage family might exist, and he coined the term “Nostratic”. To this day, there is no agreement among scholars as to which languages and language families actually belong to Nostratic, but most approaches would now include IndoEuropean, Uralic, Altaic and perhaps also Kartvelian. Many also add Dravidian and Afroasiatic. Nostratic would have been spoken around 15,000 BCE. But how exactly do the proponents of such an old macro-family arrive at their conclusion? Their method is essentially the same as outlined above: they compare lists of basic vocabulary from all these (reconstructed) language families. Table 9.5 gives some examples (note that V stands for an unspecified vowel).

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Figure 9.7 The Nostratic family tree (after Bomhard 2008) Nostratic

Afroasiatic

Kartvelian

Dravidian

Indo-European

Eurasiatic

Uralic

Altaic

Table 9.5 Nostratic word list (adapted from Ruhlen 1994: 103) Language

Who?

What?

Two

Water

One/finger

Arm

Bend/knee

Hair

Smell/nose

Afroasiatic Kartvelian Dravidian Eurasiatic

k(w) min ya¯v kwi

ma ma ya¯ mi

bwVr yor irantu pa¯la¯

ak a rtsˑqˑa nı-ru akwa

tak ert birelu tik

ganA tˑotˑ kaŋ konV

bunqe muql menda bu-k(a¯ )

put putˑ pocˇcˇu pˑutˑV

suna sun cˇuntu sna¯

w

When one looks at Table 9.5, it becomes clear that, despite some differences, there are surprising similarities between these languages. The word for ‘what?’ is similar in all four languages: ma, ma, yā, mi, and so are the words for ‘smell/nose’: suna, sun, čuntu, snā. Some words are very similar in only two or three languages. Consider ‘who’, which is k(w) in Afroasiatic and kwi in Eurasiatic, or ‘finger’, which is tak in Afroasiatic and tik in Eurasiatic. Akwa is the word for water in both languages. Is that coincidence? Advocates of the Nostratic hypothesis would say no, and they would claim that the similarities are strong enough (based on a much larger word list) to warrant the idea that Afroasiatic, Kartvelian, Dravidian and Eurasiatic actually go back to one common ancestor, Nostratic. In 1994 the American linguist Merritt Ruhlen pushed this idea one step further. His initial question was a very simple one: if we assume Nostratic can be established as one macro language family spoken about 15,000 years ago in some parts of the world (mainly Europe, Asia and Africa), what about the other languages? Wouldn’t it be plausible to assume that Nostratic itself comes from some ancestor language, together with the other large families we haven’t looked at yet (the languages of America and Australia, for example)? Ruhlen tried to reconstruct as many of the other languages and families as possible and compared them to the material already available. The results are summarized in Table 9.6. Table  9.6 again reveals surprising resemblances. The word for ‘water’, for instance, turns out to be the same for Eurasiatic and for Amerind (akwa), and the

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Table 9.6 Proto-World word list (adapted from Ruhlen 1994: 103) Language

Who?

What?

Two

Water

One/finger Arm

Bend/knee Hair

Smell/nose

Afroasiatic Kartvelian Dravidian Eurasiatic Khoisan Nilo-Saharan Niger-Congo DenéCaucasian Austric

k(w) min ya¯ v kwi !kuna nani k wi

ma ma ya¯ mi ma de ni ma

bwVr yor irantu pālā /kam ball bala gnyis

ak a rtsˑqˑa nı-ru akwa k···anki engi ʔoχwa

tak ert birelu tik //kɔnu tok dike tok

ganA tˑotˑ kaŋ konV //kukani kono kan

bunqe muql menda bu-k(ā) //gom kutu boŋgo pjut

somm toma pu-ta punče /ˑusum

suna sun cˇuntu sna-Khi cˇucˇona

tsha-m

suŋ

namaw ntoʔ

xeen

buku

s´ya-m

-ıjun

okho gugu akwa-

akan mala kano

buku buŋku buka

utu

sinna mura cˇuna

Indo-Pacific Australian Amerind

o-ko-e m-anu ʔ(m) bar mina boula ŋaani minha bula kune mana pˑal

w

dik kuman dikˑi

summe

word for ‘finger’ is remarkably similar in 7 out of 12 language families. The same goes for ‘knee’ and ‘smell’. On the basis of such data, Ruhlen claims to have identified roots for at least some of these words (using methods of reconstruction we examine below): ku = ‘who’ ma = ‘what’ pal = ‘two’ akwa = ‘water’ tik = ‘finger’ kanV = ‘arm’ buŋku = ‘knee’ sum = ‘hair’ čuna = ‘nose, smell’ These words (or roots), Ruhlen argues, come from Proto-World, the language that was spoken before Nostratic and that gave rise to all our modern languages. ProtoWorld is the mother of all languages. It is hard to say when such a language might have been spoken. The earliest fossils for Homo sapiens date back to about 195,000 years ago, and our genetically common ancestor (“mitochondrial Eve”) dates back about 130,000 years. Some groups of Homo sapiens left Africa about 110,000 years ago. The oldest signs of symbolic communication in Homo sapiens date back to the explosion of culture in the Upper Palaeolithic, or the Late Stone Age, about 40,000 years ago. Here we begin to find art and evidence for rituals. This is important because language is also a symbolic system, so that we can assume that by 40,000 years ago humans were probably able to use some kind of speech. Unfortunately, this is as far as we can get. If we assume Nostratic was spoken about 15,000 years ago, all we can

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say is that Proto-World must have been spoken about 150,000–120,000 years ago, before Homo sapiens left Africa and spread across the world. It seems highly unlikely that a later and independent development of Proto-World in different parts of the world would have led to the kind of similarities we see in the data in Table 9.6. The idea of Nostratic (and even more so Proto-World) has been fiercely debated. If we look back at what we said above about the dangers and problems of finding cognates, it is clear that identifying cognates in reconstructed languages dating back more than 10,000  years is a highly speculative enterprise. Some of the apparent cognates might be independent developments on the basis of onomatopoeia; so the words for ‘smell’ might simply resemble sniffing sounds in the individual languages. Also, given the extremely fast pace of radical semantic changes over time, it is anything but clear whether the reconstructed words or their cognates actually mean what they are supposed to mean. Campbell and Poser (2008: 370–372), for example, point out that there are at least three words in Spanish that can be traced back to the root *kuna: cónyuge ‘wife, spouse’, china ‘girl’ and cana ‘old woman (adjective)’. All these look as if they could be related to the root *kuna. However, when we look at the detailed word histories, we see that this is far from the truth: cónyuge comes from Latin and is related to the words ‘with’ and ‘yoke’. So this has nothing to do with *kuna ‘woman’. China is a loanword from Quechua, a South American language, where it means ‘young woman’, but loanwords don’t count, as we mentioned above. Cana comes either from a Latin word for ‘white’, candidus, or from Latin canna ‘reed’ and is again unrelated to the word ‘woman’. In a nutshell, when we take together the dangers of cognate hunting and the very concrete objections by Campbell and Poser, it becomes clear that the reconstruction of Proto-World, or even Nostratic, is a fascinating, but highly problematic and speculative exercise. One need not go as far as Campbell and Poser and say that “the search for global etymologies is at best a hopeless waste of time, at worst an embarrassment to linguistics as a discipline, unfortunately confusing and misleading to those who might look to linguistics for understanding in this area” (p. 393), but it is certainly advisable to take these ideas with more than just a pinch of salt.

9.7  RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST In 1877 Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph, a machine that could record the human voice and other sounds. This was the first time in human history that spoken language could be recorded. Whatever we know about languages before 1877 must be based on written sources. Inevitably, these records are never complete – depending on the time and language, we lack data from certain social groups, styles and genres. Also, written language can never accurately represent spoken language. So we need to reconstruct many aspects of language before 1877. But what about languages or times for which we have no record at all? As just discussed, human language is at least 50,000 years old, but the first written records are only about 5,000 years old. What about those years in between? And what about the language stages for which we have only few or no records at all? If we want to say anything about these, we also need to reconstruct what they could have been like.

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9.7.1  Written sources as evidence of change What can we say about a language if all we have are written sources? Can we say anything about its pronunciation? And what can we say about informal styles and registers? And how do we deal with those social groups that could not read or write? Let us look at some of these questions in greater detail. What can we say about Shakespeare’s pronunciation, for example? First, it should be clear that earlier pronunciations sometimes have to be reconstructed; i.e. we do not have direct and concrete evidence for them, but we need to develop arguments that support our claims. In the case of Shakespeare, such arguments could come from a number of sources – wordplay and puns or rhyming patterns for instance. Romeo and Juliet is full of witty wordplay. Here is just one example: MERCUTIO Nay, gentle Romeo, we must have you dance. ROMEO Not I, believe me. You have dancing shoes With nimble soles: I have a soul of lead So stakes me to the ground I cannot move. (Romeo and Juliet, I.4) There seems to be some pun here on the words soles and soul. Mercutio, who has “dancing shoes with nimble soles”, encourages Romeo to dance. But Romeo is feeling sad and depressed; he has “a soul of lead” and thus does not want to dance. This may lead us to suspect that in Shakespeare’s time already soul and sole were pronounced in similar ways (but we still don’t know how). Rhyming patterns can also be helpful. Some examples come from the famous “wedding sonnet” no. 166: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no; it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests, and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. There are at least three word pairs that don’t seem to rhyme in this sonnet. Love is made to rhyme with remove, come with doom and proved with loved. Such rhymes

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no longer work, and they may point to some differences in the earlier pronunciation. But there are three problems. First, these could be so-called eye rhymes or visual rhymes, i.e. rhymes not based on sound but on letters (e.g. modern bough and through rhyme visually, but not in their pronunciation). With remove and love this might actually be the case – but we will never know for sure. The second problem is that there is no guarantee that Shakespeare always rhymed perfectly. The third and most interesting problem is the fact that a rhyme only can tell us that two words A and B rhymed, but it doesn’t tell us whether A sounded like B, or B sounded like A. For that, we need more evidence, for example from other rhymes or from puns. Sometimes we are lucky and find “indirect evidence”, such as contemporary descriptions of how some words or sounds were pronounced. Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote in his Grammatica Anglicana ‘English Grammar’ about the letter : “In the long time it naturally soundeth sharp, and high; as in chósen, hósen, hóly, fólly [. . .] In the short time more flat, and a kin to u; as còsen, dòsen, mòther, bròther, lòve, pròve” (1640: 39). So love and prove probably sounded like modern northern British English: [lʊv] and [pɹʊv]; by extension, we suspect it was [rəmʊv]. So occasionally we can say something about the pronunciation of earlier languages on the basis of what contemporaries said about the topic.

Nursery rhymes Old nursery rhymes also give us clues about earlier pronunciations. Take “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water; Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.” The words water and after are awkward here, and it’s water that is the culprit. Like many similar words, the vowel sound was coloured by the rounded lips of [w], and [watər] shifted to [wɔtər]. So water originally rhymed with after. It wasn’t a perfect fit, of course, but in non-standard pronunciations [f] was often left out (Dickens occasionally spelled after as ). So it was probably more a case that “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of [wahter]; Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling [ahter].” What about Old Mother Hubbard who “went to the cupboard to get her poor doggie a bone; but when she got there the cupboard was bare; so the poor doggie had none.” The words bone and none look as if they ought to rhyme, and they once did. Originally, both were pronounced with [a], though at the time this rhyme was being sung, [a] would have shifted to something closer to [o]. So the word none is the guilty party here. It later did its own thing by shifting its vowel to rhyme with nun. None is historically ‘not + one’, so it behaves in the same curious way as the number one. There are all sorts of ways we can reconstruct the pronunciations of earlier times. Our knowledge of sound change, dialect variation, early commentaries and poetry all provide different clues. Rhymes are not always reliable, of course, but they can provide vital pieces of the puzzle.

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As we described in Chapter 6, written sources are particularly problematic when it comes to the study of syntax. These days we can ask native speakers if a given sentence is grammatical or not. If native speakers agree that it isn’t grammatical, we have what is called negative evidence – confirmation that something isn’t possible in a given language. When they say it is possible, we have positive evidence for its existence. Alternatively, we could even check one of the many corpora with millions of words to see whether that sentence (or a similar structure) occurs in real speech. This, of course, only gives us positive evidence. Whatever is in the corpus must be possible in that language (though there’s always the chance of accidental slips of the tongue and brain!). However, if some structure isn’t in the corpus, this doesn’t mean it is ungrammatical. The problem is compounded in historical linguistics. All the data we have is necessarily corpus data. We have no access to a time machine to ask native speakers if some structure is acceptable or not. Even worse, as emphasized in Chapter 6, we need so much more data to study past grammar, and yet most historical corpora are small and limited in scope. If we never find a sentence in Shakespeare’s English that has articles following their nouns (dog the), we might suppose this was not possible in Shakespeare’s English. But who knows – we also might be wrong, and somebody might find just such a phrase in a long lost manuscript. Needless to say, matters get worse the further we go back in time, simply because the amount and variety of sources usually becomes even more limited. Early English Books Online (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home), containing manuscripts from Shakespeare’s time (about 1500 to 1600), comprises an astonishing 350,000,000 words. This is almost as much as we have for some present-day English corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable English Texts (http://www.uibk.ac.at/ang listik/projects/icamet/), one of the most comprehensive corpora of Middle English (ca. 1100–1500), only has about 7.8 million words. And if we go back another 500 years, we find that practically all Old English texts (ca. 800–1100) still available to us today, and available through the Complete Corpus of Old English/Dictionary of Old English (http://doe.utoronto.ca/pages/index.html), only amount to about 3 million words. This is 1% of the Early English Books Online, and about ten times the complete works of Shakespeare. For languages other than English, the situation can be even worse. Few manuscripts have survived for Gothic, and for other East Germanic languages, like Burgundian or Vandalic, we only have the name (as mentioned in other documents), but not a shred of direct evidence is left. The same applies to the many historical languages all around the world that did not have written forms. But let’s come back to those for which we have some evidence, such as Old and Middle English. Even though there are a few million words of text still available, the extant written sources are obviously not fully representative of the language. For one, we can hardly say anything about informal language, as most documents are in a rather formal and literary style. In Chapter 6 we mentioned the Old English leechdoms (the Anglo-Saxon first aid kit), which are very different from the highly stylized remains of Anglo-Saxon literature (such as the poems Beowulf and Caedmon).

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They are the closest we come to the spoken idiom for that period, but they are still rather formulaic. But if we are really lucky, every now and then we get a quick peek at truly informal language. For Latin and Greek, we have some informal graffiti on walls, vases and other ceramics. And for some languages (including Latin, Greek and late Middle English) we have various personal letters, which are closer to informal, oral language structures than, say, formal letters, sermons or histories. So even though these are written, they bring us nearer to what people may have said. Nevertheless, historical corpora are necessarily deficient when it comes to the linguistic representation of different social groups. Obviously, there are no written records by the people who couldn’t read or write (though some may have dictated, and current researchers try to uncover what they can from this language). It depends a lot on the time and culture who these people were. In many cases, female speakers didn’t leave written records. For example, there is not one single manuscript from a female Anglo-Saxon; we have to wait for the Middle Ages.1 On the other hand, we find many manuscripts by female authors from Latin, Greek and even Ancient Egyptian (so a lot earlier than Old English!). In most societies and cultures, the lower social groups (with low incomes, little learning and no social power) were illiterate. This means we usually don’t have many written records of the language of farmers, blacksmiths or fishmongers, or wet nurses, for example. For English at least, this only gradually begins to change in the Early Modern period, when we see the slow spread of literacy. In sum, we can say that historical linguistics, once it goes back beyond 1877 in time, is faced with challenges, mostly to do with the fact that there are only written sources available. These bring with them their particular problems, but occasionally also opportunities. For example, with written sources it is now possible to trace the linguistic behaviour of single individual speakers across their lifetime, sometimes over more than 50 or 60 years – provided of course that they were literate and actually wrote material across that time span. Surprisingly, this is much more common in the Early Modern English period than we’d expect (https://www.uantwerpen. be/en/projects/mind-bending-grammars/project/). So we really get a chance to observe long-term changes in the individual and the linguistic community in real time. Today such a study would be extremely costly and time consuming, as we would have to follow and record speakers over several decades. Here, historical linguistics with its written sources has a clear advantage over present-day data, and we are not dealing with such “bad data” at all, as Labov (1994: 11) once complained.2

9.7.2  The comparative method How can we reconstruct what happened in the past even if there is not enough evidence? One of the most widely used approaches is the so-called comparative method. You have already learned a lot about this earlier in this chapter. The idea behind it is actually simple. Let us assume we have four languages, A, B, C and D, which might go back to one common ancestor, Language E (a protolanguage for which we have no direct evidence). Diagrammatically, this may look like a simple language family tree, as in Figure 9.8.

