Language Change
LING 100
How does language
change proceed?
 We’ve seen how language families
spread and interact
 How languages constantly change, and
diverge when separated
Language Change
 What actually changes?
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phonetics
phonology
morphology
syntax
Semantics
 We’re talking primarily about internally
motivated change in this chapter, not change
as a result of language contact (borrowings,
etc.)
Samples of change…
 P. 484
 Check out the examples of Old English
all the way up to Modern English and
compare them.
 What kinds of changes do you see?
Sound samples…
 Wanna know what OId English sounded like?
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WlOZ3breE
 Middle English (taken from Canterbury Tales)
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE0MtENfO
MU
Sound change (Files 12.3)
 All languages contain variation at all times
 Sound change is complex, and probably
reflects subtle changes in the distribution of
variation that accumulate over time
 Keeping this in mind, we can still get some
mileage out of simplifying the situation
 Sound change implies an initial state of affairs
 that is replaced by another state of affairs at some
historical point (remember though: change is not
abrupt)
Sound Change
 Sound changes as a result of some
phonological process (~a rule)
 a new rule, or the expansion of an old one
 e.g. pin~pen - some English dialects or registers
have the same vowel in both words
 if this rule spread to all similar environments, or all mid
front lax vowels became high front lax vowels, then it would
count as a sound change
 this would be an example of an unconditioned sound
change - the vowel changes regardless of its phonetic
environment
Sound Change
 An example of a conditioned sound
change:
 /s/ aspiration in Spanish - occurs at the end
of a syllable, e.g. ¿cómo ehtás/ehtáh?
 /s/ at the beginning of a word is unchanged
 s / V_V also changes in some dialects, so
the process would be different, but it’s still
conditioned
Sound Change
 Types of conditioned and unconditioned
sound changes are listed in Files pp 49495
 NOTE!!!
 These are closely related to the phonological
processes we looked at synchronically
earlier in the course
 It might be good to review that chapter!
Sound Change
 The big picture:
 There is a close relationship between synchronic
variation and diachronic sound (or other) change in
language.
 Changes originate as variation, then spread through
the lexicon, affecting all instances of a sound (in a
particular context, if it’s a conditioned change)
 Once the change has spread through the whole
lexicon, there’s no going back - the link to the earlier
forms is broken
Sound Change - one more
note
 Phonemic changes alter the phonemic
structure of a language
 the pin~pen one we mentioned, if it took over all of
English, would collapse the mid front lax and high
front lax vowels into one phoneme
 Phonetic changes alter allophones, but not
phonemes
 Spanish /s/-aspiration (/s/ becomes /h/) would
create another allophone of /s/, but it’s still the same
phoneme
 This doesn’t necessarily correlate with whether
the change is conditioned or not
Morphological Change
 Refer to Files
 Summary: morphological change is usually
analogical, either by proportional analogy (a:b::c:X)
or by paradigm leveling (where related words are
changed to look more like each other
 It also results from reinterpretation (Files calls this
misanalysis) (if burglar has the suffix /er/, then there
must be a verb to burgle)
 We also add words by various processes (see p.
500/501)
Practice!
 Exercise (13), p. 518
 What sounds changes that occurred
between Proto-Quechua and its daughter
language Tena?
 Which sounds changes are conditioned
and which are unconditioned?
Syntactic Change
 Consider these examples:
 “father our”…
 “our father”
NP->N Det
NP-> Det N
Syntactic Change
 Also:
 fæder ure
 fæder urne
(subject)
(object)
 Change in marking of grammatical
function from OE to ModE.
 OE had nominal inflection (case marking)
 ModE based on word order
Practice
 (24), p. 521
Semantic Change
 Semantic extensions
 OE “dog” – particular breed
 ModE “dog” – general term
 Metaphorical extension: broadcast - “to
scatter seed over field” – “to send radio
waves through space”
 Semantic reductions
 OE “hund”- referred to dogs in general
 ModE “hound” – particular breed of dogs
Semantic Change
 Semantic elevations
 Positive change in connotation
 knight (OE cniht) initially meant
“youth”/”military follower” and later on a
romanticized warrior.
 Semantic degradations
 Acquisition of a pejorative meaning
 ME “silly” – happy, innocent
 ModE “silly” – foolish, inane
Practice
 Think of terms you use to talk about
computers and actions related to using
the PC.
 How many of these are old words that have
been put to new use?
 How many are totally new words?
 Why do you think this is the case?
The Comparative Method
 2 crucial assumptions
 sound-meaning correspondences are arbitrary
 otherwise we couldn’t tell if languages were related, or if
similarity was just meaning-related
 Sound chage is regular
 a sound either changes completely across a language
 or it changes completely, within a given phonetic
environment
 By this assumption, we expect sister languages to have
regular sound correspondences between words with the
same meaning
The Comparative Method
 Goals:
 to discover which languages are related
 to discover why and how languages change
 Protolanguages:
 we either have a historical record
 or we can reconstruct protoforms (e.g. protoIndo-European *ma:te:r (mother))
The Comparative Method
 Procedure (Files pp 511ff)
 compile cognate sets, eliminate borrowings
 list sound correspondences across cognates
 reconstruct sounds in each position
 total correspondence
 most natural development
 Occam’s Razor (most frequent variant)
 check for regularity (exceptions mean you have to
revise!)
Example
 A
siza
B
sesa
 Sound correspondences
s>s>s
i>e>i
z>s>z
C
siza
a>a>a
 (p. 512) common sound changes
 /s/ voices between vowels to [z]
So *[s_sa] preliminary reconstruction
 What about the vowel [i] or [e] in the 1st
syllable?
 Occam’s Razor:
 It is easier to posit that i > e (one change) than to
say that e>i (two changes)!
= >
Final Reconstruction:
*[sisa]
Practice
 Group up and do the reconstructions pp.
523 (36), (37), (38)