语言学基础教程

Chapter 8 Historical Linguistics: Language Through Time

8.1 What is historical linguistics?

It is an indisputable fact that all languages have been constantly changing through time. Essentially, modern linguistics has centered around two dimensions to deal with language change: the synchronic dimension and the diachronic dimension. The synchronic dimension has dominantly been applied to describe and explain differences or variations within one language in different places and among different groups at the same time. The synchronic dimension is usually the topic of sociolinguistics, which will be discussed in Chapter 10. This chapter will focus on the diachronic dimension of language change. Those who study language from this latter point of view are working in the field of historical linguistics(Poole, 2000: 123). To put it more specifically, historical linguistics is the study of the developments in languages in the course of time, of the ways in which languages change from period to period, and of the causes and results of such changes, both outside the languages and within them (Robins, 2000: 5).

8.2 When language changes

Although language change does not take place overnight, certain changes are noticeable because they usually conflate with a certain historical period or major social changes caused by wars, invasions and other upheavals. The development of the English language is a case in point. Generally speaking, the historical development of English is divided into three major periods: Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Modern English (ModE).

500 (the time when Germanic tribes invaded Britain)

Old English

1100 (the time after the Norman Conquest in 1066)

Middle English

1500 (the beginning of Renaissance and the first printing

press set up in 1476 in England)

Modern English

the present

In about the year 449 AD, the Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes from northern Europe invaded Britain and became the founders of the English nation. Their language, with the Germanic language as the source, is called, the name derived from the first tribe, the Angles. It

had a vocabulary inherited almost entirely from Germanic or formed by compounding or derivation from Germanic elements (Dension, 1993: 9). From this early variety of Englisc,many of the most basic terms in the English language came into being: mann (“man”), cild (“child”), mete (“food”), etan (“eat”), drincan (“drink”) and feohtan (“fight”). From the sixth to the eighth centuries AD, the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity, and a number of terms, mainly to do with religion, philosophy and medicine, were borrowed into English from Latin,the language of religion. The origins of the modern words angel,bishop,candle,church,martyr,priest and school all date from that period. From the eighth century to the tenth century, the Vikings from northern Europe invaded England and brought words such as give, law, leg, skin, sky, take and they from their language, Old Norse (Yule, 2000: 218).

In the year of 1066 AD, the Norman French conquered the whole of England, bringing French speakers into the ruling class and then pushing French to the position as the “prestige language” for the next two hundred years. This language was used by the nobility, the government, the law and civilized behavior, providing the source of such modern terms as army, court, defense, prison and tax (Yule, 2000: 219). Yet the language of the peasants remained English.

By the end of the ME period, when English had once again become the first language of all classes, the bulk of OE lexis had become obsolete, and some ten thousand French words had been incorporated into English, maybe 75% surviving into ModE (Baugh & Cable, 2001:174).

During the early ModE period, which coincided with the Renaissance period, English borrowed enormous lexical resources from the classical languages of Latin and Greek. And, later on as the British Empire expanded, the range of lexical influence widened to ever more exotic source languages (Dension, 1993: 13).

The types of borrowed words noted above are examples of external changes in English, and the internal changes overlap with the historical periods described above. According to Fennell (2005: 2), the year 500 AD marks the branching off of English from other Germanic dialects; the year 1100 AD marks the period in which English lost the vast majority of its inflections, signaling the change from a language that relied upon morphological marking of grammatical roles to one that relied on word order to maintain basic grammatical relations; and the year 1500 AD marks the end of major French influence on the language and the time when the use of English was established in all communicative contexts. Thus, those internal changes will be elaborated below

at the phonological, lexical, semantic and grammatical levels.

8.3 How language changes

The change of the English language with the passage of time is so dramatic that today people hardly read OE or ME without special study. In general, the differences among OE, ME and ModE involve sound, lexicon and grammar, as discussed below.

8.3.1 Phonological change

The principle that sound change is normally regular is a very fruitful basis for examining the phonological history of a language. The majority of sound changes can be understood in terms of the movements of the vocal organs during speech, and sometimes more particularly in terms of a tendency to reduce articulatory effort (Trask, 2000: 70, 96).

