The comparative-historical method in linguistics.

Semantic change and analogy in historical linguistics.

Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression or semantic drift) is the evolution of word usage — usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage. In diachronic (or historical) linguistics, semantic change is a change in one of the meanings of a word. Every word has a variety of senses and connotations, which can be added, removed, or altered over time, often to the extent that cognates across space and time have very different meanings. The study of semantic change can be seen as part of etymology, onomasiology, semasiology, and semantics.

Examples

Awful—Originally meant "inspiring wonder (or fear)". Used originally as a shortening for "full of awe", in contemporary usage the word usually has negative meaning.

Guy—Guy Fawkes was the alleged leader of a plot to blow up the English Houses of Parliament on 5 Nov. 1605. The day was made a holiday, Guy Fawkes day, commemorated by parading and burning a ragged, grotesque effigy of Fawkes, known as a Guy. This led to the use of the word guy as a term for any "person of grotesque appearance" and then by the late 1800s—especially in the United States—for "any man", as in, e.g., "Some guy called for you."

Gay—Originally meant (13th century) "lighthearted", "joyous" or (14th century) "bright and showy".

Types of semantic change

 

Narrowing: Change from superordinate level to subordinate level. For example, skyline formerly referred to any horizon, but now in the USA it has narrowed to a horizon decorated by skyscrapers.[1]

Widening: Change from subordinate level to superordinate level. There are many examples of specific brand names being used for the general product, such as with Kleenex.

Metaphor: Change based on similarity of thing. For example, broadcast originally meant "to cast seeds out"; with the advent of radio and television, the word was extended to indicate the transmission of audio and video signals.

Metonymy: Change based on nearness in space or time, e.g., jaw "cheek" → "mandible".

Synecdoche: Change based on whole-part relation. The convention of using capital cities to represent countries or their governments is an example of this.

Hyperbole: Change from weaker to stronger meaning, e.g., kill "torment" → "slaughter"

Meiosis:. Change from stronger to weaker meaning, e.g., astound "strike with thunder" → "surprise strongly".

Degeneration: e.g., knave "boy" → "servant" → "deceitful or despicable man".

Elevation: e.g., knight "boy" → "nobleman".

Specialization of meaning: Downward shift in a taxonomy, e.g., corn "grain" → "wheat" (UK), → "maize" (US).

Generalization of meaning: Upward shift in a taxonomy, e.g., hoover "Hoover vacuum cleaner" → "any type of vacuum cleaner".

Cohyponymic transfer: Horizontal shift in a taxonomy, e.g., the confusion of mouse and rat in some dialects.

Antiphrasis: Change based on a contrastive aspect of the concepts, e.g., perfect lady in the sense of "prostitute".

Auto-antonymy: Change of a word's sense and concept to the complementary opposite, e.g., bad in the slang sense of "good".

Auto-converse: Lexical expression of a relationship by the two extremes of the respective relationship, e.g., take in the dialectal use as "give".

Ellipsis: Semantic change based on the contiguity of names, e.g., car "cart" → "automobile", due to the invention of the (motor) car.

Folk-etymology: Semantic change based on the similarity of names, e.g., French contredanse, orig. English country dance.

 

The Noun

The Pronoun

OE pronouns fell under the same main classes as modern pronouns: personal, demonstrative, interrogative and indefinite. As for the other groups – relative, possessive and reflexive – they were as yet not fully developed and were not always distinctly separated from the four main classes.

Personal pronouns

In OE, while nouns consistently distinguished between four cases, personal pronouns began to lose some of their case distinctions: the forms of the Dat. case of the pronouns of the 1^st and 2^nd p. were frequently used instead of the Acc. It is important to note that the Gen. case of personal pronouns had two main applications: like other oblique cases of noun-pronouns it could be an object, but far more frequently it was used as an attribute or a noun determiner, like a possessive pronoun, e.g. sunu mīn.

Demonstrative pronouns

There were two demonstrative pronouns in OE: the prototype of NE that, which distinguished three genders in the sg. And had one form for all the genders in the pl. and the prototype of this. They were declined like adjectives according to a five-case system: Nom., Gen., Dat., Acc., and Instr. Demonstrative pronouns were frequently used as noun determiners and through agreement with the noun indicated its number, gender and case.

Other classes of pronouns

Interrogative pronouns – hwā, Masc. and Fem., and hwæt, Neut., - had a four-case paradigm (NE who, what). The Instr. case of hwæt was used as a separate interrogative word hw ў (NE why). Some interrogative pronouns were used as adjective pronouns, e.g. hwelc.

Indefinite pronouns were a numerous class embracing several simple pronouns and a large number of compounds: ān and its derivative ǽni з (NE one, any); nān, made up of ān and the negative particle ne (NE none); nānþin з, made up of the preceding and the noun þin з (NE nothing).

