Morphological, Syntactic Change, and Grammaticalization

Morphological Change, Syntactic Change, Grammaticalization

Languages can be classified typologically, according to their characteristics:

Isolating languages:

Agglutinative languages:

A word may contain several morphemes (a root and a number of affixes). They are “glued” together.
Each morpheme remains distinct and identifiable.
One meaning per morpheme
The morphemes can be clearly separated.
Turkish: wametulipa (they have paid us) wa: they; me: perfect marker; tu: us; lipa: pay

Inflectional languages:

The form of a word changes to indicate a change in meaning or grammatical function.
Also root + affixes, but morpheme boundaries are blurred.
Each affix may express more than one meaning.
Marius amat Sofiam –us: Nominative masculine singular; -am: Accusative feminine singular
Old English = Inflectional
Modern English = more isolating but still with characteristics of inflectional.
On his dagum comon arest scipu norDmanna
- on: in
- arest: first
- his: his
- scipu: ships
- dagum: days
- norDmanna : of northmen
- comon: came
The process towards isolating began in Old English, especially in the plurals.

Drifan

Ic drife we drifaC

Du drifst ge drifaC

He drif hie drifaC

Old English tending towards an isolating language (pronouns needed in plural)

The extension of a linguistic pattern to forms which originally belonged to another pattern.
Old English: helpan holp Holden; Modern English: help helped helped
knife-kinves, life-lives.
scarfs, hoofs (former scarves, hooves)
Brother- brethren
Back-formation
Speakers derive a morphologically simple word from a form which they analyze as morphologically complex.
Burglar> to burgle
Babysitter>babysit
French Cerise >English Cherry

Languages can be classified by word order
Verb in initial position:
- VSO Welsh: Gwelsan (nhw) ddraigh (saw they a dragon)
- SVO English: They saw a dragon
- VOS Malagasy: Mamaky boky ny mpianatra (reads book the student)
Verb final languages (SOV) Japanese: Gakusei-da (student am)
The differences between V and V O represent the relationship Dependent-Head Head-Dependent
The order of the basic constituents of a sentence tends to be reflected in the ordering of the syntactic elements.
Ðæt wæron þa erestan scipu deniscra manna þe angel cynnes land gesohton
- “Those were the first ships of Danish men that of the English people land had sought”
English from V final to V initial
- His geleafa hine getrymde
- His faith him strengthened
- His faith strengthened him
- And he nafre nanig leod geleornade
- And he never no poetry learned
- And he never learned any poetry
From SOV to SVO
Heavy NP shift
- Complex subject to extraposition (at the end): It is tragic that so many of his generation died as they did.
- Lexical NPs and PPs were moved to the right of the clause, after the V
Verb second V2
- Verb-fronting rule, which moves the verb to the left of the clause
- The fronted verb typically follows an adverb such as ne, here, etc.

In grammaticalization lexical items turn into grammatical words
- Old English lic “body” > Modern English –ly
- Latin rem “thing” > French rien “nothing”
- Old English ān “one” > indefinite article.
Words are often grammaticalized to replace inflections which are lost or weakened
Modern English “shall” or “will” began life as full lexical verbs.
Now their meaning faded and became pure markers of the future tense.
French pas: “step”
In Old French negation was formed by placing the negative particle ne before the verb.
A verb of motion negated by ne could optionally be reinforced by pas:
- Il ne va pas “He doesn’t go a step”
Pas was reanalyzed as a negative particle
Pas was extended analogically to new verbs having nothing to do with motion.
- Il ne sait pas “ He doesn’t know”
In spoken French pas came to replace ne
- Il sait pas “He doesn’t know”