Msila University

Master 1 Linguistics

Module :
Applied Linguistics

Dr Touati
Master 1/Linguistics Applied Linguistics / S1 Dr Touati

Lecture 1 : What is Applied Linguistics?

‘Applied linguistics’ is using (a) what we know about language, (b) how it is learned and (c)
how it is used, in order to achieve some purpose or solve some problem in the real world. Those
purposes are many and varied.
In a broad sense, applied linguistics is concerned with increasing understanding of the role of
language in human affairs and thereby with providing the knowledge necessary for those who are
responsible for taking language-related decisions whether the need for these arises in the
classroom, the workplace, the law court, or the laboratory. These purposes may be related to the
list of topics :
• analysis of discourse and interaction • assessment and evaluation
• language and ideology • language and learner characteristics
• language planning and policy • second language acquisition
• text analysis (written discourse) • translation and interpretation.

The Development of Applied Linguistics

Early History
back at least as far as the ancient Greeks, where both ‘Plato and Aristotle contributed to the
design of a curriculum beginning with good writing (grammar), then moving on to effective
discourse (rhetoric) and culminating in the development of dialectic to promote a philosophical
approach to life. In 1755, Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language,
which quickly became the unquestioned authority on the meanings of English words.
During the Twentieth Century
Grammar-translation method : A lesson would typically have one or two new grammar
rules, a list of vocabulary items and some practice examples to translate from L1 into L2 or vice
versa. The content focused on reading and writing literary materials. One of its main problems
was that it focused on the ability to ‘analyse’ language, and not the ability to ‘use’ it. In addition,
the emphasis on reading and writing did little to promote an ability to communicate orally in the
target language.
Direct method : This emphasized exposure to oral language, with listening and speaking as
the primary skills. Meaning was related directly to the target language, without translation. It
imitated how a mother tongue is learnt naturally, with listening then speaking, and only later
reading and writing.

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Reading method : In the UK, Michael West was interested in increasing learners’ exposure
to language through reading. His method attempted to make this possible by promoting reading
skills through vocabulary management. He controlled the number of new words which could
appear in any text.
Audiolingualism : It drew its rationale from the dominant psychological theory of the time,
Behaviourism. Thus, the method included activities which were believed to reinforce ‘good’
language habits, such as close attention to pronunciation, intensive oral drilling. In short,
students were expected to learn through drills rather than through an analysis of the target
language.
Communicative approach : it emphasized that language competence consists of more than
just being able to ‘form grammatically correct sentences but also to know when and where to use
these sentences and to whom’. This helped to swing the focus from language ‘correctness’
(accuracy) to how suitable any use of language was for a particular context (appropriacy).

Perspectives in Applied Linguistics

Incorporating Social and Cultural Elements :
Saussure, (1966) split language (‘langue’) from the actual use of language (‘parole’).
Chomsky’s (1965) ideas had a similar effect as they distinguished what was happening inside the
learner (‘language competence’) from what was observable outside the person (‘language
performance’).
Labov (1970) began exploring how social factors influence L1 language use and Tarone
(1979) and others later did the same for L2 usage. The study of the interface of social factors and
language use eventually developed into the field of ‘sociolinguistics’. Similarly, it was
acknowledged that the context in which language is used (for example, for what purpose, the
relative power relationship between interlocutors) also affects the language of communication.
The study of these factors blossomed in the area of ‘pragmatics’. Together, these fields, along
with the closely related area of ‘discourse analysis’, have shown that social and contextual
influences cannot be divorced from individual learners when language learning and use are
studied.
One view of cognition, called ‘sociocultural theory’, emphasizes individual–social integration
by focusing on the necessary and dialectic relationship between the sociocultural endowment
(the ‘inter’-personal interface between a person and his or her environment) and the biological
endowment (the ‘intra’-personal mechanisms and processes belonging to that person), out of
which emerges the individual.
Psycholinguistic Perspectives in Applied Linguistics :
One of the most noticeable recent trends has been the establishment of a more psychological
perspective of language acquisition, processing and use which is driven by psycholinguistics.
The current leading theories of how second languages are acquired are all informed by
psycholinguistic thinking and research.