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Figure 9.8 A simple language family tree Language E (protolanguage)

Language A

Language B

Language C

Language D

Now let’s assume that Language A has a word for ‘hand’ which sounds like [mano] , and Language B has a word for ‘hand’ which sounds like [mão] , Language C has [mɛ]̃ , and Language D has [mano] (represented in Figure 9.9). Let’s assume these are “cognates”, or related words, and that all four are “reflexes” of a word in Language E; i.e. they can all be derived somehow from a common ancestral form. Two things are interesting and important now. First, two of the words are very similar to each other – in fact, they are the same: [mano] . Second, we know from independent sources that it is more likely that consonants get deleted and adjacent vowels get nasalized rather than vice versa (see also Chapter 4). When we take these two pieces of evidence together, it makes sense to assume that Language E, the parent language, probably had a word that began with (all reflexes have this in writing, three in pronunciation) and had an following , so . The rest of the word is more complicated. In this particular case, we know Languages A–E. [mano] mano is Italian, [mão] mão is Portuguese, [mɛ͂] main is French and [mano] mano is Spanish, and they all go back to Latin (Language E). In Latin, the actual word for ‘hand’ is [manus] – so we were really close with our reconstruction! This, in a nutshell, is the idea of linguistic reconstruction by using the comparative method. Needless to say, matters are a bit more complicated than this. First of all, in order to reconstruct a language we need a lot more evidence. So we are not comparing four or five words (or cognates) but hundreds of them. Second, the goal is not only to reconstruct the vocabulary of that language, as we did with Latin, but to reconstruct the whole linguistic system: phonology, morphology and syntax. The first and maybe most difficult step along the way is the exclusion of noncognates, words which do not share a common ancestor. As we’ve just seen, this is particularly tricky because sometimes words look stunningly similar even though they are not related at all (remember Modern Greek μάτι [ˈmati] and Malay mata [mata], both meaning ‘eye’), and sometimes words are hardly similar, and yet they Figure 9.9 A simple language family tree for the word ‘hand’ Language E (protolanguage)

[mano]

[mão]

[mɛ̃]

[mano]

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are related (Greek πέντε [pente], German fünf [fynf]). We also need to exclude apparent cognates which were borrowed at a later stage, simply because they don’t point to a common ancestor, but only to some later language contact. Both Japanese and Portuguese share the word pan ‘bread’, but they are not related at all. Japanese adopted the word pan from Portuguese pão in Late Middle Japanese, between about 1500 and 1600. At the same time, they also seem to have incorporated botan ‘button’ (Portuguese botão – originally a Germanic word butt), arokuuro ‘alcohol’ (Portuguese álcool – originally an Arabic word al-kuħuul) and tabako ‘tobacco’ (Portuguese tabako – originally Spanish and Caribbean Arawakan tabaco). This doesn’t make Japanese in any way related to Portuguese or any of these languages, and we have to be careful to exclude such adopted words (and hence non-cognates) from our considerations. What we need to do now, with all these caveats in mind, is to find a large list of cognates and establish so-called sound correspondences. For the sake of simplicity, let’s use some Romance again. Consider the lexical items in Table 9.7. Table 9.7 Cognates in Romance languages Lexeme ‘goat’

Italian kapra

Spanish kabra

Portuguese kabra

‘dear’

karo

karo

karu

‘head, top’

kapo

kabo

kabu

‘meat, flesh’

karne

karne

karne

French

ʃɛvʁə ʃɛʁ ʃɛf ʃɛʁ

In establishing sound correspondences, we look at the individual sounds of each cognate in matching environments (this is important). The initial sound appears to be /k/ in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, but /ʃ/ in French. So we can simply write down the sound correspondence: k- = k- = k- = ʃSimilarly, /a/ seems the same in all cognates in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese except the last one. This also seems different in French, where /a/ turns into /ɛ/: -a- = -a- = -a- = -ɛ-/-ə (read: -ɛ- in the middle of a word, -ə at the end) The sound /r/ is equally similar: -r- = -r- = -r- = -ʁ-/-ʁ /p/ or /b/ shows some variation: -p- = -b- = -b- = -f/-vHow about /o/?

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-o = -o = -u = ø (ø means ‘nothing’) And /e/ and /n/? -e = -e = -e = ø -n- = -n- = -n- = ø Table 9.8 summarizes what we have found so far. Table 9.8 Sound correspondences for goat, dear, head, meat, dog k- = k- = k- = ʃ-a- = -a- = -a- = -ɛ-/-ə -r- = -r- = -r- = -ʁ-/-ʁ -p- = -b- = -b- = -f/-v-o = -o = -u = ø -e = -e = -e = ø -n- = -n- = -n- = ø

Can we draw any conclusions from this? In fact, we can, but we first need to consider a few rules for comparative reconstruction (assuming, as we described earlier, that sound changes are not capricious, but regular): a When reflexes are the same, assume the ancestor language had that same sound. b Consider “natural” sound changes (see Chapter 4). It is more common for /k/ to turn into /ʃ/, or for final vowels to get lost, than vice versa. c Assume the winner takes all. In many cases, the most common form is the source, and the rarer forms the innovations. d Assume as few changes as possible. e Never forget to consider where in the word particular sounds occur. f It is sometimes easier to do consonants first. So what does this mean for our data set? For k- = k- = k- = ʃ- and -n- = -n- = -n- = ø, we can invoke rules (b), (c) and (d): /k/ to /ʃ/ is a very common, natural change (lenition), and /k/ is the most common form among the four. And why would three languages change to /k/ and only one keep /ʃ/? So let’s assume that /k/ is the original sound. Similarly, three languages have nasals, so let’s assume that French is again the aberrant one (besides, sounds are deleted much more often than they are added). It is also very natural for stops like /p/ to become voiced between voiced segments (e.g. in the middle of words). So it makes sense to assume /p/ as the original form, which was then either voiced word medially in Spanish and Portuguese, or changed to a fricative in French (also voiced in the middle of words). Rules (c) and (d) also help with -r- = -r- = -r- = -ʁ-/-ʁ. We could argue that French underwent an innovation that turned all /r/ into /-ʁ/. The majority of languages have /r/, and why would they all change in the same direction, away from /ʁ/? This seems unlikely, so let’s assume

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/r/. Rules (b) and (c) can help us with both /e/ and /a/. The reduction of vowels to schwa /ə/ or zero at the end of a word is a common process, and the majority of reflexes are /a/ and /e/; so let’s assume /a/ and /e/ for the protolanguage – we might assume /ɛ/ occurs word medially in French instead of /a/ as a regular sound change. The -o = -o = -u = -ø set is a little problematic, but it makes sense to invoke rules (b) to (e) in this case. We are dealing with vowels at the end of the word, so erosion or even loss is not unusual. This would explain French -ø. Out of the remaining three, /o/ is the most common, and it would be hard to explain why two languages changed in this particular direction, when one kept the original sound and one eventually lost it. So, /o/ seems the most likely candidate for this set. In sum, we arrive at the following sounds: /k/, /r/, /p/, /n/, /a/, /e/ and /o/, from which we can attempt to reconstruct the lexemes on our list in (undocumented) Proto-Romance. Lexeme ‘goat’

Italian kapra

Spanish kabra

Portuguese kabra

‘dear’

karo

karo

karu

‘head, top’

kapo

kabo

kabu

‘meat, flesh’

karne

karne

karne

French

ʃɛvʁə ʃɛʁ ʃɛf ʃɛʁ

Proto-Romance *kapra *karo *kapo *karne

Incidentally, the reconstructed forms are very close to Latin: capra ‘goat’, carus ‘dear’, caput ‘head, top’ and caro, carnis ‘meat, flesh’ (note that Latin spelling represents /k/ with ).

Digging for clues – internal reconstruction As we’ve seen on several occasions in this book, language change usually leaves behind relics. All sorts of things can get stuck in the linguistic sediment over time. They might be words (earlier wer ‘man’ petrified in the compound werewolf   ), pronunciations (the old voicing rule preserved in modern alternations like wife-wives), meanings (the old meaning of wife ‘female’ buried in compounds like midwife) and even grammatical features (original ObjectVerb word order embedded in expressions like woodcut and bloodshed). Linguistic debris of this kind can help us discover historical language structures. But the comparative method is only partly helpful here; we have to use another method of reconstruction. This method is known as internal reconstruction, and the basis of it is simple. Irregularities in the modern language (like foot-feet) are the fall-out of changes, and if we undo these changes, we can get back to a more regular set-up (recall our study of i-umlaut: irregular forms like foot-feet are relics of an earlier pronunciation rule whereby the main vowel of the word assimilated to the high vowel of the lost plural ending). So with internal reconstruction, we infer earlier forms of a language via material available from a synchronic description only. Whereas the

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comparative method can help us draw linguistic family trees and lead us to a common historical “mother language”, internal reconstruction only investigates earlier stages of a single language (e.g. Pre-Old English *føti > Modern English feet). Clearly the technique isn’t as powerful as the comparative method, but it is a valuable tool in cases where languages have no known siblings (language “isolates” like Basque). It is also usefully applied in preparation for the comparative method to bring forms back to a shape so that comparisons are easier. Modern languages are full of rubble, and hidden in the remains are partial linguistic histories of these languages. So being a historical linguist is sometimes like being an archaeologist – we both dig stuff up in order to provide a fuller picture of the past.

The techniques of phonological reconstruction give great insight into the nature of phonological change, but they don’t transfer readily to syntax. Because the lexical shape representing a given meaning in language is completely arbitrary (the symbolic nature of words), it follows that when lexical cognates are discovered across languages they must be the result of shared history – a time of common development when the cognates in question represented one lexical item in the shared parent language. And we’ve seen how the relatedness between cognate items is preserved, sometimes despite extreme sound change, because of the regularity of sound change. But what happens when we apply this methodology to syntax? Syntactic patterns relate form to meaning, but they aren’t symbols in the same way. If, for instance, Language A has the construct “Players hit the ball” (i.e. SVO) and Language B has the construct equivalent to “Players the ball hit” (i.e. SOV), all we can compare are the parts of the constructs, not the whole; i.e. the lexical but not the syntactic information. To take this example further, if we want to reconstruct PIE word order, what we find is that all three major word order types are represented in the daughter languages: Dravidian languages (SOV) Celtic languages (VSO) Romance languages (SVO) The proto word order may have been any three, all three or even none, i.e. free word order. Indeed, all of these patterns have been suggested by linguists working on the ancestral word order. But even if we had three different corresponding phones (a parallel case in phonology) in three related languages, we could still, through our knowledge of phonological systems, and our understanding of phonological change, attempt to reconstruct the shape of the proto-phoneme (the sound correspondence p-f-h could plausibly evolve from *p). When syntactic correspondences show completely diverging patterns, we can’t even be sure they are cognate. The syntactic categories verb and object are extremely common across languages, and the comparison of OV and VO is meaningless. Another example is the

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Indo-European passive. The syntactic category exists in all daughter languages, but the syntactic constructions and incorporated lexical material are irreconcilable. We assume PIE had some sort of passive, but what was its syntactic shape? No one-to-one correspondences can be set up for syntactic constructs, because they don’t evolve in the systematic way sounds do. The types of changes affecting syntactic systems are the same ones that cause the comparative method to fail – as we saw in Chapter 6, these are pattern replacement, analogy and reanalysis. But it’s not all bad news. One solution is to isolate language specific developments and reconstruct languages at the stage before the individual changes took place (so internal reconstruction), until we get patterns that are comparable. This method has had some success in the reconstruction of past syntactic systems. Typology and language universals can also assist. As we described in Chapter  6, our knowledge of syntactic types indicates preferred directions of change, so we can use this as we do our knowledge of phonological systems. Moreover, the growth of strong general theories of syntax has given us insights into historical processes, which can be applied to the reconstruction of sentence structures. Recall from Chapter 6 Talmy Givón’s now famous catchphrase “Today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax.” We know that independent syntactic items become fossilized as morphology; hence, the synchronic morphology of languages provides valuable clues about their early syntax. We also know that grammar is created out of lexical items – we know the usual suspects, and we know their paths of change. In short, we know a lot more than we did about how to go about reconstructing the syntax of protolanguages.

SUMMARY In this chapter we had a detailed look at the relationships between languages. After a brief discussion of what languages actually are, we followed up on the venerable and powerful idea that languages can be grouped in a family tree, so that we have grandparent languages (like Indo-European), parent languages (like Italic) and daughter languages (like Spanish, Italian, French etc.). As an alternative, we discussed the more dynamic wave model that captured the fact that new features of a language can spread from a central point in continuously weakening concentric circles (like waves created when something is thrown into water). We examined “the comparative method”, the technique for studying the evolution of languages via the meticulous feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages, leading to the reconstruction of unattested ancestral forms. There were two important concepts here: (1) the symbolic nature of words and (2) the principle of regular sound change. Both tenets are what give linguists proper licence to compare and reconstruct ancestral forms in this way. Here we looked far back in time and discussed the pros and cons of a kind of Proto-World, the mother of all languages. Finally, we also had a look at the (sometimes controversial) quantitative methods of measuring language relationships, including approaches that combine findings from evolutionary genetics and language typology.

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FURTHER READING There is a flourishing literature on the comparative method and related issues going back a long way: we recommend Bloomfield (1933), Fox (1995) and Anttila (1989). We briefly mentioned internal reconstruction as a second historical method; for details see Hock (1991: Chapter 17); Fox (1995: Chapters 7–8) and McColl Millar (2015: Chapters 8 and 9). Long-distance genetic relationships (taking in Nostratic and Proto-World) have captured people’s imaginations, and the topic makes regular media appearances; you can find a discussion of this controversial aspect of the comparative method in Campbell (2003), and of the genetic grouping of the world’s languages in Comrie (2001). Glottolog (http://glottolog.org/) is also a good start on the topic, as is the World Atlas of Language Structures (wals.info). For glottochronology see Campbell (2013). Many researchers working on languages in Australasia and the Pacific have written about naming taboos and noted the difficulty of finding cognates: see Keesing and Fifiʔi (1969) and Holzknecht (1988).

EXERCISES 1  Investigating genetic relationships Choose 20 random items from the Swadesh list in Table 9.4. Identify the words in at least 15 different Germanic languages (choose across the different sub-branches) for these 20 items. Is there any pattern? On the basis of what you find, identify the language families and possible relationships for the 15 languages you investigated. 2  The comparative method Examine the sets of Germanic words in Table 9.2 and answer the following questions: a What is the name given to such sets of words? b Provide the sound correspondences for the vowel sounds. c Give the Dutch, German and Swedish words that would correspond to English brown. d English has the word maroon corresponding to the Italian word marrone ‘brown’ – how do you explain the similarity to the Italian word? e How do we account for the striking similarities between the vocabulary items here? Why do you think we can rule out chance or borrowing? f Draw a mini family tree to represent the relationship between these languages. 3  Reconstructing Proto-Algonkian (American Indian) Look at the cognate sets for these languages of the Algonkian family. Suppose that, on the basis of the two correspondence sets shown in lines (a) and (c), a protosegment *h were reconstructed. How could this reconstruction be questionable? Discuss. (Hint: think regularity of sound change.)

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a b c d e

Gloss ‘he sits’ ‘belch’ ‘crow’ ‘he embarks’ ‘knock down’

Fox nahapiwa

Cree nahapiw sekiw aha posiw kawin

ʃekiwa aho posiwa kaweni

245

Menomini nahapɛw sekeew aʔa posew kaeɛn

4  Reconstructing Proto-Polynesian Examine the data below and answer the questions.

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa bb cc dd ee ff gg hh

Gloss ‘sky’ ‘road’ ‘house’ ‘rock’ ‘sea’ ‘canoe’ ‘new’ ‘turn over’ ‘fire’ ‘hand, arm’ ‘five’ ‘one’ ‘two’ ‘three’ ‘four’ ‘six’ ‘seven’ ‘eight’ ‘nine’ ‘ten’ ‘mistake’ ‘cut’ ‘cry’ ‘house fly’ ‘fish’ ‘sennit’ ‘sleep’ ‘mosquito’ ‘louse’ ‘yam’ ‘rain’ ‘afraid’ ‘bird’ ‘ear’

Hawaiian lani ala hale haku kai waʔa hou huli ahi lima lima kahi lua kolu haa ono hiku walu iwa anahulu (day) hala maahele kani nalo iʔa ʔaha moe makika ʔuku uhi ua makaʔu manu pepeiao

Samoan laŋi ala fale fatu tai vaʔa foou fuli afi lima lima tasi lua tolu faa ono fitu valu iva aŋafulu sala sele e taŋi laŋo iʔa ʔafa moe name ʔutu ufi ua mataʔu manu taliŋa

Māori raŋi ara ɸare ɸatu tai waka hou huri ahi riŋa rima tahi rua toru ɸaa ono ɸitu waru iwa ŋahuru hara here taŋi ŋaro ika kaha moe name kutu uɸi ua mataku manu tariŋa

Tongan laŋi hala fale fatu tahi vaka foʔou fuli afi nima nima tahi lua ua tolu faa ono fitu valu hiva hoŋofulu hala hele tele taŋi laŋo/raŋo ika kafa mohe name kutu ʔufi ʔuha manavahee manu taliŋa

246 ii jj kk ll mm

Understanding Language Change ‘year’ ‘deaf’ ‘pandanus’ ‘light, moon’ ‘moon’

i ii iii iv v

kau kuli hala — mahina

tau tuli fala maalama maasina

tau turi ɸara marama —

taʔu tuli fala malama maahina

What consonant correspondence sets are found? What is the probable phonemic inventory of Proto-Polynesian? What examples of metathesis are found? What items do not appear to be cognate? Give the likely Proto-Polynesian reconstruction for each item.

