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INTD0112 Introduction to Linguistics

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INTD0112 Introduction to Linguistics Announcements INTD0112 Midterm graded. Very good work overall. I wrote some comments, but should you have Introduction to questions, please do come to my office hours. Linguistics I’ll return HW4 by Monday at the very latest. HW5 is due today and will be returned to Lecture #21 you the Monday after Thanksgiving. Nov 18th, 2009 On Monday, I’ll let you know the order of presentations for the last week of classes. Language change continued Syntactic change: Word Order We have seen examples of three types of Word order in a language could change over language change so far: lexical, semantic, and time. For example, Old English (OE) had more morphological. variable word order than Modern English (ModE) does. Today, we discuss two other aspects of So, we do find SVO order in simple transitive change: syntactic change and phonological clauses: change. Hē geseah πone mann We also talk about historical linguistics, and He saw the man how to reconstruct dead languages. Syntactic change: Word Order Syntactic change: Word Order When the clause began with an element such as a (=“then”), the verb would follow that π When the object was a pronoun, the order in element, therefore preceding the subject: OE was typically SOV: πa sende sē cyning πone disc HēohinelQrde then sent the king the dish She him saved “Then the king sent the dish.” “She saved him.” 1 Syntactic change: Word Order Syntactic change: Word Order The same SOV word order also prevailed in As we noted earlier, case markings were lost embedded clauses, even when the object was during the Middle English (MidE) period, and, not a pronoun: as you should expect, SVO order became the πa hē πone cyning sōhte, hē bēotode unmarked word order in the language. when he the king visited, he boasted The following table shows the change in word order frequency that took place around 1300 “When he visited the king, he boasted.” and 1400: Syntactic change: Word Order Syntactic change: Negation Negation in OE was done by placing the negation marker ne before a verbal element: πQt he na siππan geboren ne wurde Year 1000 1200 1300 1400 1500 that he never after born not would-be OV % 53 53 40 14 2 “that he should never be born after that” VO % 47 47 60 86 98 Notice word order and the use of double negatives. Syntactic change: Negation Syntactic change: Negation Both forms developed a division of labor, where ne became Proto-Indo-European is believed to have had a the used form when the negation word is placed before verbs, negation marker ne. and non for other cases of negation: Il ne dorme pas In old Latin, a new form arose from combining he not sleeps (not) ne with the word for “one” (ūnum). This led to Vous venez ou non? the form non. you come or not Hence, Old French ended up with both non Interestingly, many French speakers today are dropping the ne: and ne. J’ai pas dit ça I’ve not said this 2 Double comparatives and superlatives Genitives Examples: The Wife’s Tale of Bath (MidE) more gladder, more lower, moost The Wife of Bath’s Tale (ModE) royallest, moost shamefullest These were all ok in Middle English. The man’s hat from Boston (MidE) The man from Boston’s hat (ModE) Phonological change Assimilation in place or manner Perhaps the most noticeable change in the grammar of a language happens in pronunciation. Even though change can affect all areas of phonology Old Spanish [semda] Æ Modern Spanish [senda] “path” (e.g., tone, stress, and syllable structure), we will Early Latin [inpossiblis] Æ Late Latin [impossiblis] focus here primarily on change involving individual Early OE [stefn] Æ Later OE [stemn] “stem” sounds as they occur in sequence. This is called Latin [octo] (c = k) Æ Italian [otto] “eight” sequential change. Assimilation: Affrication Assimilation: Nasalization Affrication is a form of assimilation in which Vowels may get nasalized before nasal palatalized stops become affricates, either [ts] consonants, followed by deletion of that nasal or [tS] if the original stop was voiceless, or [dz] consonant (typically when it is final). This is or [dZ] if the original stop was voiced, e.g., how nasal vowels were created in French and Latin centum [k] Æ Old French cent [ts] “one hundred” Portuguese, e.g., Latin medius [d] Æ Italian mezzo [dz] “half” Latin Portuguese French bon- bom [bo)] bon [bç)] “good” 3 Dissimilation Epenthesis Late Latin [amna] Æ Spanish [alma] “soul” Earlier OE [ganra] Æ Late OE [gandra] “gander” Latin [arbor] Æ Spanish [arbol] “tree” Latin [schola] Æ Spanish [escuela] “school” Italian [albero] (but cf. French arbre). Metathesis Vowel deletion A vowel may be deleted from a word, resulting Earlier OE waps Æ Late OE wasp “wasp” in apocope (if the vowel is final) or syncope (if the vowel is