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Lecture 2 : Vocabulary
What is a word ?
Answers are very difficult to be decisive. It is dependent on the reasons for asking such a
question.
If we want to count how long a book is, or how fast someone can speak or read in words per
minute, then we need to count tokens. The sentence ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’
contains ten tokens. Even though the same word form " be " occurs twice, it is counted each time
it occurs.
If we are interested in how many different words someone knows or uses, then we would
count word types. For example, if we are interested in how much sight vocabulary a learner has.
The sentence ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’ contains eight word types. Both 'be' and
'to' occur twice, and so they are not counted after their first occurrence. Some of the problems
with counting types include deciding what to do about capital letters (Are High and high two
types or one?) And what to do with identical types that have different meanings (generation(of
electricity) and (the younger) generation).
If our reason for counting is related to vocabulary learning, then we need to choose the unit of
counting : word form/ word family (mend, mends, mended, mending) as belonging to the same
word family and it is the total frequency of a word family that determines the familiarity of any
particular member of that family. A major problem with counting word families is in deciding
what should be counted as a member of a family. The most conservative way is to count lemmas.
A lemma is a set of related words that consists of the stem form and inflected forms that are all
the same part of speech. So, approach, approaches, approached, approaching would all be
members of the same lemma because they all have the same stem, include only the stem and
inflected forms, and are all verbs. Approach and approaches as nouns would be a different
lemma. A less conservative definition of a word family would also include items made with
derivational affixes like un- and non-, -ness and -ly.
If we are counting learners’ receptive knowledge, the word family is the best unit. If we are
counting productive knowledge as in speaking or writing, the word type (or perhaps the lemma)
is the best unit.
There are some groups of words, like good morning and at the end of the day, which seem to
be used like single words. Some of the groups may be items that have not been analysed into
parts but are just learned, stored and used as complete units. Others may be constructed from
known parts but are used so often that users treat them as a single unit. Native speakers speak
appropriately and fluently because they have stored a great deal of this formulaic language
which they can draw on when engaging in communication. From a learning perspective,
formulaic language could be classified to :

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Core idioms: These are items where the meaning of the parts bears no obvious relationship to
the meaning of the whole. The most frequent examples of these in English are as well (as), of
course, such and such, out of hand, take the piss, and serve(someone) right.
Figuratives: These are items that have both a literal meaning and a figurative meaning. For
example, We have to make sure we are singing from the same hymn Sheet has a literal meaning,
but it is used here with a figurative meaning – ‘We have to make sure we are following the same
set of rules’.
Literals: By far the largest group of formulaic sequences are literals, where the meaning of the
part clearly makes up the meaning of the whole. Some of the highest frequency literals in spoken
English are you know, I think, thank you, in fact, talk about, and I suppose.

What Vocabulary Should Be Learned?

What vocabulary to focus on should be determined by two major considerations : the needs of
the learners and the usefulness of the vocabulary items. The traditional way of measuring the
usefulness of items is to discover their frequency and range in a relevant corpus.
If we use frequency counts to distinguish high-frequency from low-frequency words, then it
seems clear that the high-frequency words need to be the first and main vocabulary goal of
learners. These words are so frequent, so wide spread. The low-frequency words are so
infrequent, have such a narrow range of occurrence and make up such a large group that they do
not deserve teaching time. Of course, learners need to keep on learning them both

How Should Vocabulary Be Learned?

Many teachers would assume that vocabulary learning stems mainly from the direct teaching
of words in the classroom. However, vocabulary learning needs to be more broadly based than
this. Let us look at four strands of vocabulary learning in turn.
I- Learning Vocabulary from Meaning-focused Input (Listening and Reading)
Learning from meaning-focused input, that is, learning incidentally through listening and
reading, accounts for most first language vocabulary learning. Although this kind of learning is
less sure than deliberate study, for native speakers there are enormous opportunities for such
learning. For such learning to occur with non-native speakers, three major conditions need to be
met. First, the unknown vocabulary should make up only a very small proportion of the tokens.
Second, there needs to be a very large quantity of input. Third, learning will be increased if
there is more deliberate attention to the unknown vocabulary through the occurrence of the same
vocabulary in the course. Incidental learning is cumulative, incidental , strengthening,
typically for foreign learners.
II-Learning Vocabulary from Meaning-focused Output (Speaking and Writing)
Learning from meaning-focused output, that is, learning through speaking and writing, is
necessary to move receptive knowledge into productive knowledge by : using activities relying
on pictures, group discussions, using known words in speaking and writing.

