语言学基础教程

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

14、Latin 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 pe

15、riods 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 ma

16、rking 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 e

17、laborated 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 s

18、ound, 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 du

19、ring 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 (Yul

20、e, 2000: 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 (respectiv

21、ely 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 <e> (Dension, 1

22、993: 12). The 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

23、 the air-stream, 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

24、speech organs 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-

25、should be “in- 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 gen

26、erally derive 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

27、thousand years (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

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

29、 defined by Freeborn (2000: 23), lexical change refers to 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.

30、Thus, lexical change mainly consists of addition of new 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 la

31、nguages and the situations in which they are employed are 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

32、while the majority of words in a language are native words, 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, h

33、and, wind, red. Loan words are those that are borrowed or 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 evolut

34、ion of English. 8.3.2.1.1 Compounding and affixingAccording 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 a

35、nd prefixing in OE, the former usually used to transform 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 par

36、ticiples: ceosan (“to choose), gecoren (“chosen”); findan (“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,

37、 conversion, blending, backformation and abbreviation. All 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 dif

38、ferent structure. The Latin word minimum consisted in Latin 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 consistin

39、g of a prefix mini- (“very small”) plus something incomprehensible, 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

40、, a type of change impressively called metanalysis. Forms 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 A

41、nalogical creation Analogical creation is the replacement 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

42、 an example of analogical creation, and so are the more 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

43、.2.2 Loss of wordsIn the course of time, some words pass 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 s

44、uch as falconry (Robins, 2000: 343). Such examples abound 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).Broaden

45、ing and narrowing are changes in the scope of word meaning. 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

46、or less definite concept or meaning. For example, the original 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 mea

47、ning. For example, the word girl used to mean “a young person”, 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 à all breeds of dogs bird (brid ME) young bird à al

48、l birds irrespective of ageholiday (holy day) a religious feast à the very general break from workNarrowing: hound (hund OE) any kind of dog à a specific breed of dogmeat (mete OE) any kind of food à edible food from animalsdeer (dor ME) any beast, animal à one species of animalM

49、eaning shift is a process by which a word that used to denote one thing is used to mean something else. 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 f

50、rom the literal meaning to the figurative meaning of words. For example, in expressions like the foot 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

51、process by which a word changes from a derogatory sense to an appreciative sense. For example, the word 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

52、 used to mean “happy” and cunning originally meant “skillful”.8.3.3 Grammatical change The most fundamental 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

53、. The major difference is that a synthetic language is one that indicates the relation of words in a sentence 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 wor

54、ds in a clause was more variable than that of ModE, and there were many more inflections on nouns, adjectives 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

55、as those in word order are the consequence of the loss of rich inflections in English. The most sweeping morphological 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

56、, during most of the OE period the endings of the noun, the adjective, and the verb are preserved more or 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 (Den

57、sion, 1993: 12; Baugh & Cable, 2001: 50).The loss of inflections in the case system of Old English is a good 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 w

58、hich the Latinate terms nominative (subject), accusative (direct object), genitive (possessive) and dative (indirect 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 is the beginning of the loss of most o