Summary: Historical Cilingualistics: Language Change?

Register to read the introduction… Lexical level refers to changes in the meaning of words:

1- Loss Lexical Items – same phonemic structure but different meaning .
Eg.”Bank”; or phonetic attrition ”refrigerator” -”fridge”.
2- Change of meaning – semantic change due to historical or psychological factors .

3- Creation of new lexical items .
Eg. External from French words - “crown”, “power”.
Internal: “bird” as “girl” from “bride”. …show more content…
In this process, morphs, combinations of morphs or linguistic patterns are modified .

1- Morphological change: languages as analogy.
Eg. Middle English plural from ”cow” was “kine “; Modern English: cow/cows; bull/bulls.

2- Syntactic change: lexical words increasingly adopt a grammatical function.
Eg. “Will” meant “want”.
Sound level describes the passage of historical transition from a given phoneme or group of phonemes to another [5].

Eg. The change of Germanic /sk/ into Old English /sh/.

Sound level

1- Phonetic change: affects the manner of articulation . -Influence of neighboring sounds. Eg. From /y/ (“mýs”) in Old English to /i:/(“mice”) in Modern English.

-Apocope: omission of some vowels from the end of a word. Eg.“Child” as “Chile”.
2- Phonemic change: affects the pronunciation or sound system structures .

Eg. /з:/ (as in “meat” or “read”) or /e:/ (as in “meet” or “reed”).

Conclusion

1. Classification of the origins of the language change (economy, analogy, contact) and related theories (Chomsky, Labov).
2.Focus on how these changes happen at different levels of language structures over time (lexicon, grammar,