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III-Deliberate Vocabulary Learning
Studies comparing incidental vocabulary learning with direct vocabulary learning
characteristically show that direct learning is more effective. Also, deliberate learning is more
focused and goal-directed than incidental learning. Such teaching can have three major goals.
First, it can aim to result in well-established vocabulary learning. This involves spending a
reasonable amount of time on each word and focusing on several aspects of a word, such as its
spelling, pronunciation, word parts, meaning. Second, raising learners’ consciousness of
particular words so that they are noticed when they are met again. Third, helping learners gain
knowledge of strategies and of systematic features of the language. These features include
sound-spelling correspondences, word parts, (prefixes, stems and suffixes), underlying concepts .
IV-Developing Fluency with Vocabulary across the Four Skills
Knowing vocabulary is important, but to use vocabulary well it needs to be available for fluent
use. Developing fluency involves learning to make the best use of what is already known. Thus,
fluency development activities should not involve unknown vocabulary.
There are two general approaches to fluency development. The first approach relies primarily
on repetition. This involves gaining repeated practice on the same material so that it can be
performed fluently. The second approach to fluency relies on making many connections and
associations with a known item. This could be called ‘the richness approach’ . It involves using
the known item in a wide variety of contexts and situations.

Strategy Development
There are four major strategies that help with finding the meaning of unknown :
. Guessing from Context : it is the most useful of all the strategies. To learn the strategy and to
use it effectively, learners need to know 95–98 per cent of the tokens in a text. That is, the
unknown word to be guessed has to have plenty of comprehensible supporting context.
. Studying deliberately words on word cards
. Dictionary Use : Dictionaries may be monolingual (all in the foreign language), bilingual
(foreign language words–first language definitions and vice versa) or bilingualized (monolingual
with first language definitions also provided). Learners show strong preferences for bilingual
dictionaries, and research indicates that bilingualized dictionaries are effective.
. Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge : There are several vocabulary tests that have research
evidence supporting their validity. They include:
Vocabulary Levels Tests: using a matching format where examinees write the number of
their answers in the blanks. Productive Levels Tests: requiring learners recall the form of
words using a sentence cue. Vocabulary Dictation Tests: generally they consist of five
paragraphs each paragraph contains less frequent vocabulary. Vocabulary seize tests: they
comprise 140 miltiple-choice items with the stem containing the tested word in a non-defining
context sentence.

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Limitations On Generalizing Vocabulary Size (Strategies To Other Languages)

It is worth pointing out that most of the research on vocabulary has been done within the broad
context of English Language Teaching (ELT). This is rather unfortunate, since English is a very
peculiar language in some respects, and particularly so as far as its vocabulary is concerned. This
means that the findings reported in the earlier part of this chapter may not always be
generalizable to other languages in a straightforward way.
The chief characteristic of English vocabulary is that it is very large. Consider, for example,
the set of objects and actions that in English are labeled as: book, write, read, desk, letter,
secretary and scribe. These words are all related semantically, in that they refer to written
language, but it is impossible to tell this simply by looking at the words. They share no physical
similarities at all, and this means that learners of English have to acquire seven separate words to
cover all these meanings. In other languages, this is not always the case. In Arabic all seven
meanings are represented by words which contain a shared set of three consonants – k-t-b.
There are also some historical reasons which contributed to the complexity of English
vocabulary. A substantial proportion of English vocabulary is basically Anglo-Saxon in origin
but, after the Norman invasion in 1066, huge numbers of Norman French words found their way
into English. English vocabulary was again very heavily influenced in the 18th century when
scholars deliberately expanded the vocabulary by introducing words based on Latin and Greek.
English has a tendency to use rare words where other languages often use circumlocutions
based on simpler items. Thus, English uses plagiarism to describe stealing quotations from other
people’s literary works, rustling to describe stealing other people’s cows and hijacking to
describe stealing other people’s airplanes. In other languages, these ideas would often be
described by words that literally translate as stealing writing, or stealing cows or stealing aircraft.