8.3.1.1 Phonemic change

8.3.1.1.1 Vowel change

One of the most obvious differences between ModE and the English spoken in earlier periods is in the quality of the vowel sounds (Yule, 2000: 219). Sometimes a language experiences a wholesale shift in a large part of its phonological system. This happened to the long vowels of English in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries AD, each vowel becoming closer, the highest becoming diphthongs as in the words wife and house (respectively changed from wayf /wi:f/ and haws /hu:s/ in OE). We call this shift the Great Vowel Shift (Poole, 2000: 127), and the specific changes may be diagrammed as follows (Robins, 2000: 342).

In ME, the vowels in nearly all unstressed syllabic inflections were reduced to [?], spelled (Dension, 1993: 12). The general obscuring of unstressed syllables is a most significant sound change (to be elaborated further in 8.3.3 and 8.3.4), since it is one of the fundamental causes of the loss of inflections (Fennell, 2005: 99).

8.3.1.1.2 Consonant change

Consonants are produced with an obstruction of the air-stream, and tend to be less stable over time than vowels in most languages. Two fairly common processes are assimilation and lenition.

Assimilation is the process by which two sounds that occur close together in speech become more alike. This sort of change is easy to understand: moving the speech organs all over the place requires an effort, and making nearby sounds more similar reduces the amount of movement required, and hence the amount of effort (Trask, 2000: 53). Instances can be found in words such as irregular,impossible and illegal, in which the negative prefixes im-and il-should be “in-based” in accordance with etymology.

Under the influence of neighboring vowels, consonants may also be weakened. This weakening or lenition, can change a voiceless consonant into a voiced one and a plosive into a fricative (Poole, 2000: 126). Instances of [h] in native English words generally derive from the lenition of an earlier *[k]: such words as head,heart,help,hill and he all began with [k] in a remote ancestral form of English, but this [k] was lenited first to [x] and then to [h], and the modern lenition of [h] to zero merely completes a process of lenition stretching over several thousand years (Trask, 2000: 59).

8.3.1.2 Whole-segment change

Certain phonological changes are somewhat unusual in that they involve, not just changes in the nature of segments, but a change in the number or ordering of segments, and these are referred to as whole-segment processes (Trask, 2000: 66). The change known as metathesis involves a reversal in position of two adjoining sounds. The following are examples from the OE period: acsian → ask bridd → bird brinnan → beornan (burn)

frist → first hros → horse waeps → wasp

(Yule, 2000: 220).

8.3.2 Lexical change

As defined by Freeborn (2000: 23), lexical change refers to new words being needed in the vocabulary to refer to new things or concepts, with other words dropping out when they no longer

have any use in society. Lexical change may also involve semantic change, that is, change in the meaning of words. Thus, lexical change mainly consists of addition of new words, loss of words and change in the meaning of words.

8.3.2.1 Addition of new words

The conditions of life for individuals in society, their artifacts, customs, and forms of organization are constantly changing. Accordingly, many words in languages and the situations in which they are employed are equally liable to change in the course of time (Robins, 2000: 343). Floods of new words constantly need to be added to the word-stock to reflect these developments.

E tymology, which is the study of the history of individual words, shows that while the majority of words in a language are native words, there may also be loan words or borrowed words from another language. Native words are those that can be traced back to the earliest form of the language in question. In English, native words are words of Anglo-Saxon origin, such as full, hand, wind, red. Loan words are those that are borrowed or imported from another language, such as myth, career, formula, genius. Apart from borrowing, many new words are added to a language through word-formation. The following processes are quite pervasive in the addition of new words in the evolution of English.

8.3.2.1.1 Compounding and affixing

According to Fennell (2005: 77-8), new words in OE were mainly formed on the basis of compounding and affixing. Many words were formed through compounding, e.g. blod + read (“blood-red”); Engla (“Angles”) + land = England. Affixing covers suffixing and prefixing in OE, the former usually used to transform parts of speech while the latter generally used to change the semantic force. A suffix like -dom could create an abstract noun from another noun or adjective: wis + dom (“wisdom”). The perfective prefix ge- was most often used to form past participles: ceosan (“to choose), gecoren (“chosen”); findan (“to find”), gefunden (“found”). It could also be used to change the meaning of a word: hatan (“to call”), gehatan (“to promise”).

