Hickey: Language change review
If you are
interested in topics like language change, but you don’t know where to begin, I
am going to introduce a good textbook about this topic. It’s Raymond Hickey’s
Language Change. In this work you can learn about the nature of language
change, why change happens, the methods that deals with change, language
typology, language contact and language variations.
All languages change and they change
regularly. However, the branch of linguistics, the historical linguistics which
deals with language change, posed only the ‘how’ question and not the ‘why’.
Languages can change by internal and external motivation. Change can be gradual
or global. He says that it is possible to find models for unchanging languages
as well. The speakers try to stop the change consciously. Even though, the
process can be leaded consciously, it is impossible to predict language change.
The author describes the techniques of historical linguistics like comparative
method, internal reconstruction, consistency of orthography, rhyme material and
reverse spelling.
He touches
topics like relative chronology, which is the method of dating certain changes.
He divides two main types of analogy: proportional analogy and analogical
levelling. Lexicalization and grammaticalization are unavoidable terms in the
field of language change. Lexicalization is when certain words are transparent
in their composition or in the derivational process. For example, the English
asleep derives from Old English ‘on sleep’. Grammaticalization is a process
when certain words enter new grammatical categories. Any word class can be
subject to grammaticalization. This process is unidirectional, although there
are debates in this regard.
He gives
instances of language change like phonological changes, morphological change,
semantic change and shifts in syntax and lexicon.
He dedicates a
chapter for typology which is a classification of languages according to their
grammatical type and not their historical backgrounds. The two main types are:
analytic and synthetic. Analytical languages show few inflections and they have
fixed word order while synthetic languages have complex morphology.
In the next
chapters, he focuses on language contact like language shift, dialects and
areal linguistics and language variations like pidgins and creoles.
It’s a nice
overview of language change in general.
Do you know good
books or articles in this topic? Leave me a comment.
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