The lexical Bar / Barrier

Unfortunately for EFL learners, the opaque terms are not just an optional extra. A large part of
English education is about learning this difficult vocabulary, which are called the ‘lexical bar’ or
barrier, and educated English speakers are expected to know these words and be able to use
them. The lexical bar are the formal and the informal word-forms that should be aware of in
terms of appropriate use ; when, where, and with whom.... (a Vocabulary dependent on context)

Vocabulary size and language Profeciency

-The relationship between vocabulary size and linguistic ability differ from one language to
another. (how many words you know and how well you can perform in an ability test.)
- The size of Vocabulary is dependent on the way we teach and what achievement is expected.
In no way we can generalize the research findings on English Language on other languages
neither in vocabulary learning nor in teaching Methods.

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Lecture 3 : Grammar

What is Grammar ?
the word ‘grammar’ means different things to different people. For many, the term suggests a list
of rules that tell us we should say "It is I, not It is me",. For others, the term may refer to the rules
of grammar found mainly in written language even though they are often found in spoken
language (Ex : '‘Working on a term paper’' as a response to the question ‘What are you doing?’).
Grammars with rules that make distinctions between correct and incorrect forms are defined as
‘prescriptive’ grammars. They tell us how we ought to speak, as in ' It is I ' , and how we ought
not to speak, as in ' It is me' , or 'He ain’t hom'.
Grammars that do not make these distinctions and that aim to describe language as it is actually
used are called ‘descriptive’ grammars. Taking this unconscious knowledge into account, this
approach focuses on describing how native speakers actually do speak and does not prescribe
how they ought to speak. No value judgments are made, but rather the value-neutral terms
‘grammatical’ and ‘ungrammatical’ are used to distinguish between patterns that are well-
formed, possible sentences or phrases in a language and those that are not. For example, The cow
ate the corn is a grammatical sentence in English, but *Ate the corn the cow is ungrammatical.
For linguists, a descriptive grammar may also be a more detailed look at language, including not
only syntax and morphology but also phonetics, phonology, semantics and lexis .
Grammar in this sense consists of rules of syntax, which specify how words and phrases
combine to form sentences, and rules of morphology, which specify how word forms are
constructed (for example, present and past tense distinctions: love, loved; number distinctions:
word, words) and so on.
For applied linguists, the focus is more on ‘pedagogical grammar’, the type of grammar
designed for the needs of second-language students and teachers. Pedagogical grammar focuses
on the ability of students in producing an using correct and meaningful grammatical structures.

Issues when Describing Grammar

When we describe grammar we have to consider five issues :
I- Selection of which rule to describe
For one thing, we tend to expect grammars to state rules in terms of general statements, to
describe how structures behave in a predictable, rule-governed way. Yet a moment’s reflection
tells us that some rules apply more consistently than others. For example, whereas the ordering
rule for auxiliaries is invariant (modal auxiliaries such as would, might and so on, always precede
the primary auxiliaries have or be, as in, would have tried but not *have would tried ), the
subject–verb agreement rule admits exceptions (verbs take the suffix -s if their subject is third
person singular, as in He leaves, but there are exceptions such as subjunctive forms, I insist that
he leave now).