In modern English, new words are added not only through compounding and affixing, but also by means of coinage, conversion, blending, backformation and abbreviation. All these word-formation processes are discussed in Chapter 3.

8.3.2.1.2 Reanalysis and metanalysis

Reanalysis means that a word which historically has one particular morphological structure, is perceived by speakers as having a second, quite different structure. The Latin word minimum consisted in Latin of the morphemes min-(“little”, also found in minor and minus) and-im-(“most”), plus an inflectional ending; however, thanks to the influence of the unrelated miniature, English speakers have apparently reanalyzed both words as consisting of a prefix mini-(“very small”) plus something incomprehensible, leading to the creation of miniskirt and all the newer words which have followed it (Trask, 2000: 102).

The history of English provides some nice examples of reanalysis involving nothing more than the movement of a morpheme boundary, a type of change impressively called metanalysis. Forms like a napron and an ewt were apparently misheard as an apron and a newt, producing the modern forms. Other similar instances are adder(the English former word: naddre), umpire (noumpere) and nickname (ekename) (Trask, 2000: 103).

8.3.2.1.3 Analogical creation

Analogical creation is the replacement of an irregular or suppletive form within a grammatical paradigm by a new form modeled on the forms of the majority of members of the class to which the word in question belongs. The virtual replacement of kine by cows as the plural of cow is an example of analogical creation, and so are the more modern regular past tense forms helped, climbed, and snowed, for the earlier holp, clomb, and snew (Robins, 2000: 359). Analogical creation is quite persuasive in accounting for the process of cultural transmission to be discussed in 8.4.2.

8.3.2.2 Loss of words

In the course of time, some words pass out of current vocabulary as the particular sorts of objects or ways of behaving to which they refer become obsolete. One need only think in English of the former specialized vocabulary, now largely vanished, which relates to obsolete sports such as falconry (Robins, 2000: 343). Such examples abound in almost every language.

8.3.2.3 Semantic change

Semantic change refers to changes in the meanings of words. There are mainly three processes of semantic change: broadening, narrowing and meaning shifts (Fromkin & Rodman 1983: 297).

Broadening and narrowing are changes in the scope of word meaning. That is, some words widen the range of their application or meaning, while other words have their contextual application reduced in scope. Broadening is a process by which a word with a specialized meaning is generalized to cover a broader or less definite concept or meaning. For example, the original meaning of carry is “transport by cart”, but now it means “transport by any means”. Narrowing is the opposite of broadening, a process by which words with a general meaning become restricted in use and express a narrow or specialized meaning. For example, the word girl used to mean “a young person”, but in modern English it refers to a young female person. More examples of broadening and narrowing are provided below:

Broadening:

dog (docga OE) one particular breed of dog →all breeds of dogs

bird (brid ME) young bird →all birds irrespective of age

holiday (holy day) a religious feast →the very general break from work

Narrowing:

hound (hund OE) any kind of dog → a specific breed of dog

meat (mete OE) any kind of food →edible food from animals

deer (dēor ME) any beast, animal →one species of animal

Meaning shift is a process by which a word that used to denote one thing is used to mean something else. For example, the word coach, originally denoting a horse-drawn vehicle, now denotes a long-distance bus or a railway vehicle. Meaning shifts also include transference of meaning, that is, change from the literal meaning to the figurative meaning of words. For example, in expressions like the foot of a mountain, the bed of a river and the eye of a needle, we use foot, bed and eye in a metaphorical way. Other types of meaning shifts include elevation and degradation. Elevation of meaning is a process by which a word changes from a derogatory sense to an appreciative sense. For example, the word nice originally meant “ignorant” and fond simply meant “foolish”. Degradation of meaning is a process by which a word of appreciative meaning falls into pejorative use. For example, the word silly used to mean “happy” and cunning originally meant “skillful”.

