CH. 1 - Language Change and Variation - A Handbook of Present-Day English PDF

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A HANDBOOKOFPRESENT-DAY ENGLISHCHAPTER 1 : LANGUAGE CHANGE ANDVARIATION IN ENGLISH1 - DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHANGE ANDVARIATION VARIATION: in linguistics, it refers to the formation of different language forms (variants) with the same meaning CHANGE : it refers to the process by which a certain languag...

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A HANDBOOK OF PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH

CHAPTER 1 : LANGUAGE CHANGE AND VARIATION IN ENGLISH 1.1 - DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHANGE AND VARIATION - VARIATION: in linguistics, it refers to the formation of different language forms (variants) with the same meaning - CHANGE : it refers to the process by which a certain language form, or variant substitutes another one used before with the same meaning.

1.2 – IMPORTANT QUESTIONS - Do languages change in time? Of course they do. Languages are subject to constant process of change which can take place either suddenly (introduction of new words) or slowly (pronunciation). There are no static or uniform languages

- Why do languages change? All languages are open and dynamic entities which adapt to the history and the culture of the speech communities - How do languages change? Language change happens through the adoption and diffusion of a certain language form , or variant (e.g. a phoneme, a word, a syntactic construction). Equivalent variants coexist within a speech community until one predominates over the other. - How, and why, do languages vary at a given time in history? The study of language variability commonly deals with how languages varies among its speakers, when speakers use different variants and what the social and linguistics significance of such variation is. Language variation is considered in relation to its standard variety - What is the best form of a language? All the varieties of a language are equally acceptable and interesting for a linguist and for its users but in each epoch there is a more socially accepted variety which is considered the standard variety.

1.3 - LANGUAGE CHANGE : EXAMPLES AND CAUSES 1.3.1 - EXAMPLES OF SLOW AND SYSTEMATIC CHANGE IN ENGLISH PHONOLOGICAL CHANGE It deals with any mutation within the sound system of a language. - THE GREAT VOWEL SHIFT  It’s an example of regular change: it implies changes leading to the reorganization of the phonological inventory of a language.  Unconditioned change: it refers to sound change regardless of the phonetic context in which it happens  It begun in the 15th century and lasted until the 17th  It affected long vowels of ME and caused a major reorganization of the vowel system through a “push chain process”. o /i:/ was the first to change -> / ʌi / causing -> o /e:/ - /ɛ/ ->/ i: / and -> o /a:/ ->/ ɛɪ / o /u:/ ->/ au: / causing -> o /o:/ ->/ u: /  It partly explains the present discrepancy between spelling and pronunciation

MORPHO-SYNTACTIC CHANGE It refers to any change in both morpho-phonematic and syntactic system of a language. - MORPHOLOGY o a standard example is represented by the leveling of the noun ending system (reduction of case endings) or inflection.  It started during the transition from late OE to early ME  OE unstressed dative plural –um, genitive plural –a, dative singular –e cases collapsed and were completely lost in early ModEng. In the late ME period there were only 2 phonological distinguished forms: singular and plural (plural were also used to represent the marked form of the genitive plural)

- SYNTAX o The gradual fixing of the SVO (subject + verb + object) word order o The gramaticalisation, or the phenomenon by which a grammatical function is given to a previously autonomous word. Some example of this kind of phenomenon can be identified as the changes which led to the formation of PDE modal/auxiliary verbs : wilan, sculan, magan, motan and cunnan -> will, shall , to be able, may/might, can functioned in OE as main verbs.

1.3.2 - SUDDEN CHANGE IN ENGLISH

- NEW WORDS o YUPPIE (Young, Upwardly Mobile Professional People) o DINKY (Double Income No Kids) o NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) Since the 80s New these new words have been used to refer to different groups of people and their life-styles

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Ms : since the 1970s Ms was suggested to neutralize the distinction between Mrs. And Miss in order to avoid “linguistic sexism”

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BORROWING from other languages o From Italian in classical music (allegretto, pizzicato) o From Italian in food (spaghetti, pizza)

- SEMANTIC CHANGE : it refers to any mutation in the meaning of individual lexical items which is commonly influenced by external factors such as socio-cultural change, scientific innovation and foreign language influence, namely borrowing. o Widening: the use of a particular item in more than one context, e.g. dog which originally meant “a particular powerful breed of dog” e.g. subprime from adjective became a noun too to refer a “subprime loan” o Narrowing: which indicates the opposite process, e.g. PDE meat was originally used with the general meaning of food o Pejoration: which is linked to speakers’ social attitude and prejudice, e.g. silly derives from ME sely, meaning “happy,

innocent”; gay , once meaning “merry”, “cheerful” now means “male homosexual” o Amelioration: it refers to a change denoting a positive attitude towards a certain word, e.g. queen comes from OE cwen meaning “woman”, “wife”