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As these examples indicate, grammar must include both rules that are invariant and rules
that admit variations. Notice that these examples fall under well-established categories of
acceptable, standard English. But what about different varieties? Some descriptive grammars
may include only standard varieties as spoken and written on formal occasions by educated
speakers of the language, whereas others may focus more on standard forms but also
include certain non-standard, or ‘informal’, variants. Grammars intended for use by students
of writing, for instance, typically include only those forms acceptable in formal writing.
Pedagogical grammars, on the other hand, may focus on standard formal patterns but also
include a number of informal alternatives, with explanations of the situations in which each is
acceptable, for example, class assignments or job interviews typically require formal writing or
speaking (How do you do?, I would like to enquire about X), whereas casual conversation with
friends tends towards informal expressions (Hi there, What’s up?). These examples illustrate that
issues of what to include can often be decided on the basis of the intended audience.
II- Form and Function
Models of grammar differ greatly, depending on whether they are formal grammars or functional
grammars. Formal grammar is concerned with the forms themselves and with how they operate
within the overall system of grammar. Traditional grammar, which describes the structure of
sentences, is perhaps the best known formal grammar. Among linguists, the most influential
formal grammar in the latter half of the 20 century has been the generative (transformational)
theory of grammar (Chomsky, 1957, 1965).
Generative theory is based on a rationalist approach, the central assumption being that language
is represented as a speaker’s mental grammar, a set of abstract rules for generating grammatical
sentences. This mental grammar, or internalized, unconscious knowledge of the system of rules,
is termed ‘competence’. The rules generate the syntactic structure and lexical items from
appropriate grammatical categories (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) are selected to fill in the
corresponding grammatical slots in the syntactic frame of the sentence. The interests of
generative linguists focus mainly on rule-governed behaviour and on the grammatical structure
of sentences and do not include concerns for the appropriate use of language in context.
Hymes (1972), an anthropological linguist, developed a functional model that focuses more on
appropriate use of language, that is, on how language functions in discourse. Although not
rejecting Chomsky’s model entirely, Hymes extended it and gave greater emphasis to
sociolinguistic and pragmatic factors. A central concern of his model is the concept of
‘communicative competence’, which emphasizes language as meaningful communication,
including the appropriate use of language in particular social contexts (Ex: informal conversation
at the dinner table versus formal conversation at the bank). For him, communicative competence
is defined as ‘the capabilities of a person’, a competence which is ‘dependent upon both [tacit]
knowledge and [ability for] use’. In other words, it includes not only knowledge of the rules in
Chomsky’s sense (grammatical competence) but also the ability to use language in various
contexts (pragmatic competence).

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Newer linguistic theories that attempt to combine form and meaning (though they give less
attention to appropriate use) are cognitive grammar (Langacker,1987) and construction grammar.
Pedagogical grammarians recognize that grammar is not merely a collection of forms ‘but
rather involves the three dimensions of what linguists refer to as (morpho)syntax (form),
semantics(meaming), and pragmatics(use)’.They illustrate the importance of all three
dimensions by means of a pie chart divided into equal and interconnected parts labeled ‘Form’,
‘Meaning’ and ‘Use’ (Figure 2.1). Learners need not only to achieve a certain degree of formal
accuracy, but that they also need to use the structures meaningfully and appropriately as well.

SEMANTICS
Lexical meaning
FORM / STRUCTURE Grammatical meaning
(how is it formed) (what does it mean)

Morphosyntactic and
lexical patterns
Phonemic/graphemic
MEANING USE / PRAGMATICS
(when and why is it used)
Social context Linguistic discourse context
Presuppositions about context

Figure 2.1 Interconnected dimensions of grammar

III. Type Vs. Token

In terms of descriptive grammars, there still remain questions about what it is, exactly, that
should be described. Descriptions of language will also have different outcomes depending on
whether they account for types of linguistic elements in the abstract, or for tokens of linguistic
elements as they actually occur in contexts of use.
IV. Discourse Grammar
Corpus studies have also led to an increased interest in analysis of ‘discourse grammar’, that is,
analysis of the functional roles of grammatical structures in discourse. Here we are using
discourse to mean the organization of language at a level above the sentence or individual
conversational turn – that which connects language at the suprasentential level.

