English Linguistics Part 1 theory

Name two factors of language changes

Internal and External Factors

What do internal factors include?

Linguistic economy (principle of least effort), preservation of communicative clarity

What does linguistic economy comprise of?

Assimilation (wifman-wimman), Simplification of consonant clusters (castle, knee), addition of sounds (burh-buruh), Inversion of consonants (acsian-ask), Analogy (staff/stavves-staff/staffs)

What preservation of communicative clarity include?

Fixing of word order (SVO), as inflexions are dropped, change in a phoneme as another adjcaent morpheme starts to be pronounced in a similar way.

What do external factors include?

Socio-historical factors (language contact, spread of literacy, prestige)

Language contact - borrowings

also known as loan words: words borrowed from the donor language into the recipient language (restaurant from French)

Language contact - pidginization and creolization

Pidgin - non-native language where elements of the native language (substrate) and dominant language (superstrate) are employed to facilitate basic communication. Borrowed lexis from the superstrate, grammar of the subsrate. Creole - native language derived from a pidgin.

Name 5 language variations:

Diatopic (geographical), diastratic (social group), diaphasic (style/register), diamesic (written/oral), diachronic change (over time).

Name types of lexical change

neologism, borrowing, semantic change

What is neologism? What does it include?

New words formed through morphological changes. It consists of: derivation, compounding, conversion, clipping and blending/portmanteau formation.

Derivation, the definition

process of creating new words by adding prefixes or suffixes to existing words, addition of a grammatical affix (unkind)

Compounding

the process of combining two or more words to create a new word with a specific meaning, such as 'toothbrush', combining two lexical bases (blackbird)

Conversion

the process of changing a word's grammatical category without altering its form, such as using a noun as a verb (e.g., 'to run' from 'a run'), derivation without the addition of an affix (text —to text)

clipping

the process of shortening a word by removing syllables, such as 'ad' from 'advertisement', removing part of a longer word (omnibus - bus)

blending/portmanteau formation

the process of merging two or more words to create a new term, typically combining sounds and meanings, like 'smog' from 'smoke' and 'fog', combining parts of two words (smog, brunch)

Borrowing

the process of taking words from one language and incorporating them into another, often reflecting cultural exchange, such as 'ballet' from French, there are 2 types: direct borrowing - often undergoes phonological or morphological adaptation, calque - a foreigh word or phrase translated morpheme-by-morpheme (example: point of view - french, point de vue)