Language change: processes, causes and theory

Learning objectives

Identify and name the processes by which the lexicon changes — borrowing, compounding, blending, clipping, affixation, conversion, acronym and initialism formation, eponyms and coinage — using examples from the data in front of you

Analyse semantic change through broadening, narrowing, amelioration, pejoration, metaphorical extension and euphemism, and account for the social pressure behind each shift

Describe grammatical and orthographical change over time, including the loss of inflections, shifts in pronoun and auxiliary use, the regularisation of verbs and the standardisation of spelling

Explain the external causes of change, including contact, migration, trade, colonial expansion, technology, printing and the influence of dictionaries and prescriptive grammars

Evaluate theories of change, including the prescriptivist and descriptivist positions, Aitchison's metaphors for decline, the wave and S-curve models, random fluctuation, functional and substratum explanations, and judge how far each fits the data given

Take a position on whether an observed change represents decay or natural evolution, and defend it with linguistic evidence rather than opinion

Identify back-formation, telescoping and coalescence in examples, and use etymology — the recorded history of a word's form and meaning — as the evidence for deciding which form came first

Explain cultural transmission theory, and set the tree model of descent against the wave model of diffusion, judging what each can and cannot show about the history of English