Syntactic Change

1. Modern English is an SVO(Subject-Verb Object) language. The syntactic rules permit less variation in word order. In Modern English, negation is expressed by adding not or do not. We may also express negation by adding words like never or no:

I am going I am not goingI went I did not goI go to school I never go to school.I want food. I don’t want any food; I want no food.

2. contraction rules: do not don’t will not won’t

ME : the negative element occurs at the end of the word because “not” is put after the auxiliary

OE : the negative element occurs at the beginning of the contraction because it preceded the auxiliary in sentences.

3. “comparative” and “superlative” constructions:

ME : We form the comparative by adding - er to the adjective or by inserting more before it, the superlative is formed by adding – est or by inserting most.OE : Double comparatives and double superlatives occur, which today are ungrammatical : more gladder, more lover, most royallest.

Lexical Change

Lexical changes include:

(1) the addition of new words

(2) changes in the meanings of words

(3) the loss of words

1.  New Words

Methods to form new words:

(a) Compounding: the recombining of old words to form new ones with new meanings. ex. bigmouth, chickenhearted, egghead … etc.

(b) Derivational processes ex. Uglify uglification finalize finalization

(c) Other methods: word coinage, deriving words from names, blends … etc.

2. Borrowings

Borrowing from other language is another important source of new words. It occurs when one language takes a word or morpheme from another language and adds it to the lexicon.

(a) Two divisions: (i) native words (ii) nonnative words (loan words)

(b) Ways: (i) directly ex. Feast (ii) indirectly ex. Algebra

(c) Introduce what languages did English

borrow from ? Similarly, other languages

borrow words.

e.x. Japanese from Chinese and European words

(esp. American English)

3.  Loss of Words

A word is lost through inattention: nobody thinks of it; nobody uses it; and it fades out of the language.

4. Semantic Change

(a) Broadening: become widen and general ex. Holiday, picture

(b) Narrowing: become specific ex. Meat, deer

(c) Meaning shifts ex. Bead, silly

• Linguistic classification • The following slides are tackling very

significant questions:

• How are languages classified and?• How are family trees established?

Language and Language Families

World Languages-- Today there are approximately 6,000 languages spoken around the world. We do not know for certain if all of these derive originally from one common ancestor or parent language.

Language Origins

• Monogenetic Theories – Language origins in ONE common source, a Proto-Language.• Garden of Eden– Common Source

• Tower of Babel—Language diversity as punishment.

Language Origins

• Multi-Source Theories– Several Proto-Languages emerge in different locations around the world,

either around the same time or at different times.

Language Families

• We do know that many languages are related to each other. We call these groups of languages that

have a common ancestor Language Families. • English is part of the Indo-European Language

Family.

Discovery of Language Families

• Although we don't have any evidence of the original parent language (the culture that spoke it did not

possess writing), we call the original language Proto-Indo-European.

An Englishman, Sir William Jones (1786) was the first to notice that some languages were related to

each other by comparing words in Sanskrit (a very ancient I-E language) with words in Greek, Latin and

English.

Comparative Linguistics

• Comparative Linguistics–

The study of the relationships between different languages, often with the goal of reconstructing or

identifying the parent language.

Indo-European

• There are 10 major groups within the Indo-European Family of Languages.

• 1. Germanic (English is part of this group or sub-family).

• 2. Italic– This includes the Romance (Roman) languages of Latin (parent), French, Spanish, and

Portugese.

I-E Language Groups (10)

• 3. Celtic—This was one of the earliest and most wide-spread of the IE languages throughout

Europe. Its descendants include Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, Breton, and Welsh.

• 4. Hellenic—The languages and dialects of Greece, including Attic-Ionic (Athens) from with

Modern Greek derives.

IE Language Groups (10)

• 5. Balto-Slavic– This includes most of the major languages of Eastern Europe, including Polish and

Russian. • 6. Albanian• 7. Armenian

IE Language Groups (10)

• 8. Indo-Iranian: Some scholars divide this into two separate groups.

• A. From this group we get most of the major languages spoken in India, inluding Hindi and Urdu. • Sanskrit is the most ancient written form of IE

(written Hindu)

IE Language Groups (10)

• 8.B– We also get many of the most ancient languages spoken in Iran, including Persian.

• 9. Anatolian—This is an ancient language group. The most well-known language in this group is Hittite, a

language documented in the Old Testament.

IE Language Groups (10)

• Tocharian– An isolated language (no longer spoken) discovered from fragments of texts in Western

China.

Language Families (Two Models)

• Family Tree ModelThis model is a model of language change described

by an analogy with the concept of family tree. In this scientific metaphor, the family members are

languages, the family is a language family and the birth kinships of people are genetic relationships

between languages. A language can therefore be a parent or mother language or a daughter language

(fathers and sons are not in the metaphor). Languages can have lines of descent, can be cognate

and can be "related."

• Wave Model• This is a model of language change in which a new language feature (innovation) or a new combination

of language features spreads from a central region of origin in continuously weakening concentric circles,

similar to the waves created when a stone is thrown into a body of water. The theory was intended as a

substitute for the tree model, which did not seem to be able to explain the existence of some characters,

especially in the Germanic languages,• Helpful because it shows more complicated inter-relationships among languages, how they influence

each other over time.

Proto Indo-European

• Major immigration probably began in 3rd or 4th millennium BCE.

• Location was probably in Northern Central Europe (Southern Russia).

• Origins were perhaps among the Kurgans who lived somewhere north of the Caspian Sea.

Characteristics

• Cognates-- I-E languages have similar word forms:

• Numbers--• Body parts-- heart, head, foot.

• Natural phenomena-- star, snow, sun, moon.• Plant/animal names-- beech, bear, corn, wolf.

• Cultural terms-- yoke, mead, weave, sew.

Characteristics

• Highly inflected language–

Inflections on the end of words were used to indicate such grammatical functions as case, number

tense, person, and mood.

The best examples of this are Sanskrit, Greek, and Classical Latin.