Concept of Linguistic Change

One can distinguish three main types of difference in language: geographical, social and temporal. Linguistic changes imply temporal differences, which become apparent if the same elements or parts of the language are compared at successive historical stages; they are transformations of the same units in time which can be registered as distinct steps in their evolution. For instance, the OE form of the Past tense pl Ind. Mood of the verb to find – fundon ['fundon] became founden ['fu:ndən] in the 12th-13th c. and found in Mod E. The continuity of the item was not broken, though we can register several changes: a) phonetic and spelling changes as the root vowel [u] became [u:] and then [au] and the letter u was replaced by the digraph ou; b) phonetic and morphological changes in the inflection: - on>-en > — (the sign > means ‘became, developed into’); c) morphological changes in the place of the form in the verb paradigm and its grammatical meaning: fundon was the Past tense pl. of the Ind. Mood; its descendant founden was also the form of Past pl Subj and Part. II, as these three forms had fallen together; the modern found has further extended its functions – it stands now both for the singular and plural since these forms are not distinguished in the Past tense. All these changes can be defined as structural or intralinguistic as they belong to the language system.

The concept of linguistic change is not limited to internal, structural changes. It also includes temporal differences in the position of the given unit in language space that is the extent of its spread in the functional varieties of the language. A new feature – a word, a form, a sound – can be recognised as a linguistic change only after it has been accepted for general use in most varieties of the language or in its main, "prestige" variety – the Literary Standard. For instance, in the l0th-llth c. many Scandinavian words penetrated into the Northern dialects of the English language (as a result of Scandinavian invasions and mixture of the population), e.g. sky, they, call; later they entered literary English.

Most linguistic changes involve some kind of substitution and can therefore be called replacements. Replacements are subdivided into different types or patterns. A simple one-to-one replacement occurs when a new unit merely takes the place of the old one, e.g. in the words but, feet the vowels [u] and [e:] (pronounced four or five hundred years ago) have been replaced by [ʌ] and [i:] respectively ([u] > [ʌ] and [e:] > [i:]). OE ea was replaced by the French loan-word river, OE ēode ['eode], the Past tense of to go, was replaced by a new form, went. Replacements can also be found in the plane of content; they are shifts of meaning in words which have survived from the early periods of history, e.g. OE feoh [feox] had the meaning ‘cattle’, ‘property^’, its modern descendant is fee.

Those are the simplest one-to-one replacements. Most linguistic changes, however, both in the language system and language space, have a more complicated pattern. Two or more units may fall together and thus may be replaced by one unit, or, vice versa, two distinct units may take the place of one. The former type of replacement is defined as merging or merger, the latter is known as splitting or split. The modern Common case of nouns is the result of the merging of three OE cases – Nom., Gen. and Acc. Many instances of splitting can be found in the history of English sounds, e.g. the consonant [k ] has split into two phonemes [k] and [ʧ] in words like kin, keep and chin, child.

Linguistic changes classified into different types of replacement, namely splits and mergers, can also be described in terms of oppositions, which is a widely recognized method of scientific linguistic analysis. Thus a merger is actually an instance of neutralisation or loss of oppositions between formerly contrasted linguistic units, while the essence of splitting is the growth of new oppositions between identical or non-distinctive forms. To use the same examples, when three OE cases merged into the Comm. case, the opposition between the cases was neutralised or lost. When [k] split into [k] and [t ] there arose a new kind of phonemic opposition – a plosive consonant came to be opposed to an affricate (cf. kin and chin).

Although many linguistic changes can be described in terms of replacements and explained as loss and rise of oppositions, the concept of replacement is narrower than that of linguistic change. Some changes are pure innovations, which do not replace anything, or pure losses. Thus we should regard as innovations numerous new words which were borrowed or coined to denote entirely new objects or ideas, such as sputnik, Soviet, nylon, high-lacking, baby-sitter. On the other hand, many words have been lost (or have died out) together with the objects or ideas which have become obsolete, e.g. OE witena ʒ emōt ‘Assembly of the elders’, numerous OE poetic words denoting warriors, ships and the sea.

In addition to the distinctions described above – and irrespective of those distinctions, – various classifications of linguistic changes are used to achieve an orderly analysis and presentation. It is obvious from the examples quoted that linguistic changes are conveniently classified and described in accordance with linguistic levels: we can speak of phonetic and phonological changes (also sound changes), spelling changes, grammatical changes, including morphology and syntax, lexical and stylistic changes. At these levels further subdivisions are made: phonetic changes include vowel and consonant changes, qualitative and quantitative changes, positional and independent changes, and so on. Changes at the higher levels fall into formal and semantic, since they can affect the plane of expression and the plane of content; semantic changes, in their turn, may take various forms: narrowing or widening of meaning, metaphoric and metonymic changes, etc.

In books on language history one may often come across one more division of linguistic changes: into historical and analogical. This distinction was introduced by the Young Grammarian school in the late 19th c. A change is defined as historical only if it can be shown as a phonetic modification of an earlier form, e. g., the modern pl ending of nouns -es has descended directly from its prototype, OE -as due to phonetic reduction and loss of the vowel in the unstressed ending (cf. OE stan-as and NE ston­-es); both the change and the resulting form are called "historical";. An analogical form does not develop directly from its prototype; it appears on the analogy of other forms, similar in meaning or shape. When the plural ending -es began to be added to nouns which had never taken -as – but had used other endings: -u, -an, or -a, – it was a change by analogy or an instance of analogical levelling. This analogical change gave rise to new forms referred to as "analogical" (cf. OE nam-an and NE nam-es).

So far we have spoken of separate changes: those of sounds, grammatical forms, or words. In describing the evolution of language, we shall more often deal with the development of entire sets or systems of linguistic units. Every separate change enters a larger frame and forms a part of the development of a certain system. As known, language is a system of interrelated elements, subsystems and linguistic levels. Every linguistic unit is a component part of some system or subsystem correlated to other units through formal or semantic affinities and oppositions. The alteration of one element is part of the alteration of the entire system as it reveals a re-arrangement of its structure, a change in the relationships of its components.

The systemic nature of linguistic change can be illustrated by the following examples.

In the early periods of history the verb system in English was relatively poor: there were only two simple tenses in the Ind. Mood – Pres. and Past – the prototypes of the modern Pres. and Past Indef. In the course of time the system was enriched by numerous analytical forms: the Future tense, the Continuous and Perfect forms. The development of these forms transformed the entire verb system, which has acquired new formal and semantic oppositions; the growth of analytical forms has also affected the employment of the two simple forms, for some of their former meanings came to be expressed by the new compound forms (e.g. futurity and priority).

In the age of Shakespeare (late 16th– early 17th c.) in certain phonetic conditions the sonorant [r] changed into [ə] giving rise to diphthongs, e.g. bear, beer, poor; the new set of diphthongs with a central glide [ɪə], [еə], [ʊə] introduced new distinctive features into the system of vowel phonemes.