语言学基础教程

《语言学基础教程》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《语言学基础教程（18页珍藏版）》请在装配图网上搜索。

1、Chapter 8 Historical Linguistics: Language Through Time8.1 What is historical linguistics?It is an indisputable fact that all languages have been constantly changing through time. Essentially, modern linguistics has centered around two dimensions to deal with language change: the synchronic dimensio

2、n and the diachronic dimension. The synchronic dimension has dominantly been applied to describe and explain differences or variations within one language in different places and among different groups at the same time. The synchronic dimension is usually the topic of sociolinguistics, which will be

3、 discussed in Chapter 10. This chapter will focus on the diachronic dimension of language change. Those who study language from this latter point of view are working in the field of historical linguistics (Poole, 2000: 123). To put it more specifically, historical linguistics is the study of the dev

4、elopments in languages in the course of time, of the ways in which languages change from period to period, and of the causes and results of such changes, both outside the languages and within them (Robins, 2000: 5). 8.2 When language changes Although language change does not take place overnight, ce

5、rtain changes are noticeable because they usually conflate with a certain historical period or major social changes caused by wars, invasions and other upheavals. The development of the English language is a case in point. Generally speaking, the historical development of English is divided into thr

6、ee major periods: Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Modern English (ModE). 500 (the time when Germanic tribes invaded Britain)Old English 1100 (the time after the Norman Conquest in 1066) Middle English 1500 (the beginning of Renaissance and the first printing press set up in 1476 in Englan

7、d) Modern English the present In about the year 449 AD, the Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes from northern Europe invaded Britain and became the founders of the English nation. Their language, with the Germanic language as the source, is called, the name derived from the first tribe, the

8、Angles. It had a vocabulary inherited almost entirely from Germanic or formed by compounding or derivation from Germanic elements (Dension, 1993: 9). From this early variety of Englisc, many of the most basic terms in the English language came into being: mann (“man”), cild (“child”), mete (“food”),

9、 etan (“eat”), drincan (“drink”) and feohtan (“fight”). From the sixth to the eighth centuries AD, the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity, and a number of terms, mainly to do with religion, philosophy and medicine, were borrowed into English from Latin, the language of religion. The origins

10、 of the modern words angel, bishop, candle, church, martyr, priest and school all date from that period. From the eighth century to the tenth century, the Vikings from northern Europe invaded England and brought words such as give, law, leg, skin, sky, take and they from their language, Old Norse (Y

11、ule, 2000: 218). In the year of 1066 AD, the Norman French conquered the whole of England, bringing French speakers into the ruling class and then pushing French to the position as the “prestige language” for the next two hundred years. This language was used by the nobility, the government, the law

12、 and civilized behavior, providing the source of such modern terms as army, court, defense, prison and tax (Yule, 2000: 219). Yet the language of the peasants remained English.By the end of the ME period, when English had once again become the first language of all classes, the bulk of OE lexis had

13、become obsolete, and some ten thousand French words had been incorporated into English, maybe 75% surviving into ModE (Baugh & Cable, 2001:174). During the early ModE period, which coincided with the Renaissance period, English borrowed enormous lexical resources from the classical languages of Lati

14、n and Greek. And, later on as the British Empire expanded, the range of lexical influence widened to ever more exotic source languages (Dension, 1993: 13). The types of borrowed words noted above are examples of external changes in English, and the internal changes overlap with the historical period

15、s described above. According to Fennell (2005: 2), the year 500 AD marks the branching off of English from other Germanic dialects; the year 1100 AD marks the period in which English lost the vast majority of its inflections, signaling the change from a language that relied upon morphological markin

16、g of grammatical roles to one that relied on word order to maintain basic grammatical relations; and the year 1500 AD marks the end of major French influence on the language and the time when the use of English was established in all communicative contexts. Thus, those internal changes will be elabo

17、rated below at the phonological, lexical, semantic and grammatical levels. 8.3 How language changes The change of the English language with the passage of time is so dramatic that today people hardly read OE or ME without special study. In general, the differences among OE, ME and ModE involve sound

