戴炜栋 Linguistic·Language Change_思维导图模板

戴炜栋 Linguistic·Language Change

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Chapter 7·Language Change

As language changes over time, the meaning of a word may deviate from its original denotation. Discuss the major types of semantic changes.

Major types of semantic changes are semantic broadening, semantic narrowing and semantic shift.

Semantic broadening refers to the process in which the meaning of a word becomes more general or inclusive than its historically earlier denotation.
Take the word "holiday" for example, the older meaning was a holy day." Today everyone enjoys a holiday, whether he or she is religious or not.

Semantic narrowing is a process in which the meaning of a word be-comes less general or inclusive than its historically earlier meaning.
For example, wife used to mean "any woman," but now it means "married females'”only.

Semantic shift is a process of semantic change in which a word loses its former meaning and acquires a new, sometimes related meaning.
For example, the word silly meant "happy" in Old English, and naive in Middle English, but "foolish" in Modern English.

What are the causes of language change? Discuss them in detail.

Sound assimilation

Sound assimilation refers to the physiologicaleffect of one sound on another. In an assimilative process. Successive sounds are made identical or more similar, tooneanother in termof place or manner of articulation, or of haplology. The loss of one of two phonetically similar syllables in sequence.

For example, the Old English word"Engla-land"("the land of the Angles")came to be pronounce "England"through the assimilation of"la-la sounds

Rule simplification and regularization

Rule simplification and regularization are a type of spontaneous morphological rule change that involves exceptional plural forms of nouns.

For example,the plural forms of "agendum", "datum", "curriculum" and "memorandum" are "agenda", "data", "curricula" and "memoranda".
The irregular plurals of these nouns have been replaced by regular plurals of"agendas","curriculums", and"memorandums"among many speakers thus making them simplified and regularized.

Internal borrowing

In order to reduce the number of exceptional or irregular morphemes, speakers of a particular language may borrow a rule from one part of the grammar and apply it generally.

For example, by analogy to the plural formation of"foe-s" and "dog-s" speakers started saying "cows" as the plural of "cow"instead of the earlier plural kine.

Elaboration

Rule elaboration occurs when there is a need to reduce ambiguity and increase communicative clarity or feature is lost as a result of a change in the phonological system, some other feature ma be added in another component of the grammar

Social triggers

Soiopoltical changes such as wars, invasions, occupation, colonization and language planning and standardizatior policies lead to language changes.

For history of English, the Norman Conquest marked the beginning of the Middle English period. And British colonial settlement.and the country's economic advances in distant lands such as North America, Oreania, South Africa and India lead to the change of English into British, American Australian, South African and Indian varieties.

Cultural transmission

Although a new generation has to find a way of using the language of the previous generation, it has find expressions that can best communicate the views and concepts of the time and the changed and ever-changing social life. And rereate the language of the community.

For example,while old people tend to call a refrigerator "icebox" the younger generation is more often heard speaking of a"fridge". This tenuous the inevitable and ongoing language change and variation.

Children's approximation toward the adult
grammar

The way children acquire thelanguage is another basic cause for language change.

Children usually construct their personal grammars by themselves and generalize rules from the linguistic information they hear. Children's grammar never models exactly after that of the adult speech community, because children are exposed to diverse linguistic information.