Linguistic Changes, Their Rate and Mechanism.

LECTURE 1.

THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE HISTORY.

Social Nature of the Language.

Language is a social phenomenon. It grows and changes together with the growth and the development of a society reflecting all the major changes the society goes through.

Hierarchical Structure of Language as a System.

To study any element of the language we should understand that all the elements of the language present a well-organized system that has a hierarchical structure. It means that each element of the language has its own place in the structure of the system and belongs to certain level of the structure. The elements of the lower level are the foundation for higher level of the structure, which bears the name “hierarchical”. Each level has its own unit of investigation. The hierarchical structure of language as a system can be presented schematically as the following pyramid:

LEVELS: U N I T S

Text (texteme)

Super-syntactic (intonation)

Syntactic 1) phraseme

Syntaxeme

Lexical (lexeme)

Morphological (morpheme)

Phonological (phoneme)

Linguistic Changes, Their Rate and Mechanism.

Language history is a slow uninterrupted chain of linguistic process: alternations, changes and modifications and adaptations of certain linguistic units. The changes take place on every level of the hierarchical structure of the language as a system. But these changes are not evenly distributed in time: periods of intensive and vast changes at one or a few levels may be followed by periods of relative stability. The rate of language evolution is determined largely by the historical changes in the life of the society.

A living language can never be absolutely static. It is in the state of constant development. But it does not mean that the historical development of a language is a permanent instability. Many features of a language remain static in diachrony: they do not change at all or change slightly. Some features exist in all languages at any period of time, such as the division of sounds into vowels and consonants, the dysfunction between the main parts of speech and the parts of sentence. English possesses these universal properties and has many specific stable characteristics, e.g. most of English pronouns have been preserved through ages, many ways of word-formations have remained historically stable, and the grammatical categories of number in nouns and degrees of comparison in adjectives have suffered little alternation. But English also has some features, which have undergone profound changes, e.g. the grammatical categories of case and gender have been changed greatly. The proportion of stable and changeable features varies at different historical periods and at different linguistic levels. Statics and dynamics can be found both in synchrony and in diachrony. Dynamics in diachrony is called a linguistic change.

Linguistic changes are usually slow and gradual. They are mainly unnoticed by the speakers. The evolution of a language can only be noticed when centuries are observed. The role of linguistic changes is restricted by the communicative function of a language, because rapid changes would have disturbed communication between speakers of different generations. There are no revolutions in the language history. The role of linguistic changes is not constant. Different levels of language develop at different rates. The lexical level (the vocabulary of a language) can change more rapidly then the other levels. The phonetic and the grammatical systems are very slow to change. Beside that, the rate of linguistic changes is different at different historical periods (they may grow more intensive or may slow down).

A linguistic change begins with a synchronic variation. Alongside the existing language units some new ones spring up. They may be different in form, stylistic connotations, and social values. At the same time a new meaning may arise in the existing words or forms. There are two kinds of variations: formal and semantic. These synchronic variations can be found in every language at every stage of its history and are caused by two main factors:

1) functional differentiation of language;

2) tendencies of historical development.

Variation supplies material for a linguistic change and also provides conditions for its realizations. A speaker has to select, and he/she selects the most suitable forms, words, and phrases. For a certain period of time old and new forms co-exist indiscriminately as free variations. Later their relative frequencies may be changed and one form starts to predominate.

Thus, most of linguistic changes involve some kind of substitution and can therefore be called replacements. Replacements may be of different types:

one-to-one (one form is replaced by the other);

merging (two or more units fall together and are replaced by one unit);

splitting (two distinct units take the place of one).

But some linguistic changes are not replacements, they are pure innovations, e.g.borrowed or coined words to denote new object or ideas: sputnik, baby-sitter.

On the other hand, many words became archaic and even have died out.