5  Research essay Write an essay (approx. 1,000 words) that explores the hypothesis that sound changes operate “without exception”. Consider types of apparent exceptions, and discuss how they might be dealt with. Your bibliography should have at least five references.

NOTE 1 The project on women’s literary culture in England and Europe has an ongoing database of texts and manuscripts, available at http://www.surrey.ac.uk/medievalwomen/index. htm. 2 In this respect, the “Up” series offers wonderful opportunities for linguists. In many different places around the world people have been making long-term documentary films that follow people’s lives from childhood into adulthood. There is now available a corpus of audio files and transcripts from the original British “Up” series based on the interviews of individuals at seven year intervals over a period of 42 years (see http://www. linguistics.berkeley.edu/~gahl/upInPress.pdf).

10 An end on’t INTRODUCTION In order to understand where languages have come from and where they might be heading, historical linguistics has to draw on many aspects of the study of living languages. The discipline embraces a range of different subfields within linguistics, including those core areas that handle the structural features of language (e.g. phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax), those that deal with different aspects of language and communication (e.g. pragmatics and discourse), language and society (sociolinguistics) and the mental make-up of human beings (cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics). More recently, it has accommodated new topics to do with language endangerment, language change and new media, corpora and computational applications. It’s not surprising, then, that research in historical linguistics now encompasses a wide range of very different theoretical frameworks. In this final chapter we introduce some additional perspectives that we hope will take you to what it is that lies at the very heart of the historical linguistics enterprise. Our intention is to add a stronger theoretical dimension to some of the issues raised in previous chapters, and to frame our discussion of some recent initiatives in the discipline. We begin with the three obvious components to any investigation of language change: The “what” of change – possible and impossible changes The “how” of change – processes and mechanisms of change The “why” of change – explanations for change At first, linguists concentrated their endeavours on identifying and classifying the facts of language evolution. They concerned themselves with features that had changed in the past (in particular, sounds) and the processes by which these had changed; in other words, the “what” and the “how” of change. More recently, the focus of research has shifted more to explanation, and the internal and external forces that drive change. The main goals have become the collection of historical information, the discovery of common patterns of change and the testing of hypotheses about the causes of change. Ideally, these goals lay the foundation of a general theory of language development with a set of universal laws that regulate languages and compel them to proceed in particular directions.

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10.1  FIVE QUESTIONS FOR ANY THEORY OF CHANGE In their seminal work “Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change”, Weinreich et al. (1968) pose five interrelated problems that any explicit theory of language change must address: 1 The constraints problem (what determines the possible and impossible changes and directions of change?) 2 The transition problem (how does change progress through the linguistic system?) 3 The embedding problem (what is the linguistic and social context of language change?) 4 The evaluation problem (what are the attitudes of a speech community towards a given change, and the effect of these attitudes on change?) 5 The actuation problem (why do linguistic changes occur when they do and where they do?) To illustrate these five key questions, it is probably helpful to provide an example, and one that is already familiar to you. Recall the developments in English negation that we outlined in Chapter 6. Of course these represent but one type of change, and other types relate differently to these problems; however, the various issues surrounding diachronic negation are enough to give some idea of how these five issues have been driving research in historical linguistics. To summarize this development, take the following four sentences from different stages in the history of English (note that these sentences all come from books on health and good behaviour). What we see here are clearly identifiable phases in the history of negation (the reality of course wasn’t quite this neat, and there was considerable overlap between the stages): (Old English) preverbal ne 1 Ne forlæt þu þæs blodes to fela ‘don’t let too much of the blood’ (Old English) (Middle English) embracing ne-not 2 Ne blow not on thy drynke ‘don’t blow on your drink’ (Middle English) (Early Modern English) postverbal not 3 Drinke not above four times ‘don’t drink more than four times’ (Early Modern English) (Modern English) do-support 4 Don’t drink and drive (Modern English)

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1  The constraints problem First, in terms of the “constraints” problem, we are potentially looking at various types of checks and controls here, such as those monitoring the direction of change, the source of new negators, as well as their placement. These constraints involve both diachronic aspects (i.e. negation across time), as well as synchronic aspects (i.e. “universals” or (im)possible patterns of negation). Most linguists now refer to this kind of negator renewal as “Jespersen’s Cycle”. As we described in Chapter 6, cross-linguistic studies show that the change is extensively attested across a wide range of languages. As a paradigmatic case of grammaticalization, Jespersen’s Cycle (including the rise of do-support in the last stage) qualifies as a “natural” or “normal” change. Moreover, the development of not is in line with the first (and most common) of the three main options that have been identified for new negative markers: namely nominal minimizers such as (not) a bit (see Willis et al. 2013). In terms of positioning, we know negative markers tend to precede the elements they negate, with preverbal as the norm for standard clausal negation. What has come to be known as the “Neg-first principle” (Jespersen 1917: 5; Hirt 1937: 73) receives strong support from empirical studies, such as Dahl’s 1979 survey of negation (around 81% of his 240 languages had negative particles before the verb, and the figure increases if cases of prefixal negation are included; see also Dahl 2010). Both Jespersen and Dahl suggest there is something natural about the preverbal placement of negators, with evidence from second language learning and child language to support this. So the changes we see here in English negation illustrate well-trodden paths of change, and yet they are not universal – nor would we expect them to be, for the simple reason that “constraints” have to be violable for language change to ever take place. A more useful formulation of this problem is therefore, as Labov (1982: 59) has suggested, to locate “general principles that influence the course of linguistic change without determining it absolutely”; in other words, to frame the problem in terms of natural tendencies rather than rigid laws. As we have emphasized in several places throughout this book, the aetiology (i.e. the study of the causes or origins) of innovation and change is usually complex, with all sorts of interfering psychological, physiological, linguistic, social and cultural pressures working to coerce a language in a particular direction – linguistic structures don’t exist outside these forces, and they militate against the operation of regular and utterly predictable changes. Interestingly, in Germanic, Jespersen’s Cycle has resulted in a typologically less common arrangement that places the negator after the verb in sentence negation (Drink not). Hence, we would predict subsequent changes to restore a more “natural” situation. This is one way of viewing the Modern English system of negative auxiliaries (don’t, can’t, won’t etc.); this restores the balance by once more ensuring that negative elements appear before the lexical verb.

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2  The transition problem In terms of the “transition” problem (how changes disperse through the linguistic system), we can view the remodelling of English negation as an orderly progression through recognizable (but overlapping) stages (note that V = verb here): (preverbal) ne-V > (embracing) ne-V-not > (postverbal) V-not > (preverbal) negative auxiliary-(main) V Grammatical changes are gradual and (like phonological shifts) subject to the same measured transmission. This progression did not affect all linguistic contexts at once, but (akin to “lexical diffusion”, discussed in Chapter 7) spread gradually through the system. As is typically the case in syntactic change, subordinate clauses were conservative, preserving negative patterns long after they had been abandoned in main clauses. A crucial factor affecting transition is frequency. English (like its siblings) had in common a group of frequent verbs that held onto older patterns of negation for some time; for example, phrases such as I know not and I think not existed well after dummy do had become a requirement. Throughout this book we’ve seen how many different aspects of our linguistic behaviour are shaped by repetition – paradoxically, the most frequent words and phrases are at the forefront of sound change but prove to be the least adventurous when it comes to grammatical change. Over time often-repeated structures become entrenched and therefore able to resist the generalizing forces outside, hence the conservative nature of these high-usage verbs (see Bybee 2003). As shown vividly in Chapter  7, more recent formulations of the “transition” problem have built in the routes of linguistic variants through speech communities (also incorporating the puzzle of how all this happens without interfering with communication). To understand how these negative patterns were promoted and dispersed, we need to study the social lives of English speakers, in particular the relationships between individuals and their social networks. Relevant here is a cornerstone of linguistic methodology known as the “uniformitarian principle”: developments within languages are subject to the same factors and controls at all times, and hence we assume that the social structures that assist the transition of features through speech communities today were also around in the past. Though the sociocultural settings for English speakers 1,000 years ago and English speakers in the 21st century are clearly very different (considers the rise of universal literacy, standardization, mass media and e-communication for starters!), uniformitarianism assumes that changes today and those in the past are driven by the same sorts of mechanisms.1 Indeed, as we’ll see in a moment, the discipline of socio-historical linguistics rests on the viable application of sociolinguistic methods to historical situations (though of course it uses written data to do this). As the network studies of Lesley and James Milroy have shown, tight-knit communities with strong social networks and values are norm enforcers – speakers with few external contacts will identify with and orientate towards those they interact with

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most extensively. These networks correlate with conservative speech patterns and lack of innovation (quite simply, members won’t want to speak differently from their mates). On the other hand, where there is little social cohesion between members of the speech community, such loose networks are more typical of larger, often urban communities with many external contacts, and they are more open to innovation. People have ties to other groups, and changes are spread via the weak ties between them – these speakers are the conduits for change. Writing specifically on negation, Nevalainen (1998) noted that “a Milroyan type of weak-ties network structure could well have been the means of spreading the loss of multiple negation” (p. 281).

3  The embedding problem A closely related problem involves how the change is embedded in the surrounding linguistic and social setting. The changes in negation occur in the context of longterm grammatical changes that have been taking place in the language. Crucial here is the notion of “drift”, the cumulative unconscious selection of variants that propels a language in a particular direction, or, as Sapir originally put it, “[l]anguage moves down time in a current of its own making. It has drift” (1921: 160). Something we haven’t mentioned here is that there is plenty of evidence suggesting that preverbal ne formed a unit with the finite verb; hence, the transition from original ne to nenot to not is also a transition from morphological negation to an adverbial system of negation, and therefore consistent with the drift towards increased analyticity, one of the drifts Sapir identified for English (see also Chapter 5). These changes have also taken place within another of Sapir’s drifts: the fixing of constituent order and the shift from OV to VO structures. One way to see the movement of the negative particle from the position before the finite verb to the position after the finite verb in Germanic languages was a consequence of the grammaticalization of word order patterns, particularly verb-second order for declarative main clauses. This is an illustration of where typological coherence has applied additional pressure for change to have a causal role in the shift to postverbal negation (see Burridge 1993). Any account of the changes to English negation must take in how variants were embedded in the larger context of the speech community; it must also try to resurrect the social distribution of the various patterns and the motivations for spreading certain favoured patterns. Assuming the uniformitarian principle, we take for granted that the same dimensions of social structure relevant to linguistic change in the modern language (age, sex, social class, ethnicity, race) were important when these changes in negation were taking place – and that, like today, the innovative forms would have acquired some prestige before being transmitted to the community as a whole. Also relevant here is an observation made by a number of early linguists (such as Jespersen 1922: 259–61), namely that periods of dramatic linguistic change appear to go hand-in-hand with social upheaval (for example epidemics and civil wars). As we saw in Chapter 4, the Black Death in the 14th and 15th centuries coincided with major changes in English, and this includes the transition from embracing to post-verbal negation. You can see now how social network

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theory can make sense of this correlation. In some communities, the plague (made worse by subsequent epidemics) killed up to three-quarters of the population. It triggered psychic epidemics (see Gordon 1959: 545–79) and would have torn even the densest of social networks apart. It is precisely at such tumultuous times that variants are able to take off, spread and eventually embed themselves as long-term changes in the language system.

4  The evaluation problem It is usually the case that as soon as speakers become conscious of a linguistic change, the response is negative (we addressed this in Chapter 1). For most speakers, change is only acceptable if it takes place in the distant past – though fascinated by the origins of words and the stories that lie behind the structures in their language, they typically condemn changes that happen within their lifetime. This can have an effect on the propagation of a variant. Nevalainen (1998) looks at the stigma that attached to the use of multiple negation in the Early Modern period. These negative evaluations continue and may block another Jespersenian scenario from unfolding based on the pattern You don’t know nothing; more likely to take off are the less salient variants that can slip more easily under the prescriptive radar such as never, at all, a bit (as in I don’t like him a bit). However, prestige reversals do occur. Indeed, as we discuss later in this chapter, current pressures on the standard language are endowing informal non-standard language with a cachet and respectability (see Crystal 2006 on the “new sociolinguistic climate” that is seeing the re-evaluation and elevation of non-standard features). Non-standard variants, once condemned, now have a good chance of slipping out of the local context into a bigger arena; multiple negation/negative concord is now well on its way to being an established “vernacular universal” (see Kortmann and Lunkenheimer 2013, who list it as having 80% attestation across 76 varieties of English worldwide). Moreover, with the increasing influence of newer varieties of English comes the diminishing clout of those native varieties from the so-called “inner circle”. Linguistic innovations (including some very un-English-looking structures) are now being started and propagated by second language speakers, foreign language speakers and creole speakers (e.g. the current role of rapping).

5  The actuation problem The preceding four problems all contribute to the big problem of “actuation”. As Weinreich, Labov and Herzog originally expressed it (1968: 102): “Why do changes in a structural feature take place in a particular language at a given time, but not in other languages with the same feature, or in the same language at other times?” In clarifying the actuation of the negation changes just outlined, linguists must account for why the Germanic languages, and also French, display such different chronologies. In English the exclusive use of not was the norm by the mid 1400s (see also Jespersen 1917: 9), but for the Scandinavian languages, “Jespersen’s Cycle” was completed at a much earlier date. What’s more, Scandinavian probably underwent two negator renewals in a Jespersen-like progression: (1) reinforcement of ne

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with -a/-at (ne disappeared by the 9th century); and (2) replacement of -a/-at by eigi (completed by the 14th century) (cf. Willis et al. 2013). In German, nicht had eliminated the old preverbal negative particle ni by 1300; in fact, even in the 13th century, distribution of ni was limited to common usage verbs and special constructions (see Paul 1959: 236–8). In Dutch the cycle was completed more slowly, and there were dialect differences; by the mid 1600s, embracing negation had finally disappeared from Hollandish but was still intact in Brabantish (only relics remain today; see Burridge 1993). Only now is Modern French showing signs of losing preverbal ne. One fact we hope you will carry away from this book is that language change is not straightforward. For a start, we have to consider what else is going on in the linguistic system. For example, in English we see the development of do-support, and a set of negative auxiliaries appearing before the main verb. So why have Modern Dutch and German retained their postverbal negators? If you remember, in Chapter 7 we described some of the older verb-final aspects of modern Dutch and German; this so-called verbal brace means that German nicht and Dutch niet will frequently occur before the main verb, and in subordinate clauses before all verb parts. We are looking here at a complex of different intersecting pressures that have been influencing these languages at different times: systemic (the linguistic system with interacting components), cognitive/psychological (the mental make-up of speakers), physiological (the production of language), social and political (the speech community and the individual, the socio-political environment) and external (contact and borrowing). And don’t underestimate the cultural preoccupations of speakers either. These can be powerful triggers for change. If we compare human lives in Anglo-Saxon times with those in modern times, we see a colossal transformation in human ways of thinking – the earlier communal thought processes, once so gripped by natural and supernatural outlooks, are a world apart from our modern secular sense of identity, which presupposes understanding and control (think of personal mantras such as “doing your own thing”). What repercussions does this budding selfawareness of the modern western individual have for linguistic structures? There is no doubt that cultural forces shape language, even those features of language that are more than skin deep (i.e. grammatical). With breakthroughs in science (say, in neural networking) and advances in experimental tools will surely come better understanding of this society, language and mind liaison (see Deutscher 2010; De Busser and LaPolla 2015). In short, what we’re saying here is that, like any change, these developments in negation emerge from a complex interaction of factors. Analogous to the evolutionary processes of the “invisible hand” (see Keller 1994), language evolves through processes of competing mechanisms and motivations.

10.2  ADDITIONAL THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES As hinted at the start of this chapter, historical linguistics draws on inspirations from every one of the major branches of synchronic linguistics – a proper understanding

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of sound change is impossible without a knowledge of how sounds are articulated (phonetics), and so on. There have been significant inputs from fields outside linguistics too, such as prehistory, philology, anthropology, psychology and sociology. With such spread as this, all our small book has been able to do is to highlight some of the fundamental issues, methods and results that characterize this vast and very interdisciplinary field. In this section we outline three relatively new fields of linguistic research that are now contributing to a fuller picture of language change.

