5: Morphological Stages

Video Script

Okay, folks, it's not just phonology that changes over time. In this section, we'll talk a little bit about morphological changes, and then in the next section we'll talk about semantic and lexical changes. It is important to note that at this level, talking about each of these types of changes gets pretty complicated, and I don't want to go too far into this. But I will give you some examples and showcase what happens. Again, I’m going to be using Indo-European and especially the Romance languages as examples. This is in part, again, because they are so well documented over the history of these changes. That's not to say we don't have similar documentation elsewhere; it's just to focus a little bit on something that everybody seems familiar with. You all speak English, so looking at the history of English for some of these changes make sense; you can see how things have changed over time in a language you all speak. So many of you speak a Romance language, whether it's Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian or any of the Romance languages. So many of you either natively or learnedly speak a Romance language, so by showing you the history of how these languages have happened, you can start applying it to other languages.

As we start going into morphology and morphological changes, one of the big ones when we're talking about Indo-European languages and many other major language families, has to do with case marking. What is case? Remember, we talked about it with respect to morphosyntax when you are using some kind of inflection to show the role that the noun phrase or propositional phrase may have, whether it's a subject, a direct object, etc. We see here Old English versus Late Modern English, so what we speak today. In Old English, you had four main cases: nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative. Nominative case is always the subject; genitive is always possession. Dative is always what we like to term the indirect object, so the person or entity that benefits from the action. But dative also can imply other roles that involve propositional phrases, like to or towards, like if we have the sentence, I throw the rock at the building, the noun phrase the building might be marked with a dative. Accusative usually is what we call the direct object, so the person or thing that is undergoing the action, but it also can imply some kind of direction away.

In a lot of languages, and certainly in old English, we had different forms of the noun—singular versus plural—according to different case, so that whatever role it had grammatically in the sentence was marked with the inflection. There wasn't just a ‘stān’ or stone; stān was the nominative singular, as well as the accusative singular. But if you wanted to say, the stone’s color, you couldn't say stān; you had to say stāne because it was the color of the stone. If it was plural, you had different forms.

This is old English, and I chose to show you this instead of say Latin because Latin was a lot more complicated. There was something here in this data set that you don't see as much in Latin. Compare everything in this data set, notice how many forms are similar, and I mean very similar. This is written in modernized English writing, which is based off of IPA. Notice that the nominative singular and accusative singular are the exact same form, so whether it's the subject or the direct object, you don't know. Notice that this is true just not in singular, but in plural. Also, notice that stāne versus stāna are very similar; just that one little vowel is different. When we see something like this, historically one of two things typically happens: either there is a merger of the roles, so the morphosyntax, specifically the case system, collapses and goes away. Or you start dissimilating every individual piece. In the case of English, we clearly see that case is being deleted, so that now we really only have genitive and non-genitive. By the way, genitive is that apostrophe-s (-‘s) that we have as the possessive. Everything else is a different form, and then we have singular and plural accordingly. Also, notice that this plural genitive is starting to go away; more and more folks do not use this form, so there is further evidence of the case system further eroding.

As I said, this is all in English, but we see this in almost all Indo-European languages, where the case system has modified over time. Some languages, like English like the Romance languages for the most part, and in certain other cases, you see either severe reduction or a deletion of the case system. Other examples, like the Slavic languages and the Baltic languages, or the Aryan languages like Farsi/Persian, we see a dissimilation. We start seeing strengthening of those case markers in some way.

Remember that when you have a reduction in case marking, that isn't the only thing that's affected. Everything in the entire language is affected, which means you're going to affect the phonology, the morphology, the syntax, and the semantics; it's a big circle.

There are other examples that I wish to show you, and analogy is kind of the big one. Analogy is what we start seeing when there are mergers or combinations, and roles gets shifted. Phonology has a great impact on what happens; if the sounds start blending and sounding the same in a given environment, then you're going to have a whole slew of other effects in the rest of the aspects of the language. For example, if you talk about a cow, it used to be that the plural of cow was kine. Now it's really only cows; we have we have used analogy to apply the standard pluralization. The same is true with the present tense and the past tense. We saw that there are dialects that still showcase older forms, older pronunciations and older relics. When we talked about umlaut or vowels changing to either pluralize or make something past tense. We see it in Appalachian English, we have seen it in other dialects of English that are more remote.

Reanalysis part of this as well; when we're talking about reanalysis, we're also talking about how the morphology is affecting the syntax. If you have a reduction in case system, meaning you don't separate out the parts of speech, you have to start relying on word order. That change is going to affect the syntax and everything else with respect to the language. We see this with Latin and the Romance languages; we see this with the old English to Late Modern English—actually see it in Early Modern English. There's some interesting with versions of adpositions—prepositions or postpositions, depending on where they are with respect to the root. They can get reanalyzed case markers, and case markers can get realized as adpositions. With respect to the case markers that we see in Russian, some of them started off as adpositions, I believe prepositions. We see this from Traditional Japanese to Modern Japanese, as well. We also see the reverse; some of those case markers in Latin turned into prepositional phrases, for the most part course, although if we talked about Romanian that language has postpositional phrase.

When we talk about these changes, we aren't just talking about a change in one area. Language is not in a vacuum; it is going to affect everything else. So, I started off talking about phonological change, but notice that it impacts the morphology, and then in the next section we'll see how it impacts the syntax and lexicon.