Linguistics Quotes

“Linguistic changes of a simplifying kind are common in high-contact areas and were long assumed to be natural. But changes in the opposite direction – leading to greater complexity – have also been observed, particularly in areas which are relatively isolated.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Contact and isolation offer an alternative explanation for Labov’s observation from the previous chapter that it is often the intermediate rather than upper social classes which lead change. Instead of interpreting this finding in ideological terms, i.e. in terms of the social insecurity or aspirations of these groups, it may simply be the case that these groups have greatest contact with members of other social groups, and therefore are most likely to adopt changes and pass them on”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Externally motivated change is generally slow in communities where social networks are dense and multiplex, particularly in isolated areas where there are few weak ties to other networks. Conversely, in communities characterized by low-density social networks, change is more rapid because there are large numbers of weak ties between networks, which facilitate the transmission of new variants.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Key idea: Koinés Koinés are new compromise varieties which emerge from contact between speakers of different varieties. Koinéization is driven primarily by two processes: •  Levelling – the retention of forms which are used by a large number of speakers •  Simplification – the retention of forms which are morphologically simple or more regular, and therefore easier for post-adolescent learners to acquire.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“The first process, levelling, involves the selection of forms with the widest currency in the new setting. Where several forms are in competition, the one used by a majority of speakers or that occurs in most of the input dialects is more likely to prevail than one used by very few speakers.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Particular attention has been paid in recent years, however, to exploring the outcomes of contact between speakers of different varieties of the same language. This interest has been fuelled in part by increasing urbanization, which brings together speakers of different varieties in new and unfamiliar settings (the world’s officially urban population crossed the 50 per cent threshold for the first time in 2009).”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“An early study by Gumperz and Wilson showed how regular and prolonged contact between speakers of Kannada, Marathi and Urdu in Kupwar, India, brought about significant convergence between the languages at the syntactic level, even though their lexicons remained distinct.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“The letter i now represents /ai/ rather than /i:/ (except in words like ski, borrowed in this case from Norwegian, where the shift did not take place); ee represents /i:/ rather than /e:/ in tree, free etc.; oo represents /u:/ rather than /o:/ in words such as loop, and cool and so on.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“The chain shift appears to have been triggered by a change in realization of the /i:/ vowel in words like bite and side, which would once have been pronounced [bi:tə] and [si:də], but diphthongized to [əI], and later [aI] similar developments affected the back vowel /u:/ in, for example, house [hu:sə], and mouse [mu:sə], which diphthongized to [əɷ] (and later [aɷ]) This left a space in the area formerly occupied by /u:/ and /i:/, into which the vowels immediately below them, i.e. half-close /e:/ and /o:/ of beet and boot respectively, could move. This is called a drag chain effect, in that a movement in one position frees up space into which other vowels may move, but the converse push chain effects appear also to have been involved in GVS. The open front vowel /a:/ of mate ([ma:tə]) shifted initially to [æ:] and then to [ε:], forcing the vowel in the existing [ε:] set (e.g. beat) to move up into the /e:/ position. Similar developments affected long back vowels. The overall effect of these changes from a systemic point of view has been to maximize available space for vowel oppositions in the vocal tract, without changing the overall number of oppositions available. A consequence is the rather chaotic mismatch between sound and grapheme which we witness in English spelling.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Although the opposition is maintained in some areas, most English speakers now no longer use the /ʍ/ phoneme. Reducing the number of phonemes in the inventory by one represents a gain in economy at relatively small cost: while some homonymic clashes do result, these are few in number and easily resolved in context (e.g. ‘Whales have been spotted off the coast of Wales’). The /W/ – /ʍ/ opposition, like that of the perfect and past historic tense in French, is a luxury the system can manage without.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“The simple past (or ‘past historic’) forms on the left locate an action entirely in the past, while the perfect tense forms on the right signal that a past action has present relevance. In spoken French, only the perfect tense is used, so j’ai fait now means both ‘I did’ and ‘I have done’, and the subtle distinction between the two, generally retained in English (see Spotlight above), has been lost from the tense system.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Another important internal process is grammaticalization, by which a full lexical word acquires a grammatical function. An example here is back, which in its original meaning refers to the rear of the human torso, a meaning lost in the complex preposition at the back of, meaning ‘behind’. Similarly, the negative particle pas in French originally had only its full lexical meaning of ‘step’, and was used to reinforce the negative ne with some related verbs, e.g. il ne marcha pas (‘He did not walk a step’). But gradually in negative contexts it lost the meaning ‘step’ and became a general marker of negation, e.g Il ne parle pas (‘He does not speak’, not ‘He doesn’t speak a step’). The loss of lexical meaning that accompanies grammaticalization is known as semantic bleaching; very often phonetic reduction is also involved as the item evolves from lexical to functional unit (see Case study below).”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Although independent of grammar, sound changes might well have important consequences for the grammatical system. A good example is the extreme erosion of final consonants in French, which has left singular and plural sounding identical in many cases. Labov (1994: 569) quotes a speech by Charles De Gaulle in Madagascar in which he states: ‘Je m’adresse aux peuples français – au pluriel’ (‘I address the French peoples – in the plural’), clearly feeling the need to add ‘au pluriel’ because singular au peuple and plural aux peuples [opæpl] are homophonous.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“In multilingual states, the Personality Principle enshrines the right of a citizen to use whichever language he/she chooses, while the Territory Principle recognizes only one language in a given area.