8.3.3 Grammatical change

The most fundamental feature that distinguishes Old English from the language of today is its grammar (Baugh & Cable, 2001: 54). Modern English is an analytic language while Old English is a synthetic language. The major difference is that a synthetic language is one that indicates the relation of words in a sentence largely by means of inflections, but an analytic language makes extensive use of prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and depends on word order to show other relationships. In OE, the order of words in a clause was more variable than that of ModE, and there were many more inflections on nouns, adjectives and verbs (Freeborn, 2000: 66). The grammatical changes of English such as those in number, gender, case and tense mainly took place on its morphological level, while syntactic changes such as those in word order are the consequence of the loss of rich inflections in English. The most sweeping morphological change during the evolution of English is the progressive decay of inflections. OE, ME and ModE can be called the periods of full, reduced and zero inflections, respectively because, during most of the OE period the endings of the noun, the adjective, and the verb are preserved more or less unimpaired, while during the ME period the inflections become greatly reduced, and finally by the ModE period, a large part of the original inflectional system had disappeared entirely (Dension, 1993: 12; Baugh & Cable, 2001: 50).

The loss of inflections in the case system of Old English is a good example of grammatical change. Case is the grammatical feature that marks functions of the subject, object, or possession in a clause. In OE, nouns showed a four-term case contrast, for which the Latinate terms nominative (subject), accusative (direct object), genitive (possessive) and dative (indirect object) are conventionally used, and the case-ending system can be illustrated by the following:

CASE nominative genitive dative accusative MODERN

ENGLISH

stone/stones

stone’s/stones’

stone/stones

stone/stones

OE

SINGULAR

stān

stānes

stāne

stān

OE

PLURAL

stānas

stāna

stānum

stānas

(Fromkin & Rodman, 1983: 290)

The ME period is the beginning of the loss of most of the inflections of OE, mainly through the weakening and dropping of the final unstressed vowels. For example, when the vowel was

dropped in the plural form of stones[st :n?s], it became [st wnz], and when the “weak”syllables representing case endings in the forms of the singular, genitive plural, and dative plural were dropped, English lost much of its case system (ibid).

The loss of inflections marks a transition of English from a synthetic to an analytic language, and thus led to a greater reliance on word order. Word order in OE was more variable than that of ModE: word order was not as fixed or rigid in OE as it is in ModE (Fennell, 2005: 59). Both the orders subject-object-verb (“hē hine geseah”: “he saw him”) and object-subject-verb (“him man ne sealde”: “no man gave [any] to him”) are possible (Yule, 2000: 221). Word order in an OE sentence was not so crucial because OE is so highly inflected. The doer of the action and the object of the action were revealed unambiguously by various case endings, which makes the sentence meaning perfectly clear.

It can be said that changes in sound, lexicon and grammar do not operate separately or independently of each other, but they are interacting and interdependent. One change is often integrated or incorporated into the other changes. And, it is the complex interrelationships among them that have shaped the whole process of the language change. As is shown above, the dropping of the final unstressed vowels led to the loss of inflections of OE, and this in turn led to a greater reliance on word order.

8.4 Why language changes

No change described above has happened overnight, but has constantly and gradually taken place. Many changes are difficult to discern while they are in progress. The causes of language change are many and various, and only some of them are reasonably well understood at present (Trask, 2000: 12). Two broad categories of factors contribute to language change: external and internal factors.

8.4.1 External causes

External causes of linguistic changes are the contacts between the speakers of different languages: the sort that occurs when a language is imposed on a people by conquest or political or cultural domination, or when cultural and other factors produce a high degree of bilingualism between adjacent speech areas (Robins, 2000: 340). The significant influence of Norman French on the English language from the eleventh century AD supports this proposition. It can be said that

any dramatic social change caused by wars, invasions and other upheavals can possibly bring about correspondent changes in language.

8.4.2 Internal causes

According to Yule (2000: 222), the most pervasive source of change seems to be in the continual process of cultural transmission (in particular, the transmission of speech habits from one generation to another). Each new generation has to find a way of using the language of the previous generation. In this unending process whereby each new language-user has to “recreate”for him-or herself the language of the community, there is an unavoidable propensity to pick up some elements exactly and others only approximately. There is also the occasional desire to be different.

In the process of cultural transmission, some underlying physiological factors can also play a vital role, mainly marked by least effort. For sound change, one key motivator is ease of articulation. There is a tendency for intervocalic voiceless plosives to be subjected to lenition because producing a voiced fricative between vowels requires less physiological change than does the production of a voiceless plosive (Poole, 2000: 130). For grammatical change, it is not difficult to see that the principle of least effort works for widespread simplification of the grammatical categories in the English language, exemplified by substantial losses of gender, case and tense distinctions.

8.5 Summary

In this chapter we have focused on language change in the diachronic dimension, namely from the historical perspective of change. We draw the conclusion that English has gradually and continuously shifted from a synthetic language to an analytic language in the course of time, marked by interrelated and interdependent changes at all levels, including the general obscuring of unstressed syllables, the progressive decay of inflections and the rigidity of word order. And, this shift may be mainly caused by major social changes and contacts, and by cultural transmission and least effort.

Questions and Exercises

1. Define the following terms.

historical linguistics Great V owel Shift lenition

metathesis analogical creation etymology

synthetic language

reanalysis

analytic language

2. How are the historical developments of the English language generally divided? What are the main features that characterize each period?

3. Can you apply the theory of reanalysis to explain how cheeseburger, chickenburger and

vegeburger are derived from the word hamburger? Can you find more examples of reanalysis in English?

4. Use one or two examples to show how the grammatical case is changed in the course of the historical evolution of English.

5. Use one or two examples to illustrate how changes in sound, lexicon and grammar are

integrated or interrelated.

6. What are the semantic processes in the changes of word meanings?

7. Among the phonological, lexical and grammatical levels of language change, which level do you believe undergoes the fastest change and which level the slowest change? Can you account for these changes?

8. In the English language, some names of animals are generally known by the Germanic terms and the resultant meats by the French terms. Which of the following words are derived from OE and which from Norman French? Can you trace the reason for this differentiated origin?

calf, pork, mutton, ox, veal, swine, beef, sheep

9. Give examples to account for the causes for language change.

陈新仁《英语语言学实用教程》章节题库(含名校考研真题)-第8~11章【圣才出品】

第8章英语语言的应用（I） I. Fill in the blanks. 1. A perlocutionary act is the act performed by or resulting from saying something; it is the _____ of, or the _____the utterance. （人大2004研） 【答案】consequence, change brought about by 【解析】言外行为指说话的效果。 2. When a teacher says “The exam this year is going to be really difficult”, the sentence would have an _____force. （清华2001研，清华2000研） 【答案】illocutionary 【解析】言外行为，表达说话人的意图。 3. _____ were sentences that did not state a fact or describe a state, and were not verifiable. 【答案】Performatives 【解析】施为句是用来做事的，既不陈述事实，也不描述情况，且不能验证其真假。 II. Multiple Choices. 1. The speech act theory was developed by _____.（对外经贸2006研) A. John Searle B. John Austin

C. Levinson D. G. Leech 【答案】B 【解析】言语行为理论是哲学家约翰·奥斯丁在他《如何以言行事》一文中提出的。它从哲学意义上对语言交际的本质进行解释，其目的在于回答”用语言干什么”这个问题。 2. Point out which item does not fall under the same category as the rest. (Focus on the type of illocutionary act) （南京大学2007研） A. threaten B. advise C. beseech D. urge 【答案】A 【解析】A为命令性言语行为，而其他三项为指示性言语行为。 3. _____ is using a sentence to perform a function. （西安外国语学院2006研） A. A perlocutionary act B. An illocutionary act C. A locutionary act D. Speech act 【答案】D 【解析】约翰·奥斯丁在他《如何以言行事》一文中提出言语行为理论, 此理论对语言交际的

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Contents ?Chapter 1 Invitations to Linguistics Chapter 2 Speech Sounds(Phonetics) Chapter 3 From Morpheme to Phrase (Morphology) Chapter 4 From Word to Text(Syntax) Chapter 5 Meaning(Semantics) Chapter 6 Language and Cognition ?Chapter 8 Language in Use(Pragmatics)

Chapter 1 Invitations to Linguistics ?1.1 Why study linguistics? ?1.2 What is language? ?1.3 Features of language ?1.4. Origin of language ?1.5. Functions of language ?1.6. What is linguistics ?1.7 Main branches of linguistics ?1.8. Macrolinguistics ?1.9 Important distinctions in linguistics

Lead-in ?Qestion1: Other animals can beat us in many different ways, but what makes us superior to all of them? ?Qestion2: Why are children easy to undrstand their mother's tongue??Qestion3: Why do people in different social classes speak in different ways??Qestion4: Why is it "I love you" in English, but "私はあなたを愛して" in Japanese?

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