English is always changing — in its words, meanings, grammar and spelling. This lesson covers how and why English changes and the debate over whether change is decay or evolution.
You will meet the processes and levels of change, standardisation, and theories including Aitchison's metaphors. Press Start.
Language change happens at every level:
Context: printing, empire, science and technology have all driven change.
New words enter through several processes:
Loss: words also become archaic and obsolete over time.
Words keep their form but shift meaning:
Keep separate: broadening/narrowing (scope) vs amelioration/pejoration (value).
Tap an example, then tap the process it illustrates.
Early spelling was highly variable. Standardisation was driven by:
Haugen described standardisation as selection, codification, elaboration and implementation.
Remember: Johnson's Dictionary, 1755 — recording usage, not inventing it.
Explain both why change happens and how people react:
Jean Aitchison rejected decline narratives, naming three prescriptivist metaphors: the damp spoon (laziness), the crumbling castle (a mythical perfect past) and the infectious disease (usage is caught). The wider debate is prescriptivism vs descriptivism.
Attribute: the three metaphors describe attitudes Aitchison rejects.
Tap a term on the left, then its definition on the right.
Levels: lexical, semantic, grammatical, orthographic, phonological change
New words: borrowing, coinage, compounding, blending, conversion
Meaning: broadening/narrowing (scope); amelioration/pejoration (value)
Standardisation: Caxton's press; Johnson's Dictionary 1755; Haugen's stages
Theories: substratum, functional, random fluctuation, S-curve
Debate: prescriptivism vs descriptivism; Aitchison's three metaphors
You can now explain how and why English changes, and evaluate attitudes to it. Press Finish to see your score.
You have worked through Language Change for OCR A-level English Language. 🎉
Your stars: 0 / 0
Next: test yourself in the Verify stage.