Note! Preliminary Version!
Dear students, I wanted to let you have a preliminary version of these notes to help you with this week's homework. (Note that in the instructions relevant to questions 1 and 2, when you are asked "what type of conditioned or unconditioned sound each sound change is, these "types" refer to assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis, etc., as discussed by Crystal p. 330, and below in these notes). The notes are not complete in that I have yet to put in the links, and there are other details that will change in the final version I hope to have available for you by tonight (12/2/97). If you download the notes to study for the final, PLEASE MAKE SURE to get the final notes that will replace this version! Thanks for your patience! Gillian Sankoff.
Access to previous stages of any language shows us that language is always changing. (We can gain this access through written texts or audio recordings, which now give us the possibility of comparing many of today's spoken languages with the way they were spoken many decades ago.) Indeed, if language did not change, we would all still be speaking the same original language that first evolved among our ancestors some 50 millenia (or so) ago. Since language is constantly changing, when the people who have previously spoken one language split up and move apart, the previously united language will also begin to show differences between the new "branches". After a few hundred years, clear differences can be observed, although communication will still be possible and the new speech varieties are said to be mutually intelligible. After a few millenia, however, they will have evolved into separate languages that are no longer mutually intelligible.
Second, although it used to be thought that because language change is always going on, its very normalcy must mean that it happens without impeding communication, we now know that this is not the case. Linguists thought that the redundancy that is a normal part of language would serve to make communication unproblematic even during language change. We now know that change can impede communication, especially under conditions of "noise", when people don't have as much redundancy to help them understand.
A third observation about language change is that, when people realize that it is happening, they usually react negatively, feeling that the language has "gone down hill", or has deteriorated. You never seem to hear older people commenting that the language of their children or grandchildren has improved as compared with the state of the language when they were young!
Language change seems even more puzzling, given that it hampers communication, and that people object to it.
Another line of explanation lies in considering how the transmission of language is mediated by social forces. For one thing, children acquire language based on the input of many speakers, and these speakers may well have different linguistic systems based on their own different linguistic histories. It is well established in phonology that children whose parents have foreign accents acquire the variety of the language spoken by the native-speaker community around them rather than the foreign accent of their parents. This also holds across dialect boundaries: the child growing up in Atlanta whose parents come from Maine will end up speaking like an Atlantan. The implication of this is that children are formulating their linguistic systems over a period of years, and input from later in childhood (when they hear more from peers than from parents) has an important effect.
A further aspect of how language change is mediated by social forces takes us out of the area of primary acquisition altogether: when we observe how language is used, we discover that people do not speak exactly the same way across all the occasions they have to use language. In particular, expressivity, the conveying of formality and informality, and the expression of intimacy and social distance seem to influence how speakers deploy their linguistic resources. Intimacy, associated with minimizing social distance, seems almost iconically to be associated with minimizing the linguistic signal: rapid speech and the concomitant truncation processes mentioned by Crystal: assimilation, dissimilation, syncope and apocope (these are only some of the processes of sound change Crystal discusses -- we will look at the whole set a little later on today).
Expressivity leads to some vocabulary replacement, often via the constantly renewed slang vocabulary; formality may lead to the borrowing of words from literary language or even from high status foreign languages.
Other theories that have been advanced to explain language change include the "least effort" theory by which sloppy pronunciation in rapid speech causes sound change; the "emulate the upper class" theory according to which the masses copy the upper class, which changes once it has been copied in order to remain socially distinct; and the theory that change is led by the least educated members of society who are the least influenced by the conservative force of the standard language, including the written language. Work of the past three decades in approximately a dozen cities around the world has shown, however, that ongoing language change in the sound system of language is usually led by people who are neither at the top nor the bottom of the social ladder: people who can often be best described as "lower middle class". Another fact about language change, clearly established on the basis of approximately 100 studies, is that women are usually a generation ahead of men in sound change.
Words can also change their meaning. Crystal mentions six types of semantic change, which we'll repeat here with different examples:
Extension. Modern English board , originally a plank of wood, had already come to be used for 'table' before it was again extended to refer to the people who sit around the table (as in 'Board of Governors'), or the food that is served on the table (as in 'Bed and Board').
Narrowing. Though most of us learn in school that English animal includes all life forms that are not plants , we generally use it to refer to a much narrower range: the four-footed animals .
Shift. Modern English silly derives from OE saelig, meaning 'happy, blessed, blissful'.
Figurative use. Very tall buildings are called skyscrapers.
Amelioration. Old English cniht 'servant' became Modern English knight, which refers to a nobleman.
Pejoration. A villain once simply meant 'belonging to the villa', and referred to people now usually called 'peasants'.
New words may be also be formed by productive word formation processes, as we discussed in the morphology lecture. One process of particular interest is the formation of new close-class lexical items from open-class lexical sources. For example, the English future auxiliary shall developed out of a main verb which meant 'to owe' (markers of obligation often develop into futures). The French pronoun on 'one' is derived from the Latin homo 'man'.
II. Morphemes may be worn away as a product of phonological change. Old English nouns had endings distinguishing four cases (nominative, accusative, dative and genitive), and this case system was lost (except for the genitive) mainly because of sound changes that led to the dropping of vowels and nasals in final syllables.
The most well-known change process that affects morphology is known as analogy. Analogy seems to operate within paradigms, where people created regularities across word classes that have historically been different. The regularization of English past tense to the -ed suffix is one well known example, as is the replacement of OE -en plurals by -s . Only a few -en plurals are left in some high-frequency words like children , but even here, we can often observe young learners analogizing when they create forms like childs and sheeps.
