LING20010 Chap.10 Language Change
Language Change
Languages never stand still, and this chapter connects the variation studied so far to change over time. It covers language families and the Indo-European spread, the regularity of sound change as shown by Grimm's law, and four domains of change: lexical replacement, semantic change, sound change and syntactic change.
Grammaticalisation, the growth of grammatical forms out of lexical ones, is worked through with be going to and have to, including phonological reduction to gonna and I'mma. The sociolinguistic perspective then insists that speakers, not sounds, change: orderly heterogeneity, the S-curve of spread, social mediation through networks and ideologies, and the possible effect of prescriptive grammar on you was.
Public anxiety about change is explained by Labov's Golden Age principle. It also asks why languages change at all, setting identity and the wish to differentiate groups beside communication and its competing needs for efficiency and clarity, and stressing that languages do not change by themselves: individual speakers do.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Language families and Grimm's law
- 02
Lexical, semantic, sound and syntactic change
- 03
Grammaticalisation and phonological reduction
- 04
Orderly heterogeneity and the S-curve
- 05
Networks, ideologies and prescriptive grammar
- 06
Why languages change
Worked example · free
Place two innovations on the S-curve
- 1Variant X sits on the slow early section of the curve, where few speakers have adopted it.
- 1Variant Y sits on the steep middle section, where adoption accelerates.
- 1Predict that Y will slow as it nears completion, while X may stay low or take off later.
Key terms
- Grammaticalisation
- Grammaticalisation is the process by which lexical words become grammatical forms over time.
- Grimm's law
- Grimm's law is a set of regular sound changes that helps define the Germanic branch of Indo-European.
- Lexical replacement
- Lexical replacement is the displacement of one word by another for the same thing, as car replaced automobile.
- Orderly heterogeneity
- Orderly heterogeneity is the principle that variation within a language is structured rather than chaotic.
Language Change FAQ
What is the evidence that going to became a future marker?
It now combines with subjects that cannot travel anywhere, such as a building that is going to collapse, and with events that involve no journey at all, such as weather that is going to change. Those uses make no sense as travel, so the construction must encode futurity.
Is sound change random?
No. The lecture presents sound change as regular, consistent and rule-based, applying across the whole language rather than word by word, which is why a set of correspondences such as Grimm's law can describe it.
Can grammar books affect a change already under way?
Possibly. Nevalainen suggests that eighteenth-century grammarians who condemned you was as ungrammatical may have contributed to its reversal, an example of normative ideology influencing an ongoing change.
What does orderly heterogeneity mean for change?
It means variation is structured and present in every language, and that this structured variation is where change begins. Speakers gradually shift their preferences between variants, so studying present variation is a way of studying change in progress.
Assessment move
Make a four-row table of the domains of change and add one lecture example and one example of your own to each row, in any language. Learn the grammaticalisation of going to as a story with three stages: motion, future meaning, then phonological reduction, and be able to cite the evidence from immobile subjects. Draw the S-curve from memory with its three phases labelled.
Then connect change to earlier chapters: networks explain why innovations spread through loose ties, and ideologies explain why some variants are resisted. When you read a news story claiming language is being ruined, practise explaining it with the Golden Age principle.
As a final check, take the S-curve and mark where a change you have noticed in your own speech community might sit, then say what evidence would show whether it is still spreading.
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