1.3.3 - CAUSES FOR LANGUAGE CHANGE

- EXTERNAL: external causes are extra-linguistics or social factors which contribute to language change such as technological innovations, the introduction of new concepts and the vocabulary to express the, contact with other languages and cultures (military conquest and immigration)

- INTERNAL: changes happen through the following morpho-syntactic mechanisms: o Analogy: it’s the process of modeling a language form in

o

relation to an already existing form of that language Hypercorrection: or speakers’ awareness of the social value of

o

the different language varieties within their speech community: e.g. the form umbrellow which, in some varieties of American English represents an attempt to avoid American non-standard forms like *yella, *fella (yellow, fellow) Backformation: it’s the creation of a language form which is not historically documented, particularly the formation of a verb from an adjective -> e.g. to laze from lazy

1.4 - LANGUAGE VARIATION : EXAMPLES AND CAUSES

1.4.1 - EXAMPLES OF COEXISTING VARIANTS

- PERSONAL PRONOUNS o Thou / You  Thou is used in religious or literary text while you in a much larger variety of contexts - RELATIVE PRONOUNS o Who / Whom  Tho whom shoud I complain?  Who/whom should I complain to? -> Who is much more used.

1.4.2 - CAUSES FOR LANGUAGE VARIATION

- SOCIAL FACTORS LINKED TO LANGUAGE USERS , such as region, social class or group, education gender, ethnicity, age. Sociolinguistics has mainly contributed to the understanding of how language behavior and variability are influenced by social fators o Labov’s analysis of the pronunciation of [r] in New York city after 1945 according to social class and style

 Prestigious r-full pronunciation was less frequently used by speakers from the lower socio-economic classes

- SOCIAL FACTORS LINKED TO THE CONTEXT OF SITUATION, such as topic, relationships between participant and the medium chosen o Topic :  Scientific “avian influenza” vs popular “bird flu” o Relationships:  “Hello Tom” for a friend vs “good morning Tom” to a colleague o Style of speech:  Labov’s work observed that that the use of [r] increased in all speakers as the degree of attention and formality increased (from casual speech to careful reading style) According to sociolinguistics, or the study of the relation between language and society, all the varieties of a language have the same status. Categories of correctness and appropriateness should not be applied to languages. However language varieties suffer from social, ethnic and racial prejudice towards their speakers, their socio-cultural, economic and political status, and speakers develop positive or negative attitudes.

1.4.3 - THE VARIETIES OF A LANGUAGE

Language behavior is conditioned by factors like language attitude towards a specific language or variety. Languages, in fact encode a particular social meaning which is determined by speakers, the speech

community they are associated with, and their functions and demains of use. All the varieties of a language are equally acceptable and interesting for a linguist and for its users but in each epoch there is a more socially accepted variety which is considered the standard variety. A standard is associated to the elites of the time (monarchy, the parliament, upper classes, intellectuals, educated people, the media or literature writers) and will be gradually elaborated and codified in grammars, dictionaries and style books

1.4.4 - SOME CONCEPTS AND TERMS

- SYNCHRONY : it refers to something within a specific time in history, in relation to its social and structural status. - DIACHRONY : it’s a sort of investigation of language change over time - SOCIOLINGUISTICS: it’s the study of the relation between language and society - SOCIAL VARIABLES: o related to USERS : social class, social network, sex/gender, ethnicity, age o related to the CONTEXT: style of speech, language attitude. - SYNTHETIC LANGUAGE : a language that that express grammatical and syntactic categories (mainly) through CASES (or INFLECTION) - ANALYTIC LANGUAGE: language that express grammatical and syntactic relations (mainly) through WORD ORDER and GRAMMATICAL WORDS such as PREPOSITION AND AUXILIARIES

- HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS: or diachronic linguistics refers to the study of language change and variation through a historical continuum (not exclusively at a given time). It has been the main paradigm of investigation of language change over time. There are 2 approaches to historical language change : o COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS or LANGUAGE RECONSTRUCTION, based on the concept of “protolanguage” (usually a reconstructed language) and a “language family” divided into “sub-families” -> English is a Germanic language (Ingvagenonic, or Anglo-Frisian sub-group of Germanic) which originated from Indo-European. o HISTORY OF LANGUAGE: it’s the study of changes undergone by a single language over centuries -> distinguishes into internal and external causes for change.

