Riassunto esame Linguistica inglese, prof.ssa Maggioni, libro consigliato A handbook of presentday English, Pulcini

A handbook of present-day English

A cura di Virginia Pulcini

Language change and variation in English

Gerardo Mazzaferro

1. Language change, variation and history

As all social aspects of human life, languages are subject to constant processes of change which can take place suddenly, as in the case of introduction of new words, or slowly, as for example the change of pronunciation from one generation to the next. There are not static or uniform languages. All languages can be considered as open and dynamic entities which adapt to history and culture of the speech communities in which they are in use.

Language changes happen through the adoption and diffusion of a certain language form, or variant (e.g. a phoneme, a word or a syntactic construction). As a consequence, equivalent variants may coexist within a speech community for either a long or short time until one predominates over the other.

All languages show a surprising level of variability concerning their phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical structures. The study of language variability commonly deals with how language varies among its speakers, when speakers use different variants, and what the social and linguistic significance of such variation is.

In major modern languages we usually analyse language variability in relation to its standard variety, which is considered the language par excellence in terms of social prestige, language functions and domains of use. Non-standard varieties, by contrast, have been commonly regarded as “irregularly patterned” and “unsystematic” with respect to standard.

According to sociolinguistics, all the varieties of a language have the same status. In other words, the categories of correctness and appropriateness shouldn’t be applied to languages.

Sociolinguistic has mainly contributed to the understanding of how language behaviour and language variability are influenced by social factors, or social variables such as social class, social network, sex/gender, ethnicity and age and, at a general level, by the context in which the interaction takes place, the people we address and our willingness to accommodate or dissociate from them.

EX: Labov's analysis of the pronunciation of the phoneme [r] in NYC according to social class and style (1960).

The prestigious 'r-full' pronunciation was less frequently used by speakers from the lower socio-economic classes and increased in the pronunciation of middle and upper-class speakers. The use of [r] increased in all speakers as the degree of attention and formality increased. This proves that all speakers tended to conform to the more prestigious norm when they are monitored as they speak. The analysis also shows that the lower middle-class out-performed speakers from upper middle-class. This phenomenon is an example of hypercorrection, whereby middle-class speakers conformed to the prestige norm with higher frequency than the next higher classes.

Language behaviour is conditioned by factors like language attitude towards a specific language or variety. Languages, in fact, encode a particular social meaning which is determined by their speakers, the speech communities they are associated with and their functions and domains of use. A positive attitude favours the adoption and diffusion of a variant, thus contributing to language change. The use of a prestige variety represents a means which allows both social mobility and access to cultural values which are perceived as prestigious.

Language change and variation do not emerge exclusively in relation to their social and structural status at a given time, or synchronically, but they take place along a historical continuum, or ordered chronological sequencing of events.

Historic linguistics, or diachronic linguistics, has been the main paradigm of investigation of language change over time. There are two approaches to historical language change:

• Comparative linguistics or language reconstruction, which is based on the concept of 'proto-language', usually a reconstructed language, and 'language family', the latter being divided in sub-families or parent languages. For example, English is a Germanic language, which originated from Indo-European and which belongs to the sub-group of Germanic.
• The history of language, which is the study of the changes undergone by a single language over the centuries. Literature on the history of language has usually distinguished between external and internal causes for change. External causes are extralinguistic or social factors which contribute to language change, such as technological innovations. The internal causes are changes leading to balance in the system, like for example the analogical spread of a regular form.

Traditional histories of English Language (HEL) have mainly focused on the history of the standard variety and its speakers and have conceived the HEL as divided into three main periods: Old English (OE – 700-1150), Middle English (ME – 1150-1500) and Modern English (ModEngl – 1500-1900). This approach has been supported by the ideology or “discourses” according to which the development of English has happened in a sociolinguistic vacuum, where language change has been considered exclusively as an internal or structural matter, and phenomena such as language contact and mixing have been simply disregarded or overlooked.

The analysis of language use in social context applied to the history of language is, however, difficult for at least two main reasons: firstly, the lack of any spoken evidence for the earlier stages of language and, secondly, the difficulty of interpreting and dating changes in earlier written texts.

2. Types of language change

2.1 Phonological change

Phonological change deals with any mutations within the sound system of a language and can be both sporadic and regular. Sporadic change refers to changes which affect the sound of a limited number of words (the loss of [r] in speak, or the aspiration of PDE voiceless plosives /p, t, k/ in words such as pool [pʰu:l], tool [tʰu:l] and cool [kʰu:l]). Regular change implies changes leading to the re-organisation of the phonological inventory of a language, e.g. the split of the nasal phoneme [ŋ] around 1600 (it didn't exist in OE).