10.2.1  Corpus linguistics In various places in this book we’ve made reference to the use of corpus data in the study of language change. (Note that corpus has a rather fancy plural corpora, though you will also find people using the more mundane corpuses – another example of analogy, as discussed in Chapter 5.) Basically, corpora are collections of texts, either written or spoken (so recorded and transcribed). We can use them to find out all sorts of things about how a language is being used or has been used. People have always looked to texts as sources of language for analysis, but the advances in corpus linguistics in recent years come with exciting possibilities, especially for examining language in the past. We’ve already seen examples in this book of how historical corpora can help to answer questions to do with the “what”, “how” and “why” of change; for example, what new structures enter the language and how they spread through the system (e.g. abruptly or slowly) and through the speech community, how they relate to matters of style, as well as societal and cultural shifts, and so on. Any collection of texts could be called a corpus, but within linguistics a corpus is usually understood to be a structured, digitized collection of texts that is searchable and that has been annotated to make it more useful. Corpora do vary in their degree of annotation, but usually they include such things as morphological segmentation and structural mark-ups such as clause and parts of speech tagging. Here historical corpora encounter complications, especially to do with word level annotation. One reason is the considerable spelling variation in early texts. To give you some idea of the extent of this variation, consider that in one short 14th century English cookery manuscript (The Forme of Cury, or ‘Method of Cooking’) we find the word ginger spelled nine different ways: gyngeuer, gyngyuyr, genger, gynger, gyngere, ginge, gyngeuyr, gyngyuer, ginger. There is a long tradition of studying the history of English, and as you’ve seen from some of the case studies in this book, it relies heavily on texts that have survived from the earlier stages of the language. These days there are some wonderful online resources available, notably the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Diachronic and Dialectal (http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/HelsinkiCorpus/), with texts covering the period from ca. 750 to ca. 1700 and a dialect part based on transcripts of interviews with speakers of British rural dialects from the 1970s. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003), drawing on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/domains/CEEC.html) (6,000 letters from 1417 to 1681), were able to reconstruct the social setting of late Middle English and Early Modern English to investigate a number of linguistic changes,

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including those in negation mentioned earlier. Even within the quite recent (and more modest) Australian National Corpus (https://www.ausnc.org.au), there is a historical collection, the Corpus of Oz Early English (CoOEE), comprising over two million words of Australian, New Zealand and Norfolk Island origin between 1788 and 1900. It contains a combination of speech based texts (speeches, plays, court proceedings, testimonies) and written texts (government legal documents, public documents such as newspapers, and private documents such as letters and diaries). We’ll have more to say on the uses of such databases below. Corpora vary a lot with respect to the number of texts they contain and the overall size of the collection. Of course the desirable size for a corpus will depend on what aspects of language you’re investigating; we saw in Chapter 6 how historical syntax relies on generous and robust corpus data. Corpora also vary in their representativeness. Some cover a wide range of text types and genres, and are broadly representative of the wider community in terms of age, gender, dialect and socioeconomic group membership, while others are quite restricted in size, focusing on one particular group. The size and composition of a corpus typically reflect the resources that were available for compiling the corpus and the purposes it was developed to meet. In the case of historical corpora, it can be a matter of salvaging what we can, but even with a small collection much can be done (especially if you’re investigating high-frequency items like pronouns or auxiliaries). Corpus based research has many applications, and as Davies (2011: 63) puts it, any disadvantages are far outweighed by the advantages. The Corpus Resource Database gives an idea of just how many corpora are already out there (http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/index.html), but new corpora are becoming available all the time. A recent arrival is the Old Bailey Corpus (http://www1.uni-giessen.de/oldbaileycorpus/index.html).2 It has transformed the records of the almost 200,000 criminal trials held at the Old Bailey (London’s central criminal court) into a massive diachronic corpus of spoken English over a 200 year period (1720–1913) with approximately 14 million words (all annotated for parts of speech and direct speech). Each text also provides socio-biographical information on speakers (gender, age, occupation) and pragmatic information (the role of the speaker in the courtroom: defendant, judge, victim, witness and so on). These texts give an idea of what went on in English criminal courts in early times and, most importantly for us, give us valuable access to the language of non-elite people. Since the proceedings were taken down in shorthand by scribes in the courtroom, they provide a rare glimpse of spoken English from the 17th through to the early 20th century. (The scribes would have used quill, pen or pencil and probably used the pen-writing method of shorthand – until stenotype machines became available in the 1870s.) Being more colloquial in nature, these texts are especially useful – even taboo words (notoriously absent from other writing) make an appearance. Transcripts reveal that as early as the 1700s bugger could be used to strengthen negative constructions; this is more than a century earlier than previously thought (It cannot be helped now, I should not care a b – dy b – gg – r if I was going to be hung up for it; see Musgrave and Burridge 2014 for details).

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In recent years, the development of computer mediated communication and improved possibilities for creating and disseminating high-quality recordings of language have made for vast improvements in corpus design. Many modern corpora now aim to be multimodal – so not simply text based collections, but highquality recordings of transcribed speech with aligned audio files as well as visual records of interaction (video). With new corpora and new tools appearing all the time, corpus based research can only get better.

10.2.2  Historical pragmatics In Chapter 1 of this book, we had a look at Shakespeare’s language, so it’s only fair if this last chapter also includes an example from Shakespeare. Look at the following two excerpts from Much Ado about Nothing; in particular, pay attention to the phrases (I) pray thee. (10.1) BENEDICK Do you question me, as an honest man should do, for my simple true judgment; or would you have me speak after my custom, as being a professed tyrant to their sex? CLAUDIO No; I pray thee speak in sober judgment. BENEDICK Why, i’ faith, methinks she’s too low for a high praise, too brown for a fair praise and too little for a great praise: only this commendation I can afford her, that were she other than she is, she were unhandsome; and being no other but as she is, I do not like her. CLAUDIO Thou thinkest I am in sport: I pray thee tell me truly how thou likest her. BENEDICK Would you buy her, that you inquire after her? (Much Ado about Nothing, I.1) (10.2) MARGARET Troth, I think your other rabato [a piece of 17th century clothing] were better. HERO No, pray thee, good Meg, I’ll wear this.

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MARGARET By my troth, ’s not so good; and I warrant your cousin will say so. HERO My cousin’s a fool, and thou art another: I’ll wear none but this. (Much Ado about Nothing, III.4) First, it seems fairly clear that pray does not mean the same as pray in presentday English. Very generally speaking, for Shakespeare it seems to mean something like I ask you, or maybe I beg you. The first two occurrences (10.1) could be translated into Modern English as I beg you. As such, this is a good example for a socalled performative verb, that is, a verb that performs the action it stands for (e.g. in I quit, simply by saying that (in particular contexts), you perform the act of quitting). Similarly, if you say I beg you, you are performing the act of begging. English has undergone some changes here. We no longer use pray as a performative verb. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; http://corpus. byu.edu/coca/), which has 450 million words, we only find about 50 occurrences of I pray you, and they are all either literary, or Shakespeare quotes, or deliberately antiquated. I beg you, in contrast has more than 250 hits in the same corpus. And if we consider simple please as a second alternative (‘please speak in sober judgment’, ‘please tell me truly’), then of course we find thousands of occurrences in Modern English – but not a single one in Much Ado about Nothing (except for please as a simple verb, e.g. “Father, as it please you”, “He both pleases men and angers them”)! So one could say that here we see I pray thee as the Shakespearean equivalent of modern please. But now have a look at Hero’s use of the phrase in the second excerpt (10.2). This appears to be slightly different. First, it does not have the subject pronoun I, it is just pray thee. Second, it is not followed by a verb-initial clause as in the former two examples: “I pray thee speak . . .”, “I pray thee tell . . .”. And while this example of simple pray thee could somehow also be translated as ‘please’ or ‘I beg you’, it also seems to function much more like a come on, in some sense, rather than a performative verb. In this function, it helps to convey the speaker’s feelings and organize the conversation, rather than conveying any actual information about the world. The same difference can also be seen in the modern use of like in English. Look at examples (10.3) and (10.4): (10.3) I like pizza. I like McDonald’s. That’s me. (COCA, Harper’s Bazaar, 2007, 3550: 530) (10.4) And she goes, “Oh, they’re in Paris. And I’m like Paris, California?” No, no, Paris, France. And I’m like, what? (COCA, NBC Dateline, 2012, 12017)

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Very roughly speaking, the word like in (10.3) means ‘love’ (“I love pizza, I love McDonald’s”). But you can’t substitute like in example (10.4) with love: “And I’m love Paris, California? No, no . . . And I’m love, what?” sounds very weird. So like in (10.3) is more like a full verb with a particular meaning, whereas like in (10.4) is more like some conversation organizing element: it signals that the speaker is quoting someone. Similarly, Hero’s use of “pray thee” is less like a full expression of her wishes, but rather something to organize the conversation and the social relationship between Margaret and Hero. This is one example of a study that can be found in the field of historical pragmatics; in other words, the study of language use and meaning making practices in past contexts. Needless to say, such an enterprise is not without its challenges. Present-day pragmatics has actual speakers and authentic (and spoken) language to work with. So it becomes possible to talk about things like “speaker intention” for present-day English utterances. But what about languages in the past? How do we know what speakers actually intended? How do we know how they felt? Whether they considered an utterance polite or impolite, bossy or shy? We do not have spoken language and actual speakers available for past language stages. But there are two ways to avoid or at least reduce this problem. First, historical pragmatics usually takes a fairly broad stance towards what counts as pragmatics. In line with a more European perspective, it includes almost any kind of language resource that is used in the negotiation of meaning. Thus, written language in all its forms also becomes part of the picture and is subject to pragmatic studies.3 In other words, politeness strategies are relevant and interesting not in spoken language alone, but also in written documents, such as letters. Here we can look at salutations and closing formulae, for example. These can reflect different levels of politeness or social relations. Consider the following examples, taken from 15th century English personal letters. Note that these are all the first lines of the individual letters. (Don’t be thrown by the imaginative spellings here – remember at this time there was no concept of a “correct way to spell”. Often reading the language aloud helps comprehension, though one symbol might throw you – , or “yogh,” appears instead of .) (10.5) Ryth reuerend and worchepfull modyr, I  recomand me on-to you as humbylly as I can think, desyrinyng most hertly to her of youyr welfare and hertys ese [. . .] ‘Right revered and worshipful mother, I recommend myself to you as humbly as I can think, desiring most heartily to hear of your welfare and heart’s ease [. . .]’ (John Paston III to his mother, Margaret Paston, 1468) (10.6) Ryth wyrchypful hwsbond, I recomawnd me to ʒw, desyryng hertyly to heryn of ʒwr wel-fare [. . .] ‘Right worshipful husband, I  recommend myself to you, desiring heartily to hear of your welfare [. . .]’ (Margaret Paston to her husband, John Paston I, 1448)

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(10.7) I grete you wele, letying you wete that your brothere and his felesshep stond in grete joparté at Cayster [. . .] ‘I greet you well, letting you know that your brother and his fellowship stand in great jeopardy at Caister [. . .]’ (Margaret Paston to her son, John Paston II, 1469) (10.8) On Tuesday in the morwyn whas John Botillere [. . .] and Davy Arnald your cook, and William Malthows [. . .] taken at Heylesdon be the balyf of Ey [. . .] ‘On Tuesday in the morning John Botillere [. . .] and Davy Arnold your cook, and William Malthows [. . .] were taken at Heylesdon by the bailiff of Ey [. . .]’ (Margaret Paston to her husband, John Paston I, 1465) First, it seems that letter openings were very much standardized and fairly complex in the late Middle Ages – at least in comparison to our modern “Hi!” Second, the examples (10.5) to (10.8) create the impression that they are somehow different with regard to politeness and social roles. (10.5) seems to be the most polite, most humble form to begin a letter. Not only does the writer say that he recommends himself “most humbly” to the addressee, but he also uses the intensifier “most” in his wish to know about the addressee’s wellbeing. (10.6) is very similar, but slightly less polite and humble (perhaps we could call this a more or less neutral form of address). It follows the same structure as (10.5) – “right worshipful husband, I recommend myself to you, I wish to know about your wellbeing” – but it does so less emphatically. It does not mention the word “humble”, and it does not use boosting superlatives such as “most heartily”. Example (10.7), then, is very different from both (10.5) and (10.6). There is no formal address such as “my right worshipful son”, nor any recommendations, nor any questions about the addressee’s wellbeing. Rather, there is a simple impersonal greeting formula “I greet you well”, followed directly by the actual message. In comparison to the first two examples, this must have been rather blunt. Even worse, in some sense, is (10.8), which starts with the message right away and does not offer any greetings or recommendations at all. So we do get the impression that these letter openings can be ranked in terms of politeness, from the most polite (10.5) to the least polite (10.8). But how do we know? There are no speakers of late Middle English we can ask, and only rarely have these ever commented in writing on the politeness or impoliteness of certain forms. The answer is that we cannot know for sure, but that we can try to find some evidence for our conjectures. One thing we notice when we study late Middle English letters is that they show highly formalized structures, as we have seen above. This is documented not only by the high number of letters that somehow follow these structures, but also by some more theoretical letter writing manuals and models still available today. What this means is that the majority of letters follow the expected patterns, and that openings such as (10.7) and (10.8) stick out – both in terms of numbers, but also with regard to explicit norms. Second, when we look in greater detail at the actual contents of these letters (and

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pragmatics is the study of meaning making, after all!), we discover that our first impressions are actually confirmed. While (10.5) and (10.6) are fairly neutral, if not even nice kinds of letters, (10.7) is an accusing, reprimanding letter from mother to son (blaming him for failing to defend Caister, the family home, thereby putting his brother in danger). Similarly, (10.8) seems to have been written in great agitation, as it tells of the unjustified arrest of several men that worked for the addressee. In other words, both forms of address seem to be related to some sort of emotional distress. In (10.7) the curt greeting might reflect Margaret’s being angry with her misbehaving son, and in (10.8) the lack of a greeting could reflect her great worries about the situation. Eventually, what we see here is a complex and plausible analysis of pragmatic features and verbal behaviour in written documents that are more than 500 years old. The second option in historical pragmatics to counter the lack of authentic spoken data is to investigate materials which come as close as possible to spoken language. We know spoken language can never be perfectly represented in written language, but there are some genres and text types that come a bit closer than others. For example, historical linguists can use drama to investigate at least some aspects of spoken interaction, such as speech acts, discourse markers or some politeness features. We have tried that above in our analysis of pray thee in examples (10.1) and (10.2). It can be argued that drama to some extent mirrors or resembles spoken interaction, and that some of the linguistic features that we find in drama reflect what speakers say off stage. And, more importantly, we do not have to speculate about the reactions of addressees. When we looked at the example of letter opening formulae, we had to speculate a little bit about how people may have evaluated the different structures. But if somebody gets insulted or flattered in a play, for example, we often also see their reactions and can thus arrive at conclusions about the linguistic triggers for these reactions. Historical pragmatics necessarily relies on written corpora but will be informed by research on how people today make sense out of messages. As we’ve been emphasizing, historical linguistics by its nature is interdisciplinary, and it is constantly being informed by breakthroughs in synchronic linguistics. Technological advances in corpus design mentioned earlier are opening up all sorts of new avenues for research possibilities by providing access to interactional phenomena that go beyond what is actually being said to what is presupposed, what is implied and so on; for example, in multimodal spoken corpora paralinguistic and non-verbal elements are an inherent part of the database (see Haugh 2008). It’s all good news for historical pragmatics!

