Types of language change + views

Diachronic Change

The historical development of language

Synchronic change

The study of language change at a particular moment in time

Descriptivism

• Involves exploring, analysing and describing language.

• Acknowledges language change as an important thing to study, and celebrates multicultural/multilingual diversity.

• All varieties of language are equal.

• Language choices are neither ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ and are understood according to the context they appear in.

Prescriptivism

• Aligns language change with ‘failing standards, laziness and sloppiness’ with little regard of context the language appears in.

• Believes in linguistic standards, correctness and rules, reject celebration of multiculturalism (rejecting any sort of change to the traditional standards of english.) Also claims language is ruining tradition and the beauty of english.

• Norman Tebbit, an MP suggests that if standards slip to the point where “good english is no better than bad english, where people turn up filthy to school” then this causes people to have “no standards at all” and that therefore there would be “no imperative to stay out of crime.”

• eg. grammar books support prescriptivism - this is good to mention about the influences of prescriptivism when talking about grammar books. Also, standardisation in a way supports prescriptivism, that there is a ‘right way’ to use language and that it should be used consistently.

Semantic change

• Refers to changing of the meaning of words overtime.

• Four types: Narrowing, broadening, amelioration, and pejoration.

Semantic Narrowing

• Process by which a words meaning becomes less general, and more specific overtime.

• eg. ‘Hound’ used to refer to any type of dog whereas now it refers to specifically hunting dogs. ‘Girl’ used to mean either gender but now refers to specifically female children. ‘Accident’ used to mean any unseen or unexpected event however now means an unfortunate of disastrous event.

Semantic broadening

• Process by which a word gains additional, broader meanings overtime (is commonly associated in todays society with the rapid acceleration of technology development/ reusing existing words with new contexts.)

• eg. ‘friend’ means to get along well with someone/good companionship, but also means to friend someone on social media due to technology development. ‘Mouse’ used to refer to just a rodent but now also refers to a computer input device.

Semantic Amelioration

• Process by which a word develops positive connotations overtime compared to what connotations it had before.

• eg. ‘nice’ used to stupid whereas today, it means pleasant and agreeable. ‘Fun’ used to refer to “an act of fraud or deception” to “light-hearted pleasure, enjoyment, or amusement.” ‘Cute’ used to mean ‘keen, sharp witted and clever’ whereas now it means ‘pretty, attractive, charming.’ ‘Pretty’ used to mean ‘cunning, and crafty’ to now attractive in appearance, and pleasant to the senses.’

Semantic pejoration

• Process by which a words develops negative connotations overtime and becomes less favourable than its previous connotations.

• eg. ‘attitude’ used to refer to a persons state without any suggestion if this was positive or negative, but however now connotes to ‘disagreement’ or ‘agression.’ ‘Issue’ used to refer to simply a topic of discussion whereas today refers to more of a problem or complaint.

Phonetic Change

• Refers to shift in sound of words.

• Unlikely to talk about this in the exam, but it could be worth mentioning in the context of WHY phonetic shift occurred due to the great vowel shift where pronunciation of words were shifting, and the influence of accents on word pronunciation when people form different areas were mixing/integrating together. But its important to consider that there is no standard pronunciation for a word - represents diversity of accents in phonetic shits.

Lexical change

• Changes to the words we actually have available to use. Lexical change is the process by which words are coined, altered or recycled to fit our needs or attitudes

• Coining (creating) Neologisms (new words) - This would be good to mention when talking about lexical gap theory.

• Derivation - add a prefix or suffix to an existing word: post-punk, democratise, hyperlink.

• Compounding - placing two words together: bailout, keyboard, jellyfish.

• Blending - compounding but with the removal of part of one or both words: brunch, biopic, motel, workaholic.

• Conversion - taking a word from class and converting it to another: giant (Noun to Adj), friend (Noun to Verb).

• Eponyms - named after a related place or person: cheddar, Alzheimer's, wellington, gun

• Abbreviation -
  Clipping (rhino, cardio, temp),
  Acronyms (NASA, MAGA, LASER)
  and Initialisms (VIP, DVD, BCE)

• Back Formation - remove a prefix or suffix to form a different part of speech from the original word:
  enthuse (from the noun enthusiasm), emote (from the noun emotion), liaise (from the noun liaison),
  babysit (from the noun babysitter).

• Nonce Words - complete inventions without a clear rule: fleek, bling, quark.

• Loan Words – words which enter the English lexicon from other languages (Schadenfreude, Ketchup, alarm, royal, beef, pork etc.

  Other key terms:

• Obsolete - where a word entirely falls out of usage.

• Archaic- where a word is rarely used (but still has some function in certain contexts or scenarios.)

• The process of words falling out of usage is called obsolescence.

Orthographic change

• Refers to changes to our systems of spelling and punctuation, capitalisation.

• Important concept to mention is the adoption of standardisation of spelling and the historical complications of this eg. the printing press vs the great vowel shift.

Syntactic Change

• Refers to how word order and sentence construction changes overtime.

• Looking out for different types of sentence structures eg. simple sentence, compound and complex sentences. - could the presence or not presence of these link to any historical context at the time compared to todays society. eg. an advertisement today uses very short, simple sentences so the readers does not have to read a lot to avoid boredom whereas old adverts use quite long, complex sentences to describe the product/event.

• Word order - Modern standard English usually follows a subject-verb-object structure (however not always.)