Language Change

Old English: Kisses the girl the boy often? (main verb is moved)

Modern English: Does the girl kiss the boy often? (requires the word do)

• In Old English, the comparatives and superlatives were doubled (more lower, moost royallest)

Lexical Change

• Change in category – hoover, text, food, twitter

• Addition of New Words, Loss of Old Words (beseem-to be suitable, wot – to know)

Semantic Change

Broadening

• When the meaning of a word becomes broader

• Dogge – firstly referred to a specific breed of dog, now it is used to name all members of the species

• The word holiday originally meant a day of religious significance, from “holy day.” Today the word refers to any day that we do not have to work

• More recent broadenings are mouse, cookie, virus, footage

Narrowing

• Deer meant “beast” or “animal”, now it is narrowed to just a particular animal

• Hound – “dog”, now it is a particular dog breed

Meaning Shifts

• Knight meant “youth”, but shifted to “mounted man-at-arms”

• Lust meant just „pleasure „without sexual overtones

• Silly used to mean „happy “, then „naive “, now „foolish “

• Pejoration – change in meaning for worse

• Nice meant „ignorant “

Changes

• Each child constructs the grammar of her language alone, generalizing rules from the linguistic input she receives, but it will never be the same as the adult language

• For example, at certain times they may say “It’s I” and at other times “It’s me.” The less formal style is usually used with children, who, as the next generation, may use only the “me” form of the pronoun in this construction

• Analogic change – generalization of rules that reduces the number of exceptional or irregular morphemes

• For example – plow/plows. Vow/vows – analogic change was that people started to say cow/cows instead of plural “kine”

• Other example: datum/data, agendum/agenda, curriculum/curricula, memorandum/memoranda, medium/media are being replaced by regular plurals by many speakers: agenadas, memorandums

• In some cases the borrowed original plural forms were consideres to be the singular (agenda, criteria) and the new plural (agendas) is a plural-plural.

• Or in some cases speakers think that they do not a have a plural forms

• The study of linguistic change is called historical and comparative linguistics

Why do language change?

• Influence by other languages

• Isolated island – the language be never the same, children are making their own version of language, because they have our language just second hand, just our performance, not a competence

• Simplification – regularity of verbs, plural

• Simplification – clipping (saving our breath – but it is more similar to other things microphone/mic – might)