Morphological, Syntactic Change, and Grammaticalization
Morphological Change, Syntactic Change, Grammaticalization
Morphological Change
Morphological Typology
Languages can be classified typologically, according to their characteristics:
- Isolating or analytic
- Agglutinating or agglutinative
- Inflectional or inflecting
Isolating languages:
- One (free) morpheme per word
- Words do not use affixes
- Word order is very important.
- Chinese júzi wo chi le “orange I eat past”
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)
Analogical Change
- 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
Syntactic Change
- 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.
Grammaticalization
- 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”