10.3  HISTORICAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS A second field of study that has gained wide prominence over the last 30 years or so is historical sociolinguistics. Again, the idea is very simple. We touched on it earlier: speakers in the past are social agents, just like speakers today. They associate and dissociate with certain social groups, just as present-day speakers do, and

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their speech may depend in complex ways on language external factors such as age, gender, education, place of living and the like. The only problem – again – is the availability of data. Until the 1980s historical linguists worked with more or less a-social data, i.e. data which either was not socially distinguishable in any way or simply was not differentiated. But in 1982, in a truly ground-breaking book called Socio-historical Linguistics, Suzanne Romaine showed that even in historical linguistics, social information on speakers and texts is available and can be used in fruitful ways in our analyses. Romaine investigated the use of various strategies for forming relative clauses in Middle Scots, the language spoken in Scotland in the 16th century. (Relative clauses are a type of sub-clause, used to modify nouns and pronouns.) She discovered that there is some complex, but systematic variability in the use of the different markers that introduce the relative clause (the relativizers): that, the so-called wh-relativizers, and the omission of the relativizer, also known as “zero”: The thing that he remembered The thing which he remembered The thing he remembered This variability depended on both language internal factors, i.e. factors that belong to the language system, and language external factors, i.e. factors independent of the language itself. In terms of language internal factors, she found that, similar to Modern English, that was preferred in restrictive relative clauses (clauses that identify or restrict the reference of the noun; e.g. I saw the man that stole the cookie). In non-restrictive relative clauses (clauses that add extra information about a noun whose reference is already well established; e.g. I met John, who was also at the party), there is a preference for wh-relativizers and zero. Interestingly, and unlike Modern (standard) English, zero was also possible for subject relativizers, as in I saw a man stole the cookie. Today, this can only be heard in some dialects. In terms of language external factors, Romaine was primarily interested in register and style differences in the texts she analysed. Her data suggested that that was a lot more common in informal texts, and texts representing some sort of oral speech. The wh-relativizers, on the other hand, were prominent in the more formal texts. This led Romaine to the conclusion that the wh-relativizers must have been introduced through literate, learned styles in the most formal writings (an idea which is also supported by the fact that wh-relativizers first occur in the more complicated syntactic structures). Interestingly, at least in Scottish English, the wh-relativizers have never been such a great success. To this day, the most common everyday relativizer for all purposes and functions remains that. All this goes to show that in historical sociolinguistics we try to unify ideas from historical linguistics and modern sociolinguistics. All language change is ultimately tied up with language variation, and variation in turn has both language internal and language external aspects. For quite some time, it was assumed that historical data, because it is so sketchy and unreliable, does not allow for any systematic study of language external factors. This is partly

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true of course. We do not have first hand data from female speakers in the Old English period, for example, or from illiterate peasants in 10th century France. But this does not mean that we can’t discover meaningful and interesting patterns in the data that we do have. As just described, new methods in the “digital humanities” allow us to collect enormous amounts of data and to process these with the help of powerful computers. We can apply sophisticated statistical tools to these data sets. To be sure: this does not mean that now we can say something about female speakers in Old English, or illiterate peasants in 10th century France. We still need to be very critical about the actual data that is available to us (see Bergs 2012 for some details). But modern tools now allow us to identify patterns in linguistic variation which so far had either been ignored or deemed chaotic and not very revealing. More than 30  years after Romaine’s ground-breaking monograph, historical sociolinguistics can be regarded as a well-established discipline, just like historical pragmatics. It has its own journal, the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (edited by Gijsbert Rutten, Anita Auer and others), and an online network (HISON), which also organizes an annual summer school, and we see the publication of an evergrowing number of studies on numerous topics and languages. In Chapter 7 we described how William Labov, and later linguists like Peter Trudgill and the Milroys, showed for the first time that linguistic variation was systematic, motivated and affected by social factors. From the viewpoint of correlational sociolinguistics (as this approach came to be known), historical sociolinguistics has successfully identified broad patterns of linguistic diffusion across social groups in Early Modern English, for example. Earlier studies have established that the development of do in questions and negation depends on the syntactic context (we discussed Ellegård’s study in Chapter 7). It was quicker in negative questions (e.g. Don’t you like cheesecake?) and slower in negative declaratives (e.g. You don’t like cheesecake!). Studies in historical sociolinguistics have complemented these findings by showing that, for example, the loss of do in positive statements (e.g. I do like cheesecake) is something that was most prominent in London and the court, and copied by other regions – except, it seems, for East Anglia and female writers, who were lagging behind. Conversely, female speakers appeared to lead in the introduction of do in negative statements. So women’s linguistic behaviour, like that of men, was by no means uniform (and nor would we expect it to be; see Cameron 2003). The same kind of study also showed that the replacement of -th (as in he singeth) by -s (he sings), as discussed in Chapter 7, was tied not only to language internal factors (such as the final sound of the stem) but also to social factors. Third person -s came from the North of England, together with huge waves of migrants in the 16th and 17th centuries moving to the South and in particular to London. This change was also driven by female speakers, and in particular female speakers from the upper gentry in the 17th century (see Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 1996: 84). In a similar vein, other studies in historical sociolinguistics have looked at issues such as historical dialectology (i.e. the study of linguistic variation as it depends on region, including the perception and evaluation of dialectological differences) and what is commonly termed sociology of language. The latter is not so much concerned with correlational aspects but studies the role of language in society as such.

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What kind of varieties or languages were speakers exposed to? What did they think of these different varieties? How do modern national standard languages develop, and how are minority languages treated over time? All these are questions that are productively investigated under this label. One example is the study of the developments in 19th century Spain (see, e.g., Del Vallé 2013). There were some serious attempts in Spain (and elsewhere in Europe) in the 19th century to establish a national standard language (like Spanish or German) in order to strengthen national identity. For Spain this meant that other languages spoken there, like Catalan or Galician, had to be suppressed in favour of Castilian Spanish, which was supposed to become the national standard language. Needless to say, this provoked resistance and fierce discussions. And, to this day, many regions in Spain (like Catalonia and Galicia) maintain a strong local identity and still use their original language in many contexts, rather than the official national language, Castilian Spanish. These developments illustrate one aspect that historical sociolinguistics studies from the viewpoint of sociology of language. And there are many more. Consider the relationship of the Gaelic languages and English in Ireland and Scotland, or of English and indigenous languages in Australia, Africa, Asia and North America – or the development of Standard Russian or Mandarin Chinese. All these are immensely interesting from a sociological, political and cultural point of view, and issues such as language choice, language identity, nation building, cultural identity and the protection of minority languages are hot and pressing topics for historical sociolinguistics.

Busting language myths Yet another area in historical linguistics is the study of language myths, or “alternative histories” as they are sometimes called (Watts 2011, 2012). The key idea is that, for the most part, the study of language history has been the study of “official” or uniform languages, and how these developed. So, when we look at the development of English, for example, we usually take a very specific kind of perspective. We assume, for example, that at one point in time (usually very long ago) English as a language was “born”. It then went through some times where we find several English dialects and varieties, but not a standard language as such until, ultimately, English became the uniform, official standard language that we assume to exist today. This development has usually been seen from either a “tunnel” or a “funnel” point of view (Watts 2011: 585). From a tunnel perspective, we only focus on what is inside the tunnel, and we are moving towards the end of the tunnel, the light, as the end point of the development. All variation, for example the different dialects, lies outside the tunnel and does not come into view. With the funnel view on language history, many related varieties have to pass through a funnel, which gets much narrower at the bottom, and thus reduces all variability until we have a uniform standard (see Figure 10.1).

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Figure 10.1 The funnel view of language history (adapted from Watts 2011) Varieties of English/Anglo-Saxon

Standard English

Watts points out that tunnel and funnel visions are problematic. The tunnel view simply ignores all variability and thus might miss important aspects of language development – such as the fact that “third person -s” came into Standard English from northern dialects (see above). Moreover, it marginalizes culturally and socially important facts, as, for example, the role and development of Catalan or Galician in Spain. The fact is that these were and still are parts of life and culture in Spain, and simply ignoring them does not do justice to scientific investigations. The funnel view, on the other hand, at least acknowledges that certain varieties may have played a role in the development of the standard language that stands at the bottom of the funnel, but it disregards the histories of these varieties, as well as their continued development. The traditional account of the Great English Vowel Shift (see Chapter 4), for example, focuses on some sort of “standard” accent, ignoring other varieties where the shift didn’t occur or did occur to varying degrees. And, as Watts points out, also at work here is an associated language myth – the myth of greatness for the standard variety (which underlies the name of course). In Chapter 4 we mentioned another “great” vowel shift currently underway in the southern hemisphere varieties of English, but what we really should emphasize is that vowels are shifting all the time – and no one shift is any greater than the other.

10.4  THE RATE OF CHANGE – DIVERSITY AND STABILITY In this book you have seen examples of changes at every level – orthography, phonology, lexicon, semantics, pragmatics, morphology and syntax. We should not give the impression, however, that all these linguistic elements are equally susceptible to innovation and replacement. Lexical components are the most volatile, with vocabulary

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addition and loss being particularly rapid; however, there are differences even within the lexicon – culturally significant words are more prone to revitalization than basic vocabulary, which can endure over centuries (as you saw in Chapter 9). Words of high frequency are more prone to sound changes (of a reductive nature), but are the most resistant to grammatical changes (of a levelling and regularizing nature). In fact, grammatical aspects of the language (especially syntactic) exhibit the most stability of all. However, as Janda and Joseph (2003: 88) remind us, if we are to truly understand change, it is just as important, and interesting, to consider those aspects of language that do not change as those that do. We saw in Chapter  7 that some variation leads to dramatic change; other variation remains stable for long periods of time. Nichols (2003) addresses precisely these questions, examining in detail different kinds of stability and variability/renewal of linguistic elements over time. It is also the case that individual dialects and languages do not change at a constant rate. As the overall history of English shows, at least the history of the standard language (we don’t want to be accused of tunnel/funnel vision), there can be periods of speeding up and periods of slowing down. From the time of Old English through to the 18th century, changes were complex and rapid. As a consequence, people in the 1700s could not read with ease the literature of, say, roughly three centuries earlier; the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer presented difficulties, as it does today. And looking at language from a still earlier time prompted even Chaucer to make the observation (in Troilus and Criseyde II, 22ff): “[y]e knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge” (‘you know also that in (the) form of speech (there) is change’), noting the “wonder nyce and straunge” (‘wonderfully curious and strange’) nature of early English words. In his preface to the Eneydos (1490), the printer William Caxton also observed how different and difficult early English was, describing it as “so rude and brood that I coude not wele vnderstande it”. And yet Modern English readers have little trouble reading texts of the 1700s; the language of Jonathan Swift or Jane Austen is stylistically different and has some unfamiliar looking vocabulary, but it is recognizably Modern English. As Svartvik and Leech (2006: 191) observe, such written texts might suggest very little has happened to the language over the last few hundred years. True, this is writing, which is slow to reflect changes, but a number of factors have also been putting the brakes on changes – notably, the introduction of the printing press, the knock-on effects of standardization and its linguistic straitjacketing, and the establishment of reading and writing as educational necessities (rather than optional extras). These have had the effect of slowing down changes, in some cases even reversing ones already well entrenched.

Spelling pronunciations As Dwight Bolinger describes in Chapter 2 of his book Language the Loaded Weapon (1980), so immersed are we in writing these days that it has taken a hold on our minds. All this has had a conservative effect on the normal processes of change. Influential written texts such as the Bible act as a kind of artificial life-support system for obsolete expressions – words, images and

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turns of phrase that would otherwise have shuffled off the lexical coil remain in our mental lexicons. But the effects are even more obvious in phonology. When spelling is there to act as a reminder, pronunciation is less apt to change. Take the child who insists that remember is actually bemember (as one of us experienced – a nice example of distance assimilation). This child will eventually encounter the written representation, and with the visual image of remember in his head is less likely to pronounce it bemember. Phonological changes are generally reductive, and as we saw in Chapter 4, these kinds of fast-speech phenomena are harbingers of change (they also feed grammatical developments of the sort we saw in Chapter 6). These changes occur much more readily if we have no notion of the written word but will slow down considerably with a knowledge of writing, especially spelling. A consciousness of spelling can even lead to the reversal of a sound change. You probably pronounce the first syllable of the word comrade as [kɒm], but well into the 19th century it was pronounced the same as the vowel you find in sponge and frontier – so [kʌm]. It was the pressure of spelling that changed the pronunciation to [kɒm] – “let’s pronounce it like the spelling”. Hence the variation in the pronunciation of in words like comfrey and constable. There are many such rearward shifts happening right under our noses. The palatal pronunciation [ɪʃu] for the word issue has been around since at least the 15th century. We know this because of early spellings with : , , , and so on. However, the older pronunciation [ɪsju] is making a comeback, probably again because of the pressure of spelling. The clout of the written word is such that many older pronunciations are returning from the dead. These days there’s a kind of tug of war between [ɪʃu] and [ɪsju] – and [ɪsju] is getting a good bit of the rope.

However, disrupting forces are at work, promising once more major episodes of change. In the case of English, the language has been described as “one of the most hybrid and rapidly changing languages in the world” (Graddol 2006: 116). The processes set in place by the electronic revolution, colloquialization, liberalization and globalization are releasing speech from the conservative forces of the literary standard and its prescriptive ethos. The written tail has stopped wagging the spoken dog (to use an image that nicely describes the control that writing has had over speech), and features that have been lurking in the wings as variation now have a greater chance of taking hold and being embedded in the language system as actual change.

10.4.1  The effects of new and emerging media These days we are witnessing a linguistic revolution. The internet and the global trend towards electronic communication is making an impact akin to some of the major shifts in the past (from pen and ink, to printing, to the telephone, radio and television broadcasting). It has blurred even further the (already rather blurry)

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traditional distinction between speech and writing. Emails, tweets, text messages and other social media are now routine aspects of most people’s lives. They involve, of course, written language, but clearly they also share many of the features not just of spoken language, but of actual conversation. In real-time online communication, people exchange messages in much the same way as they would chatting face-toface. The spontaneity and speed of this sort of communication mean that we simply don’t go in for the same careful organization and planning as we would with normal writing. We end up writing very much as we speak, and this means a looser construction, repetition, false starts, digressions, comment clauses and asides. Electronic communication also has the expressive opportunities in word order that we typically associate with spoken language, and there is lexical and grammatical informality as well (I get called a lot of oder names coz my name is kinda hard to pronounce so yeah I dont mind wat ever) – all things normally frowned upon in writing. There are comment clauses and asides (oh by the way just so you know), interjections (so wats happening with u huh), filled pauses (Umm about me), and even repetition, false starts and digressions. There is also reduction, and plenty of it. This kind of writing is full of the omissions, the contractions and the non-standard spellings that represent the short cuts and assimilations of ordinary rapid speech (cuzn ‘cousin’, pic ‘picture’, dno ‘don’t know’). Vowels are always less informative than consonants, so these are typically sacrificed: because becomes cuz, bcuz, bcz or bcos and be right back becomes brb. Single letters and numerals often replace syllables or even full words: are becomes r, and ate becomes 8. It becomes complicated when conventions are combined: Andrew becomes &ru. This last convention is actually quite old, and examples like r ‘are’ are known as “rebuses” (letters or pictures standing for whole words). In fact, Bergs (2009) points out that the linguistic features of text messaging generally were well and truly around in earlier and more established forms of communication.4 Of course e-communication does differ from spoken language in one obvious respect – it lacks the vast repertoire of expressive devices that are available to speakers. But it is developing its own. To some extent, unusual punctuation (including capitalization, underlining, italics and bolding) and even creative spellings (such as ) go some way to capturing these features. The use of “scare quotes”, for example, or capital letters can show that a word has a special (non-standard) sense, or can express the intonation and emphasis of spoken language. Strings of non-alphabetic symbols such as ?#*! Have I got news!!!!!! is an effective way of avoiding full-blown orthographic obscenity, while still getting the message across. Special graphic devices such as emoticons and emoji also add to this written medium a semantic dimension that places it closer to speech. These smiling, frowning, winking, crying etc. faces try to communicate something of the same meaning conveyed by the prosodic and paralinguistic features of speech and make up for the fact that we tend not to give e-messages the careful wording we might, say, in a snail mail letter. Typically, we bang down the message, almost with the same speed and spontaneity of speech, but of course without the full support of the expressive devices that speech can utilize. In e-conversations, people don’t observe the same politeness conventions that go on in usual conversation. They don’t undertake the same time

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consuming routines that are so important when it comes to establishing social rapport (greetings and leave-takings and so on). Without this social lubricant to oil the interaction, messages can come across more brusquely and more directly than originally intended.