The Adjective

The adjective in OE could change for number, gender and case. Those were dependent grammatical categories or forms of agreement of the adjective with the noun it modified or with the subject of the sentence – if the adjective was a predicative. Like nouns, adjectives had three genders and two numbers. The category of case in adjectives differed from that of nouns: in addition to the four cases of nouns they had one more case, Instr. It was used when the adjective served as an attribute to a noun in the Dat. case expressing an instrumental meaning.

 

Old English grammar. Verb.

The majority of OE verbs fell into two great divisions: the strong verbs and the weak verbs. Besides these two main groups there were a few verbs which could be put together as “minor” groups. The main difference between the strong and weak verbs lay in the means of forming the principal parts, or “stems” of the verb. The strong verbs formed their stems by means of ablaut and by adding certain suffixes; in some verbs ablaut was accompanied by consonant interchanges. The strong verbs had four stems, as they distinguished two stems in the Past Tense – one for the 1^st and 3^rd p. sg Ind. Mood, the other – for the other Past tense forms, Ind. and Subj. the weak verbs derived their Past tense stem and the stem of Participle II from the Present tense stem with the help of the dental suffix -d- or -t-; normally they did not interchange their root vowel, but in some verbs suffixation was accompanied by a vowel interchange. Minor groups of verbs differed from the weak and strong verbs. Some of them combined certain features of the strong and weak verbs in a peculiar way (“preterite-present” verbs); others were suppletive or altogether anomalous.

Strong Verbs

The strong verbs in OE are usually divided into seven classes. Classes from 1 to 6 use vowel gradation which goes back to the IE ablaut-series modified in different phonetic conditions in accordance with PG and Early OE sound changes. Class 7 includes reduplicating verbs, which originally built their past forms by means of repeating the root-morpheme; this doubled root gave rise to a specific kind of root-vowel interchange.

The principal forms of all the strong verbs have the same endings irrespective of class: -an for the Infinitive, no ending in the Past sg stem, -on in the form of Past pl, -en for Participle II.

Weak Verbs

The number of weak verbs in OE by far exceeded that of strong verbs.

The verbs of Class I usually were i -stems, originally contained the element [-i/-j] between the root and the endings. The verbs of Class II were built with the help of the stem-suffix -ō, or - ōj and are known as ō -stems. Class III was made up of a few survivals of the PG third and fourth classes of weak verbs, mostly -ǽj -stems.

Minor groups of Verbs

The most important group of these verbs were the so-called “preterite-presents” or “past-present” verbs. Originally the Present tense forms of these verbs were Past tense forms. Later these forms acquired a present meaning but preserved many formal features of the Past tense. Most of these verbs had new Past Tense forms built with the help of the dental suffix. Some of them also acquired the forms of the verbals: Participles and Infinitives. In OE there were twelve preterite-present verbs. Six of them have survived in Mod E: OE ā з; cunnan; cann; dear(r), sculan, sceal; ma з an, mæ з; mōt (NE owe, ought; can; dare; shall; may; must). Most preterite-presents did not indicate actions, but expressed a kind of attitude to an action denoted by another verb, an Infinitive which followed the preterite-present. In other words they were used like modal verbs, and eventually developed into modern modal verbs.

Middle English grammar

OE had been a synthetic language with a well-developed ending system in the Middle English period it was transform in the analytical type. Analytical ways of expression of meaning now prevailed over synthetic one.

                   Analytical type                                                                 Synthetic type

· Auxiliaries                                                                        - ending

· Prepositions                                                                   - affexes

· Articles                                                                            - suffexes

· Particle                                                                             - prefexes

· Word order                                                                      - transfix -n

· Intonation                                                                        - postfix

· Sound interchange

+ таблица, где сравниваются сущ, прил, и местоимения.

Adj.

B y the end OE period the agreement of adj. with the noun had become looser and in the course of ME it was practically lost.

Only 1 ending-e which is seen in the 14^th/c text.

Late ME:

Adj.                              sing.        Pl.

             Strong         O           - e

          Weak          - e         - e

Degrees of comparison have been preserved but the form building means altered.

More                are used in ME to form the degree of comparison

Most                     

Bet

Best

The way of formation analytically or syntect. didn’t depend on the     structure of the adj.

* sweter

* More swete

23????????????????

The Great Vowel Shift.

The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in the south of England between 1450 and 1750.[1] The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term.[2]

The Great Vowel Shift involved six vowels: all were long, stressed monophthongs -- vowels in stressed positions which were pronounced long and had a pure sound. For the non-linguist, what I have just written probably sounds like academic gobbledygook, so let’s look at some specific examples.

