Grammatical change (some basics) exemplified with Early Modern
English
Morphological innovation
 borrowing
 sound change
 analogy
o extension
o levelling
Borrowing
 radius, radii
Sound change
 OE ynog “enough”, plural ynog-e (and other inflections) ->
o ME enough, plural enow
 OE attributive mīn “my”: eyes, hands, feet -> with loss of /_n/
before a consonant,
o EmodE mine eyes but my feet
 often creates differences within a set which may get
leveled later
Analogy
 “The process whereby elements within the morphological system,
especially those in inflectional paradigms or sets, tend to influence
one another.”
 look for similarities of
o meaning: radius, octopus both nouns, both “formal/classical”
o form: both end in –us
 so, by analogy, octopus has acquired an
incorrect/unhistorical but very healthy plural form,
octopi
radius
radii
octopus
…
Examples of analogical extension
 influence of productive noun plural –s on other categories of nouns
o foreign: back-formation of English hero from Gk. heros
“hero”
o native: eventual replacement of –en by –s in shooen, eyen
 influence of regular verbs (productive category) on irregular verbs
o regular verbs: fell, past tense felled; shell, past tense shelled
o by analogy, irregular swell has acquired regular form swelled
(also an example of levelling; see below)
 swell sounds like fell, shell
 they’re all verbs
 regular verbs are more common
 older form may survive: swollen
cat shoe
heros -> hero
cats shoen -> shoes hero+s > heros
fell
shell
swell
felled shelled swoll-> swelled
Doesn’t always work this way
 “zero-plural” nouns like sheep, deer
o attracted a loanword: moose
o and a native word: fish (we keep fishes for different species)
 extension to words where “plural” could be redefined as
“collective”?
 “irregular” verbs like ride, drive (rode, drove)
o formerly regular dive, dived has acquired past tense dove
1 sheep
5 sheep
deer
deer
moose
moose (not
mooses or
meese)
fish
fishes -> fish
ride drive write dive
rode drove wrote dived->dove
Analogical levelling regularizes differences within a paradigm
o enough, enow -> enough
o mine eyes, my feet -> my eyes, my feet
o now my / mine have a functional distinction
 my book: attributive
 that book is mine: predicative
enough enough
enow enough
mine eyes my eyes
my feet
my feet
Levelling isn’t always complete
o speak, spake, spoken -> speak, spoke, spoken
o /o/ leveled from past participle into past tense
Different kinds of sets, e.g.
 inflectional, paradigms of words and their grammatical forms
o e.g. nouns and their plurals (cactus, cacti), verbs and their
principal parts (ride, rode, ridden; dive, dove, dived)
 syntactic:
o e.g. SV(O) is the word order default for English
 set consists of an infinite number of sentences: I run, he
eats worms …
o SVO pattern might account for
 disappearance of old impersonals: methinks -> I think
 disappearance of of with some objects: “to consider of”,
“to judge of” -> consider, judge
 “All these bills were then referred to committees
to consider of them”
 “We have not enough information to judge of the
case”
o VO generalized to these?
Syntactic change
Language universals (Greenberg 1963)
o classify languages according to order of SVO
o English is a VO language
o likely used to be an OV language
o VO languages tend to share other patterns of word order, e.g.
o prepositions before objects (to there)
o genitives after their heads (the roof of the house)
o changes in a language are interrelated
o as English changed from OV->VO, other changes happened
too
o there are often relics left over
o e.g. herein, hereafter (preposition after the object)
o e.g. John’s book (alongside the roof of the house)
 older way favoured by nouns “highest on the gender
scale”
Reanalysis
o example: going to
o Fred’s going to look at his neighbours’ property assessments
at City Hall.
 verb of motion?
 purpose/future?
o depends on the possibility of more than one analysis of a given
construction
o doesn’t change its surface modification
o but changes its “underlying structure”
o can eventually occur with complement verbs not possible
with verbs of motion
 It is going to rain
 You’re going to like Bill
Other examples
o to go about, to be about to
o “to be engaged in,” “to be preparing”
 1611: “Why go ye about to kill me?”
 1635: “Cardinall Granvill … went about to set the
English and the Netherlanders at variance”
o future participle: “on the point of, going”
 “The wounded soldier rests his head / About to die
upon the dead.”
o considering
o present participle of verb: “to contemplate mentally”
 “Considering his youth, we were surprised at his
attainments”
 we is subject of the verb consider
o preposition: “in view of, taking into consideration”
 “The evening was pleasant, and also warm, considering
we were amongst Ice”
 the evening is clearly not able to do any
considering
Grammaticalization
o “the increase in the range of a morpheme advancing from a lexical
to a grammatical or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical
status”
o often characterized by a concurrent “weakening” of both the
meaning and the phonetic form of the word involved.”
o e.g. verb will
 weakening of meaning: “want” -> future
 weakening of form: ‘ll
o e.g. going to
 lexical: I’m going to the store
 future/intention: It’s gonna rain.
Social factors in morphosyntactic change
 choice of thou (old 2nd person singular) or you (old 2nd person
plural) in earlier English
o social factors in ME: you high status, thou low status
o pragmatic factors in EmodE
 you: respect, formality, but also (if used unexpectedly
or inappropriately) emotional distance or coldness
 thou: condescension to social inferiors, but also marker
of familiarity or intimacy
 interested? see
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~eng121-c/politenessin%20AME.htm
Spread of innovations
 consider factors like region, social stratification, gender
 Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg have found that region is
significant in the spread of my and thy before vowels (vs mine and
thine) and third person verbal –s (vs –th)
o first northerners
o then Londoners
 then other factors start to become significant
Syntax more open to pragmatic variation than morphology and
phonology
o pragmatics: how language is influenced by context, the
relationship between speaker and hearer
o when would you say “the man to whom I’m speaking”, when
“the woman I’m speaking to”?
o when antennas, when antennae?
E.g. “violation” of word order
o poetry: “This is the forest primeval.”
o emphasis: “Your essays you should proofread carefully.”
Some sources
Campbell, Lyle. Historical sociolinguistics: an introduction. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.
Fitzmaurice, Susan. “Politeness in Early Modern English: the second
person pronouns.”
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~eng121-c/politenessin%20AME.htm
Lehmann, Winfred. Historical linguistics: an introduction. New York:
Holt, 1962.
McMahon, April M.S. Understanding language change. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1994.
Nevalainen, Terttu and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. Historical
sociolinguistics: language change in Tudor and Stuart England.
London, etc.: Longman, 2003.
UK vs US grammar
Grammatical differences reflect
o variation in Early Modern English
o among different regional and social varieties
o within individual varieties
Sample example
o to a British person, American “He’s gotten really good at that”
stands out
o they don’t have gotten
In British English, the paradigm for get has more leveling than in
American English
o in ME, was get-e(n), gat, gotten
o by PDE, the o has been leveled into the past tense,
o in British English, the –en has disappeared
In British English, have got has got two meanings
o “have acquired” (older, from eME, perfect of get)
o “where he thought to have gotten perpetual praise”
 once you have acquired something, you possess it
o “possess” (newer, after C16th)
o Johnson’s dictionary: “he has got a good estate does not
always mean that he has acquired, but barely that he
possesses it. So we say the lady has got black eyes, merely
meaning that she has them.”
 “The lady has got black eyes” can’t mean “acquired”!
In American English, have gotten has the “acquired” meaning
o “have acquired” or “become”
o They’ve gotten tickets (“acquired”)
o Carol’s gotten fat (“become”)
o “possess”
o They’ve got tickets
o Carol’s got short legs