PREFACE

One of the most fundamental truisms in the story of language is that a language changes. This certainly impresses as a blatantly simplistic statement; at the same time, however, it conveys an ultimately impenetrable concept. It is for good reason, then, that the Modern Language Association of America regularly includes in its annual meetings two sessions of an established Division on Language Change. At the 1980 Houston MLA Convention, seven of the contributions contained herein provided the seminal idea for this volume. These papers were so well received and stimulated such interest that the editors realized the articles should be made available to the wide audience which the timeless field of language change attracts. Accordingly, plans were initiated to supplement the work of an already exceptional panel of contributors with an additional five contributions, drawn again from among the world’s leading experts on the subject of language change.

What is involved in the vast and elusive study of language change? Its attraction lies in the fact that it deals with discernible realia, such as sounds or structured groups of sounds, or words and their intra- and interrelationships. Experience has shown, however, that in the very instant in which the researcher is prepared to derive a conclusion from his empirical language data, he finds that the data may be incomplete, i.e., they have already mutated from one linguistic moment to the next, or new linguistic circumstances influencing the interpretation of the data have come into play. Whether these circumstances have in point of fact just arisen, or whether the observation of the linguist was remiss is of little importance; at issue is the fact that in either case the linguist must content himself with the knowledge that his efforts necessarily remain incomplete.

On the one hand, description of language change has the advantage of hard evidence. Where contemporary language is concerned, the linguist has the added advantage of being an eyewitness. Historical evidence may be plentiful or meager, but in both instances it presupposes at least a degree of probability in comparison to the relative certainty of present-day facts. Not only do documents and artifacts need to be datable and identifiable, but at best the linguist can only surmise what a piece of evidence represents. Extrapolation of linguistic fact is, of course, the sine qua non in reconstructing prehistoric data. Regardless of the time of a language change, however, data of some sort are available, and they are inviolable, i.e., no amount of manipulation on the part of the researcher can alter the evidence. Linguistic evidence is what it is, and thus it provides a basis of security for the linguist in monitoring the developments of a language.

On the other hand, the uncovering of the reasons behind the existence of a set of language data is not at all a secure task. Here the language change specialist meets his most difficult challenges. In both the description of the evidence and the subsequent explanation of the data, today’s linguist has the benefit of a rich tradition of methods. Nevertheless, from philosophical and philological approaches through the various schools of modern structuralism, whether Neogrammarian, Bloomfieldian, Chomskyan or Post-Chomskyan, to psycho- and sociolinguistic as well as semiotic and again philosophical methods, the elusive WHY for the occurrences or non-occurrence of a given change remains unanswered. This is, of course, because language is integral to the human condition and, accordingly, reasons for its being what it is become of teleological interest, as does any characteristic behavior of man. To study a language change exhaustively, then, requires realistically the study of the many facets involved in a given human mental and physical act.

An analogical microcosm of the two polar areas in investigating language change is found in the levels of language: Phonology, with its immediate alliance to physiology and physics is ascertainable through laboratory techniques, offering the linguist a high degree of predictability in his results; semantics, with its penetration into the meaning of the world at large, transversed by pragmatics and the understanding of general action theory, affords at best a very diffused degree of certainty.

It is customary in a collection of the kind offered here to group the papers according to levels of language, i.e. phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, or according to schools of thought, i.e. Classical Phonemic, Generative Transformational, Relational, Semiotic. Although these designations are insightful parameters, we have chosen neither of the arrangements in the book itself, in an effort to shift the foci of attention of the reader, for the purpose of motivating innovative attitudes toward a very venerable and, to an extent, unexploited field of study. Writing on language change typically concentrates on past or historical changes, since these are viewable as historical events with a traceable beginning and end. The editors, accordingly, were solicitous to include research on changes occurring in our own time; almost half of the articles offer contemporary data. Part One includes three of these. We are indeed fortunate in publishing here Ilse Lehiste’s 1980 Presidential Address to the Linguistic Society of America. She presents to the reader not only PHONOLOGICAL evidence which is difficult to capture and conceptualize, namely suprasegmental data, but data outside of Indo-European, i.e. from the Ural- Altaic Estonian. So certain is Lehiste of her approach, which is characteristically acoustically oriented, that she is able to predict the change of Estonian into a pitch language. She underscores an intent in her contribution, writing: “... this analysis was to show that it is indeed possible to study prosodie change in progress” ( ). Raven McDavid, Jr. (Part Three), in a paper originally presented in the Language Change section at the Houston 1980 meetings and first published in Journal of English Linguistics, 15:21-9, deals as well with PHONOLOGICAL data from Modern American English. He is intent on opposing his findings concerning the production and perception of low-back vowels in Providence, RI to the findings of other established scholars on the same topic.

