Historical Linguistics

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Historical Linguistics

• Causation of change
• Lecture 9, Week 10
• Lynne Cahill
• March 2008

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Causal explanations of language change

• Need to define what we mean by
• causal
• explanation
• language change
• Look at a range of types of accounts
• Evolutionary (compared to biological evolution)
• Physical
• Random
• Psychological
• Social
• And others ...

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Causal

• Philosophical debate on whether all explanations
  are causal
• What might a non-causal explanation be?
• What causes something to happen?
• Inevitability is a problem in language change
• If A causes B to happen, must B always happen if
  A does?
• Language change is a complex mass of causes and
  effects

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Explanation

• Chomsky's three-way differentiation of adequacy
  of linguistic accounts
• observationally adequate correct observations,
  no attempt to draw generalisations etc.
• descriptively adequate generalisations made,
  something said about the nature of language
• explanatorily adequate not only makes claims
  about the nature of language, but attempts to
  explain why it is the way it is
• Explanation involves more than just examining
  what happens in language

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Language change

• Innovations happening all the time
• Not all innovations stick
• Language change involves some change in the
  system of a language
• Not necessarily a systemic change as such
• Changes involving, e.g., adding vocabulary items,
  not systemic changes
• Still involve permanent change to the language
  system

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Evolutionary approach

• Theory from biology, adapted to linguistic change
• Correspondences between biological and linguistic
  entities and processes
• If process works in essentially the same way,
  must be able to recognise correspondences
• Assumes survival of the fittest as underlying
  motivation
• See additional sheet

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Evolutionary explanations

• Replicator an entity that passes on its
  structure largely intact in successive
  replications
• Interactor an entity that interacts as a
  cohesive whole with its environment in such a way
  that this interaction causes replication to be
  differential
• Selection a process in which the differential
  extinction and proliferation of interactors
  causes the differential perpetuation of the
  relevant replicators
• Lineage an entity that persists indefinitely
  through time either in the same or an altered
  state as a result of replication

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Physical explanation

• Changes in language caused by physical changes
  (in people or environment)
• Changes in physical environment may lead to need
  for different vocabulary
• May lead to different types of language use
• Changes attributed to physical causes include
  phonological changes caused by need to use
  language in different situations
• E.g. using less air, distinguishing sounds more
  clearly etc.

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Random explanations?

• Not really an explanation
• More of a get-out
• Seems that there must be at least some element of
  randomness
• However, usually when things seem to be purely
  random, we just haven't looked closely enough
• Causes may be many and complex, but they are
  there
• Why does one change take and not another?
• May be social, psychological etc.

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Psychological explanations

• Economy of effort (speaker oriented)
• in production
• in acquisition
• Communicative effectiveness (hearer-oriented)
• Universal pressures (cognitive? speech
  processing?)
• typological (naturalness)
• structural (system-dependent naturalness see
  lecture 12)

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Social explanations

• Language variety as a social marker
• There is no more reason for language to change
  than there is for automobiles to add fins one
  year and remove them the next, for jackets to
  have three buttons one year and two the next ...
  the causes of sound change without language
  contact lie in the general tendency of human
  cultural products to undergo non-functional
  stylistic change. (Paul Postal, 1968, Aspects of
  phonological theory, p. 283)
• External contact

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Mechanisms of diffusion

• Milroy and Milroy (1985) Labov (2001 chaps
  10-12)
• Social networks how closely integrated with a
  community an individual is
• Denser social networks lead to more non-standard
  usage
• Social networks consist of all the people you
  know
• Networks dense or diffuse
• dense everyone you know knows each other
• diffuse people you know do not know each other

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Social networks

• Network ties (lines linking two people)
• neighbour
• work colleague
• relative
• friend
• customer/client
• Multiplex ties more than one of these between
  two people
• Multiplex ties likely to be strong ties
• Strong vs weak ties time, emotional intensity,
  intimacy etc.

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Social networks

• Strong ties reinforce variation but do not spread
  it
• Weak ties spread change
• Innovators vs early adopters
• Innovators introduce changes
• Early adopters spread the change
• Innovators on periphery of network
• Early adopters typically at core of network
• (If EAs didn't adopt a change, others wouldn't
  adopt it)

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Henning Anderson's typology

• Typology of innovations (not necessarily change)
• Adaptive, evolutive and spontaneous innovations
• Classification based on causation rather than
  result
• Cuts across classifications based on e.g. social,
  psychological etc.
• Andersen, Henning (1989) Understanding linguistic
  innovations. In Breivik Jahr (eds), Language
  Change Contributions to the Study of its Causes.

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Adaptive innovation

• 'A purposeful elaboration of an innovators
  competence (a covert innovation), typically
  motivated by immediate communicative needs and
  immediately realized in discourse (in an overt
  innovation)
• Arises from a speakers perceived inadequacy of
  communicative competence
• May give rise to metaphor, word-formation,
  analogy in morphology or syntax, borrowing
• May include passive acceptance of interference

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Evolutive innovation

• Unintentional deviation from previous norm in
  grammar acquisition, as a result of grammars
  continuously being reformed on the basis of
  infinitely varying discourse data
• Effectively the same as imperfect learning
• May include over- and under-generalization when a
  speaker lacks full knowledge of earlier norm

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Spontaneous innovation

• Random fluctuation interpreted as regular
  variation and given social meaning
• Why? Anderson
• man's ability to acquire language is so superior
  to the task that even the merest cues may suffice
  for the identification of some existing
  regularities
• even fluctuations may be interpreted as rule
  governed variation
• learners must bring to many of their analytic
  decisions definite expectations regarding the
  kinds of values to assign

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Spontaneous innovation

• Examples from lexical and phonetic/ phonological
  innovation
• Alternative expressions become indexes of social
  group membership
• Never of hair colour, body height etc.
• Allophonic alternations created which highlight
  existing phonemic distinctions
• Not in any random way, but in apparent accordance
  with universal regularities

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Problems of explanation

• Weinreich, Labov Herzogs five problems
• constraints
• transition
• embedding
• evaluation
• actuation
• Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov, M. I. Herzog
  (1968) Empirical foundations for a theory of
  language change. In Lehmann, W.P. Malkiel,
  Yakov (eds), Directions for Historical
  Linguistics. A Symposium.

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Problems of explanation

• Constraints
• A strong claim about explanation says that we can
  predict the course of change a language will take
• A weak form asks only that we place constraints
  on possible transitions
• Transition
• Assumptions about transitions from one state of a
  language to the next
• What is a state? When does it begin and end?

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Problems with explanations

• Embedding
• How are the observed changes embedded in the
  matrix of linguistic and extralinguistic
  concomitants of the form in question? (p.101)
• Evaluation
• And how can the observed changes be evaluated
  in terms of their effects upon linguistic
  structure, upon communicative efficiency (...)
  and on the wide range of nonrepresentational
  factors involved in speaking?

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Problems with explanations

• Actuation
• What factors can account for the actuation of
  changes?
• Why do changes in a structural feature take place
  in a particular language at a given time, but not
  in other languages with the same feature, or in
  the same language at other times?
• Weinreich, Uriel and Labov believe that many of
  the problems within historical linguistics stem
  from Saussurean structuralism and the emphasis on
  synchronic linguistics