Punctuation makes a comeback Interesting things are happening to punctuation marks, with once neutral little symbols taking on a whole heap of new significances. No longer aligned to grammar or rhythm (two functions that have always been intertwined for English), punctuation has broken free of the literary standard – with new life now breathed into commas, colons, exclamation marks, question marks, apostrophes, quotation marks and even full stops. Not that long ago people were actually predicting the demise of these symbols. In the new world of texting, instant messaging and tweets, fewer punctuation marks means fewer keystrokes – less time and less effort. You might receive a text: on way home will call later Why bother to indicate the start or end of sentences here? Indeed, some years back, one of us recalls attending a workshop for editors where the message was just this – “dump the punc” (was how the presenter put it). But punctuation marks have far from faded away. Like some Schwarzenegger comeback, they are now bolder and braver than ever, no longer the meek little symbols they once were. When people choose to use a full stop now, there’s more to it than just ending the sentence. These writers are being emphatic in some way – usually indicating a displeasure or frustration about a situation. So, were you to reply to the previous text message (on way home will call later) with Thanks. there’s now a whole lot of meaning lurking behind that little full stop – your thanks’ becomes ‘thanks for nothing’. It’s punctuation with attitude. Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, commented on this exact topic on Language Log: “Not long ago, my 17-yearold son noted that many of my texts to him seemed excessively assertive or even harsh, because I routinely used a period at the end” (http://languagelog. ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=8667) E-communication formats have been busy resuscitating the careers of many moribund characters (like @ and _), bestowing upon them new tasks and new responsibilities. Even ellipsis points are being used creatively. Like

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“the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”, a succession of full stops no longer simply indicates missing text. And then there’s the interrobang . Brought back from the dead, this now “cool little punctuation mark” (Urban Dictionary) is much loved by online communication channels – social media requires all the emotion in the world, but not at the cost of brevity. Changes like these aren’t surprising. In this all-digital-all-the-time age of Facebook, SnapChat, Instagram, chat rooms, web forums, online games, blogs, tweets and so on, we’re looking at virtual speech communities where people converse on a regular basis but in writing. And if their members are to express their identity, personal and shared, they have no choice but to break out of the straightjacket of the written standard. We are not sure what societies like the Apostrophe Protection Society (http://www.apostrophe.org.uk) think of all this. But surely it’s a matter for celebration‽

So what might the future hold for a language like English in this era of technology? Looking back, we have to consider the effects of several generations of television viewing; it started with radio, of course, but it was television that really brought different parts of the English speaking world into the average home. Varieties that would never have been heard, even in the first half of last century, were suddenly in everyone’s living room. Speech was being set free, at that time by audio and video devices (or speech was shearing off from the anchor of writing, to use Bolinger’s metaphor; 1980: 51). Now, with the advent of e-communication, we have reached a stage which in many ways is reminiscent of the situation in medieval times; in other words, before prescription and before standardization – the time when people wrote as they spoke. Chatting online is like chatting on the telephone or even face-to-face. Writers don’t typically go through the sort of drafting processes and layers of editorial intervention that reinforce the written standard. Instead, we find the sort of far-reaching variation that existed before standardization and before there was any autonomous prose style. Regional and social variation is rampant on the net; texts and tweets can reveal characteristics of accent or dialect in the spelling of words, as in for (in fact this is a return to a 17th century spelling – the start of l-drop!). There is even idiolectal variation, where people use punctuation, spellings and abbreviations to reflect their personality. The “boundless chaos of a living speech” (as Dr Samuel Johnson put it in the preface to his famous dictionary) has broken through the lines and now appears in writing, just as it did in the manuscripts of Middle English and earlier. Getting used to seeing forms like gonna in writing undermines the standard and must inevitably speed up the acceptance of new grammar, as it will the acceptance of new phonological forms ( for government) and new lexical items (nomophobia ‘fear of being separated from one’s mobile phone’).

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Because grammar As you know, because is a conjunction (created out of the reanalysis of an original prepositional phrase by + cause). An example of this use might be I love grammar because it always comes up with surprises. It’s also part of a compound preposition, thus one that occurs in a sequence with another preposition, as in because of grammar. But something interesting is happening to because. On the internet there is now a flourishing of examples where it appears as a preposition without of, as in I’ve been missing out on sleep because the “Breaking Bad” series. It illustrates the kind of reduction we’ve come to expect of casual e-speak, but in fact it’s more interesting than this. Because not only appears before noun phrases (as a standard preposition would) but also precedes adjective phrases (I’ve been missing out on sleep because addicted), verb phrases (I missed the ending because fell asleep) and even interjections (I was horrified because yikes!). Early in this book we likened the transmission of linguistic forms to the spread of thought contagions (or memes) – fads that spread from person to person within a culture. Expressions are particularly infectious and disseminate rapidly through speech communities, especially virtual ones. Admittedly, constructions like because grammar are still rather faddish creations, but look out for them – it’s these sorts of jokey constructions that often provide the basis for real change in the language.

10.4.2  Social change We’ve seen on many occasions in this book how societal and cultural shifts impact on language, and of course all the changes we’ve been describing in this section so far are also set against a backdrop of wide-ranging social change. It started in the 1970s with social and political movements pushing for clear and simple language. The Plain English movement was a piece of social engineering that attempted to redress inequalities in our societies – the intended audience was the “average” person struggling with the complexities of law, government, banks and insurance (and there were parallel cries heard all over Europe; e.g. the push for comprehensible Swedish in place of byråkratsvenska). So-called political correctness also aimed to ensure a fair go for all by getting English speakers to focus on the claims of different groups. It prescribed and proscribed public language for ethnicity, race, gender, sexual preference, appearance, religion, (dis)ability and so on. It’s not relative success of either of these verbal hygiene operations that is at issue here, but the fact that they are evidence of a new linguistic thinking. Growing egalitarianism is now seeing the solidarity function of language gaining over the status function. Many people are now trying to speak more “down-toearth” and with a more obvious stamp of the local. The vernacular has acquired

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a brand new prestige. Features once condemned as ignorance and corruption are now viewed with pride. We see this in pronunciation also. The shift towards everyday spoken language is also very evident in the informalization of television and radio. Perhaps you’ve heard examples of early broadcasting – even the style of sporting commentary comes across as exceedingly formal in matters of accent, vocabulary and grammar. Different regional and social accents (and well away from posh end of the accent spectrum) are now commonplace in these media. Broadcasters in places like Australia and New Zealand, for example, have moved well away from the BBC-accented English that once dominated the airways “downunder”; it is telling that when Brian Johns took over the A(ustralian) B(roadcasting) C(orporation) in 1995, he was heard saying, “We don’t want an outdated accent” (by which he would have meant the local “cultivated” accents closest to Received Pronunciation; see Bradley and Bradley 2001: 275). Many other factors have been contributing to this more personal broadcasting style, including changing technology (e.g. the introduction of the portable transistor radio in the late 1950s, and the introduction of smaller and better microphones). Bear in mind that up until quite recently it was even usual for radio presenters to dress in formal clothing – a bow tie and dinner suit! The short of it is, public speaking and writing are becoming progressively more casual and everyday. We see this even in changes to the terminology that we use: lectures are now more likely to be called talks, and terms like oratory (the art of public speaking), rhetoric (the art and study of persuasive writing and speaking), elocution (the art of public speaking where qualities of voice production, gesture and delivery are emphasized) and recitation (the act of reciting memorized materials in public) are simply no longer part of most people’s active vocabulary. Even the language we use in this textbook is itself a good example of this informalization of expression. The writing is more laid back and very much more personal than anything you will find in earlier textbooks (at least up until the 1960s, when the changes began). Take, for instance, the rather chatty way we constantly refer to you, the readers. If reference was ever made to reader(s) in the past, it was typically done using the third person. This now comes across as very stilted; for example, “the astute reader [that’s you!] will doubtless have noticed the familiar style adopted in this present book”. Here’s an actual example from J.M.D. Meiklejohn’s A Brief History of the English Language and Literature (published in 1887, but used well into the 1960s): It is earnestly hoped that the slight sketches of the History of our Language and of its Literature may not only enable the young student to pass his examinations with success, but may also throw him into the attitude of mind of Oliver Twist, and induce him to “ask for more”. (Preface, p. 7) To sum up, the processes put in place with the invention of the printing press eventually fashioned a standard for languages like English. Dictionaries and grammar books emerged; reading and writing became educational necessities. All this had the effect of shackling speech to writing and applying the brakes

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to the “fleet of juggernaut trucks” (this is Robert Burchfield’s (1985: 173) image of English, but it works for all living languages) – retarding, and in some cases even reversing, the normal course of change. But these processes that started with Gutenberg are now being overturned, and informal, non-standard, unedited English has gone public. And with English now in almost every nook and cranny of the globe, everything points to more diversity, more variety and more change (see Crystal 2006).

10.5  WHERE TO FROM HERE? As we have emphasized throughout this book, change schemas (like the one for negation outlined earlier) do not follow prescribed courses determined by exceptionless laws or principles, but it is possible to talk about preferred pathways of change – those “gutters” that channel language change, to use that image famously invoked by Kuryłowicz (1945). Referring specifically to analogical change, Kuryłowicz likened these developments to episodes of rain. While we may not be able to predict when it will rain, or even if it will, once the rain has fallen, we know the direction the water will flow because of gutters, drainpipes and spouting. An important goal of historical linguistics is thus to gain a clearer picture of these “gutters of change”, in other words, to refine our notions of natural and unnatural change (à la the “constraints” problem). Hence, more work must be done logging and classifying the changes that have occurred within individual languages, especially those with well-documented histories. The good news is that rapid advances in technology are making the job much easier. We may have no time machine to take us back through history, but vast improvements in corpus design are making available massive digitized collections of texts that are annotated and searchable, and historical evidence better suited to the study of language change is now more reliable and more readily available. As we hope we have shown in this book, linguists are also getting better at the historical dimension of the relationship between language and society; in other words, at identifying how linguistic features are distributed socially, and how social factors operate in partnership with linguistic mechanisms of change (à la the “transition” and “embedding” problems). Trudgill (2011) offers a sociolinguistic typology based on a huge range of contexts and languages; he reveals the socio-cultural phenomena (e.g. social stability, size, contact, prestige, complexity and relative isolation of a speech community) that are critically linked to the relative stability/replacement of linguistic elements, the accelerating/decelerating stimuli for change, and other issues to do with transmission and diffusion. Whereas tight-knit communities have long been linked with linguistic stability, Trudgill shows that small speech communities with tight social networks “are more able, because of their network structures, to push through, enforce, and sustain linguistic changes which would have a much smaller chance of success in larger, more fluid communities – namely, changes of a relatively marked, complex type” (p. 103). The closely integrated Anabaptist speech community of North America offers robust support of this in the form of rapid

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grammatical changes in Pennsylvania German (as described in Chapter  8); it is clear that social context here has an accelerating influence (see Burridge 2015). As Janda and Joseph (2003) conclude in their wonderfully wide-ranging overview of historical linguistics, it surely makes sense for historical linguists to study language evolution by focusing on changes currently in progress – “building up an inventory of well-studied present times which, as they accumulate into a store of well-studied pasts, will slowly but inevitably provide a more solid database for formulating and testing increasingly sophisticated hypotheses regarding language change” (p. 128). For many of the world’s languages, this task is an urgent one. The majority remain undescribed, and many of them are endangered (Native American languages, Australian Aboriginal languages and many Austronesian languages, to name just a few). When it comes to mining the linguistic diversity around the world, the discipline is again being greatly assisted by advances in computing and technology. The developments within computer mediated communication and improved possibilities for creating and disseminating high-quality recordings of language have made for vast improvements in corpus design. As described earlier, many modern corpora now aim to be multimodal – so not simply text based collections, but high-quality recordings, both audio and video. Ongoing breakthroughs in speech technology, machine translation and transcription, information extraction, text mining, voice recognition and voice translation software, recording and archiving technologies, and software development for (field) linguists, to name just a few, are making easier the business of collecting, describing and cataloguing the behaviour of language elements. At the end of Chapter 6, we invoked the image of Tolkien’s cauldron, a metaphor he used when he talked about fairy stories. His “Cauldron of Story” has been simmering on the fire for a long, long time, with spicy bits of life continually being added to the stock. And so it is with the story of language change. The pot continues to bubble away, always being enriched, refined and enhanced. And with ongoing contributions from within linguistics and many other fields, we have every reason to be optimistic about future research in historical linguistics.

FURTHER READING With the burgeoning interest in historical linguistics has come a flourishing of comprehensive textbooks and handbooks with accounts of the individual achievements of the relatively new discipline areas and their perspectives on change; see individual chapters in Joseph and Janda (2003). Bauer (1994) also has a good discussion of Weinreich et al.’s five key problems, as does J. Milroy (1992); see Bergs (2012) and Bergs and Pentrel (2015) for discussions of the “uniformitarian hypothesis”. Much has been written on different perspectives on corpus linguistics: Viana et al. (2011); the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (http://clu.uni. no/icame/) also has an online journal which has reports and articles relating to the area. Historical sociolinguistics is a growing field, and there is an abundance of reading out there: Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003) and Bergs (2005) give

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excellent overviews. Language and the internet is another huge and expanding field: Crystal (2004); Rowe and Wyss (2009); Androutsopoulos (2014); and Georgopoulou and Spilloti (2015). Language@Internet (http://www.languageatinternet.org) is an open-access electronic journal that publishes research on language and language use mediated by the internet, the World Wide Web and mobile technologies.

EXERCISES Write up a research project (approx. 1,500 words) on one of the following topics (1–5). Think of structuring your report along the lines of the following (though you don’t have to address every bullet point; it will depend on which project you select): • Introduction (briefly say what you’re going to say) • Literature review (provide a brief account of the relevant research to set the scene) • Methodology (briefly say what you did and how you did it) • Results (give an account of what you found) • Discussion (review the relevance of your results) • Conclusion (provide a summary of results/findings; sometimes this can include recommendations – what might now be done on account of what you’ve uncovered) • References (you should have at least six references) • Appendix (not necessary, but you might want to include additional material such as word lists) 1  A corpus investigation Go to the Corpus of Historical American English: http://corpus.byu.edu/corpora.asp and familiarize yourself with the web based user interface. Now search for the word cool across time and registers. What can you say about the distribution and possible developments? Try the same for the construction what with, as in “But you know what with nursing and traveling with the newborn we said you need to take care”. Again, is there any pattern in the distribution across the different registers? Does this evolve over time? 2  Profiling a feature across time Focus on a grammatical feature (such as passive, subjunctive, negation or dosupport) and compare its use diachronically across two different states. You can be flexible in the time lapse (partly it will depend on the language and on the feature you select, but it would have to be long enough to view a change take place). In the case of English, you could select, say, Early Modern English (or any earlier period of course) through to modern times. As part of your account, you need at least two sample texts for the two periods. One idea is to choose a text that has been rewritten many times. You can find examples online, or there are textbooks that also have such passages (e.g.

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Burnley 2000; Freeborn 2006). There are also many wonderful digitized texts readily available; e.g. Frederick Furnivall’s (1868) collection from late Middle to Early Modern English, all dealing with meals and manners (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/ cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=cme;idno=AHA6127.0001.001). Apart from the fascinating insights these texts give into early etiquette, they are a treasure trove of language for historical linguists. 3  The actuation of linguistic change As outlined in this chapter, Weinreich et  al. (1968) divided the task of explaining linguistic change into five areas, with the first four aspects (constraints, transition, embedding and evaluation) contributing to the fifth (the actuation problem), which they describe as being “the very heart of the matter”. Take some problem of language change and examine it with respect to the issue of actuation (including aspects to do with the social setting as well as the linguistic system). You could take data sets involving changes from one language (e.g. vowel or consonant shifts, evolution of grammatical categories and forms, lexical/semantic variation and innovation). 4  W(h)ither the standard As described in this chapter, recent developments are doing much to challenge the authority of standard languages. Everything points to greater variety, less standardization and more changes coming (especially from newer varieties of English). Comment on these developments and how you see them affecting Standard English and its relationship to non-standard varieties. 5  Contributions to a theory of language change Weinreich et al. (1968), Labov (1994) and Milroy (1992) all discuss the fundamental questions, principles and mechanisms of linguistic change. As described in this chapter, Weinreich et al. present five different problems for linguistic change: constraints, embedding, transition, evaluation and actuation. What do Milroy (1992) and Labov (1994) say about these five problems?

NOTES 1 The Neogrammarians of the 19th century borrowed this powerful dictum from geology and biology (see Janda and Joseph 2003: 27–31). Classicist Hermann Osthoff and Indo-Europeanist Karl Brugmann expressed it this way in 1878: “the psychological and physiological nature of man as speaker must have been essentially identical at all epochs” (Collinge’s translation; 1995: 205); Bergs (2012) offers an extensive discussion of the principle of uniformity and the risk of anachronism in historical linguistics. 2 The full proceedings of the Old Bailey (1674–1913) are also freely available online: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org. 3 The Journal of Historical Pragmatics, established in 2000 by Andreas Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen, explicitly states that its “editorial focus is on socio-historical and pragmatic aspects of historical texts in their sociocultural context of communication (e.g.

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conversational principles, politeness strategies, or speech acts)”; https://benjamins. com/#catalog/journals/jhp/main. 4 We might also add that the “horse and buggy” communities in North America, featured in Chapter 8, were using emoticons in their personal letters well before they appeared in electronic form; recall that the diglossic situation means their experience of English is within more formal contexts, and presumably these symbols help add the emotional spice to their writing.

