Principles of language change

STUDY UNIT 7: PROCESSES OF SYNTACTIC CHANGE

Outline
Reanalysis Shift of markedness Grammaticalisation

Typological harmony

Reanalysis
Erroneous understanding of syntactic structures E.g. development of the present perfect and past

perfect tenses

OE Ic hbbe one fisc gefangenne stative construction I have the fish caught (= I have the fish in a state of being caught) OE Ic hbbe one fisc gefangen

Shift of markedness
Difference in emphasis: I cannot stand Mary vs

Mary I cannot stand. Marked forms can become unmarked or unmarked forms can become marked:

E.g. in front of was originally a marked form, but it has generally replaced before in expressions of position, except for some expressions (e.g. before the judge) Whom did you meet? vs Who did you meet?

Marked forms can become even more marked: E.g. To whom did you give it? vs Who did you give it to?

Lexical vs grammatical items

Divide the elements of the following sentence

between lexical and grammatical items:

He told me that he had come because he thought that I was ill.

Which criteria have you used to divide the words?

Grammaticalisation I
Lexical words lose their semantic force (semantic

bleaching) and are reduced to grammatical units (bound morphemes or independent words). E.g.:

OE lc body > OE -lic associated with, having the quality of (e.g. fderlic fathely) > -ly; OE hd state, quality > OE - hd > hood Going to: expression of motion > indication of futurity (gonna) Givn (1971: 413): Todays morphology is yesterdays syntax

Lexical word > grammatical word > clitic > affix > Opposite direction (very rare): e.g. in fashionable, ism doctrine

Grammaticalisation II: Lehmann (1985)

Gradual loss of semantic and phonological

substance (attrition) A gain in bondedness (coalescence) Shrinking of scope or syntagmatic weight (condensation) Loss of syntagmatic variability (fixation) A gain in paradigmatic cohesion or paradigmaticity (paradigmatisation)> integration of the syntactic forms into morphological paradigms Loss of paradigmatic variability (obligatorification)

Word order and typological harmony

Basic word order: VSO, SVO (2nd most frequent),

SOV (most frequent), VOS, OVS and OSV Greenbergs (1963) word-order types
VO Languages Verb precedes object Auxiliary precedes main verb Adjective follows noun Genitive follows noun Relative clause follows head Prepositions Case-marking absent OV Languages Verb follows object Auxiliary follows main verb Adjective precedes noun Genitive precedes noun Relative clauses precedes head Postpositions Case-marking present

English: From SOV to SVO

North-West Germanic: Ek Hlewagastiz Holtijaz horna tawido I Hlewagastiz son-of-Holt horn did OE: 8th century red me ah Eanred mec agrof red me owns Eanred me carved OE: *am cyninge licodon hundas > EModE The

king liked hounds Revision: read ch. 6 in Millar (2007) and Lehmann (1985)