deflexion (linguistics)
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Deflexion is a diachronic linguistic process in
inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...
al languages typified by the degeneration of the inflectional structure of a language. All members of the
Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...
language family are subject to some degree of deflexional change. This phenomenon has been especially strong in Western European languages, such as
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...
, French, and others. Deflexion typically involves the loss of some inflectional affixes, notably affecting word endings ( markers) that indicate noun cases, verbal
tenses In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns. The main tenses found in many languages include the past, present, ...
and
noun class In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...
es. This is part of a process of gradual decline of the inflectional
morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...
s, defined as atomic semantic units bound to abstract word units (
lexeme A lexeme () is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken ...
s). Complete loss of the original subset of affixes combined with a development towards
allomorph In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant phonetic form of a morpheme, or, a unit of meaning that varies in sound and spelling without changing the meaning. The term ''allomorph'' describes the realization of phonological variations for a specif ...
y and new morphology is associated in particular with
creolization Creolization is the process through which creole languages and cultures emerge. Creolization was first used by linguists to explain how contact languages become creole languages, but now scholars in other social sciences use the term to describe ne ...
, i.e. the formation of
pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from s ...
s and
creole language A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language. ...
s. Directly related to deflexion is the languages becoming less synthetic and more analytic in nature. However, the ways in which languages undergo deflexion and the results of these developments are by no means uniform. For example, the modern
Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...
all continue to feature a complex verb system, while having strongly deflected their nouns, adjectives, and pronouns.
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) ** Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...
, on the other hand, has further simplified the already simple Germanic verb system (even radically so in some dialects) but has preserved the three genders and four cases of early Germanic languages. Deflexion is a common feature of the history of many Indo-European languages. According to the Language Contact Hypothesis for Deflexion, supported by the comparison between Germanic languages (for instance, Icelandic and Afrikaans), this process is attributed to language contact. Specifically, the phenomenon occurs in the presence of large, influential groups of speakers that have acquired the leading idiom as a second language (L2) and so is limited to economical trade-offs widely considered acceptable. Though gradual, English experienced a dramatic change from Old English, a moderately inflected language using a complex case system, to Modern English, considered a weakly inflected language or even analytic. Important deflexion changes first arrived in the English language with the
North Sea Germanic North Sea Germanic, also known as Ingvaeonic , is a postulated grouping of the northern West Germanic languages that consists of Old Frisian, Old English, and Old Saxon, and their descendants. Ingvaeonic is named after the Ingaevones, a West Ge ...
(Ingvaeonic) shifts, shared by Frisian and
Low German : : : : : (70,000) (30,000) (8,000) , familycolor = Indo-European , fam2 = Germanic , fam3 = West Germanic , fam4 = North Sea Germanic , ancestor = Old Saxon , ancestor2 = Middle L ...
dialects, such as merging accusative and dative cases into an objective case. Viking invasions and the subsequent Norman conquest accelerated the process. The importance of deflexion in the formative stage of a language can be illustrated by modern Dutch, where deflexion accounts for the overwhelming majority of linguistic changes in the last thousand years or more. Afrikaans originated from Dutch virtually by deflexion. According to the
unidirectionality hypothesis In linguistics, the unidirectionality hypothesis proposes that grammaticalisation works in a single direction. That is, pronouns may fuse with verbs, or prepositions may fuse with nouns, to create new inflectional systems, but inflectional ending ...
,Hopper, Paul J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott: Grammaticalization, 1993, Cambridge University Press. deflexion should be subject to a semantically driven one-way cline of grammaticality. However, exceptions to the gradual diachronic process have been observed where the deflexion process diminished or came to a halt, or where inflexional case marking was occasionally reinforced. There are also a few cases of reversed directionality, e.g. in the evolution of the common Romance inflected future and conditional (or "indicative future-of-the-past") from earlier periphrastic suppletive forms for the loss of the corresponding classical Latin tenses.


See also

*
Periphrasis In linguistics, periphrasis () is the use of one or more function words to express meaning that otherwise may be expressed by attaching an affix or clitic to a word. The resulting phrase includes two or more collocated words instead of one infl ...


References

{{reflist Linguistic morphology