18、, lexicon and grammar, as discussed below. 8.3.1 Phonological change The principle that sound change is normally regular is a very fruitful basis for examining the phonological history of a language. The majority of sound changes can be understood in terms of the movements of the vocal organs during

19、 speech, and sometimes more particularly in terms of a tendency to reduce articulatory effort (Trask, 2000: 70, 96). 8.3.1.1 Phonemic change 8.3.1.1.1 Vowel changeOne of the most obvious differences between ModE and the English spoken in earlier periods is in the quality of the vowel sounds (Yule, 2

20、000: 219). Sometimes a language experiences a wholesale shift in a large part of its phonological system. This happened to the long vowels of English in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries AD, each vowel becoming closer, the highest becoming diphthongs as in the words wife and house (respectively

21、changed from wayf /wi:f/ and haws /hu:s/ in OE). We call this shift the Great Vowel Shift (Poole, 2000: 127), and the specific changes may be diagrammed as follows (Robins, 2000: 342). In ME, the vowels in nearly all unstressed syllabic inflections were reduced to , spelled (Dension, 1993: 12). The

22、general obscuring of unstressed syllables is a most significant sound change (to be elaborated further in 8.3.3 and 8.3.4), since it is one of the fundamental causes of the loss of inflections (Fennell, 2005: 99). 8.3.1.1.2 Consonant changeConsonants are produced with an obstruction of the air-strea

23、m, and tend to be less stable over time than vowels in most languages. Two fairly common processes are assimilation and lenition.Assimilation is the process by which two sounds that occur close together in speech become more alike. This sort of change is easy to understand: moving the speech organs

24、all over the place requires an effort, and making nearby sounds more similar reduces the amount of movement required, and hence the amount of effort (Trask, 2000: 53). Instances can be found in words such as irregular, impossible and illegal, in which the negative prefixes im- and il- should be “in-

25、 based” in accordance with etymology. Under the influence of neighboring vowels, consonants may also be weakened. This weakening or lenition, can change a voiceless consonant into a voiced one and a plosive into a fricative (Poole, 2000: 126). Instances of h in native English words generally derive

26、from the lenition of an earlier *k: such words as head, heart, help, hill and he all began with k in a remote ancestral form of English, but this k was lenited first to x and then to h, and the modern lenition of h to zero merely completes a process of lenition stretching over several thousand years

27、 (Trask, 2000: 59). 8.3.1.2 Whole-segment change Certain phonological changes are somewhat unusual in that they involve, not just changes in the nature of segments, but a change in the number or ordering of segments, and these are referred to as whole-segment processes (Trask, 2000: 66). The change

28、known as metathesis involves a reversal in position of two adjoining sounds. The following are examples from the OE period: acsian ask bridd bird brinnan beornan (burn) frist first hros horse waeps wasp(Yule, 2000: 220). 8.3.2 Lexical change As defined by Freeborn (2000: 23), lexical change refers t

29、o new words being needed in the vocabulary to refer to new things or concepts, with other words dropping out when they no longer have any use in society. Lexical change may also involve semantic change, that is, change in the meaning of words. Thus, lexical change mainly consists of addition of new

30、words, loss of words and change in the meaning of words. 8.3.2.1 Addition of new words The conditions of life for individuals in society, their artifacts, customs, and forms of organization are constantly changing. Accordingly, many words in languages and the situations in which they are employed ar

31、e equally liable to change in the course of time (Robins, 2000: 343). Floods of new words constantly need to be added to the word-stock to reflect these developments. Etymology, which is the study of the history of individual words, shows that while the majority of words in a language are native wor

32、ds, there may also be loan words or borrowed words from another language. Native words are those that can be traced back to the earliest form of the language in question. In English, native words are words of Anglo-Saxon origin, such as full, hand, wind, red. Loan words are those that are borrowed o

33、r imported from another language, such as myth, career, formula, genius. Apart from borrowing, many new words are added to a language through word-formation. The following processes are quite pervasive in the addition of new words in the evolution of English. 8.3.2.1.1 Compounding and affixingAccord