A further distinction concerning phonological change refers to the differentiation between an unconditioned and a conditioned change. An unconditioned change refers to sound change regardless of the phonetic context in which it happens as in the case of the so-called Great Vowel Shift (GVS), which started in the 15^th century and affected ME long vowels. It caused a major reorganization of the vowel system through a push chain process. The vowel /iː/ was the first to change, becoming a diphthong: [biːt] > [bɛit] > [bəit] > [baɪt] (PDE bite [baɪt]). These changes partly explain the inconsistencies between spelling and pronunciation in PDE. Therefore, while pronunciation of English was dramatically modified by the GVS, its orthography had already begun to be standardised by the introduction of the printing press on the basis of 14^th century orthography and pronunciation.

A conditioned change refers to a phonological change which is conditioned by a specific phonetic environment, as for example the development of PDE fricative phonemes. In OE only one set of fricative phonemes existed, namely /f, s, θ/. Each of them was used to represent two different allophones:

• /f/ [f] and [v], e.g. OE wif [f] (PDE wife);
• /s/ [s] and [z], e.g. OE nosu [z] (PDE nose);
• < þ / ð > [θ] and [ð], e.g. OE þynne [θ] (PDE thin).

2.2 Morpho-syntactic change

Morpho-syntactic change refers to any change in both the morpho-phonematic and syntactic systems of a language. A standard example of morpho-phonematic change in English is represented by the levelling of the noun ending system in the transition from late OE to early ME. The main mechanisms of morpho-syntactic change are:

• Analogy: the process of modelling a language form in relation to an already existing form of that language;
• Hypercorrection, or speakers' awareness of the social value of the different language varieties within their speech community;
• Backformation, or the creation of a language form which is not historically documented.

Two main examples of syntactic change are: word order, or the order of the elements within the sentence, and grammaticalisation, or the phenomenon by which a grammatical function is given to a previously autonomous word.

2.3 Semantic change

Semantic change refers to any mutation in the meaning of individual lexical items, which is commonly influenced by external factors such as socio-cultural change, scientific innovation and foreign language influence, namely borrowing. There are different kinds of semantic change. There are two types of change which involve a change of meaning:

• Widening, or the use of a particular item in more than one context (PDE dog, which originally meant “a particular powerful breed of dog”);
• Narrowing: it indicates the opposite process (PDE meat, was originally used with the meaning of “food”);

and there are two types of change which affect connotation:

• Pejoration: it is linked to speakers' social attitude and prejudice (PDE silly derives from ME sely meaning “happy, innocent”);
• Amelioration: which refers to a change denoting a positive attitude towards a certain word (PDE queen comes from OE cwēn “woman, wife”).

3. The history of English

3.1 Old English (OE - 700-1500 AD)

Historically English is a Germanic language. It is, however, difficult to locate or give a date to the origin of the Germanic languages and their speakers. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, Germanic was the language of the populations who inhabited the continental European area.

The progenitor of Germanic is the Indo-European language that is a reconstructed language, which is considered to be the ancestor of classical languages like Latin, Greek and Slavic and as a consequence of many modern European languages such as Italian, French, Russian, English, and so on. The resemblance among these languages is testified by sound correspondences in words.

The stage of the language that goes from 700 to 1150 A.D. is commonly known as the OE period. The term OE refers to the Germanic dialects spoken at that time in England by Germanic population who were called Jutes, Angels and Saxon, and who arrived in the British Isles, a former partly Romanised Celtic-speaking area, in the 5^th century A.D.

The event that mostly contributed to the shaping of the OE language was the shaping of the OE language was the Christianisation of the Island, starting from the 6^th century, the main consequence of this being the introduction of the Latin alphabet and the progressive abandonment by the Anglo-Saxon of the Runic alphabet.

During the period from the 9^th to the 11^th centuries several manuscripts were written, copied and translated from Latin into OE, namely the West-Saxon dialect of OE. West-Saxon is commonly considered the first standard written language, or the language associated with political, military and cultural power in society.

Two important historical episodes profoundly changed the history of English during this period: the arrival and occupation of England by Scandinavian populations from the 8^th century on and the Norman conquest by William the Conqueror in 1066.

The term OE refers to a highly inflected or synthetic language. Synthetic means that language functions, grammatical categories and relations, and verbal conjugations (for person, number, mood and tense) are expressed by the use of a system of case markers, or inflections. PDE is, by contrast, an analytic language in which grammatical and syntactic relations are expressed by word order, and grammatical words such as prepositions and auxiliaries.

The most striking aspect is that in inflectional languages like Latin and OE, words are variable, that is they are usually composed of a root and an ending. OE distinguishes case (nominative, accusative, genitive and dative), number (singular and plural) and gender (masculine, feminine and neuter) for nouns, adjectives and pronouns.