The vowel “i” as in “mice” is a high front vowel. In Middle English “mice” would have been pronounced “mees”.

The modern word “mouse” would have been pronounced “moos” in Middle English. It then evolved into “mah-oose” and then finally into the dipthong which we have today in “mouse”.

The vowel “e” as in “feet” is considered a mid-vowel. In Middle English “feet” would have been pronounced “fate”.

Another mid-vowel is “o” as in “do” which would have been pronounced “dough” in Middle English.

The vowel “a” is a low back vowel. The modern word “name” would have been pronounced “nahm” in Middle English.

The long open “o” which was pronounced “aw” became the long “o”. Thus the modern English word “so” would have been pronounced “saw” in Middle English.

Linguists summarize that in the Great Vowel Shift: (1) front vowels were raised and fronted; (2) back vowels were raised and retraced; and (3) high vowels were made into diphthongs.

Linguists have documented the fact that the Great Vowel Shift happened, but the intriguing question is why did it happen? In answering this question, linguists offer two non-exclusive hypotheses.

The expansion of English.

As Britain consolidated into a single powerful state, it extended its borders to include Wales, Scotland and part of Ireland.

As mentioned before, the partial subjugation of Wales was the last stage of the Norman Conquest. It was not until the 16th c., however, that the annexation was completed. Both during the wars and after the final occupation, the English language penetrated into Wales and partly replaced the native Celtic dialect; a large proportion of the aboriginal population, however, did not give up their mother tongue and continued to speak Welsh. (It is noteworthy that to this day Wales has preserved a large number of old Celtic place-names and the Welsh dialect.)

The attempts to conquer Ireland in the 13th and 14th c. ended in failure. In Ireland, only the area around Dublin was ruled direct from England, the rest of the country being Irish or Anglo-Irish. Ireland remained divided among innumerable chiefs and turned into one of the poorest and most backward countries. Despite the weak ties with England and the assimilation of English and Welsh invaders by the Irish, in- penetration continued

The repeated claims of the English kings to be overlords of Scotland were met with protest and revolt. In the early 14th c. Scotland’s independence was secured by the victories of Robert Bruce. Feudal Scotland remained a sovereign kingdom until the later Tudors, but the influence of the English language was greater than elsewhere.

Scotland began to fall under English linguistic influence from the 11 century, when England made her first attempts to conquer the territory. The mixed population of Scotland — the native Scots and Picts, the Britons (who had fled from the Germanic invasion), the Scandinavians (who had stayed on after the Scandinavian settlement), and the English who had gradually moved to the north) from the neighboring regions) was not homogeneous in language. The Scotch-Gaelic dialect of the Scots was driven to the Highlands, while in Lowland Scotland the Northern English dialect gave rise to a new dialect, Scottish, which had a chance to develop into an independent language, an offshoot of English. The Scottish tongue flourished as a literary language and produced a distinct literature as long as Scotland retained its sovereignty. After the unification with England under the Stuarts (1603), and the loss of what remained of Scotland's self-government, Scottish was once again reduced to dialectal status. In the subsequent centuries English became both the official and the literary language in Scotland.

Thus by the end of the Early NE period, the area of English had expanded, to embrace the whole of the British Isles with the exception of some mountainous parts of Wales and Scotland, the Isle of Man, Cornwall and some parts of Ireland, though even in most of these regions people were becoming bilingual.

Modern Germanic languages.

Genetically, English belongs to the Germanic or Teutonic group of languages, which is one of the twelve groups of the I-E linguistic family. The Germanic languages in the modern world are as follows:

· English – in Great Britain, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the South African Republic, and many other former British colonies;

· German – in the Germany, Austria, Luxemburg, part of Switzerland;

· Netherlandish – in the Netherlands and Belgium (known also as Dutch and Flemish respectively);

· Afrikaans – in the South African Republic;

· Danish – in Denmark;

· Swedish – in Sweden and Finland;

· Norwegian – in Norway;

· Icelandic – in Iceland;

· Frisian – in some regions of the Netherlands and Germany;

· Faroese – in the Faroe Islands;

· Yiddish – in different countries.

Lists of Germanic languages given in books differ in some points, for the distinction between separate languages and also between languages and dialects varies. Until recently Dutch and Flemish were named as separate languages; Frisian and Faroese are often referred to as dialects, since they are spoken over small, politically dependent areas; the linguistic independence of Norwegian is questioned, for it has intermixed with Danish; Br E and Am E are sometimes regarded as two independent languages. All the Germanic languages are related through their common origin and joint development at the early stages of history.

The comparative-historical method in linguistics.

The comparative-historical method in linguistics.    

