Aspects of Language Change

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Aspects of Language Change

• Prepared by
• Mariam Bedraoui

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Outline

• Lexical Change
• Borrowing
• Coining new words
• Semantic Change
• Broadening
• Narrowing
• Shifts of meaning
• Sound change
• Loss of phonemes
• Addition of phonemes
• Metathesis
• Syntactic Change
• Word order
• Re-analysis
• Grammaticalization

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Aspects of language Change
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Lexical Change Borrowing

• Languages are avid borrowers
• Two-fifths of common words in English are loan
  words
• Direct/indirect borrowing
• Phonological and morphological treatment of loans
• Rarely borrowed words

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Borrowing Examples

• Kayak

• Raccoon

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Borrowing Further Examples
Examples of Loan Words Examples of Loan Words
kayak superstar
Yogurt Top model
Racoon T- shirt
Ski Check- up
kangaroo Gentlemen
Tsunami look
democracy cool
coach computer
yacht disk
algebra fan
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Lexical Change Coining New Words

• New words can be formed using the basic
  resources of the language through a number of
  processes
• Compounding Combining two or more words to form
  new words
• Blackboard- girlfriend- gingerbread
• shopkeeper- sky diving
• laptop- ozone friendly
• Derivation Using affixes to create new words
• warmth- length- depth- wisdom- freedom-
  stardom
• Otherwise- clockwise- moneywise- profitwise
  
• miniskirt- mini-budgets- mini-project-
  mini-wars

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Lexical Change Coining New Words

• Clipping Forming a word by extracting an
  arbitrary portion of a word of an identical
  meaning
• phone (telephone)
• bus
• Gym (gymnasium)
• Flu (influenza)
• Ciggie (cigarette)
• Blending Pieces of existing words are combined
  to form new words
• Motel
• Smog
• Brunch
• Chunnel
• Oxbridge
• Acronyms The reduction of long phrases to a few
  letters
• NATO- FBI- BBC
• TA- LA
• Laser

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Semantic Change Broadening and Narrowing

• Broadening Words acquire more meanings beside
  the original one
• Dog
• Holiday
• Picture
• Mouse
• Virus
• Narrowing limiting the semantic scope that words
  used to have
• Meat
• Deer
• Girl

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Semantic Change
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Semantic Change Shift of Meaning

• Shift of Meaning Words cease to mean what they
  used to, and take on new semantic representations
• Silly
• Nice
• Immoral
• With
• cheer

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Sound Change

• Phonetic and phonological
• Natural
• Ease of articulation

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Sound Change Types

• Loss of phonemes
• Knot- knee- knife-know
• Make- time- dive
• Lit- gros- murs- aimer- part
• Wednesday- Choclate- camera- correct- police
• Addition of phonemes
• Latin scala- snob- smeralda- spatha
• Spanish escala- esnob-esmerada- espada
• Middle English amonges- amiddes, betwix
• Amongst- amidst- betwixt

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Sound Change Types

• Metathesis It occurs when two sounds switch
  places
• Old English Ask- aks
• Latin crepare- parabola- miraculu- pericula
• Spanish quebrar- palabra- milagro- peligru

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Syntactic Change Types

• It occurs in the grammatical notions that govern
  languages
• Slow and in need for further investigation
• Word order
• Old English SOV and SVO language
• Modern English An SVO language
• Reanalysis a process whereby grammatical
  notions which has one particular function comes
  to be perceived by the speakers of a language as
  having a second.
• The perfect tense in English
• I have finished my dinner
• I have a copy of her new book
• She have my hair cut
• She has her daughter trapped in war
• Old English Your faith has you healed
• Your faith healed you

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Syntactic Change Types

• Grammaticalization The process whereby lexical
  items are reduced to grammatical items without
  entirely losing their function as words.
• Verbs meaning go, come, want very often
  develop into grammatical markers of futurity
• Going to
• Will

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• Thanks for your attention