The inflections of nouns are divided into two categories: strong (masculine and neuter) and weak (consonant nouns, three genders). The most striking differences in relation to PDE concern the forms and functions of the definite article (PDE the) and demonstrative pronouns (PDE sing. this/that and pl. these/those).

Language continuity from OE to PDE can be traced with reference to personal pronouns which show four main cases (nominative, accusative, genitive and dative), three persons (first, second and third) and three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter).

In OE there are two main types of verbs: strong (irregular) and weak (regular). Both strong and weak verbs show: two tenses (present and preterite), three moods (indicative, subjunctive and imperative), two infinitive forms and two participle (present and past).

A feature that contributes to differentiating OE from PDE is vocabulary. The core of OE vocabulary is inherited Germanic lexis as is testified by complex process of word formation and by the capacity to expand vocabulary. The influence of foreign languages such as Latin and Scandinavian is also attested during this period. For Latin, two major stages of influence can be distinguished:

• The first period related to the conquest of part of the British Isles by the Romans (54 B.C.);
• The second stage of influence concerns the period of Christianisation of the island from the 6^th century, when many religious terms were borrowed with minimal phonetic accommodation.

The Scandinavian influence on OE vocabulary during this period is limited to technical terms for ships, warfare and legal institutions.

3.2 Middle English (ME - 1150-1500)

The Norman conquest of England in 1066 is traditionally considered as the starting point of the Middle English period. We can distinguish three main stages for ME:

• A transitional stage (1066-1150), when sociolinguistic changes occurred. The Norman conquest represented the end of the advanced Anglo-Saxon social and cultural systems. The main evidence for language maintenance in Early ME is the continuity of the late Anglo-Saxon literary tradition, in particular the religious prose tradition, which was copied, read and interpreted in monasteries for at least a century and a half after the conquest.
• An early ME period (1150-1350), during which English gradually recovered its status of official language as is testified by the increasing number of legal documents and literary writings in vernacular.
• A late ME period (1350-1430). From the 14^th century on, many socio-cultural changes took place in England, such as urbanisation, in particular the growth of London and the rising of new social classes, namely middle classes, technological discoveries, particularly the introduction of the printing press by William Caxton in 1476. These events are linked to matters of education and standard language.

During the ME period three main languages were spoken in England: French (language of power), Latin (language of learning, education and Church) and English (spoken by the majority of the population). The ME period has been described as the stage of the language in which complex phenomena of dialectal variation, language contact and attempts to standardise language co-exist.

It is commonly assumed that during the ME period the OE noun case system underwent a process of re-adjustment owing to the collapse of vowels in unstressed syllables.

As regard ME adjectives, by the end of ME period the distinction between strong and weak types was lost. OE pronouns continued almost “unchanged” in ME, apart from the introduction of a new 3^rd pers. sing. form (PDE she). The verbal system of ME keeps the OE differentiation between strong and weak verbs, though some changes occur in relation to person endings.

The most innovative aspect of the ME verbal system is the development of new tenses, in particular:

• The future tense (in OE there isn’t future tense);
• The progressive/continuous tense.

During the ME period progressive perfect and pluperfect tenses also started to develop the passive voice. ME is the period in which a large number of French words entered the English language. During the 12^th and 13^th centuries a certain degree of French-English bilingualism existed among both upper and middle classes. By the end of this period nearly 900 words of French origin had entered the language: action, age, calm...

Latin continued to exercise great power on English as the language of the Church and scholarship and to a lesser extent of the law.

3.3 Modern English (ModEngl - 1500-1900)

The Modern English period is considered as the stage of the HEL when a new “consciousness” about linguistic matters increased the need “to fix” and “codify” both the vocabulary and the grammar of English, or, in other words, to standardise the language. The origins of standard English are to be found in the south-eastern Midland variety of English, spoken in London area in the 15^th century. The growth of standard English took place through a long process of selection, acceptance, elaboration and codification. While selection and acceptance are linked to positive attitude towards the standard variety due to its association with the “powerful” emerging upper-middle classes in England at that time, elaboration and codification are complex phenomena, closely linked to the political, social and cultural dimensions of this period.

In the course of these centuries English became the language of those domains where Latin and French were previously used, that is government, law, religion and education. The expansion of vocabulary gave rise to the opposition between the so-called Neologisers and Purists. The former language contributed to introducing a certain number of words into English, mainly from Latin and French. Purists believed in the preservation of native vocabulary through processes of word formation like prefixation and suffixation.

During the ModEngl period several glossaries and both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries were compiled.