medial): Earlier OE πridda Æ Late OE πirdda “third” Apocope: Also at a distance: Latin [ōrmáre] Æ French [orner] “decorate” Latin mīra#culum Æ Spanish milagro Syncope: Latin [pérdere] Æ French [perdre] “lose” Vowel reduction Consonant deletion Vowel deletion is frequently preceded by Consonants may also delete from a word giving rise vowel reduction, where a vowel is reduced to to another instance of pronunciation change, e.g., Old and Middle English had [kn] and [gn], but the initial schwa, followed by syncope or apocope, e.g., consonant underwent deletion. OE MidE Early ModE And of course French provides a great example of loss of word-final consonant deletion: sta#nas [a] stones [´] stones [O] gros [gro] “large” nama [a] name [ ] name [ ] ´ O chaud [So] “warm” 4 Substitution Phonological split A phonological split happens when two allophones of the same phoneme become Substitution involves the replacement of one contrastive due to the loss of the conditioning segment with another similar-sounding environment. segment: This is how [n] and [N] came to be phonemes in MidE [x] Æ ModE [f] in “laugh” English: [N] was an allophone of /n/ before velar Standard English [T] Æ Cockney [f] in “thin” consonants, but when consonant deletion in MidE took place, it resulted in minimal pairs such as sin [sIn] and sing [sIN], making the difference phonemic. Phonological merge Phonological Shift Phonological merge happens when two A phonological shift is a change in which a series of phonemes collapse into one, e.g., the case of sounds is systematically modified so that their organization with respect to each other is altered. Cockney English /f/ and /T/: A well known example of this phonlogical change is fin [fIn] and thin [fIn] the so-called Great Vowel Shift (GVS) in the history of English, where the seven long vowels underwent a series of modifications between 1400-1600, as shown in the following table: The Great Vowel Shift The Great Vowel Shift i: u: Shift Example MidE ModE MidE ModE aj aw [i:] Æ [aj] [mi:s] Æ [majs] “mice” [u:] Æ [aw] [mu:s] Æ [maws] “mouse” e: o: [e:] Æ [i:] [ge:s] Æ [gi:s] “geese” [o:] Æ [u:] [go:s] Æ [gu:s] “goose” [E:] Æ [e:] [brE:k] Æ [bre:k] “break” E: ç: [ç:] Æ [o:] [brç:k] Æ [bro:k] “broke” a: [a:] Æ [e:] [na:m´] Æ [ne:m] “name” 5 The Great Vowel Shift The Great Vowel Shift We can see effects of the GVS in the The alternation is the result of the GVS taking alternation between long and short vowels in place after the Early Middle English Vowel word pairs like those below: Shortening rule affected the second word in please-pleasant each pair. serene-serenity When the GVS occurred, it affected only the sane-sanity first word of each pair since it was the one that had the long vowel by then. crime-criminal Summary of language change and Historical linguistics transition to “reconstruction” th To sum up, a language undergoes change in its The 19 century was the century for the study lexicon as well as all components of grammar of historical (aka diachronic) linguistics. (morphology, syntax, phonology, and semantics). Herman Paul in 1891: “It has been objected Over time, these changes might become that there is another view of language possible considerable enough to the point where we than the historical. I must contradict this.” become unable to tell if two historical varieties of the same language are actually related. Luckily, though, historical linguists developed ways to establish historical relations among languages. We discuss this today. Reconstruction and the comparative method Cognates Historical linguists, aka comparativists, were The forms compared were typically words that mainly concerned with “reconstructing” the were believed to have developed from the properties of the parent language of a group of languages that are believed to be genetically same ancestral root. They are called cognates. related. Consider the following table of Germanic Reconstruction was done by means of the cognates: comparative method, whereby earlier forms were determined via the comparison of later forms. The earlier forms are called proto-forms, and the earlier language is called a proto-language. 6 The discovery of Proto-Indo- Cognates European English Dutch German Danish Swedish In 1786, Sir William Jones, a British judge and scholar working in India, noted that Sanskrit bore to man man Mann mand man Greek and Latin “a stronger affinity … than could foot voet Fuß fod fot possibly have been produced by accident,” and he suggested that the three languages had “sprung from a bring brengen bringen bringe bringa common source”. This common source is what came to be known later as “Proto-Indo-European” (PIE), the parent Compare Turkish “non-cognates”: language of most of the languages spoken today in adam (man), ajak (foot), and getir (bring) Europe, Persia, and northern India.
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