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Speakers and writers make grammatical choices that depend on how they construe and wish to
represent the context and on how they wish to position themselves in it. For example, speakers
use the past perfect tense in English, not only to indicate the first of two past events, but also to
give a reason or justification for the main events of the narrative. These events are not the main
events themselves but, rather, are felt to be an essential background to what happened
V. Spoken & Written Grammar
Distinctions between these two types is very crucial to the point that written grammar
descriptions can omit all our everyday informal grammar and usage . Those descriptions are very
useful for pedagogical purposes.
Limitations of Grammatical Descriptions
Previous sections have reviewed issues in describing grammar, issues that were mainly
concerned with what to describe, how to describe it and how to account for differing approaches
and their implications in terms of theory and pedagogy in applied linguistics. There are certain
limitations to descriptions of grammar because grammar overlaps other parts of language system.
A- The interdependence of grammar and lexis
it is difficult to isolate grammar and lexis into separate categories. Grammar is interdependent
with lexis and, in many cases, grammatical regularity and acceptability are conditioned by
words. For example, the past morpheme -ed, which applies only where the verb happens to be
‘regular’, as in walked, traded, wondered. Irregular verbs, on the other hand, take various past
forms, such as drank or ate. However, the choice of lexical item may restrict grammatical
structures in other ways. The progressive aspect is often used to indicate a temporary activity,
but certain lexical items may act upon the grammar to constrain this sense of temporariness. We
easily recognize that a sentence such as Mary is taking a nap indicates a temporary activity,
whereas Mary is taking a class indicates an activity of extended duration.
B- lexicogrammar : (defining boundaries)
A more striking instance of the interdependence of lexis and grammar is that of prefabricated
‘chunks’ of language. Native speakers tend to use a great many expressions that are
formulaic in nature, fixed or semi-fixed expressions that act as single lexical units used as
wholes. These prefabricated units are called ‘formulaic sequences’. These sequences are
describe as ‘multi-word lexical phenomena that exist somewhere between the traditional
poles of lexicon and syntax, conventionalized form/function composites that occur more
frequently and have more idiomatically determined meaning that is put together each time’. As
form/function composites, lexical phrases differ from other formulaic language, such as idioms
(kick the bucket, hell bent for leather), in that they have associated discourse functions. They
range from completely fixed, as in by the way, which functions to shift a topic in discourse, to
relatively fixed frames with limited slots for fillers, as in : by the way, a…ago, used to express
time relationships (Ex: a day ago, a long time ago).Studies indicates that they are learned first
as unanalysed chunks and, only later, analysed as to particular grammatical patterns .

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Learning Grammar
Over the history of applied linguistics, different theories of learning have been proposed to
account for how grammar is learned :
Habit Formation/ behaviourism : During the middle of the previous century, for instance,
grammar learning was thought to take place through a process of verbal ‘habit formation. Habits
were established through stimulus-response conditioning (repetition, transformation, question
and Answer), which led to the ‘overlearning’ of the grammatical patterns of a language.
Rule formation : With the rise of generative grammar and its view of language as a system of
rules, grammar learning was seen to take place through a process of ‘rule formation'. Students,
who were seen to play a much more active role in the classroom, were given written grammar
exercises. So they formulated, tested and revised hypotheses about grammatical structures in the
target language, then receive feedback that enables them to revise their hypotheses.
communicative approach : With the shift toward a more communicative approach to language
teaching, views of grammar learning changed once again. They said that grammar was best
learned subconsciously when students were engaged in understanding the meaning of the
language to which they were introduced. Those that adhered to a Chomskyan universal grammar
(UG) perspective felt that target language input alone might be sufficient to have learners reset
the parameters of UG principles in order to reflect the differences between the native language
and target language grammars. Others felt that explicit grammar teaching had a role, with some
claiming that explicit attention to grammar was essential for older language learners whose
ability to acquire language implicitly was no longer efficient.
Interlanguage use : SLA research tells us that an analysis of the language that learners use, their
‘interlanguage’, reveals that grammar is not acquired in a linear fashion, one structure being
mastered after another. Further, with regard to any one structure, learners use a lot of
intermediate forms before conforming to what is accurate in the target language. It can easily be
seen that many learners’ utterances are overgeneralizations. For example, learners of English
produce ‘eated’ for ‘ate’, interpreted by some researchers as evidence for the process of rule
formation in SLA. Learners also use forms that do not resemble target forms, and they do so
consistently, such as using pre-verbal negation during early English language acquisition (for
example, ‘no want’), regardless of the native language of learners. This behaviour explains why
it has been said that the interlanguage is systematic, that is, learners operate consistently within a
system. New structures are not simply assimilated one by one, but rather as a new structure
makes its appearance into a learner’s interlanguage, the learner’s system begins to shift. Thus,
learning does not add knowledge to an unchanging system – it changes the system.
Emergentism : Emergentists believe that rather than speakers’ performance being managed by a
‘top-down’ rule-governed system, learners’ interlanguage emerges from repeated encounters
with structures and with opportunities to use them. In this way, it could be said that language
learning is an iterative process, revisiting the same or similar territory again and again. Thus,
grammar learning is facilitated by the frequency of use of the forms in the language to which the
learner is exposed.