34、ing to Fennell (2005: 77-8), new words in OE were mainly formed on the basis of compounding and affixing. Many words were formed through compounding, e.g. blod + read (“blood-red”); Engla (“Angles”) + land = England. Affixing covers suffixing and prefixing in OE, the former usually used to transform

35、 parts of speech while the latter generally used to change the semantic force. A suffix like -dom could create an abstract noun from another noun or adjective: wis + dom (“wisdom”). The perfective prefix ge- was most often used to form past participles: ceosan (“to choose), gecoren (“chosen”); finda

36、n (“to find”), gefunden (“found”). It could also be used to change the meaning of a word: hatan (“to call”), gehatan (“to promise”). In modern English, new words are added not only through compounding and affixing, but also by means of coinage, conversion, blending, backformation and abbreviation. A

37、ll these word-formation processes are discussed in Chapter 3.8.3.2.1.2 Reanalysis and metanalysis Reanalysis means that a word which historically has one particular morphological structure, is perceived by speakers as having a second, quite different structure. The Latin word minimum consisted in La

38、tin of the morphemes min- (“little”, also found in minor and minus) and -im- (“most”), plus an inflectional ending; however, thanks to the influence of the unrelated miniature, English speakers have apparently reanalyzed both words as consisting of a prefix mini- (“very small”) plus something incomp

39、rehensible, leading to the creation of miniskirt and all the newer words which have followed it (Trask, 2000: 102). The history of English provides some nice examples of reanalysis involving nothing more than the movement of a morpheme boundary, a type of change impressively called metanalysis. Form

40、s like a napron and an ewt were apparently misheard as an apron and a newt, producing the modern forms. Other similar instances are adder (the English former word: naddre), umpire (noumpere) and nickname (ekename) (Trask, 2000: 103).8.3.2.1.3 Analogical creation Analogical creation is the replacemen

41、t of an irregular or suppletive form within a grammatical paradigm by a new form modeled on the forms of the majority of members of the class to which the word in question belongs. The virtual replacement of kine by cows as the plural of cow is an example of analogical creation, and so are the more

42、modern regular past tense forms helped, climbed, and snowed, for the earlier holp, clomb, and snew (Robins, 2000: 359). Analogical creation is quite persuasive in accounting for the process of cultural transmission to be discussed in 8.4.2. 8.3.2.2 Loss of wordsIn the course of time, some words pass

43、 out of current vocabulary as the particular sorts of objects or ways of behaving to which they refer become obsolete. One need only think in English of the former specialized vocabulary, now largely vanished, which relates to obsolete sports such as falconry (Robins, 2000: 343). Such examples aboun

44、d in almost every language.8.3.2.3 Semantic changeSemantic change refers to changes in the meanings of words. There are mainly three processes of semantic change: broadening, narrowing and meaning shifts (Fromkin & Rodman 1983: 297).Broadening and narrowing are changes in the scope of word meaning.

45、That is, some words widen the range of their application or meaning, while other words have their contextual application reduced in scope. Broadening is a process by which a word with a specialized meaning is generalized to cover a broader or less definite concept or meaning. For example, the origin

46、al meaning of carry is “transport by cart”, but now it means “transport by any means”. Narrowing is the opposite of broadening, a process by which words with a general meaning become restricted in use and express a narrow or specialized meaning. For example, the word girl used to mean “a young perso

47、n”, but in modern English it refers to a young female person. More examples of broadening and narrowing are provided below: Broadening: dog (docga OE) one particular breed of dog all breeds of dogs bird (brid ME) young bird all birds irrespective of ageholiday (holy day) a religious feast the very g

48、eneral break from workNarrowing: hound (hund OE) any kind of dog a specific breed of dogmeat (mete OE) any kind of food edible food from animalsdeer (dor ME) any beast, animal one species of animalMeaning shift is a process by which a word that used to denote one thing is used to mean something else