1.4.5 - IS THE STUDY OF THE HISTORY AND VARIETIES OF ENGLISH RELEVANT TO UNIVERSITY STUDENTS OF ENGLISH? Yes!

- For cultural reasons - To understand more about present-day English (e.g. the gap between spelling and pronunciation; the mixed nature of its lexis -> liberty vs freedom ; the existence of regular and irregular verbs ; linguistic situation of present day U.K; the varieties of English in the world) - To reinforce practical competence (e.g. to improve pronunciation and grammatical correctness in a given variety and to expand lexical competence; to be prepared to understand different varieties of English).

1.5 – THE STAGES OF HEL (HISTORY of the ENGLISH LANGUAGE)

1.5.1 OLD ENGLISH , OE (700-1150)

It refers to Germanic dialects Kentish, Mercian, Northumbrian, WestSaxon, spoken by Jutes, Angles and Saxons and by a former partly romanised Celtic-speaking populations who arrived in the British Isles in the 5th century.

BEFORE OLD ENGLISH: WHO LIVED IN ENGLAND BEFORE 700 A.D? - Some mysterious populations (see Stonehenge, 3000 B.C) - The Celtic and Gaelic inhabitants. They were assimilated, or forced to move westwards and northwards and the use of their language became geographically, socially and culturally confined to those areas. Today many areas are bilingual and some geographic names are of Celtic origin, e.g. London, Leeds, Kent, Cornwall, Thames) - The Romans invaded the island at the time of Caesar (50 B.C) and abandoned it in the 5th

MAJOR HISTORICAL EVENTS AND MONUMENTS BEFORE AND DURING THE OE PERIOD - 5th century A.D : Some Germanic tribes Anglo-Saxons and Jutes, arrived in England and forced the Celts to move west and north

- 6th century A.D : Christianisation of Britain took place -> substitution of the Runic alphabet with the Latin alphabet (thorn and wynn consonants were borrowed from the Anglo-Saxon version of runic alphabet) - 8th century A.D : the Scandinavian Vikings tried to invade part of Britain - 9th century A.D: 867 - King Alfred, ruler of the West Saxon Reign, defeated them. West Saxon was considered the first written English standard (or the language associated with political, military and cultural power in society). Several manuscripts were written and translated into West-Saxon OE from Latin - 1066 A.D : The Norman Conquest by William the Conqueror - > The Anglo-Normans invaded Britain. A new dominant French-speaking nobility substituted the Anglo-Saxon Court -> Abandonment of West-Saxon variety of OE as standard in favour of Anglo-Norman variety of French.

FEAUTURES OF OLD ENGLISH - Substitution of the Runic alphabet with the Latin one, with some difference from PDE (thorn, wynn) - Nouns, adjectives, pronouns were inflected for case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative) number (singular and plural) and gender (masculine, feminine, neuter). Personal pronouns have retained case, number and gender also in PDE. - The demonstrative se, seo,þaet, þa covered the domains of both the definite article the and the demonstrative that, those . The forms þes, þeos, þis were used for PDE this/these - Two types of verbs which both show 2 tenses (present and preterite) 3 moods (indicative, subjunctive and imperative) 2 infinitive forms and 2 participles (present and past)

o Strong = irregular. “To be” is the most irregular verb. They form their past tense by changing their stem vowel ->find-fandfunden o Weak = regular which add dental suffixes –t,-d,-od –ed to form their tenses - Word order was free - Lexis was mainly Germanic but included words of Celtic (names of places) Latin (e.g. school from schola) and Scandinavian origin (e.g. Landes mann = native in PDE )

1.5.2 MIDDLE ENGLISH , ME (1066 or 1150-1500) Languages used : -

Anglo-Norman Latin West-Saxon English Scandinavian Gaelic

= POWER = CHURCH = PEOPLE = Scandinavian populations = Celts, in Scotland

It is divided into 3 main periods - 1st : TRANSITIONAL STAGE (1066-1150) Important sociolinguistic change because of the Norman Conquest. That meant the end of the Anglo-Saxon socio-cultural system. The use of vernacular West-Saxon was reduced but it survived, it continued to be used in both the spoken and written modes.

