Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The nature of human language and language variation
- 2 Language replication and language change
- 3 Language change in the speech community
- 4 Language contact as a source of change
- 5 Sound change
- 6 The evolution of phonological rules
- 7 Morphology
- 8 Morphological change
- 9 Syntactic change
- 10 Reconstruction
- 11 Beyond comparative reconstruction
- Appendix: Recovering the pronunciation of dead languages: types of evidence
- References
- General index
- Index of languages and families
7 - Morphology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The nature of human language and language variation
- 2 Language replication and language change
- 3 Language change in the speech community
- 4 Language contact as a source of change
- 5 Sound change
- 6 The evolution of phonological rules
- 7 Morphology
- 8 Morphological change
- 9 Syntactic change
- 10 Reconstruction
- 11 Beyond comparative reconstruction
- Appendix: Recovering the pronunciation of dead languages: types of evidence
- References
- General index
- Index of languages and families
Summary
Traditional historical linguists have amassed a large body of facts about specific morphological changes in particular languages, yet there is very little literature on the subject that takes modern advances in theory into consideration. This chapter will briefly describe some aspects of a recent approach to morphology, Distributed Morphology (DM), in the generative tradition. In the following chapter we will use those concepts to analyze well-attested types of morphological change.
Morphological theory and morphological change
When it became clear in the 1870s that sound change is normally regular in phonological terms, historical linguists undertook to separate regular sound changes from other types of change in the forms of words. The latter were classed together as “analogy,” defined as the influence of forms on other forms. It became generally accepted that analogical change typically operates in terms of proportions between sets of forms. For instance, the replacement of English besought by beseeched (attested as an alternative at least since John Milton) can be explained by the following analogical proportion, given that the past tense of preach is preached:
preach : preached : : beseech : X; X = beseeched.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Historical LinguisticsToward a Twenty-First Century Reintegration, pp. 152 - 166Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013