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Index

abbreviation 9, 35 – 6, 46, 47, 122, 126, 167, 269 ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) 66, 271 abduction 15, 110 Aboriginal languages 197, 200, 207 – 8, 212 – 13, 273 accent 14 – 17, 75, 90 – 1, 97, 194, 197, 209, 264, 269, 271 accommodation 14, 17 – 18, 147, 222, 247 acquisition of language 15, 24, 110, 210 acronym 36 – 7, 46 – 7 actualization 106 – 9, 130 actuation 187, 248, 252 – 3, 275 affinity between languages 215 – 43; common ancestor 229 – 33, 237 – 9; comparative method for determining 217 – 19, 222, 237 – 43; family tree model 220 – 2, 223, 231, 238; methods for reconstruction of relationship 233 – 43; quantitative approaches to divergence determination 226 – 8, 243; wave model 168, 169, 222 – 6, 243; written sources as evidence of change 234 – 7 affixation 8, 31, 33 – 5, 42, 47, 50, 79, 106, 118, 120, 127, 134, 154, 191 age grading 19, 21, 25, 175 – 9 agglutinating languages 124, 125 – 6, 127, 130, 132, 134, 142, 143 Aitchison, Jean 70, 101, 164 Albanian 202, 223, 229 Algeo, John 31, 35, 37, 50 allophones 6, 90, 92, 93 alternative histories 263 – 4 amalgamation 43 amelioration 55 – 6, 70, 72 American Dialect Society 31, 100

American English 11, 39, 63 – 4, 117, 216 American Speech 31 Amharic 144 analogical levelling, 112, 113 analogical thinking 110 – 11, 130 analogy 14 – 15, 24, 42 – 3, 64, 95 – 7, 109 – 20, 128 – 30, 146, 149, 150, 154, 156 – 7, 243, 254; changes 95, 113 – 15, 118, 120, 128 – 30, 272; four-term 110; rules of 114 – 20 Ancient Greek 7, 55 Anglo Saxon Chronicle 1, 3, 5 Anttila, Raimo 56 – 7, 90, 109, 244 aphesis 79 apocope 79 Apostrophe Protection Society 269 apparent time 18 – 19, 21, 24, 176 – 9; see also real time Arcodia, Giorgio Francesco 126 Aristotle 64, 70 assimilation 40, 81 – 4, 94 – 5, 113, 218, 266 – 7; anticipatory 82 – 2; distance 83, 84, 95, 113, 218, 266 Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures 16, 25, 212 attitudes towards language change 21 – 3 Auer, Anita 262 Australia 16, 34, 52, 92, 102, 158, 189, 193, 196 – 7, 200 – 1, 207, 213, 229, 231, 263, 271; Aboriginal languages 197, 200, 207 – 8; Australian English 54, 100; contact languages in 197, 200 – 1; language death in 16, 207 – 8; mixed language 190, 195, 198 – 201, 211 – 12; pidgins in, 197, 200 – 1 Australian English 54, 100 Australian National Corpus 255

Index backformation 34 – 5, 48, 50, 116 backronyms 37 Balkan Sprachbund 202 Bandwurmwörter ‘tapeworm words’ 32 Banfi, Emanuele 126 Bantu 201 Basque 118, 119, 242 Bauer, Laurie 9, 31, 48, 100 – 1, 142, 273 Bavarian German 216 Bell, Stephanie 47 Beowulf 76, 236 Bergs, Alexander 183, 184, 187, 262, 267, 273 Bickerton, Derek 196, 212 bilingualism 98, 190, 193, 195, 198 – 9, 200 – 1, 203, 205 – 6, 211 bipartite marker 114 – 15 Bislama 158, 196 Black Death 100, 162 ,  251 blending 31, 37 – 8, 42 – 3, 47, 50, 61, 134, 164 Bloomfield, Leonard 169, 244 Bolinger, Dwight 265, 269 borrowing 10, 12, 31, 39 – 41, 48, 50, 52, 55, 61, 64, 68 – 9, 80, 83, 94, 96 – 8, 100, 107, 109, 141, 190, 191 – 3, 203, 205 – 7, 209, 212, 215, 217 – 19, 228, 239, 244, 253 Brabantish 253 Brief History of the English Language and Literature, A (Mieklejohn) 271 British English 22, 90, 235 broadening, semantic 38, 54, 57, 65, 69 – 70, 72, 74 Bubonic Plague see Black Death Bulgarian 202, 223 Burgundian 65, 236 Burridge, Kate 70, 101, 157, 204, 212, 251, 253, 255, 273 Campbell, Lyle 24, 101, 151, 157, 161, 228, 233, 244 Canadian English 176, 202 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer) 1 – 2, 75 – 6, 79 cascade effect 170 – 1, 186

289

Castilian Spanish 263 Catalan 207, 221 – 2, 263 – 4 Caxton, William 25 – 6, 265 Celtic 98, 143, 193, 207, 242 chain shifts 99 – 100 Chaucer, Geoffrey 1 – 2, 5, 11, 58, 75, 78 – 9, 90, 99, 151, 198, 265; Canterbury Tales, The 1 – 2, 75 – 6, 79; Troilus and Criseyde II 5, 265 Cheke, Sir John 22 Chinese 123, 125 – 6, 207, 214, 222, 263; see also Mandarin Chinese Chomskyan linguistics 134, 230 class, social 171, 172 – 5, 180, 182 – 3, 185 – 6, 251 Classical Egyptian 126 Classical Latin 207, 222 clipping 35, 63 – 4, 106 clitics 154 code-switching 198 – 201, 209, 212 cognates 107, 218, 219, 227 – 8, 233, 238 – 9, 242, 244, 246 cognitive linguistics 66, 247 commonization 38 communities of practice 185 – 6, 187 – 8 compensatory lengthening 78 – 9, 219 complaint tradition 5, 21, 22, 24, 25 – 6 complementary distribution 5 – 6, 168 Complete Corpus of Old English/ Dictionary of Old English 236 compounding 31 – 3, 38 – 40, 42 – 3, 47, 50, 106, 126, 137, 140, 236, 241, 270 consonants 6 – 7, 36, 73, 76 – 9, 80 – 90, 93 – 4, 96 – 9, 104 – 5, 107 – 9, 111, 116 – 17, 119, 149, 153, 163 – 4, 168 – 9, 194, 203, 205, 218, 221, 226, 230, 238, 240, 246, 267, 275; addition of 80 – 1; aspirated 7, 88; assimilation of 81 – 2, 83; devoicing of 86; dissimilation of 88; English, evolution of 98 – 9; First Germanic Consonant Shift 163; French 149; High German Consonant Shift 168, 226; loss of 77 – 8, 109, 238; nasalized 6 constraints problem 248, 249, 272, 275 construction grammar 134

290

Index

contact between different languages 15, 98, 189 – 211; convergence 201 – 2; discourse particles 206; language creation 190, 195 – 201; language death 207 – 9; language maintenance 190 – 2; language shift 190, 192 – 4; substratum influence 194, 203, 204 – 6; superstratum influence 203 – 4; types of 190 – 202; see also creole languages; pidgins contamination 61 – 3, 218 contrastive focus reduplication 39 contronyms 59, 70 convergence 201 – 2, 207, 210 – 11 conversion 35, 38, 48, 55, 100, 180, 190, 192 – 4, 205, 228, 262, 269 Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) 17, 236, 257 Corpus of Early English Correspondence 254 corpus linguistics 254 – 6, 273 Corpus of Oz Early English (CoOEE) 255 Corpus Resource Database 254 – 5 Costa Rican Creole 196 creation of language 29, 190, 195 – 201 creole languages 16, 25, 80, 195 – 7, 198 – 9, 207, 212 Cushitic 144, 201 Dahl, Östen 156, 249 Darwin, Charles 13 Davies, Mark 255 death, language 16, 193, 207 – 9 deterioration 54, 55 – 6, 60, 69 – 70, 72 diachrony 20, 77, 102 – 3, 105, 148, 157, 188, 248 – 9, 254 – 5, 275 dialects 14 – 15, 16, 31, 40, 45, 87, 90, 93, 100, 140, 170, 175, 207, 216 – 17, 221 – 2, 224, 226, 228, 235, 253 – 5, 261, 263 – 5, 269 dictionaries 7, 9, 16, 21, 26, 28 – 32, 35 – 6, 38, 40, 43, 46, 48 – 50, 54, 59, 61, 72, 74, 85, 106, 112, 115, 187, 209, 236, 269, 271 diffusion of change see spread of change

diglossia 203, 206 discourse marker 12, 70, 206, 260 discourse particles 206 dissimilation 7, 81, 87 – 8, 94 dissociation 14, 17 – 18, 261 Dixon, Robert 126, 131 do, periphrastic 20, 167 drift 251 Dryer, Matthew 127, 143, 146 – 7,  148 Duden 21 Duden, Konrad 21 Dutch 15, 50, 141, 163, 214, 216 – 17, 221, 223 – 4, 226 – 7, 229, 244, 253 Dyirbal 147 Early English Books Online 236 Early Modern English 8, 11, 104, 160 – 1, 164, 166 – 7, 197, 198, 236, 237, 248, 254, 262, 274 – 5; pronouns in 11; verbal paradigm for 8, 166 Earp, T. W. 62 Eastman, George 29 Eckert, Penelope 186 – 7 e-communication (electronic communication) 100, 250, 266 – 9 economy of gesture 77, 81, 86, 102 Ellegård, Alvar 20, 167, 262 ellipsis 63 – 4, 70, 147, 268 embedding problem 2248, 251 – 2, 266, 272, 275 “Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change” (Weinreich, Labov, Herzog) 248 Eneydos (Caxton) 25, 265 Enfield, Nick 53 – 4, 66, 69 – 70 English 1 – 15, 25 – 7, 30 – 50, 54 – 5, 61, 63, 67 – 8, 76 – 95, 98 – 110, 113 – 19, 121 – 7, 131 – 8, 140 – 50, 151 – 5, 167, 176, 197, 198, 202, 203, 204 – 7, 236, 237, 259, 261; American English 11, 39, 63 – 4, 117, 216; Australian English 54, 100; British English 22, 90, 235; Canadian English 176; New Zealand English 100; Philippine English 40; Scots

Index English 90, 261; see also Early Modern English; Middle English; Old English epenthesis 80 etymology 29, 42, 46 – 8, 50, 63, 70, 73 – 4, 95, 233 euphemism 52, 60 – 1, 65, 70, 219 evaluation of change 156, 248, 252 Evans, Nicholas 15, 208, 229, 230 evidence of change 18 – 21, 234 – 7 exaggeration 17, 59 – 60, 66 excrescence 80 – 1 extension see analogy family tree model 220 – 2, 223, 231, 238 Farsi 18, 223 Finnish 124, 222 First Germanic Consonant Shift 163 – 4, 221 folk etymology 42, 63, 70, 95 French 3, 4, 6, 10, 16, 31, 34, 47, 54, 62, 71 – 3, 79 – 80, 83, 88, 94, 103, 107, 112, 123, 144 – 6, 149 – 151, 154, 175, 191 – 2, 194, 198, 207, 214 – 15, 239 – 41, 253; Montreal French 175; negation in 154; Norman French 6, 10, 191; Old French 54, 83, 112; vowels in 6; word order 144, 145, 149 Frisian 215, 221, 223, 226 fusional languages 122 – 3, 124, 125 – 6, 130, 132, 142 Gaby, Alice 229 Galician 263 – 4 Gascon 44 – 5 gender, change and 171 – 2, 179 – 82, 186, 188, 209, 255, 270 German 7, 9 – 11, 13 – 14, 21 – 2, 25, 32 – 6, 40, 45, 47, 53 – 4, 60, 70 – 2, 76, 78 – 83, 85 – 90, 92 – 3, 95, 98, 102 – 3, 107, 114 – 16, 125, 127 – 8, 131, 136, 140 – 1, 143, 146, 148 – 52, 157, 163 – 4, 168 – 9, 172, 176, 179, 186, 189, 191, 193 – 4, 202 – 6, 208 – 10, 212, 214 – 19, 221 – 9, 236, 239, 244, 249, 251 – 3, 263, 273; Bavarian 216; borrowing

291

from 40; compounding in 32 – 3, 35; final consonant excrescence in 81; First Germanic Consonant Shift 163; High German 168, 225 – 6; inflections in 124; Low German 168; Luther German 203; metathesis in 89; Middle High German 86; nasal phonemes in 93; negation 253; Old High German 92, 114 – 15; Pennsylvania German 150, 202 – 6, 208 – 9, 210, 273; plurals 114 – 15; Pre-Old High German 168; Standard German 9, 21; Standard High German 203; subordinate clause in 9 – 10; Swiss German 203; syntax in 9; umlaut in 83; word order 141, 143 Germanic languages 13, 32, 83, 136, 140, 148, 163, 218, 221 – 2, 224 – 6, 229, 236, 244, 251 – 2; family tree for 221, 224 – 6; umlaut in 83 – 4, 114; see also separate entries for individual language varieties Gilliver, Peter 38 Gleason, Jean Berko 110 – 11 glottochronology 226 – 8, 244 Gothic 136, 218, 221, 223, 226, 229, 236 Graddol, David 266 Grammatica Anglicana (Jonson) 235 grammatical marker 83, 114 – 16, 120 – 1, 123 – 4, 126 – 7, 134, 140 – 1, 148 – 50, 155 – 6, 200, 213, 249, 261 grammaticalization 8, 10, 12 – 13, 15 – 16, 21, 35, 39 – 40, 42 – 4, 48, 67, 70, 85, 87, 106 – 8, 110, 114, 118, 121 – 2, 124 – 8, 131, 134 – 8, 140 – 2, 144, 148 – 56, 158 – 9, 161, 189 – 93, 195 – 6, 198, 201 – 2, 204 – 5, 209, 211, 213 – 14, 215, 222, 229 – 30, 236, 241, 249 – 51, 253, 265 – 7, 273 – 5; extension in 149, 154, 161, 235; phonological reduction 44, 153, 209, 270; reanalysis in 42 – 3, 108 – 9, 130, 149 – 50, 154, 156, 161, 270; semantic changes 52, 153, 233; structural changes 146, 153 – 4, 211 Grassmann, Hermann 7, 88 Grassmann’s Law 7, 88

292

Index

gravity model of diffusion 168 – 71; see also Great Vowel Shift; wave model Great English Vowel Shift 99, 113, 219, 264 Greek 7, 16, 22, 30, 36, 42, 47, 61, 64 – 5, 70, 88, 96, 136, 144, 154, 202, 214, 217 – 18, 222, 237 – 9; Ancient Greek 7 Green, Jonathon 30 Greenberg, Joseph 131 – 2, 144, 145, 146, 148, 157 Gresham’s Law 56 Grimm, Jakob 163 – 4, 218, 221 Grimm’s Law 163, 164, 218, 221 Gullah 196 Gurindji 199 – 201, 212 Gurindji Kriol 200, 212 Hall, Rich 30 Hanunoo 89 – 90 haplology 79 Hawkins, John 148, 157 Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Diachronic and Dialectal 254 Herzog, Werner 252 High German 168, 216, 221, 225 – 6 High German Consonant Shift 168 – 9, 226 Hindi 16, 207, 222 – 3 historical linguistics 7, 23 – 4, 48, 76, 94, 101, 106, 134 – 7, 163, 198, 208, 218, 236 – 7, 247 – 8, 250, 253, 260 – 1, 263, 272 – 3, 275 historical pragmatics 23, 256 – 60, 262 historical sociolinguistics 23, 260 – 4, 273 Historical Sociolinguistics Network (HiSoN) 260 – 3, 273 Hock, Hans Heinrich 45, 83, 101, 115, 131, 244 Hofstadter, Douglas R. 14, 109, 110 Hollandish 253 Hopkins, Gerald Manley 22 Hopper, Paul 131, 134, 153, 155, 157 hothouse words 30 – 1, 45 Howard, David 47 Hughes, Geoffrey 44, 48, 192

Humboldt, Wilhelm von 122, 125 hyperarticulation 77 hyperbole 17, 59; see also exaggeration hypoarticulation 77 Iberian Romance 118 – 19 Icelandic 82, 218, 221 – 3, 226, 228 – 9 imitation 14, 41, 95, 218 imitative expressions 41 i-mutation 83 Indonesian 207, 214 infixes 33 – 4 inflection 8 – 9, 13, 35, 50, 85, 106, 110, 120 – 7, 129 – 30, 134, 136, 140, 142, 146, 154, 160 – 1, 191, 198 inflectional morphology 106, 127, 129 – 30, 136 inkhorn terms 22 Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable English Texts 236 internet 23, 28 – 9, 36 – 7, 48, 85, 100, 175, 266, 270, 274 intolerable homonymy 44 – 6 Irish 79, 83, 103, 210, 215 isofunctional morphological marker 114 – 15 isolating languages 123 – 4, 125 – 6, 132, 134, 142, 196, 229 Italian 3, 4, 79, 82, 102, 145, 163, 207, 215, 217 – 18, 221 – 2, 227, 229, 238 – 9, 241, 243 – 4 Jamaican Creole 196 Janda, Richard 161, 265, 273 janus-words 59 Japanese 12 – 13, 55, 70 – 2, 80, 138, 157, 194, 214, 216, 218, 239 Jespersen, Otto 99, 152, 154, 249, 251 – 2 Jespersen’s Cycle 152 – 3, 154, 249, 252 Johns, Brian 271 Johnson, Samuel 28, 70, 269 Jonson, Ben 90 – 1, 235 Joseph, Brian 265, 273 Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics  262