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Teaching Grammar
As mentioned above, the prevailing view today is that students must notice what it is they are to
learn. Although this has traditionally been accomplished by a teacher presentation, often of an
explicit rule, a greater variety of means, some far more implicit or interactive, is favoured these
days. An example of an implicit means of promoting student noticing is the use of some sort of
input enhancement. It might take the form of ‘input flooding’, that is, increasing the number of
times that students encounter the target structure in a particular text.
Another possibility for enhancing the input is for the teacher to modify the text features in some
fashion, such as boldfacing the target structures to make them more salient to students. An
example of encouraging noticing through interaction is accomplished through guided
participation, in which the teacher carefully leads students to awarenesses that they did not have
before – it is neither an inductive nor a deductive process.
Awareness may also be heightened through peer interactions. Peer interaction has also been
used effectively in promoting noticing through the use of specific ‘consciousness-raising’ tasks
in which students are given data, such as a set of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, and
are encouraged to discover the grammatical generalization for themselves. Input-processing
tasks, in which students are guided to pay attention to particular aspects of the target language,
especially differences between the L1 and the L2, rather than working on explicit rule learning.
Grammaring may be accomplished by asking students to engage in a communicative task
where it is necessary to use certain structures to complete it. An example might be where
students have to read maps in order to give directions to someone. By so doing, they naturally
would receive meaningful practice in using prepositions and imperatives.
Feedback is also seen to be a necessary part of grammar instruction. Feedback mechanisms span
the spectrum from direct correction by the teacher to recasts, in which the teacher reformulates
correctly what the learner has just said erroneously, to giving students the space to correct
themselves. A traditional grammatical syllabus that sequences structures one after another may
result in a mis-match between learnability and teachability. So, many have recommended the use
of a ‘spiral syllabus’, where particular structures are recycled from time to time during a course
Conclusion
Views of grammar have changed over the years. With the awareness that formulaic language is
as prevalent as it is, it is clearly the case that we should be thinking more in terms of
lexicogrammar, rather than thinking solely of morphology and syntax. Similarly, owing to
contributions from SLA research, we can appreciate the fact that the acquisition of
lexicogrammar is not likely to be accounted for by one type of learning process. Finally, due to
the multifaceted nature of grammar and the learning processes, we must recognize that the
teaching of grammar itself is complex and multidimensional and may require a variety of
teaching approaches. What should not be expected is a simple, proximal, causal link between
what is taught and what is learned. This is not surprising though, given the non-linear nature of
the learning process, and it does not reduce in the least the need for grammar instruction.