Background literature is at issue in the entire array of articles; it is, however, central in the contributions of Part Three. Winfred P. Lehmann highlights the arduous road of several key linguists from the nineteenth century onward in penetrating the function of SYNTACTIC change. Quite rightly he observes that “Disregard of syntactic features in change has taken its toll ...” ( ). It is all the more gratifying then that this volume offers the reader an exhaustive display of regard for SYNTACTIC change in the refined generative study by Wayne Harbert (Part Two) of the reflexive in Germanic. David Lightfoot (Part Two), in an article initially published in Linguistic Reconstruction and Indo-European Syntax, ed. by P. Ramat, Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1980, concentrates as well on explicating SYNTACTIC change by demonstrating that syntax may be restructured via LEXICAL change. His paradigm example is change in the meaning of Middle English like ‘to cause pleasure for;, to Modern English like ‘to derive pleasure from’, thus the transformation from the king like pears to the king likes pears. The development of a currently evolving LEXICAL set is uncovered by Irmengard Rauch (Part One) in her attempt to disambiguate three intertwining technically popular terms in both linguistic and literary analyses. By applying principles of SEMIOTICS to her data she derives fundamental distinguishing features for the terms text, discourse, narrative. SEMIOTIC method is also employed by Barbara D. Greim (Part One) in showing the reader that an idiom, contrary to widespread belief, is not a staid, frozen expression, but rather one that is subject at least in part to the mutations of quotidian language. In Greim’s article we observe the interplay of the lexicon with syntax and their phonological/morphological reflexes, all of which are pragmatically influenced.

In the fifth article using contemporary evidence, Els Oksaar (Part Four) expresses her conviction that the investigation of pragmatics leads the way to understanding causality in language change. She writes: “One can hypothesize that the conditions and motives controlling language use also cause language shift” ( ). By examples, principally from German, she shows how language interaction between varying STRATA in society, i.e. between and among different and the same professions, regions, ethnic origins, friends, strangers, listeners and hearers, results in reinterpretations and often in innovations. The Kahanes (Part Four), in this Houston 1980 MLA talk published in Wege zur Universalienforsohung, ed. by G. Brettschneider and C. Lehmann, Tübingen: Narr, 1980, view the admixture of forces in the evolution of Vulgar Latin as the interaction of nature with nurture, viz., of an indigenous Latin STRATUM with a Greek subcode, which is non-inherited and learned—a paidesia. The ample article of Yakov Malkiel completes the group of articles under the rubric Strata and Language Change in this volume. Malkiel challenges the embodiments of linguistic STRATA concepts which serve as disputable hypotheses rather than as reliable working frameworks, namely family-tree and wave theories. He concludes that with some imagination and a great deal of hard linguistic and cultural evidence, the Iberian “branch” of Romance can be found to defy a family-tree model and to evince two layers or waves of language change influences.

The classical domain of investigation of language change, namely, the Historical Change of Part Two, includes the detailed MORPHOLOGICAL study of Frans van Coetsem on the prehistoric composition of the reduplicating verbs in Germanic. Van Coetsem wrestles with this long-considered-moot question of linguistics, and concludes that the so-called ablaut in the North-West Germanic reduplicating class represents, by assimilation of the fixed reduplicating morpheme vowel e into the preterite root, a mirror image of the common Indo-European and Germanic e/o present/past verb ablaut. The regularity of MORPHOLOGICAL vowel alternation—ablaut—a hundred years before it was thus named by Jakob Grimm, was observed by the grammarian Lambert ten Kate in the eighteenth century. Edgar C. Polomé (Part Three) traces the perceptions and discoveries of ten Kate and other early Netherlandic grammarians on language change. The timeframe in which linguistic breakthroughs such as these occurred prompts humbling thoughts indeed for today’s linguist, since, as Polomé reminds us “... only the discovery of Sanskrit and the reconstruction of Indo-European [would] provide a better background to revise and improve ten Kate’s insight into Germanic morphology” ( ).

By purposefully interlacing the four designated foci of the collection, the discussion in this Preface means to preview the multidimensional nature of these twelve articles, which necessarily reflect the kaleidoscopic essence of language change itself. The linguist, the historian, the sociologist, the philosopher, the anthropologist, the semiotist, whether student or seasoned scholar, in grappling with a given language change, holds in his hands, so to speak, a singularly elegant crystal, the perception of whose full refinement ever eludes him.