Syntactic Change 1. Modern English is an SVO(Subject-Verb Object) language. The syntactic rules permit less variation in word order. In Modern English, negation is expressed by adding not or do not. We may also express negation by adding words like never or no: I am going I am not going I went I did not go I go to school I never go to school.
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Syntactic Change 1. Modern English is an SVO(Subject-Verb Object) language. The syntactic rules permit less variation in word order. In Modern English,
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Syntactic Change
1. Modern English is an SVO(Subject-Verb Object) language. The syntactic rules permit less variation in word order. In Modern English, negation is expressed by adding not or do not. We may also express negation by adding words like never or no:
I am going I am not goingI went I did not goI go to school I never go to school.I want food. I don’t want any food; I want no food.
2. contraction rules: do not don’t will not won’t
ME : the negative element occurs at the end of the word because “not” is put after the auxiliary
OE : the negative element occurs at the beginning of the contraction because it preceded the auxiliary in sentences.
3. “comparative” and “superlative” constructions:
ME : We form the comparative by adding - er to the adjective or by inserting more before it, the superlative is formed by adding – est or by inserting most.OE : Double comparatives and double superlatives occur, which today are ungrammatical : more gladder, more lover, most royallest.
Lexical Change
Lexical changes include:
(1) the addition of new words
(2) changes in the meanings of words
(3) the loss of words
1. New Words
Methods to form new words:
(a) Compounding: the recombining of old words to form new ones with new meanings. ex. bigmouth, chickenhearted, egghead … etc.
(c) Other methods: word coinage, deriving words from names, blends … etc.
2. Borrowings
Borrowing from other language is another important source of new words. It occurs when one language takes a word or morpheme from another language and adds it to the lexicon.
(a) Two divisions: (i) native words (ii) nonnative words (loan words)
(b) Ways: (i) directly ex. Feast (ii) indirectly ex. Algebra
(c) Introduce what languages did English
borrow from ? Similarly, other languages
borrow words.
e.x. Japanese from Chinese and European words
(esp. American English)
3. Loss of Words
A word is lost through inattention: nobody thinks of it; nobody uses it; and it fades out of the language.
4. Semantic Change
(a) Broadening: become widen and general ex. Holiday, picture
(b) Narrowing: become specific ex. Meat, deer
(c) Meaning shifts ex. Bead, silly
• Linguistic classification • The following slides are tackling very
significant questions:
• How are languages classified and?• How are family trees established?
Language and Language Families
World Languages-- Today there are approximately 6,000 languages spoken around the world. We do not know for certain if all of these derive originally from one common ancestor or parent language.
Language Origins
• Monogenetic Theories – Language origins in ONE common source, a Proto-Language.• Garden of Eden– Common Source
• Tower of Babel—Language diversity as punishment.
Language Origins
• Multi-Source Theories– Several Proto-Languages emerge in different locations around the world,
either around the same time or at different times.
Language Families
• We do know that many languages are related to each other. We call these groups of languages that
have a common ancestor Language Families. • English is part of the Indo-European Language
Family.
Discovery of Language Families
• Although we don't have any evidence of the original parent language (the culture that spoke it did not
possess writing), we call the original language Proto-Indo-European.
An Englishman, Sir William Jones (1786) was the first to notice that some languages were related to
each other by comparing words in Sanskrit (a very ancient I-E language) with words in Greek, Latin and
English.
Comparative Linguistics
• Comparative Linguistics–
The study of the relationships between different languages, often with the goal of reconstructing or
identifying the parent language.
Indo-European
• There are 10 major groups within the Indo-European Family of Languages.
• 1. Germanic (English is part of this group or sub-family).
• 2. Italic– This includes the Romance (Roman) languages of Latin (parent), French, Spanish, and
Portugese.
I-E Language Groups (10)
• 3. Celtic—This was one of the earliest and most wide-spread of the IE languages throughout
Europe. Its descendants include Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, Breton, and Welsh.
• 4. Hellenic—The languages and dialects of Greece, including Attic-Ionic (Athens) from with
Modern Greek derives.
IE Language Groups (10)
• 5. Balto-Slavic– This includes most of the major languages of Eastern Europe, including Polish and
Russian. • 6. Albanian• 7. Armenian
IE Language Groups (10)
• 8. Indo-Iranian: Some scholars divide this into two separate groups.
• A. From this group we get most of the major languages spoken in India, inluding Hindi and Urdu. • Sanskrit is the most ancient written form of IE
(written Hindu)
IE Language Groups (10)
• 8.B– We also get many of the most ancient languages spoken in Iran, including Persian.
• 9. Anatolian—This is an ancient language group. The most well-known language in this group is Hittite, a
language documented in the Old Testament.
IE Language Groups (10)
• Tocharian– An isolated language (no longer spoken) discovered from fragments of texts in Western
China.
Language Families (Two Models)
• Family Tree ModelThis model is a model of language change described
by an analogy with the concept of family tree. In this scientific metaphor, the family members are
languages, the family is a language family and the birth kinships of people are genetic relationships
between languages. A language can therefore be a parent or mother language or a daughter language
(fathers and sons are not in the metaphor). Languages can have lines of descent, can be cognate