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Linguistic Drift
Two types of language change can be characterized as natural language, linguistic drift: a wikt:unidirectional, unidirectional short-term and Period of time, cyclic long-term drift. Short-term unidirectional drift According to Edward Sapir, Sapir, drift is the unconscious change in natural language. He gives the example ''Whom did you see?'' which is grammatically correct but is generally replaced by ''Who did you see?'' Structural symmetry seems to have brought about the change: all other ''wh-'' words are monomorphic (consisting of only one morpheme). The drift of speech changes dialects and, in long terms, it generates new languages. Although it may appear these changes have no direction, in general they do. For example, in the English language, there was the Great Vowel Shift, a chain shift of long vowels first described and accounted for in terms of drift by Otto Jespersen, Jespersen (1860–1943). Another example of drift is the tendency in English to eliminate the ''-er'' com ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Language Change
Language change is variation over time in a language's features. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistics. Traditional theories of historical linguistics identify three main types of change: systematic change in the pronunciation of phonemes, or sound change; borrowing, in which features of a language or dialect are altered as a result of influence from another language or dialect; and analogical change, in which the shape or grammatical behavior of a word is altered to more closely resemble that of another word. All living languages are continually undergoing change. Some commentators use derogatory labels such as "corruption" to suggest that language change constitutes a degradation in the quality of a language, especially when the change originates from human error or is a prescriptively discouraged usage. Modern linguistics rejects this concept, since from a scientific point of view such inn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |