Historical linguistics and language change
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C4P121
2025-12-11
36
Historical linguistics and language change
Historical linguistics is concerned with describing how languages change and with attempting to explain why languages change. It concerns the histories and prehistories of languages and relationships between languages. Since the 1960s, explanations in historical linguistics have been revolutionised by the sociolinguistic examination of language variation. This is the observation that the language we use (the words and phrases we choose, the way we pronounce them and so on) varies from day to day, from situation to situation and from person to person. Language variation occurs at the level of the individual, in that each speaker employs distinct registers of language in different situations (formal, informal, ‘motherese’ and so on), and at the level of the group, in that speakers can be grouped according to regional dialect and social dialect. In the process of language change, speakers either consciously or unconsciously target the variation that already exists in the language due to social factors, selecting some variants over others and spreading them through a speech community. Language change can be (and often is) gradual, and in some cases almost imperceptible, but over time the results can be spectacular.
To see how spectacular, let’s briefly examine a few changes that have taken place in English. English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo European family of languages. A language family is a group of ‘genetically’ related languages, in the sense that they are hypothesised to have emerged from a common ‘parent’ language. Such relations are established on the basis of systematic correspondences in terms of words, sounds or grammar. Between the years 450 and 550 AD, several Germanic tribes from parts of modern-day Holland, Denmark and Northern Germany arrived and settled in what is now England. In doing so they pushed the native Britons, the Celts, westwards, hence the restriction of the Celtic languages (the ancestors of Cornish and Welsh) to the western peripheries of the country. Within a few centuries, the language spoken by these tribes was sufficiently distinct from the languages of continental Europe to be referred to by a new name. Texts from the period refer to the language as Englisc, and from around 1000 AD there is evidence that the country is referred to as Englaland, ‘land of the Angles’, one of the Germanic tribes. In a cruel twist, the displaced inhabitants, the Celts, were labelled wealas, meaning ‘foreigners’, by the invaders, which provides the derivation of the modern forms Welsh and Wales.
The English spoken in the centuries just after the arrival of the Germanic tribes is called Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) by historians of the language.
Old English is spectacularly different from Modern English. To get a sense of some of the differences, consider the sentences in (5) and (6):
These sentences illustrate some of the differences between Old and Modern English. Perhaps the most striking difference is the unfamiliar look of some of the words, although some of the sounds are somewhat familiar. For instance, the Old English word for ‘woman’, cwe¯n, has developed into the modern-day form queen. This is an example of a phenomenon called narrowing: over time a word develops a more specialised, or narrower, function. Today queen can only be applied to a female monarch, whereas in Old English it could be applied to all adult females.
Another striking difference is that Old English had a case system. Case is the morphological marking of grammatical relations like subject and object. In example (5), the subject of the sentence features a definite article ‘the’ marked with nominative (subject) case seo–, indicating that what comes next is the subject of the sentence. The definite article þone indicates accusative (object) case, indicating that guman is the object of the sentence. One consequence of the morphological flagging of subject and object is that word order was not as rigid in Old English as it is in Modern English. In Modern English, we know which expression in a sentence is the subject and which is the object by their position in the sentence: while the subject precedes the verb, the object follows it. One advantage of a case system is that the language is less reliant on word order to provide this kind of information.
Yet another difference illustrated by these sentences also concerns the definite articles: in addition to encoding case, Old English also encoded gender. While seo– and se in (5) and (6) are both nominative case forms, the former encodes feminine gender and the latter masculine gender. Similarly, while þa and þone in (5) and (6) both encode accusative case, þa encodes masculine gender and þone encodes feminine gender. In addition, observe that nouns show case agreement with the definite article that precedes them: the dis tinction between guman and guma results from case agreement.
Finally, these examples reveal another striking distinction. Some past tense verbs in Old English were marked by the prefix ge-, as in geseah, which contrasts with the modern past tense equivalent, saw. Historical linguistics is concerned, then, with explaining how and why Old English evolved into the version of English that we recognise today.
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
اخر الاخبار
اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة
