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Historical Linguistics 1 Historical Linguistics Contents Similarities between languages and species ............................................................................................ 5 Transmission or contact? ......................................................................................................................... 5 Sound Change ............................................................................................................................................... 5 Reasons for sound change ....................................................................................................................... 6 Babel myth ........................................................................................................................................... 6 Changes in speaker ............................................................................................................................... 6 Changes in system: systemic pressure ................................................................................................. 6 changes in hearer ................................................................................................................................. 7 transmission and actuation .................................................................................................................. 7 Language acquisition ............................................................................................................................ 7 Types of changes: ..................................................................................................................................... 7 a) Phonetic Regular sound change ........................................................................................................... 8 assimilation ........................................................................................................................................... 8 dissimilation ......................................................................................................................................... 8 sound insertion ..................................................................................................................................... 8 sound deletion ...................................................................................................................................... 8 weakening ............................................................................................................................................ 8 metathesis ............................................................................................................................................ 8 vowel shifts ........................................................................................................................................... 8 b) Phonological Change ............................................................................................................................ 9 Mergers (fusion) ................................................................................................................................... 9 Splits (fission, unpacking) ..................................................................................................................... 9 Shifts ..................................................................................................................................................... 9 Morphological change .................................................................................................................................. 9 Affixes ....................................................................................................................................................... 9 addition ................................................................................................................................................ 9 loss ........................................................................................................................................................ 9 Reanalysis ................................................................................................................................................. 9 analogy ..................................................................................................................................................... 9 Generalisations for analogy ................................................................................................................ 10 Analogy and iconicity.......................................................................................................................... 11 trends, tendencies, drifts ....................................................................................................................... 11 2 Speculationsmorphological types ...................................................................................................... 11 Grammaticalisation ................................................................................................................................ 13 Development of negative markers (Jespersen’s cycle) ...................................................................... 14 Development of future markers ......................................................................................................... 14 Reduced free morpheme to bound form ........................................................................................... 15 Derivational affixes ............................................................................................................................. 15 Does grammaticalisation constitute a theory? .................................................................................. 15 Undirectionality (Degrammaticalisation) ........................................................................................... 15 (De-)Grammaticalisaion as analogy .................................................................................................... 16 Syntactic change ......................................................................................................................................... 16 Lexical Change ............................................................................................................................................ 16 Loss of names for obsolete concepts and items .................................................................................... 16 New Words ............................................................................................................................................. 17 Morphological Compounding and Derivation .................................................................................... 17 Morphological Back formation ........................................................................................................... 17 Shortening words ............................................................................................................................... 17 Borrowing ........................................................................................................................................... 17 Semantic Change ........................................................................................................................................ 19 broadening ......................................................................................................................................... 19 narrowing ........................................................................................................................................... 19 amelioration ....................................................................................................................................... 19 pejoration ........................................................................................................................................... 19 semantic split (bifurcation) ................................................................................................................ 19 shift ..................................................................................................................................................... 19 Language variation and change .................................................................................................................. 19 geographical variation in language (traditional dialectology) ................................................................ 19 Sociolinguistic spread of language change ............................................................................................. 20 diffusion through the language .......................................................................................................... 20 spread through the population .......................................................................................................... 20 Sociolinguistic variation and language change....................................................................................... 21 Social attitudes to varieties: clines of love and respect ......................................................................... 21 Transmission and Diffusion .................................................................................................................... 21 Historical Sociolinguistics ......................................................................................................................
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