49、. For example, the word coach, originally denoting a horse-drawn vehicle, now denotes a long-distance bus or a railway vehicle. Meaning shifts also include transference of meaning, that is, change from the literal meaning to the figurative meaning of words. For example, in expressions like the foot

50、of a mountain, the bed of a river and the eye of a needle, we use foot, bed and eye in a metaphorical way. Other types of meaning shifts include elevation and degradation. Elevation of meaning is a process by which a word changes from a derogatory sense to an appreciative sense. For example, the wor

51、d nice originally meant “ignorant” and fond simply meant “foolish”. Degradation of meaning is a process by which a word of appreciative meaning falls into pejorative use. For example, the word silly used to mean “happy” and cunning originally meant “skillful”.8.3.3 Grammatical change The most fundam

52、ental feature that distinguishes Old English from the language of today is its grammar (Baugh & Cable, 2001: 54). Modern English is an analytic language while Old English is a synthetic language. The major difference is that a synthetic language is one that indicates the relation of words in a sente

53、nce largely by means of inflections, but an analytic language makes extensive use of prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and depends on word order to show other relationships. In OE, the order of words in a clause was more variable than that of ModE, and there were many more inflections on nouns, adjecti

54、ves and verbs (Freeborn, 2000: 66). The grammatical changes of English such as those in number, gender, case and tense mainly took place on its morphological level, while syntactic changes such as those in word order are the consequence of the loss of rich inflections in English. The most sweeping m

55、orphological change during the evolution of English is the progressive decay of inflections. OE, ME and ModE can be called the periods of full, reduced and zero inflections, respectively because, during most of the OE period the endings of the noun, the adjective, and the verb are preserved more or

56、less unimpaired, while during the ME period the inflections become greatly reduced, and finally by the ModE period, a large part of the original inflectional system had disappeared entirely (Dension, 1993: 12; Baugh & Cable, 2001: 50).The loss of inflections in the case system of Old English is a go

57、od example of grammatical change. Case is the grammatical feature that marks functions of the subject, object, or possession in a clause. In OE, nouns showed a four-term case contrast, for which the Latinate terms nominative (subject), accusative (direct object), genitive (possessive) and dative (in

58、direct object) are conventionally used, and the case-ending system can be illustrated by the following:CASEnominativegenitivedativeaccusativeMODERNENGLISHstone/stonesstones/stonesstone/stonesstone/stonesOESINGULARstnstnesstnestnOEPLURALstnasstnastnumstnas (Fromkin & Rodman, 1983: 290)The ME period i

59、s the beginning of the loss of most of the inflections of OE, mainly through the weakening and dropping of the final unstressed vowels. For example, when the vowel was dropped in the plural form of stones stR:ns, it became stRwnz, and when the “weak” syllables representing case endings in the forms

60、of the singular, genitive plural, and dative plural were dropped, English lost much of its case system (ibid).The loss of inflections marks a transition of English from a synthetic to an analytic language, and thus led to a greater reliance on word order. Word order in OE was more variable than that

61、 of ModE: word order was not as fixed or rigid in OE as it is in ModE (Fennell, 2005: 59). Both the orders subject-object-verb (“h hine geseah”: “he saw him”) and object-subject-verb (“him man ne sealde”: “no man gave any to him”) are possible (Yule, 2000: 221). Word order in an OE sentence was not

62、so crucial because OE is so highly inflected. The doer of the action and the object of the action were revealed unambiguously by various case endings, which makes the sentence meaning perfectly clear. It can be said that changes in sound, lexicon and grammar do not operate separately or independentl

63、y of each other, but they are interacting and interdependent. One change is often integrated or incorporated into the other changes. And, it is the complex interrelationships among them that have shaped the whole process of the language change. As is shown above, the dropping of the final unstressed

64、 vowels led to the loss of inflections of OE, and this in turn led to a greater reliance on word order.8.4 Why language changes No change described above has happened overnight, but has constantly and gradually taken place. Many changes are difficult to discern while they are in progress. The causes of language change are many and various, and only some of them are reasonably well understood at present (Trask, 2000: 12). Two broad categories of factors contribute to language change: