What changes: the levels

Language change happens at every level:

• Lexical — new words enter and old words drop out.
• Semantic — existing words shift meaning.
• Grammatical (syntactic) — sentence structures and inflections change (e.g. loss of thee/thou).
• Orthographic — spelling and punctuation conventions change and standardise.
• Phonological — pronunciation shifts over time.

Timeframe: AQA studies change from around 1600 (Early Modern English) to the present.

How new words arise

The lexicon grows through several processes:

• Borrowing — words taken from other languages (ballet, bungalow).
• Coinage / neologism — brand-new words (selfie).
• Compounding (laptop), blending (brunch), affixation (un- + friend).
• Conversion — a word shifts class (to google, a text).
• Acronyms/initialisms (radar, NASA), clipping (advert), eponyms (sandwich).

Archaism and obsolescence: words also fall out of use as the things or attitudes they name disappear.

Name the process

How meanings change

Words keep their form but shift meaning:

• Broadening — meaning widens (dog once meant one breed; now all).
• Narrowing — meaning contracts (meat once meant any food).
• Amelioration — meaning becomes more positive (nice once meant foolish).
• Pejoration — meaning becomes more negative (silly once meant happy or blessed).
• Semantic reclamation and metaphor also drive change.

Tip: keep broadening/narrowing (scope) separate from amelioration/pejoration (value).

Which semantic change?

Sort each example to its type of change

Tap an example, then tap the process it illustrates.

Standardisation and Johnson 1755

Early Modern English spelling was highly variable. Standardisation was driven by:

• Caxton's printing press (from 1476) — spreading fixed forms.
• Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755) — a hugely influential attempt to record and stabilise the language.
• Later, prescriptive grammars and standardised schooling.

Haugen described stages of standardisation (selection, codification, elaboration and implementation). A standard variety gains overt prestige, while other varieties are often unfairly judged.

Date to remember: Johnson's Dictionary, 1755 — codification, not invention, of usage.

Prescriptivism, descriptivism and theories

Attitudes to change split into two camps:

• Prescriptivism — there is a correct English; change is decline to be resisted.
• Descriptivism — linguists describe how language is actually used, without judging.

Jean Aitchison challenged prescriptivism with three metaphors for negative attitudes: the damp spoon (change is laziness), the crumbling castle (English was once perfect and is decaying) and the infectious disease (bad usage is caught from others). Other theories include the substratum theory (contact with other languages), functional theory (language changes to meet needs), random fluctuation (Postal) and wave and S-curve models of how change spreads.

Attribute: the three metaphors are Aitchison's descriptions of prescriptivist attitudes, which she rejects.

Whose metaphor?

Match term to definition

Tap a term on the left, then its definition on the right.

The big ideas to take away

You can now explain how and why English has changed since 1600, and evaluate attitudes to it. Press Finish to see your score.