Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007
5.1 Theories of language change
Unit 5 Language and time
Section 2 Language variation
All languages change over the course of time. Within a language group, these changes may develop to the extent that the language use of a particular community is significantly different from that of other users. This language use may then be described as a dialect (if those changes are at the level of small differences in grammar and vocabulary), and as a separate language (if those grammatical and lexical differences are significant). The fact of language change is relevant to the study of texts in several ways. A text may be a force for language change or it may attempt to retain older usages for particular effects. A text may become difficult to understand because of language change; it may contain words and phrases that are associated with earlier periods of the language’s history, that have now become archaisms, and that rely on an understanding of what the state of the language was at any given time. A modern text may also deliberately use archaisms for particular effects.
5.1 Theories of language change
There are various different accounts of why and how language changes over time.
5.1.1 Formalist theories: change as an autonomous process
Many linguists have described language change as being caused by and working according to structural pressures that are internal to the language itself. For example, between 1500 and 1700 many of the vowel sounds of English changed into other vowel sounds in a process called the Great Vowel Shift. The modern English word ’make’, for example, was pronounced in the sixteenth century with a different vowel, a little like the one you get in the modern English word ’mack’ if you stretch the vowel out. In pronouncing these words, the tongue is higher and therefore nearer to the roof of the mouth in ’make’ than it is in ’mack’, so we can say that the vowel was ’raised’ from its sixteenth-century pronunciation to its modern pronunciation. Many linguists, from nineteenthcentury philologists to contemporary generative linguists, have investigated how these changes relate to each other and to the larger structures of the language. For example, one might classify vowels as ’high’, ’mid’ and ’low’ on the basis of the height of the tongue when it makes them, and we could then say that, in the above example, a low vowel becomes a mid vowel. This change seems to have ’pushed’ the old mid vowel to become a modern high vowel (modern ’meat’ changed from a sixteenth-century word sounding like ’mate’) and the older high vowel to have become a modern low vowel (modern ’ride’ was once pronounced like ’reed’). What interests linguists, then, is that there seems to have been a system of interrelated changes that can be understood in relation to one another. Such linguists give a formalist account of these changes in language (that is, an explanation in terms of the form or units of structure of the language) (see Unit 3, Analysing units of structure).
5.1.2 A functionalist account: change as a politically motivated process
There is another view of language change and how to study and explain it that suggests that changes in language result from social activity, in particular from political struggle. Dick Leith (1983) accounts for the Great Vowel Shift by suggesting that the migration of workers into London in the period produced a clash of dialects that induced Londoners to distinguish their speech from the immigrants by changing their vowel system. Culpeper (1997) argues that the development of Standard English, through the use of the East Midlands dialect in the fifteenth century, can also be accounted for by examining social factors; the East Midlands dialect was used by William Caxton when he set up his printing press in London in 1476, and this dialect had become a lingua franca among merchants and government officials in the London area. This particular functionalist theory therefore claims that language change is socially motivated, rather than being solely motivated by the formal system of the language itself. A functionalist way of looking at language therefore analyses language change from the perspective of the social values carried by certain usages at specific points in time.
It is possible to combine functionalist and formalist accounts; for example, the Great Vowel Shift may have been triggered and supported in general terms by a struggle for linguistic identity, but the details of the shift - for example, which vowels changed and how they changed - might best be explained in formalist terms. Political, economic and social change can result in words being pronounced in new ways and given new meanings, and can lead to new words being invented. Also, it should be remembered that rarely, if ever, do words have one single fixed meaning or pronunciation. According to some Marxist accounts of language, the pronunciation and meaning of words can be a ’site of struggle’ when two or more social groups or interests have a political stake in enforcing one meaning of a word or phrase (see Unit 9, Language and society). For example, the local government tax levied on property in Britain in the 1980s was termed ’the community charge’ by the Conservative government that introduced it, and ’the poll tax’ by those opposed to its introduction. The latter term was coined because it has political implications in English history. The OED tells us that ’poll’ used to mean ’head’ (the current usage associated with voting comes from the poll as a counting of heads); one reason for reviving the archaism ’poll tax’ is because it is levied on all ’heads’ - i.e. on everyone of a voting age. But the term poll tax is also a specific allusion to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable notes, was ’immediately occasioned by an unpopular poll-tax at a time when there was a growing spirit of social revolt’ in England. Thus, the revival of the term poll tax was a politically motivated gesture that seemed to make an analogy between 1381 and the situation at the time of the introduction of the property tax. (Ironically enough, the OED informs us that an archaic meaning of poll was ’to plunder by . . . excessive taxation; to pillage, rob, fleece’.) The success of the opposition to the new tax can be judged in part by how widely and by whom the alternative name ’poll tax’ was used during the controversy. Now, however, the Labour government has introduced the more neutral ’council tax’.