Language Change: Historical Linguistics II

Semantic Change

• Other examples of semantic change
• Broadening: dogge used to be a specific breed
• Narrowing:
• meat used to be “food” (flesh was “meat”)
• deer originally meant “animal” (cf the related German word Tier “animal”), but became restricted
• Shifting: nice used to mean “ignorant”

Syntactic Change

• Modern English:
• auxiliary verb raises to Tense
• main verb stays in VP
• result: main verb follows adverbs: John often went skiing.
• French:
• auxiliary verb raises to Tense
• main verb raises to Tense
• result: verb (aux or main) precedes adverbs: John went often skiing

Syntactic Change

• Old and Middle English:
• Here men vndurstonden ofte by this nyght the night of synne
• here men understood often by this night the night of sin

Syntactic Change

• Modern English
• I to C in questions
• result: aux verb to C in questions
• French
• I to C in questions
• result: verb (aux or main) to C in questions

Rise of ModE Patterns

Why do Languages Change?

• Natural processes in language use
• rapid or casual speech produces assimilation, vowel reduction, deletion
• this pronunciation can become conventionalized, and so end up being produced even in slower, more careful speech

Child Language

• What’s natural for kids was natural for our ancestors as well.
• “scant” was “skamt”: m became n in the neighborhood of t (assimilation: K.I.S.S.)

• history

• bug-gug: child

Why do Languages Change?

• Language Learning
• The child must construct their language based on the input received
• This process is imperfect
• Bias towards regularization – learning an irregular form requires more input
• Also random differences may spread, especially through a small population