Index Keller, Rudi 10, 17, 25, 253 Knight’s Law 56 Krio 196 Kriol 80, 102 – 3, 196, 200 – 1, 207, 212 – 13 Kuryłowicz, Jerzy 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 130 – 1, 148, 272 Laʒamon’s Brut 115 Laberge, Suzanne 175 Labov, William 134, 170 – 1, 172, 173, 175, 177 – 8, 180, 182, 237, 249, 252, 262 Langacker, Ron 78, 104 – 5 language acquisition see acquisition of language language creation 29, 190, 195 – 201 language death 16, 207 – 9 Language the Loaded Weapon (Bolinger) 265 Language Log 268 language maintenance 22 – 3, 190 – 2, 203, 211 language myths 25, 210, 263 – 4 language planning and policy 209 – 10 Latin 3, 4, 11, 16, 22, 26, 30, 45, 54, 56, 64, 66, 68, 71 – 3, 80, 82, 88, 92, 95 – 6, 118, 121 – 3, 125, 127, 146, 162 – 3, 188, 192, 207, 214 – 15, 218, 221 – 2, 227, 229, 233, 237 – 8, 241; Classical Latin 207, 222; inflections 122, 125; Law of Latin Rhotacism 92, 96; word order 121, 122 Law of Latin Rhotacism 92, 96 Law of Semantic Change 56, 66 Leech, Geoffrey 52, 70, 265 Lehmann, Winfred P. 145, 157 Lemle, Miriam 141 lenition 81, 85 – 7, 92, 96, 240 levels of change 5 – 13 Levinson, Stephen 229, 230 lexemes 106, 239, 241 lexicon 4, 16, 23, 28 – 51, 52, 54, 59, 61, 163, 166 – 7, 190 – 2, 195, 198, 200 – 2, 209, 211, 264 – 6; additions to 9, 29 – 43; changes to 28 – 48; deletions from 43 – 6 leximania 30 Liberman, Mark 48, 63, 268

293

Light Warlpiri 200 – 1, 212 Linguistic Atlas of New England 178 Low German 168, 221, 226 Luther German 203 Ma’a 201 McColl Millar, Robert 24, 86, 101, 112, 118, 119, 225, 244 McConvell, Patrick 200 Macedonian 202, 223 Macquarie Dictionary 54 McWhorter, John 195 malapropism 62 – 3 Malay 84, 144, 217, 238 Mali 144 Mańczak, Witold 120, 131 Mandarin Chinese 16, 123, 125, 207, 263 Maori 38 – 9, 94, 108 – 9, 197, 210 Māori Pidgin English 197 Matisoff, Jim 153 Matras, Yaron 206 Meakins, Felicity 200 meaning associations 53 – 4 Media Lengua 201 Meiklejohn, J.M.D. 271 metanalysis see reanalysis metaphor 27, 59, 64 – 5, 70, 110, 114, 126, 269, 273 metathesis 81, 88 – 90, 94, 167, 246 metonymy 65 Middle English 2, 8, 11, 95, 98 – 9, 104 – 5, 108, 115, 151, 160 – 2, 164, 187, 197, 198, 212, 236 – 7, 248, 254, 259, 269; boundary shift in 151 – 2; pronouns in 11; resources 236; verbal endings in 8 Middle High German 86 Middle Scots 261 Milroy, James 21, 22, 250, 262 Milroy, Lesley 21, 22, 183, 250, 262 Modaressi, Yahya 18 – 19 Montreal French 175 Moran, Caitlin 85 Morey, Stephen 229 morphemes 42, 89, 109, 111, 123 – 6, 131 – 2, 153 – 4, 191, 213

294

Index

morphology: changes in 5, 8 – 9, 106 – 31, 134, 136 – 7, 149, 151, 154, 166, 247; inflectional 106, 127, 129 – 30, 136; reasons for 127 – 30; see also analogy; reanalysis; typology morphosyntax 134, 159 – 61 mountweazels 30 – 1, 38 myths, language 25, 210, 263 – 4 Nahuatl 124 names 29, 36 – 8, 40, 49, 54, 58, 65, 78, 79, 101, 102, 108 – 9, 123, 193, 219 – 20, 267 Naro, A. J. 141 narrowing, semantic 55, 60, 69 – 70, 72, 74 National Indigenous Languages Survey 208 “Neg-first principle” 249 negation 151 – 7, 161, 176, 180, 196, 248, 249 – 53, 255, 262, 272, 274 Neogrammarian school of linguistics 95, 101, 163 – 4 neologisms 29, 31, 34, 50 Nevalainen, Terttu 251, 252, 254 New Guinea 15, 196, 207 New Oxford American Dictionary 31 New Zealand 52, 92, 94, 100, 197, 255, 271; New Zealand English 100 Nichols, Johanna 265 NoCussing Club 186 nonce words 34 Norman Conquest 6, 191 – 2, 215 Norman French 6, 10, 191 Norwegian 144, 221, 223, 226 Nostratic 230 – 1, 232 – 3, 244 nursery rhymes 116, 235 obsolescence 43 – 4, 48 O’Connor, Joseph 101 Ogura, Mieko 166 Old Bailey Corpus 255 Old English 1 – 6, 8, 10, 13, 43 – 5, 52 – 3, 63, 73, 77 – 80, 82 – 3, 91, 94, 98, 103 – 4, 107 – 8, 112 – 13, 116 – 17, 127, 132 – 3, 137 – 8, 140, 142, 151, 155, 159 – 61, 163, 192, 197 – 8, 207, 219, 226, 236 – 7,

242, 248, 262, 265; inflections in 13; merger in 91; negation in 151; resources 236; as rhotic 163; verbal paradigm of 8; Viking Norse influence 192; voiced fricatives in 94; word order in 137 – 40 Old French 54, 83, 88, 112 Old High German 81 – 2, 86, 88, 92, 114 – 16, 168, 215, 218 onomatopoeia 41, 95, 218, 233 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 7, 10 – 11, 16, 30, 38, 54, 59, 112, 115 palatalization 82 – 3, 89, 95, 103, 175, 266 paradigms 8, 85 – 6, 111 – 14, 119 – 20, 150, 153, 249 Partridge, Eric 55 Paston, John 258 – 9 Paston, Margaret 258 – 9 Paul, Hermann 13 – 14 Pedersen, Holger 230 Pennsylvania German 71 – 2, 150, 202 – 6, 208 – 9, 210, 212, 273; discourse particles in 206; substratum influence 203, 204 – 6; superstratum influence 203 – 4 periphrastic do 20, 167 Philippine English 40 Phillips, Betty 165 phonemes 6, 82, 90 – 4, 98, 136, 153, 194; merger of 91 – 2; split of 92 – 4 phonesthemes 41, 48, 61 phonetics, changes to 5 – 7, 247; erosion 127 – 9; phonemic change and 90 – 4 phonology, changes to 5 – 7, 75 – 101, 127, 247; complementary distribution 5 – 6; irregular 94 – 7; loss of sounds 77 – 9; modification of sounds 81 – 90; new sounds 80 – 1; phonetic change and 90 – 4; processes of 76 – 90; reasons for 97 – 101; reduction 153; segmental 5; suprasegmental 7 pidgins 16, 40, 190, 195 – 6, 197 – 9, 201, 211 – 12, 214 playfulness 3, 17, 38, 71, 156

Index polysemy 53 polysynthetic languages 124 – 5, 229 Pope, Jennifer 178 – 9 Portuguese 3, 4, 163, 215, 221 – 2, 229, 238 – 41 Poser, William 233 pragmatic marker 12, 206 pragmaticalization 12 – 13, 206 pragmatics 5, 11 – 13, 23 – 5, 131, 206, 247, 255, 256 – 60, 262, 264, 275; changes in 11 – 12; historical 256 – 60 Pre-Old High German 168 prefixes 33 – 4, 42, 66, 88 – 90, 103, 127, 219, 249 prejudice 53, 55, 58 – 9, 69 pronunciation 4 – 5, 7, 13 – 14, 41, 43, 62, 78, 80 – 3, 85, 87 – 91, 93 – 96, 101 – 3, 105, 111, 114, 148 – 9, 163 – 5, 168, 172 – 3, 175 – 7, 180 – 1, 186 – 7, 193 – 4, 203, 234 – 5, 238, 241, 265 – 6, 271; accent 15, 16, 75, 90 – 1, 97, 194; reconstruction of 234 – 5; spelling 95; stress 4, 7; variation in 13 – 14 prothesis 80 Proto-Germanic 79, 82 – 3, 89, 102 – 3, 140, 141, 163 – 4, 218, 229 Proto-Indo-European (PIE) 7, 163 – 4, 218, 229, 242 – 3 Proto-Romance 241 Proto-World 229 – 33, 243 – 4 psycholinguistics 106, 247 pull chain 99, 100, 102 Pullum, Geoff 63 punctuation 209, 267, 268 – 9 purism 209 – 11 push chain 100, 102; see also chain shifts; pull chain Quechua 201, 233 rate of change in language 5, 264 – 72 Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena 166, 254, 273 real time 18, 20 – 1, 24, 176 – 9, 237, 267; see also apparent time

295

reanalysis 42 – 3, 106 – 9, 130, 149 – 51, 154, 156, 161, 243, 270; definition of 108 rebracketing see reanalysis Received Pronunciation (RP) 163, 271 reconstruction, linguistic 21, 233 – 43; comparative method of 217 – 19, 237 – 43; internal 241 – 2; written sources in 234 – 7 reduction 43 – 4, 69, 77 – 8, 85, 100 – 1, 134, 153, 193, 209, 241, 265 – 7 reduplication 36, 38 – 9, 61, 84, 88, 196 regularity hypothesis 95, 120, 164, 247 Rhenish Fan 168, 169 Romaine, Suzanne 136, 212, 261 – 2 Romance languages 3 – 4, 79, 145, 163, 207, 221 – 2, 229, 239, 242; see also French; Italian; Latin; Portuguese; Spanish Romanian 83, 202, 221 – 2, 229 Ruhlen, Merritt 231 – 2 Russian 16, 65, 82, 87, 123, 143 – 4, 194, 222 – 3, 263 Rutten, Gijsbert 262 Sankoff, Gillian 175 Sanskrit 7, 132, 163, 214, 222 – 3 Sapir, Edward 251 scare quotes 267 Scheler, Manfred 16 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 122, 125 Schmidt, Johannes 168, 224 Schuchardt, Hugo 164, 168 Scots English 90, 261 semantic halo 55 – 6 Semantics (Leech) 52 – 3 semantics, changes to 10 – 11, 52 – 70; chain reaction 56 – 7; consequences of 54 – 7; linguistic reasons for 61 – 5; psychological reasons for 58 – 61; socio-cultural reasons for 57 – 8; theories of 66 – 9 Serbo-Croat 202 Shakespeare, William 2 – 4, 8, 11, 17, 23, 48, 99, 118, 142, 234 – 6, 256 – 7; Much

296

Index

Ado about Nothing 2 – 3, 8, 17 – 18, 256 – 8; Romeo and Juliet 234 – 5 shifting see conversion Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 16 Shuy, Roger 154 sibilants 111, 166 Simons, Gary 219 Simpson, John 30 sneaky diffusion 141 – 2 social class 171, 172 – 5, 180, 182 – 3, 185 – 6, 251 social networking platforms 28 – 9, 269 social networks, change and 182 – 5, 250 – 2 Socio-historical Linguistics (Romaine) 250, 261 sociolinguistics 14, 21, 23, 172, 179 – 80, 182 – 3, 209, 247, 250, 252, 260 – 3, 272 – 3; historical 260 – 4 “Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements” (Greenberg) 144 sound laws 95 – 6, 164 sound symbolism 41, 52, 70, 217 South Seas Jargon 197 Spanish 3, 4, 16, 40, 79 – 80, 119 – 20, 157, 163, 194, 201, 207, 215, 221 – 2, 227, 229, 233, 238 – 9, 240 – 1, 243, 263; Castilian Spanish 263 spelling 6, 18, 40 – 1, 43, 46, 62, 78, 82, 86 – 7, 90 – 1, 93 – 5, 100, 114, 117, 149, 209, 241, 254, 258, 266, 267, 269 spheres of usage 115 – 16 spread of change 162 – 86; age in 175 – 9; communities of practice in 185 – 6; gender in 179 – 82; within linguistic system 163 – 7; patterns of 168 – 71; social class in 172 – 5; social factors in 171 – 82; social networks for 182 – 5; within social structures 167 – 86 Standard German 9, 21 Standard High German 203 standardization 136 – 7, 250, 265, 269, 275 Sturtevant, Edward 96

Sturtevant’s paradox 114 subjectification 68, 70 subordinate clauses 9 – 10, 22, 135, 137, 139 – 41, 143, 150, 250, 253 subreption 58, 69 substratum influence 193 – 4, 203, 204 – 6 suffixes 13, 33 – 6, 42 – 3, 78, 83, 103, 109, 114 – 16, 119 – 20, 126 – 7, 148 – 9, 158, 166, 191; Basque 118 – 19, 242; inflectional 13; Maori 38 – 9, 94, 108, 109, 197, 210; Spanish 119 – 20 superstratum influence 190 – 1, 203 – 4, 211 Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary 9 Svartvik, Jan 265 Swadesh, Morris 226 – 8, 244 Swadesh list 226 – 7, 228, 244 Swahili 79, 124, 125 – 6 Swiss German 40, 203 synaesthesia 64 – 5 syncope 79 synecdoche 65 syntax, changes in 9 – 10, 107, 131, 134 – 57, 163, 247; historical 134 – 7; reconstruction of 236 – 7, 242 – 3 taboo words 11, 45, 47 – 8, 60 – 1, 65, 70, 96, 155, 219, 244, 255 Tagalog 40 Telegraph 33 Thai 144 Thibault, Pierette 175 Tiro, Marcus 139 tokens 129 – 30 Tok Pisin 158 – 9, 196, 207 Tolkien, J.R.R. 62, 117, 157, 273 transition problem 248, 250 – 1, 272, 275 Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 66 – 7, 68, 70, 131, 134, 153, 155, 157 Trudgill, Peter 168 – 70, 172 – 3, 174, 187, 262, 272 types 20 – 1, 28, 31, 39, 43, 54, 69, 76 – 7, 81, 91, 125 – 6, 129 – 30, 132, 136, 138,

Index 141, 143 – 4, 146, 150, 179, 190 – 202, 205, 211; pure 145 typology 106, 121 – 7, 130 – 1, 134, 142, 143 – 8, 156 – 7, 226, 243, 272; morphosyntactic 106, 121 – 7; word order change and 121, 143 – 8 umlaut 83 – 4, 113 – 14, 241 UNESCO 207 uniformitarian principle 250 – 1, 273 universal grammar 134, 230 Urban Dictionary 26, 30, 32, 85, 269 Vandalic 236 variation in language 13 – 18, 21 – 4, 172 – 4, 179 – 80, 187 – 8, 195 – 6, 224, 261 – 3, 265 – 6, 269 Vennemann, Theo 145, 157 verb-final ordering 10, 138 – 41 verbal brace 140, 141, 212, 253 verbicide 44 Verein deutsche Sprache e.V. 186 vernacular universal 252 Vietnamese 123 Viking Norse 192 vocabulary see lexicon vowels 5 – 6, 76 – 7, 79 – 80, 82 – 3, 85 – 6, 91 – 2, 94, 96, 99 – 100, 113, 117, 153, 163, 194, 203, 205, 230, 238, 240 – 1,

297

264, 267; addition of 80; Great English Vowel Shift 99, 113, 219, 264; harmony 83; lengthening of 39, 78 – 9; loss of 6, 77, 78, 79, 94; merger of 91 – 2; nasalized 6, 238; reduction of 153, 241; umlaut 83 – 4 Wang, William S-Y. 166 Warlpiri 199 – 201, 212 Watts, Richard 263 – 4 wave model 168, 169 – 71, 222 – 6, 243 Weinreich, Max 24, 216, 248, 252, 273, 275 Welsh 143 Wiktionary 34 Willis, David 155, 157, 249, 253 word order 9 – 10, 13, 121 – 4, 127, 136, 137 – 42, 143 – 5, 147 – 9, 156 – 7, 196, 198, 204, 212, 241 – 2, 251, 267: change in 137 – 42; typology and 121, 143 – 8 words see lexicon World Atlas of Linguistic Structures Online (WALS) 127, 143, 148, 244 Yulparija 147 Yupik 124 – 5 Zipf ’s principle of least effort 77,  153