LING 320 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Language Change, Canadian Raising, Geoffrey Chaucer

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 320
• Professor: Lyle Campbell

Document Summary

All living languages change all the time spelling changes, changes in meaning some words are completely di erent. Chaucer (14th century) somewhat more like what we know in uence of french. Shakespeare (1600ish) can read almost all of it. Internal: result of natural language change, made by speakers in the language ex. cot and caught merger. External: changes with a source outside the language ex. borrowed words like schmuck into english. People tend to object to both, when they notice, but are generally more aware of external change (corruption) Historical linguistics: the study & theory of how languages change. Methodological hiccup: historical linguists were trying to study language change, which they thought was unobservable. Language is a system of relations, with interlocking subsystems. Strict division of synchronic and diachronic study of language: independent dimensions can study the language at this point in time, or compare two points in time have to acknowledge two di erent times as 2 distinct systems.