Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Setting the scene
- 2 Ongoing language change: problems of detection and verification
- 3 Lexical change in twentieth-century English
- 4 Grammatical changes in twentieth-century English
- 5 Pronunciation
- 6 Language change in context: changing communicative and discourse norms in twentieth-century English
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Brief survey of the corpora used for the present study
- Appendix 2 The OED Baseline Corpora
- Appendix 3 Estimating text size in the newspaper archives and the World Wide Web
- Appendix 4 A quarterly update of the OED Online (New Edition) – 13 March 2003: Motswana to mussy
- References
- Index
2 - Ongoing language change: problems of detection and verification
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Setting the scene
- 2 Ongoing language change: problems of detection and verification
- 3 Lexical change in twentieth-century English
- 4 Grammatical changes in twentieth-century English
- 5 Pronunciation
- 6 Language change in context: changing communicative and discourse norms in twentieth-century English
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Brief survey of the corpora used for the present study
- Appendix 2 The OED Baseline Corpora
- Appendix 3 Estimating text size in the newspaper archives and the World Wide Web
- Appendix 4 A quarterly update of the OED Online (New Edition) – 13 March 2003: Motswana to mussy
- References
- Index
Summary
“Visible” and “invisible” changes
The term “linguistic change” is ambiguous because it may refer to two fundamentally different aspects of the historical evolution of language. Our aim could be to describe changes that can be observed in the texts, and latterly also the sound recordings, which have come down to us – that is, in the documentary record or (to borrow the convenient term coined by Noam Chomsky) in historical performance data. On the other hand, we might want to go beyond these data and use them to make inferences about the changes that must have occurred in the underlying rule systems; that is, in native speakers' linguistic competence. It is clear that hypotheses about the second type of language change will be more difficult to arrive at and more controversial, because they are relatively more theory-dependent. The decision about which of the two perspectives on change to adopt will also crucially influence the chronology one is able to establish. For example, important changes in individual speakers' competence might not show up in the documentary record for centuries, because a traditional construction and its newer, reanalyzed variant may look identical in surface structure in the vast majority of cases. This inevitable time-lag may explain why advocates of the second perspective have generally focused on the broad outlines of major changes in the remote past of the language, rather than on developments in the recent past and the present.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Twentieth-Century EnglishHistory, Variation and Standardization, pp. 12 - 35Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006