Language Change: Historical Linguistics II

Northern Cities Shift

• ӕ > ej: laughs at it
• ɑ > a: on
• ᴐ > ɑ: all
• ɛ > ʌ: seventeen
• ʌ > ᴐ: fund

Phonological and Morphological Change

• Old English had rich case inflection
• Modern English has almost none
• Phonological change led to morphological change

Case

• Nominative = subject marker
• Accusative = object marker
• Dative = indirect object marker
• Genitive = possessive marker
• Se cniht geaf gief-e þӕs hierd-es sun-e
• the youth.NOM gave gift-ACC the shepherd-GEN son-DAT
• “The youth gave the shepherd’s son a gift.”

Old English Case

Sound Changes

• Dative: consonant deletion results in loss of plural –m
• All cases: unstressed vowels reduced to schwa
• All cases: schwa deleted
• So, what’s left?

Modern English

• SG PL
• NOM hound hounds
• ACC hound hounds
• GEN hound’s hounds’
• DAT hound hounds

Morphological Change

• Reanalysis (folk etymology) – speakers provide a morphological analysis that doesn’t correspond (historically) to the derivation of the word
• e.g. hamburger

Morphological Change

• Reanalysis
• e.g. earwig
• Old English: ēarwicga ear+insect
• would have been earwidge in Modern English
• “widge” is lost as an independent word
• Middle English: arwygyll ear+wiggle
• Modern English: earwig

Morpho-Syntactic Change

• e.g. Latin had no pronounced determiners
• the distinction between a and the (new vs old information) was marked through word order
• latrâvit canis “a dog barked”
• canis latrâvit “the dog barked”

Morphological Change

• Over-regularization – irregular morphology becomes regular
• e.g. Old English Comparatives
• Adjective + ra, with stem change (similar to certain irregular past tense, e.g., say-said)
• long ~ lengra
• Adjectives + ra, no stem change
• wearm ~ wearmra
• Expected in Modern English:
• warm ~ warmer, long ~ lenger!
• Instead, overregularization yielded longer