- 2nd EARLY ME PERIOD (1150-1350)

English gradually recovered its status of official language as is testified by the increasing number of legal documents and literary writings in vernacular. o 1204 : The Normans lost their power in favour of English kings o 1215: the MAGNA CHARTA LIBERTATUM (in Latin) - 3rd LATE ME PERIOD (1350-1500) Urbanization, growth of London, the rising of new social classes (middle classes), technological discoveries (introduction of the printing press by W. Caxton in 1476). Literacy, the access to education of a larger number of people , the middle classes, and the role and influence of Chancery and legal writings , increased the need for a more common and fixed standard language. o (1343 –1400) Geoffrey Chaucer, the most authoritative example of written literary English : The Canterbury Tales

FEAUTURES OF MIDDLE ENGLISH The middle English period has been described as the stage of the language in which complex phenomena of dialectal variation, language contact, and attempt to standardize language, co-exist. - The classical ME variety is the educated 14th century London English (Chaucer) - Reduction of the case system (leveling of the OE inflectional case system), in particular in nouns and adjectives because of the disappearance of vowels in unstressed final syllables - As a consequence, increasingly fixed SVO word order, with some variation - Development of new tenses : o The Future Tense : in OE there’s no future tense. Sculan (shall) and wilan (will) were used to express necessity or obligation and wish or intention -> from early ME it was usual to signal

“futurity” by the use of schal + infinitive and later wil + infinitive o The Progressive / Continuos Tense : in OE this tense was formed by beon/weordan + V + ende and was already in use . In ME developed the present and past progressive / continuous tenses (PDE be + Ving [pres.part] ) o Progressive perfect and pluperfect tenses also started to develop (e.g. We have been waiting all night)

- The Passive Voice : in OE the passive was formed by the verbs beon (PDE to be) and weordan (to become). In ME passive form continued to be expressed by the verb ben (PDE to be), though perfect and pluperfect passive forms with habban (to have) were used sporadically. - ME is the period in which a large number of French words entered the English language (e.g. domicile, industry, role, class, consume, elegant, decision, civilization, regime) -> 12th and 13th centuries : situation of bilingualism among both upper and middle classes. This condition lasts till the end of 13th century when majority of bilingual speakers shifted to English. There is a lot of Latin too (e.g. dismiss, instruct, inspector, hostile, popular, data, agenda)

1.5.3 MODERN ENGLISH , ModEng (1500-1900)

In this stage of HEL appears new consciousness about linguistic matters and increases the need to fix and codify both the vocabulary and the grammar of English in order to standardize the language. The origins of standard English are to be found in the south-eastern Midland variety of English, spoken in the London area in the 15th century. The growth of standard English took place through a long process of selection, acceptance, elaboration of functions and codification. While selection and acceptance are linked to positive attitudes towards the standard variety due to its association with the powerful emerging uppermiddle classes in England at that time, elaboration and codification are complex phenomena linked to the political, social and cultural dimensions of this period. In the course of these centuries English became the language of those domains where Latin were previously used that is : government, law, literature, education and religion. During the ModEng period, several glossaries and both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries were compiled : - John Florio’s Italian-English dictionary Queen’s Anna New World of Words (1611) - A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) by Samuel Johnson Latin represent in this period, the main model for the improvement of grammar and the codification of its rules. MAJOR HISTORICAL / CULTURAL EVENTS IN THE MODERN ENGLISH PERIOD

- BRITAIN BECAME A UNITED AND POWERFUL COUNTRY (with only 7 million inhabitants) o Separation of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church -> Anglican Church : the King was both the religious and the country chief o Queen Elizabeth I established the power of Britain on the seas o Great flourishing of Theatre and Literature (Shakespeare, Authorized Translation of the Bible by King James in 1611) o The English Civil War over The power of the Parliament vs the power of the Monarchy o 1702 -> ENGLAND and SCOTLAND united under the British Crown

- BRITAIN BECOME A COLONIAL WORLD POWER o Since 17th century English trading companies in India and slave trade in Africa o Since 17th century stable colonies were established in AMERICA, AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND, CANADA, CARIBBEAN and SOUTH AFRICA o 19th : IMPERIALISM in ASIA and AFRICA

FEATURES OF MODERN ENGLISH - RP (Received Pronunciation) : idea of “correct pronunciation” which goes back to Shakespeare ‘s time. In 19th century the standardization of pronunciation is achieved through the new “universal” educational system . RP was mainly a marker of social class, a symbol of social, cultural and economic prestige.

- As previously said, development of a standard form of English through long processes of selection (London English) and codifications through grammars and dictionaries.