Language Change and the Inference of Meaning

This chapter uses two case studies to explore how historians study language movement and change through comparative historical linguistics. The first case study stands as a short chapter in the larger history of the expansion of Bantu languages across eastern, central, and southern Africa. It focuses on the expansion of proto-Kafue, ca. 950–1250, from a linguistic homeland in the middle Kafue River region to lands beyond the Lukanga swamps to the north and the Zambezi River to the south. This expansion was made possible by a dramatic reconfiguration of ties of kinship. The second case study explores linguistic evidence for ridicule along the Lozi-Botatwe frontier in the mid- to late 19th century. Significantly, the units and scales of language movement and change in precolonial periods rendered visible through comparative historical linguistics bring to our attention alternative approaches to language change and movement in contemporary Africa.

Download Full-text

Language Change and Movement as Seen by Historical Linguistics

10.1093/oso/9780190657543.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Derek Nurse

Keyword(s):

West Africa ◽

20Th Century ◽

Language Change ◽

Historical Linguistics ◽

Linguistic Features ◽

Time And Space ◽

Change Over Time ◽

Comparative Linguistics ◽

Language Boundaries ◽

Over Time

The focus of this chapter is on how languages move and change over time and space. The perceptions of historical linguists have been shaped by what they were observing. During the flowering of comparative linguistics, from the late 19th into the 20th century, the dominant view was that in earlier times when people moved, their languages moved with them, often over long distances, sometimes fast, and that language change was largely internal. That changed in the second half of the 20th century. We now recognize that in recent centuries and millennia, most movements of communities and individuals have been local and shorter. Constant contact between communities resulted in features flowing across language boundaries, especially in crowded and long-settled locations such as most of Central and West Africa. Although communities did mix and people did cross borders, it became clear that language and linguistic features could also move without communities moving.

Download Full-text

Language change across a lifetime: A historical micro-perspective

Linguistics Vanguard ◽

10.1515/lingvan-2020-0029 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 7 (s2) ◽

Author(s):

Alexander Bergs

Keyword(s):

Communities Of Practice ◽

Social Factors ◽

Language Use ◽

Language Change ◽

Historical Data ◽

Data Sets ◽

The Social ◽

Challenges And Opportunities ◽

Linguistic Behavior ◽

Micro Analysis

Abstract This paper focuses on the micro-analysis of historical data, which allows us to investigate language use across the lifetime of individual speakers. Certain concepts, such as social network analysis or communities of practice, put individual speakers and their social embeddedness and dynamicity at the center of attention. This means that intra-speaker variation can be described and analyzed in quite some detail in certain historical data sets. The paper presents some exemplary empirical analyses of the diachronic linguistic behavior of individual speakers/writers in fifteenth to seventeenth century England. It discusses the social factors that influence this behavior, with an emphasis on the methodological and theoretical challenges and opportunities when investigating intra-speaker variation and change.

Download Full-text

Isoglosses and language change: Evidence of the rise and loss of isoglosses from a comparison of early Greek and early English

Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics ◽

10.1515/psicl-2020-0018 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 56 (4) ◽

pp. 553-575

Author(s):

Nikolaos Lavidas

Keyword(s):

Language Change ◽

The Other ◽

Linguistic Features ◽

Considerable Distance ◽

Causative Constructions ◽

European Languages ◽

Other Hand ◽

Structural Ambiguity ◽

Early English ◽

Aspectual Verbs

Abstract We analyze the rise and loss of isoglosses in two Indo-European languages, early Greek and early English, which, however, show considerable distance between their structures in many other domains. We follow Keidan’s approach (2013), that has drawn the attention on the fact that the study of isoglosses (i.e., linguistic features common to two or more languages) is connected with common innovations of particular languages after the split into sub-groups of Indo-European: this type of approach aims at collecting isoglosses that appear across the branches of Indo-European. We examine the rise of the isogloss of labile verbs and the loss of the isogloss of the two classes of aspectual verbs in early Greek and early English. Our study shows that the rise of labile verbs in both languages is related to the innovative use of intransitives in causative constructions. On the other hand, the innovations in voice morphology follow different directions in Greek and English and are unrelated to the rise of labile verbs. In contrast to labile verbs, which are still predominant for causative-anticausative constructions in both languages, the two classes of aspectual verbs are lost in the later stages of Greek but are predominant even in Present-day English. Again, a “prerequisite” change for the isogloss can be easily located in a structural ambiguity that is relevant for aspectual verbs in early Greek and early English. However, another independent development, the changes in verbal complementation (the development of infinitival and participial complements) in Greek and English, determined the loss of this isogloss.

Download Full-text