 Linguists today hotly debate the issue of monogenesis vs. polygenesis. One scientific way to study the origin of language is to try to prove historical relationships between languages. To find language families, that is, groups of languages descended from a common ancestor, linguists compare languages to find systematic differences or similarities. 

This method of analysing languages is known as the comparative method; linguists using it are referred to as comparative linguists. Some languages are obviously related to one another, as shown by the presence of systematic differences--like the regular sound correspondence between English [T] and German [d]. Many such correspondences show up between the vocabulary of French and Spanish, on one hand, and Hebrew and Arabic, on the other, as well as between such geographically disparate languages as Hawaiian, Maori and Malagasy. 

When comparative linguists discover a group of historically related languages, they try to reconstruct the original form of the ancestor language of each family, which they call a proto language (give example of Indo-European mother and daughter languages). Obviously, there is no way to prove the results, and proto-language reconstruction is risky business intellectually.     

Lumpers have have narrowed the number of proto-languages to about two dozen (see map): Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, 4 families in Africa, a few in East Asia; perhaps only 3 in all of the Americas. Also, there are a few languages left over that seem not related to any others. They are called language isolates: Basque, Ket, Burushaski. These languages are probably remnants of larger families spoken in the distant past.

Splitters are far more cautious in drawing conclusions of genetic relationship. The map you received is one favored by the lumpers. If I had given you a world map devised by splitters, it would contain many times the number of basic groupings, and you would be very unhappy with me. For instance, instead of one family in Australia there would be at least five; and New Guinea would have over 70 families; and Amerindian is actually composed of a few dozen major groupings, each of which the splittes consider to be a separate family.

So the debate and the research goes on. Recently there have appeared linguists who might even be called "mega-lumpers", notably Stanford University's Joseph Greenberg. Greenberg and his colleagues are convinced they will eventually reconstruct the Mother Tongue of all languages, which they call proto-World.

2. Phonetic Law. Types of the sound changes.

In linguistics, regular changes that occur during the development of a language in its sound structure (compare the disappearance of the vowels 2 and b in Russian) or in the phonetic structure of words (compare the replacement of e by o in Russian; for example the present-day nes [nyos] “he carried” from the old nes [nyes]). Spontaneous and combinative changes are distinguished from each other; the former occur in all instances where a corresponding sound is encountered; for example, in Russian?? has been replaced in all positions by the vowel e. The second type of change occurs only in certain phonetic positions; thus, the replacement of e by o took place only in the stressed syllable, if a hard consonant followed the e (compare podenii, “daily,” with den’, “day”). With the development of phonology came historical, or diachronic, phonology, in which phonetic laws were examined in the aspect of the study of the phoneme.

Sound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation (phonetic change) or sound system structures (phonological change). Sound changes can be environmentally conditioned, meaning that the change in question only occurs in a defined sound environment, whereas in other environments the same speech sound is not affected by the change. The term "sound change" refers to diachronic changes, or changes in a language's underlying sound system over time; "alternation", on the other hand, refers to surface changes that happen synchronically and do not change the language's underlying system (for example, the -s in the English plural can be pronounced differently depending on what sound it follows; this is a form of alternation, rather than sound change). However, since "sound change" can refer to the historical introduction of an alternation (such as post-vocalic /k/ in Tuscan, once [k], but now [h]), the label is inherently imprecise and often must be clarified as referring to phonetic change or restructuring.

Sound change is usually assumed to be regular, which means that it is expected to apply mechanically whenever its structural conditions are met, irrespective of any non-phonological factors (such as the meaning of the words affected). On the other hand, sound changes can sometimes be sporadic, affecting only one particular word or a few words, without any seeming regularity.

For regular sound changes, the term sound law is sometimes still used. This term was introduced by the Neogrammarian school in the 19th century and is commonly applied to some historically important sound changes, such as Grimm's law. While real-world sound changes often admit exceptions (for a variety of known reasons, and sometimes without one), the expectation of their regularity or "exceptionlessness" is of great heuristic value, since it allows historical linguists to define the notion of regular correspondence (see: comparative method).

Each sound change is limited in space and time. This means it functions within a specified area (within certain dialects) and during a specified period of time. For these reasons, some scholars avoid using the term "sound law" — reasoning that a law should not have spatial and temporal limitations — replacing the term with phonetic rule.

Sound change has no memory: Sound change does not discriminate between the sources of a sound. If a previous sound change causes X,Y > Y (features X and Y merge as Y), a new one cannot affect only an original X.

Sound change ignores grammar: A sound change can only have phonological constraints, like X > Z in unstressed syllables. The only exception to this is that a sound change may or may not recognise word boundaries, even when they are not indicated by prosodic clues.

Sound change is exceptionless: if a sound change can happen at a place, it will. It affects all sounds that meet the criteria for change.