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Belgium’s chequered linguistic history shows that neither principle, even when sensitively applied, is without difficulties. Dutch speakers resent the fact that French now dominates in the capital, a city squarely in the Dutch-speaking zone. They also complain of the tache d’huile (oil slick) effect, in which Brussels-based francophones take residence in officially Dutch-speaking suburbs, and turn them into de facto francophone areas. French speakers, on the other hand, resent being required to use Dutch in areas where they have become the majority language group.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“principles. In officially bilingual Brussels, street names and all public institutions are given in both official languages, French and Dutch, and all public services must by law be provided in both languages. Outside the capital, however, the Territory Principle applies, according to which French-speaking Belgians are required to use Dutch in the neerlandophone zone and vice-versa, with no official accommodation to the other language in either case.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“But corpus planning may also be a proxy for other political ends, as for example in the Nazis’ attempts to ‘purify’ the German language of French loan words.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“A more ambitious law, passed in 1994 by the then Culture minister Jacques Toubon (inevitably dubbed ‘Monsieur Allgood’ in the French popular press), proved equally controversial. Parties of the right and far left, for different reasons, approved the measure, but objections from centrists and the Socialist party were upheld by France’s Constitutional court, on the grounds that the constitutional right to free speech could not be maintained if the state dictated the words in which it could be expressed. This left an awkward legal limbo in which public sector employees were obliged to use the prescribed terms, but restrictions were not extended to the private sphere.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“As Rodney Ball (1997: 214) points out, this means that a car salesman may vaunt the advantages of un airbag, but the official from the ministry of transport checking the specification of the same vehicle must refer to un coussin gonflable.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“When the British government presents proposals for Royal Assent, the responses on behalf of the Monarch are still given in Anglo-Norman, for example: ‘La Reyne remercie ses bons sujets, accepte leur benevolence, et ainsi le veult’ (The Queen thanks her good subjects, accepts their bounty, and wills it so) or ‘La Reyne/Le Roy le veult’ (The Queen/King wills it).”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Anglo-Norman, on the other hand, was the living language of a very small élite, deprived of their continental lands after the fall of Normandy to Spain in 1204 and forced to focus on their English possessions, and needing to work with – and increasingly marry – the numerically superior English-speaking population. In addition to its numerical advantage, English gained increasingly in prestige with the emergence of a growing and ever more prosperous anglophone mercantile class.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“English at this time was very much the ‘poor relation’ of the three in terms of prestige, and this lowly status of English post-Norman conquest finds echoes in the modern English lexicon. When people say: ‘He uttered an Anglo-Saxon expression’ as a euphemism for ‘he swore’, they do so with good reason: much of our modern earthy or taboo vocabulary carries the stigma of low-status English in medieval England, while its socially acceptable equivalents have generally been borrowed from Norman French. The social divide between the new ruling class and the subjugated English is also evident elsewhere in the lexicon. Pork, mutton and beef, delicacies available only to the Norman-speaking élites in the Middle Ages, are terms of Anglo-Norman origin, but the names of the animals which provide them, pig, sheep and cow, all come from Anglo-Saxon, the language of the farmers who produced the meat for the rulers’ table.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Noteworthy language revitalization success stories include Catalan, suppressed for decades under Franco in Spain, but now a first language for most Catalans (almost all of whom also speak Spanish), and enjoying co-official status with the national language in Catalonia, and Welsh, which has stabilized after years of decline.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Languages never die out because they are somehow ‘not good enough’: they die because their speakers’ economic or other needs induce them to use a dominant language in more and more domains, leaving the obsolescent language with fewer and fewer functions.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Diglossia may or may not involve individual bilingualism. In many diglossic situations, speakers control both varieties and use them according to the circumstances of the speech situation. Early-nineteenth-century Tsarist Russia, on the other hand, was a diglossic society with very little bilingualism: the French-speaking elite generally did not speak Russian (L) and the peasantry generally had little French (H).”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“We are left with what has become known as the ‘gender paradox’, namely that women appear both to favour conservative prestige forms and to lead innovation in the direction of new non-standard forms.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“The workplace, which requires people to conform and show solidarity, acts as a powerful linguistic norm enforcement mechanism, to which men have traditionally been subjected to a greater degree than women.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“In all the cases examined, it has been shown that, allowing for other factors such as social class, ethnic group and age, women on average use forms which more closely approach those of the standard variety or the prestige accent than those used by men.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Variation in this case was based not on class or gender, but on speakers’ attitudes to the place in which they lived and worked. The local centralized forms had become, in McMahon’s (1994: 242) words: ‘the linguistic equivalent of wearing a T-shirt which says “I’m not a tourist, I live here”.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“The surprise here is that the social classes just below the top of the hierarchy actually use more of the prestigious (r)-1 variants in formal styles than the classes above them. This unexpected pattern, in which intermediate social classes ‘overreach’ their social superiors, is called hypercorrection in one of its two meanings (see Spotlight on p. 237), and Labov has suggested that it may be indicative of ongoing change from above, i.e. in the direction of an overtly prestigious norm. Such changes, he argues, are most likely to be led not by the highest social class but by the lower middle or upper working classes further down the hierarchy, i.e. precisely those who hypercorrect for the New York (r) variable above. Being acutely aware of their precarious position between the established middle and working classes, these groups are more sensitive to social variation than those in more secure or entrenched class positions.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself