Comments Welcome
George W. Grace
University of Hawaii

Ethnolinguistic Notes

Series 4, Number 8

LINGUISTIC CHANGE

7. HOW DOES "THE LANGUAGE" CHANGE?

Change in the absence of contact
Contact-influenced change
Self-representation in change
Sound change
Summary

QUESTION: Let me attempt to review what we've said.

We said that the reality behind language states, and therefore linguistic change, turns out ultimately to be individuals' knowledge of language (KOL). We said that this knowledge takes the form of stored memory of experiences and, in particular, memory of utterances and the situations to which they were responding.

Then, we said that although individual languages are fictions, for many purposes it's possible to proceed as if they were real. What we identify as being a language is in fact similarity in the utterances of the individuals who count as its speakers. This similarity, in turn, comes from a similarity in the KOLs of these individuals--a similarity that results from their having learned from similarly selected role models.

Now, we arrive at the question: what is linguistic change? What goes on in the KOLs of the individuals who count as speakers of a particular language that we perceive as linguistic change?

ANSWER: In the modern world probably most change comes from what would be called "contact innovations" in Henning Andersen's (e.g., 1974) terminology. That is, it comes from contact with people who would count as speakers of a different dialect (or even a different language)--at any rate, people whose own role models were different (at least in part) from ours (or from the role models of our role models).

However, we probably ought to set these aside for a moment and begin by considering the kinds of changes that occur independently of contact.

Possible changes in the absence of contact

QUESTION: What else besides "contact" can cause changes?

ANSWER: We're talking about changes in the memory stores of individuals, and of course these memory stores change constantly throughout the life of the individual. An individual's role models, and of course the individual him/herself, are constantly encountering situations that differ slightly from any situation previously encountered, and they are constantly producing slightly novel utterances. However, it seems likely that as long as the general physical and cultural environment remain essentially constant, the direction of these changes will be pretty much random.

QUESTION: Does that mean that they will cancel one another out?

ANSWER: Probably very largely so, although it does seem likely that there could be some cumulative effect over time. However, I don't know what kind of evidence we should look for in order to be able to predict the direction of change.

QUESTION: What if the general physical or cultural environment didn't remain essentially constant?

ANSWER: Then there might be more radical changes in the experiences of the people--in the situations in which they found themselves. And in that case, we might expect the sample of linguistic expressions which an individual or his/her role models produced as well as those which s/he heard to be somewhat different from a sample of those produced before the environmental changes. The later sample would reflect the people's accommodation to the new situations.

QUESTION: Wouldn't this accommodation be primarily in vocabulary?

ANSWER: Of course, our hypothesis of the KOL doesn't have any concept of vocabulary. Your question is phrased in the terminology of conventional linguistic description--of the syntax-lexicon model.

QUESTION: But we need to be able to use that terminology. Maybe you should try to give an account of what facts lie behind the notions of syntax and lexicon (as you've done in the case of the notion of languages).

ANSWER: I'll try. When we examine a corpus of artifacts of speech in a given language (I apologize for making use of this fiction, but it's much more convenient to talk in terms of "languages" since English so far lacks a convenient way of talking that conforms better with our hypothesis), it's easy to find structure in it. For example, if we consider the corpus to be made up of units such as sentences, we will find that each sentence generally has some parts that are identical with parts of other sentences. It's possible to abstract these sentence parts and conceive of the sentences as being composed of them. Furthermore many of the components can be analyzed into smaller components, different kinds of components may be distinguished, the different kinds of components may have quite different combinatory possibilities, etc. What conventional linguistic description describes is this structure in the artifacts of speech.

QUESTION: What I need to know is how the kinds of changes in KOLs that you've been describing are reflected in the linguistic description.

ANSWER: There's no very direct answer to that question. The main point to make is that the structure of the artifacts of speech--that which will appear in a linguistic description--is some kind of resultant of the KOLs of those who produced the speech. However, the KOLs can't be inferred directly from the linguistic description. By the same token, although change in KOLs is the mechanism by which change in the linguistic description comes about, the changes in the KOLs again can't be inferred directly from the changes in the description.

QUESTION: How are we to study linguistic change then?

ANSWER: I'd say, first of all, that we should continue pretty much what we're doing now as far as collecting and analyzing data are concerned. That is, we can continue identifying and analyzing the changes between états de langue as they're represented by linguistic descriptions. It's when we look for explanations that we need to be cautious. We need to keep in mind that the mechanism is changes in the KOLs of individuals and not some kind of interactions among the structural components that we've abstracted out of our corpus of artifacts of speech.

QUESTION: Ok, we've said that changes in the KOLs of individual speakers are the result of changes in these speakers' experiences, and that sometimes these changes are such that they would be reflected in changes in the linguistic description of the language that they would be counted as speaking. Is that a fair statement?

ANSWER: Yes.

QUESTION: Then, it seems fair to return now to the question I asked above. Wouldn't the resulting changes in the linguistic description be mainly in the lexicon?

ANSWER: I don't want to say categorically that that would have to be true, but no doubt it often would be. However, my objection to the question is that it's misleading.

QUESTION: How so?

ANSWER: It misleads by its conceptualization. It does precisely what we've just been warning against--confuses the linguistic description with the mechanism of change. In short, it treats the structural components that a standard linguistic description would abstract out of a corpus of artifacts of speech as if they were actual participants in the process of change.

QUESTION: If we grant that the question gives (or suggests) a misleading conception of the process, could we still say that it's in the lexicon that most of the change in the description would show up?

ANSWER: Again I'll have to say that that would no doubt often be true, but I think that that question and answer are also likely to be misleading.

QUESTION: Why?

ANSWER: Because the statements in the other parts (than the lexicon) of the description tend to be at a much higher level of generalization. According to our present conception of linguistic descriptions--descriptions of language states--a proper description includes the lexicon. Therefore, a proper description of a new language state would necessarily report any new lexical item. On the other hand, all sorts of subtle changes in the usages and frequencies of constructions might have occurred without requiring any changes in the previously-formulated syntactic rules.

Contact-influenced change

QUESTION: All right, I won't pursue that any farther. Let's return to something you said above--that most change probably comes from contact with speakers of other languages or dialects. Tell us more about what you meant.

ANSWER: I said that, at least, that was probably true in the modern world. I think we need to distinguish two ways in which these other languages or dialects may influence change. First, the other language may offer additional resources for responding to novel situations.

Second, the presence of another language or dialect creates identity options--does the speaker want to identify him/herself with dialect/language A or with B (or more precisely, with which set of speakers and role models)?

QUESTION:. We've already been talking about responses to novel situations in the absence of language contact. Let's continue with that before we look at identity options. How does having a choice of languages or dialects affect the way one responds?

ANSWER: Let's consider the position of a hypothetical bilingual (or bidialectal) confronted with the option of making an utterance. We've said that whenever we're faced with this option, our decision is made on the basis of recognizing the situation we're in--or more precisely, of recognizing the essence of some previously-experienced situation(s) in the situation we're now in. Now, let's say that the previously-experienced situation that we recognize in it is one that belongs to the memory store of experiences where Language A was used--where the associated linguistic expression was in A.(1) Then, what choices have we?

Of course, if the audience knows A (is A-speaking or bilingual in A and B), we can just use the A expression with no further ado.

On the other hand, if the audience includes or consists entirely of monolingual B-speakers, our options include the following:

1. Find the best-fitting B expression (i.e., force ourselves to find some experience in which B was used that bears some similarity to the present situation), however poor the fit may be, and settle for that.

2. Just go ahead and use the A expression--maybe with some explanation.

3. Resort to code-switching. For example, find a roughly appropriate or partially appropriate B expression and use it as a frame, but then insert a suitable A expression in it. (The inserted A expression might well be a portion of the (probably longer) A expression referred to above.)

4. Calque the A expression in B, or calque the A-language component of a code-switched message such as that just described.

QUESTION: That's too much to absorb at once. You need to explain a couple of things. First, explain how the code-switching (option 3) would work.

ANSWER: I'll try. In this hypothetical case the best fit to our current situation that can be found in our memory store is one in which a particular utterance in A was used. However, A isn't understood sufficiently well by the audience. With further searching we are able to find in our memory store another situation in which an utterance in B was used and which bears some resemblance to our present situation. However (in the case of option 3), we decide the fit between the situation and this B expression isn't good enough for us just to use the B expression as it stands. Therefore we try to improve the fit by combining the B expression, or main components of it, with a (probably shorter) expression from A. This may be done either by uttering the two in sequence or substituting the A expression for some part of the B one.

QUESTION: How are B monolinguals supposed to understand such a mixed utterance?

ANSWER: Of course, this kind of code-switching only makes sense if there's some reason to believe that the audience has a chance of understanding it. That might mean that the context will provide enough clues, or that the audience have had some experience of A, or that A and B are sufficiently closely related that some A can be understood by B speakers.

QUESTION: I'm confused by your references to utterances, (linguistic) expressions, and portions or components of expressions. First, what's the relation between an utterance and a linguistic expression?

ANSWER: An utterance is an act of uttering. Here I use it either for the process or what the process accomplishes. The strictly linguistic material employed in making an utterance is a linguistic expression.

QUESTION: You also speak of expressions and portions or components of expressions. I thought you were insisting that utterances (or the linguistic expressions that are their vehicles) are treated holistically in the KOL--that the analysis is something that linguists do with the artifacts of speech. Will you clarify that?

ANSWER: It's important not to confuse utterances with sentences. The "sentence" is a concept of linguistic description. In fact, the linguistic expressions used to make utterances can be very short indeed--one word utterances aren't at all uncommon.

Some situations seemingly call for the utterance of long linguistic expressions while others are more appropriately expressed with short ones. Thus, a speaker will normally have in his/her memory store many examples of short utterances whose expressions also occur as part of (the expressions used in) one or more longer utterances.

QUESTION: Are there differences between the situations that call for short utterances and those that require longer ones?

ANSWER: It may well be true that the situations that call for short linguistic expressions are in some sense more narrowly conceived, more focused. I'm not really prepared to say much about that, but I think it's not unreasonable to think of one situation as falling within the scope of another--of sort of fitting into it.

QUESTION: Wouldn't the speaker in such cases be likely to make the analysis him/herself--that is to come to think of the longer expression as containing the shorter one as a component?

ANSWER: I think it's very likely that many, probably most, speakers do do so. I'd guess that many people have analytical knowledge of a lot of the longer expressions they've heard. (Of course, that's very different from saying that they themselves compose the expressions they're going to use.)

QUESTION: All right, now a different question: How does the code-switching you've described relate to what is commonly known as borrowing?

ANSWER: I take it that what you mean by "the code-switching you've described" is the case where a B expression provides the frame and an A expression is attached to or substituted within it. That utterance would, of course, go into the memory stores of those who heard it. If the speaker was an important enough role model, and/or if the same A expression occurred in other utterances that found their way into people's memory stores, it might well come into common use. Of course, whether or not it would be recognized in linguistic descriptions as a borrowing would depend on whether or not it appeared frequently enough in the corpus of the linguist writing the description to convince him/her that it should be counted as part of the language.

QUESTION: Anyway, what we're ultimately concerned with here is the process of linguistic change (by which we understand the process by which changes in linguistic descriptions come about). I think you're saying that what you've just described is the process by which what we know as borrowing occurs. Is that right?

ANSWER: Yes.

QUESTION: The final option (option 4) you mentioned was calquing. What is calquing?

ANSWER: To calque an A utterance in B, it's necessary to analyze the utterance (or more precisely, the linguistic expression of which it's composed) into components (i.e., component expressions). One then substitutes the B equivalent for each of the components isolated in the analysis.

QUESTION: An example would be taking a sentence in A and replacing all of the words with their B equivalents?

ANSWER: Yes.

QUESTION: What does "equivalent" mean here?

ANSWER: It means a word (or other expression) in one language/dialect that fairly accurately translates a word (or other expression) in another. It seems that many of the most basic words in any language have fairly exact translations in any other language. Bilinguals are often quite sensitive to these translation equivalences.

QUESTION: At this point I should ask you to explain what translation is, but I'm sure that's too big a topic to take up here.

ANSWER: Yes it is. It would require a major digression. However, in the past I've made some fairly extensive efforts--which the readers should of course feel free to consult--toward answering that question.(2)

QUESTION: All right. To continue, how does the individual know what the translation equivalences are? Is that part of his/her KOL?

ANSWER: Of course, it wouldn't be part of everyone's KOL. To begin with, the person would have to be bilingual. Among bilinguals, I think there is wide variation in knowledge of translation equivalents which depends largely on the nature of the individual's experience with the two languages and partly on personal characteristics.

My hypothesis would be that most of an individual's knowledge of equivalences between words and expressions in two languages comes from experiences involving translation or what I've described (in Grace 1981:39-40) as "something akin to covert translation...where a message is received in one language and subsequently alluded to, responded to, or partially reported in another".

QUESTION: All right. Now supposing that--in accordance with option 4--we've taken the A expression that fits the situation and replaced every word with the equivalent B word, how can we be sure that this calqued expression will be understood by B speakers?

ANSWER: Of course, this, like the code-switching, would only make sense if there was reason to believe that the audience had a chance of understanding. Again, that might mean that the context would provide enough clues, or that the audience has had some experience of A, or that A and B are sufficiently closely related that the A structure can be interpreted by B speakers.

QUESTION: Well, what we're really concerned about is changes in linguistic descriptions. We've said one kind of change in the linguistic description of B that might result from code-switching would be lexical borrowing. Might calquing also result in changes in the linguistic description?

ANSWER: Again, if a particular calque or particular pattern of calquing was used often enough or prominently enough, it could. For one thing, a particular calqued form might survive in the language as an idiom. More generally, new grammatical constructions can be introduced in this way. This seems to be the mechanism that lies behind so-called "grammatical borrowing".

The representation of self in linguistic change

QUESTION: All right. We said that there were two ways in which contact with other languages/dialects might influence change. The first was by making additional resources available for responding to novel situations. You've given your account of how that works. The second was by offering identity options. What did you mean by that?

ANSWER: I mean that every time we speak--in addition to whatever else we're saying--we're also saying that we're such-and-such kind of person.(3) In a situation of language contact an important part of this self-representation is the choice between identifying oneself with Dialect/Language A or B (or more precisely, with the A or B set of speakers and role models).

QUESTION: What are the options available to the speaker in this case?

ANSWER: Not very different from the previous case: She/he can speak A, speak B, Code-switch between the two, or calque one in the other. The difference is in the motive.

QUESTION: How do the motives differ?

ANSWER: Whereas in the previous example, the motive was to find the most fitting expression for the (subjective) situation, now the motive that we're concerned with is the speaker's presentation of self.

QUESTION: You'll need to explain this a little farther.

ANSWER: I'll try. So far I've probably left the impression that the decision to make an utterance involves simply recognizing the (subjective) situation that one's in, finding a linguistic expression that fits it, and uttering this expression. However, the subjective situation is more complex than that, at the very least it can consist of a manifest part and a part that's not overt.

QUESTION: What do you mean?

ANSWER: Let me try to illustrate with the example of a simple and very straightforward-appearing kind of speech act. Say that I've noticed that it's raining (and let's say that you're in an interior room where you can't see out) , and I say to you, "It's raining".

Now, what would "understanding" this particular speech act involve?

QUESTION: I'll let you answer that.

ANSWER: First of all, there's understanding what objective situation has been reported--that is, the raining.

Second, something more can be understood about my subjective situation from the fact that I deliberately made this information available to you--viz., it can be understood that I wanted to make it available to you. In fact, the utterance itself has made this intention (the intention, more precisely, to give you to believe that it's raining) manifest to you, and of course I'm fully aware that it is manifest.

However, there's more to be understood--more to the subjective situation--although it may never be revealed. There's my motive for wanting you to know (or more precisely to believe--in this example, correctly) that it's raining. (For example, maybe I'm hoping you'll begin to doubt that conditions are propitious for an outing you've been planning for us; maybe I'm hoping the rain will keep you from leaving; maybe I just want to forewarn you.) (In fact, if my motive doesn't seem fairly transparent, you probably won't feel at all satisfied that you've understood my utterance).

QUESTION: What are you getting at?

ANSWER: It's that up to now I've pretty much let it appear that the subjective situation doesn't extend beyond the manifest part--let it appear that it's fairly easy to infer the speaker's state of mind from his/her utterance. Unfortunately (for this account, though probably fortunately for the human condition), it's not as simple as that. The complication that concerns us here is that a speaker can to some extent make deliberate choices about how she/he wants to represent the "manifest" part of the subjective situation.

QUESTION: What do you mean?

ANSWER: There are cases that typically call for deliberate misrepresentation of the speaker's subjective situation. Lying is one example. To lie convincingly, the speaker typically must make his/her state of mind appear to be something different from what it is. Another example would be an actor playing a role. He not only must recite the assigned lines but must deliver them in a way that accords with the supposed (subjective) situation of the character (which is, of course, not at all that of the actor, himself).

But our main concern here isn't with anything as bald as misrepresentation. It's with the complexity of personal identities, of the variety of roles we play in the various circumstances of our lives. In fact, the main point--and all that need concern us here--is very simple. It's just that one motive for a bilingual or bidialectal to use the resources of his/her two languages or dialects in the ways that we've discussed is to represent him/herself as being an A-speaking person, a B-speaking person, a bilingual of a particular sort, or any of what he/she perceives as available identity options.

Sound change

QUESTION: That seems to cover my main questions except for one. We haven't said anything about phonological change. No discussion of linguistic change seems complete without at least some mention of sound change.

ANSWER: No, we haven't said anything about phonology as such, although what was said above was conceived of as applying to phonology as well. However, I'll attempt to fill in some gaps.

I should begin by saying that I understand the individual's sound system also to be a kind of memory store.

QUESTION: How's that?

ANSWER: I think the core of it is stored motor skills. Basically, what we have is an inventory of articulatory gestures--articulatory movements that we've become practiced at. (I've gone into this in somewhat greater depth in Grace 1983 and 1984).

QUESTION: What about structure? First, you got rid of grammatical structure and replaced it with a kind of dictionary and now you're replacing phonological structure also with an inventory--this time of articulatory movements. Where do grammatical and phonological structure come in?

ANSWER: The structures come in as epiphenomena. The phonological structures that are revealed by linguists' analyses are the result of linguistic expressions being shaped to accommodate to a reasonably-sized inventory of articulatory gestures. How this works can be particularly apparent when a foreign word is assimilated to accommodate to the existing inventory.

As far as grammatical structure is concerned, it arises especially in the practice of creating new linguistic expressions that are modeled on existing ones.

QUESTION: And how do changes in the sound system come about?

ANSWER: Even without any new experiences there'd probably be some tendency to simplify the articulatory movements, but (as André Martinet in particular has pointed out) this tendency should encounter resistance as utterances began to be less understandable.

As far as I can see, the change in the individual's sound system that's due to new experiences in the absence of any contact--that is, any exposure to new role models--should be pretty much like other change that occurs in the same circumstances. As I suggested above, I assume that would mean some drift over time although it's hard to guess what kind of information could enable us to predict the direction of that change.

QUESTION: And where there is contact?

ANSWER: Where there's contact, there are additional options. In addition to the choices we saw above--i.e., of using A expressions, B expressions, B code-switching into A, B calqued on A, etc.--there are the additional options of pronouncing A with B "accent" (i.e., with B-influenced articulatory movements), B with A accent, etc. (In fact, where A and B have very different phonologies, there are often even intermediate pronunciations for loan words which involve partial accommodation to the pronunciation of the source language without truly mimicking pronunciation.)

QUESTION: Why would one want to pronounce A with B accent, for example?

ANSWER: I should preface my answer by mentioning that one may do it involuntarily. I proposed in something I once wrote (but I can't find what) that switching frequently between languages so that one has to shift from one sound system to the other requires a kind of "gear-shifting"--a resetting of the articulatory base--that's difficult to do accurately and swiftly. I proposed this difficulty--the residual effect of articulatory movements that one has just been using--as one source of intermediate or even completely converged pronunciations.

In addition to such purely articulatory slippages, there is often some more nearly voluntary articulatory accommodation as a sort of attempt to meet the interlocutor half way.

Beyond that, there's the matter of representation of self again. For example, recent studies of sound change in progress have shown that much ongoing change reflected speakers' choices among different dialectal pronunciations, where, for example, one pronunciation might be associated with a dialect viewed as more expressive of local solidarity and another as more "correct". Where such choices are available, a speaker must choose how to present him/herself--what identity to give him/herself.

These matters are much too complex to attempt to cover at all fully here, but it's easy to see how the cumulative effect of the choices made by each person's role models and by each person in his/her own speech can lead quite naturally to changes in the linguistic description.

Summary

QUESTION: Will you try to summarize what we've said here?

ANSWER: I'll try. I think the main points were the following:

1. Contact with people who would count as speakers of a different language or dialect is probably the main source of change in individuals' KOLs (at least in the modern world).

2. However, the KOLs may be expected to change even in the absence of such contact.

3. Changes in the absence of contact are likely to be more pronounced if there are significant changes in the physical or cultural environment, but some drift over time is to be expected even in the absence of such motivations.

4. Where there is contact, bilinguals (or bidialectals) can, by code-switching or calquing, introduce changes that may eventually show up in linguistic descriptions as lexical or grammatical borrowings.

5. The individual may introduce such changes in order to serve either expressive or emblematic purposes.