III. Syntax is almost undiscussed by Crystal in his section on language change, and this is surely in large part because it is one of the newest fields in linguistic research. We are fortunate at Penn in having Dr. Anthony Kroch, an international leader in this field, on our faculty, and the work of Kroch and his colleagues in historical syntax is only now beginning to be incorporated into the broader understanding of language change. Since an appreciation of what is involved in syntactic change demands a more extensive knowledge of syntax than the very brief introduction we've been able to give you in this class, we'll also limit the discussion of this topic to mentioning one example. The model of syntactic change that Kroch has introduced is that of competing grammars, the idea being that much as with the introduction of a new lexical item, the new word competes with the old over a period of time, in the case of syntax too, an innovation can compete with the older rule. Sometimes this can take several centuries to resolve itself. One major change that happened in English between about 1400 and 1700 was the introduction of "do-support", or the use of the verb do as an auxiliary with questions and negation. In Shakespeare's Othello, we find the following line:
"He that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him."
Today, we would have to say: "which does not (or doesn't ) enrich him".
As with the other auxiliaries ( have and be), when an auxiliary verb is used, that is the verb that is inflected (does), and the former enriches becomes the uninflected enrich.
There are many complex and quite abstract arguments involved in Kroch's explanation of this change, but even without going into them, we can see that the "competing grammar" model allows for competition between either internally-generated or externally derived elements: in other words, the model is neutral as to whether the innovation comes from within the system, or from contact with another dialect or language.
IV. Sounds change in a number of ways, and sound change is one of the most well understood aspects of language change, thanks to the long history of work in comparative/historical linguistics, and also to the research on sound change in progress by another member of the Penn linguistics faculty, Dr. Bill Labov.
There are two kinds of distinctions to be made in considering sound change: first, all sound changes can be described as either conditioned and unconditioned sound change. Unconditioned sound is just that: the old sound becomes a new sound across the board. Such a change occurred in Hawai'ian, in that all the "t" sounds in an older form of the language became "k"s: at the time Europeans encountered Hawai'ian, there were no "t"s in it at all, though the closely related languages Tahitian, Samoan, Tongan and Maori all have "t"s. Another unconditioned sound change that occurred between Middle and Early Modern English (around Shakespeare's time) is known as the Great Vowel Shift. At that time, there was a length distinction in the English vowels, and the Great Vowel Shift altered the position of all the long vowels, in a giant rotation. Long vowels can easily be diphthongized, and that is what happened to the two high vowels: the front "long i" /ii/, and the back "long u" /uu/. The nucleus of these vowels started to drop, and the high position was retained only in the offglide. Eventually, the original /ii/ became /ai/ - so a "long i" vowel in Modern English is now pronounced /ai/ as in a word like 'bite': /bait/. Similarly, the "long u" found its nucleus dropping all the way to /au/: the earlier 'house' /huus/ became /haus/. All the other long vowels rotated, the mid vowels /ee/ and /oo/ rising to fill the spots vacated by the former /ii/ and /uu/ respectively, and so on. That is why the modern pronouns 'he' and 'she' are written with /e/ (reflecting the old pronunciation) but pronounced as /i/.
Note: a chart depicting the Great Vowel Shift will be added here!
The other kind of regular sound change is called a conditioned sound change. In these cases, change in one sound is conditioned by some adjacent sound. The voicing of voiceless consonants when followed by vowels, and the other side of the coin: the devoicing of voiced consonants when followed by nothing -- can be seen in such phenomena as the Modern English voicing of the -s suffix on words like toys (pronounced as /toyz/, ) or the Modern German devoicing in words like Hund 'dog' (pronounced as /hunt/. ) We know that if a German speaker were to acquire a new noun, *Blug , it would be pronounced as /bluk/ in the singular. With a following vowel added to created the plural suffix, or other endings due to case, it would re-emerge as /bluge/, /blugen/, etc. The point here is that the sound change affected all voiced sounds in final position -- other d's, g's, etc. were unaffected, so that a word that originally began with a /d/ still begins with a /d/. Only final d's were affected, but all final d's were affected -- conditioned sound changes are still very regular.
Another dimension along which we can look at sound change is by classifying changes according to the particular process involved. These processes are listed by Crystal on p. 330, and we will run through them here again with different examples.
Assimilation, or the influence of one sound on an adjacent sound, is perhaps the most pervasive process. Assimilation processes changed Latin /k/ when followed by /i/ or /y/, first to /ky/, then to "ch", then to /s/, so that Latin faciat /fakiat/ 'would make' became fasse /fas/ in Modern French (the subjunctive of the verb faire 'to make'). Another example of assimilation would be the devoicing of German voiced final segments described above -- in this case you would have to say that they are "assimilating" to the lack of voicing when followed by nothing.
In contrast to assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis, and haplology tend to occur more sporadically, i.e., to affect individual words. Dissimilation involves a change in one of two 'same' sounds that are adjacent or almost adjacent in a particular word such that they are no longer the same. Thus the first "l" in English colonel is changed to an "r", and the word is pronounced like "kernel". Metathesis involves the change in order of two adjacent sounds. Crystal cites Modern English third from OE thrid , and Modern English bird is a parallel example. But Modern English bright underwent the opposite change, its ancestor being beorht, and not all "vowel + r" words changed the relative order of these segments as happened with bird and third . Already by the time of Old English, there were two forms of the word for "ask": ascian and acsian. We don't know which form was metathesized from the other, but we do know that acsian won out in the standard language. Haplology is similar to dissimilation, because it involves getting rid of similar neighboring sounds, but this time, one sound is simply dropped out rather than being changed to a different sound. An example is the pronunciation of Modern English probably as prob'ly.
The other processes mentioned by Crystal are merger, split, loss, syncope, apocope, prothesis, and epenthesis.
[Definitions and examples to be provided]
[Headings remaining to be developed in these notes]: