LANGUAGE CHANGE

LANGUAGE CHANGE

Language change is a study that explain about historical linguists and sociolinguistics. Language change is variation over time in a language's phonological, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features. It is studied by historical linguistics and evolutionary linguistics. Some commentators use the label corruption to suggest that language change constitutes a degradation in the quality of a language, especially when the change originates from human error or prescriptively discouraged usage.[1] Descriptive linguistics typically does not support this concept, since from a scientific point of view such changes are neither good nor bad.

The Traditional View

The only changes that are important in a language that demonstrated to have structural consequences.

u  Language knowledge largely consists of an explicit grammar that determines what sentences are part of a language

u  Language learning involves identifying the single, correct grammar of the language

u  Grammar induction is underconstrained by the linguistic input given lack of explicit negative evidence

Impossible under near-arbitrary positive-only presentation (Gold, 1967)

It occurred historically in most varieties of English in the vowels such as meet and meat or horse and hoarse. Or, a distinction may be gained where there was none before, as in a house with an [s] but to house with a [z].

            In traditional view there are two kinds of change, internal and external. To write internal histories of languages, it must showing the structural changes that have occurred over periods of time through use ‘contrast vs. lack of contrast.’ And to write external histories, this change brought about through borrowing from other dialects or languages and often quite clearly distinguishable.

Changes in Progress

Causes language change in Progress are: 

1.      Economy: Speakers tend to make their utterances as efficient and effective as possible to reach communicative goals. Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs and benefits.

The principle of least effort tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms. See vowel reduction, cluster reduction, lenition, and elision. After some time a change may become widely accepted (it becomes a regular sound change) and may end up treated as a standard. For instance: going to [ˈɡoʊ.ɪŋ.tʊ] → gonna [ˈɡɔnə] or [ˈɡʌnə], with examples of both vowel reduction [ʊ] → [ə] and elision [nt] → [n], [oʊ.ɪ] → [ʌ].

2. Language contact: borrowing of words and constructions from other languages.

3. Geographic separation: when people move away from each other, their language will diverge, at least for the vocabulary, due to different experiences.

4. Cultural environment: Groups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and objects in their language, whether they encounter different people there or not.

5.  Migration/Movement: Speakers will change and create languages, such as pidgins and creoles.

   Gimson (1962, pp. 83–5) observed that in mid-twentiethcentury Received Pronunciation (RP) the first part of the diphthong in a word like home was tending to become increasingly centralized. Bailey (1973, p. 19) say that in the western United States the distinction between the vowels in such pairs of words as caught and cot, and Dawn and Don is gone.

            For young speakers the vowel distinction is almost entirely gone, so that even hawk and hock are homophonous. For older speakers, there may be complete loss of the vowel distinction before ‘t’ followed by a vowel, but there is less likely to be such loss before a word final ‘t’ or ‘n’.

The Process of Change

            Labov (1972b, pp. 178–80) say that there are two basic kinds of change: change from below and change from above. Change from below is systematic, unconscious change, whereas change from above is sporadic, conscious, and involves issues of prestige. Change from above is conscious change, it such change to involve a movement toward standard linguistic norms.

          Milroy and Milroy (1992, p. 9) say that ‘groups linked internally mainly by relatively weak ties are susceptible to innovation’, that their conclusion about change begins in the middle of the social-class ‘is entirely same with Labov’s finding that groups are located centrally in the class structure, characterized by him as upper-working or lower-middle class

All languages change continually, and do so in many and varied ways.

Marcel Cohen details various types of language change under the overall headings of the external evolution and internal evolution of languages.

a.      Lexical changes  

The study of lexical changes forms the diachronic portion of the science of onomasiology.

The ongoing influx of new words into the English language (for example) helps make it a rich field for investigation into language change, despite the difficulty of defining precisely and accurately the vocabulary available to speakers of English. Throughout its history English has not only borrowed words from other languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings, whilst losing some old words.

Dictionary-writers try to keep track of the changes in languages by recording (and, ideally, dating) the appearance in a language of new words, or of new usages for existing words. By the same token, they may tag some words eventually as "archaic" or "obsolete".

b.      Phonetic and phonological changes

The concept of sound change covers both phonetic and phonological developments.

The sociolinguist William Labov recorded the change in pronunciation in a relatively short period in the American resort of Martha's Vineyard and showed how this resulted from social tensions and processes. Even in the relatively short time that broadcast media have recorded their work, one can observe the difference between the pronunciation of the newsreaders of the 1940s and the 1950s and the pronunciation of today. The greater acceptance and fashionability of regional accents in media may also reflect a more democratic, less formal society — compare the widespread adoption of language policies.

c.       Spelling changes

Standardisation of spelling originated relatively recently. [vague][citation needed] Differences in spelling often catch the eye of a reader of a text from a previous century. The pre-print era had fewer literate people: languages lacked fixed systems of orthography, and the handwritten manuscripts that survive often show words spelled according to regional pronunciation and to personal preference.

d.      Semantic changes

Semantic changes are shifts in the meanings of existing words. Basic types of semantic change include:

·         pejoration, in which a term's connotations become more negative

·         amelioration, in which a term's connotations become more positive

·         broadening, in which a term acquires additional potential uses

·         narrowing, in which a term's potential uses are restricted

After a word enters a language, its meaning can change as through a shift in the valence of its connotations. As an example, when "villain" entered English it meant 'peasant' or 'farmhand', but acquired the connotation 'low-born' or 'scoundrel', and today only the negative use survives. Thus 'villain' has undergone pejoration. Conversely, the word "wicked" is undergoing amelioration in colloquial contexts, shifting from its original sense of 'evil', to the much more positive one as of 2009 of 'brilliant'.

e.       Syntactic change

Syntactic change is the evolution of the syntactic structure of a natural language.

Over time, syntactic change is the greatest modifier of a particular language.[citation needed] Massive changes – attributable either to creolization or to relexification – may occur both in syntax and in vocabulary. Syntactic change can also be purely language-internal, whether independent within the syntactic component or the eventual result of phonological or morphological change.

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