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Lecture 4 : Corpus Linguistics
What is Corpus Linguistics?
Exploring actual patterns of language use and use of this exploration in developing
material for language classroom instruction. Corpus linguistics uses large collections of both
spoken and written natural texts (corpora or corpuses, singular corpus) that are stored on
computers. By using a variety of computer-based tools, corpus linguists can explore different
questions about language use. Corpus linguistics provides powerful tools for the analysis of
natural language and provide tremendous insights as to how language use varies in different
situations, such as spoken versus written, or formal interactions versus casual conversation.
characteristic of corpus-based analysis of language:
• It is empirical, analyzing the actual patterns of use in natural texts.
• It utilizes a large and collection of natural texts, known as a ‘corpus’, as the basis for analysis.
• It makes extensive use of computers for analysis, using automatic and interactive techniques.
• It depends on both quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques.
Although computers make possible a wide range of statistical techniques and accomplish
tedious, mechanical tasks rapidly and accurately, human analysts are still needed to decide what
information is worth searching for, to extract that information from the corpus and to interpret
the findings. Thus, perhaps the greatest contribution of corpus linguistics lies in its potential to
bring together aspects of quantitative and qualitative techniques. The quantitative analyses
provide an accurate view of more macro-level characteristics, whereas the qualitative
analyses provide the complementary micro-level perspective.
Corpus Design and Compilation
-No minimum size for a text collection to be considered as a collection.
-yet, the larger the corpus is the more valuable it is.
-Therefore, it is of great importance to know how corpora are designed and compiled to examine
the existing corpora and to understand what sorts of analyses they are best suitable for.
Types of Corpora
General Corpora: - aims to present Language in its broadest sense.
- Includes texts that are from different types. - May include both spoken and written language.
Specialized Corpora:
- Designed with more specific research goal - Includes also spoken both and written language.
- It may include historical texts corpora, fiction texts corpora, newspaper writing corpora...
- Learners’ corpus: a corpus of spoken and written language samples of non-native (like ICLE).
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Issues in Corpus Design
• Reliability of the results: An intended corpus for exploring lexical questions needs to be very
large to allow for accurate presentation of a large number of words of different senses, meanings.
Corpus Compilation
• When creating a corpus, data collection involves obtaining or creating electronic versions of the
target texts– storing – organizing them.
• Data collection of written corpus means using scanner to scan documents into electronic files.
• Materials for written texts are mostly keyboarded manually.
• Data collection of building a spoken corpus is lengthy and costy.
• Deciding of a transcription system ( most spoken corporas use an orthographic transcription
system that does not capture prosodic details).
• Choosing the transcription system is deciding how the interactional characteristics of the
speech will be represented in the transcripts.
What Can a Corpus tell us?
There are many levels of information that can be gathered from a corpus. These levels range
from simple word lists to catalogues of complex grammatical structures and interactive analyses
that can reveal both linguistic and non-linguistic association patterns. Analysis can explore
individual lexical or linguistic features across texts or identify features that characterize
particular registers. word list is simply a list of all the words that occur in the corpus. For
example, a word list from an appropriate corpus could be used to select vocabulary words
occurring within a specified target frequency range to be included in a course syllabus or pool of
test items. The first, or most basic information that we can get from a corpus, is frequency
of occurrence information. In addition to frequency lists, concordancing packages can provide
additional information about lexical co-occurrence patterns. Once the search word/phrase is
selected, the program can search the texts in the corpus and provide a list of each occurrence of
the target word in context. This display is referred to as a ‘key word in context’.
Working with Tagged Texts
In order to carry out more sophisticated types of corpus analyses, it is often necessary to have a
tagged corpus. when a corpus is tagged, each word in the corpus is given a grammatical label.
The process of assigning grammatical labels to words is complex. For example, even a simple
word such as can falls into two grammatical categories. It can be a modal – ‘I can reach the
book’. Or, it can be used as a noun – ‘Put the paper in the can’.
Overview of Different Types of Corpus Studies
Corpora has addressed a number of issues:
- The question of language change intrigues researchers, teachers and language learners.

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- Historical changes led to specialized corpora to gain insights into related language
development.
- Differences and similarities across different national and regional varieties of a language.
- Exploring differences between spoken and written language.
- Describing sub-registers that provide valuable resources for both teachers and learners.
Corpora and language teaching
The availability of corpus findings, along with the increased availability of tools for exploring
corpora (for example, MonoConc, WordSmith Tools, the Lextutor website) is a considerable
benefit to the language classroom. Corpus-based studies of particular language features and
comprehensive works ,such as The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, will also
serve language teachers well by providing a basis for deciding which language features and
structures are important and also how various features and structures are used.
Bringing corpora into language classroom
Corpus-based information can be brought to bear on language teaching in two ways. First,
teachers can shape instruction based on corpus-based information. They can consult corpus
studies to gain information about the features that they are teaching. For example, if the focus of
the instruction is conversational English, teachers could read corpus investigations on spoken
language to determine which features and grammatical structures are characteristic of
conversational English. Instruction could then be shaped by the features that students are most
likely to encounter.
A second way that corpus information can be brought into the language classroom is by having
learners interact with corpora. This can take place in one of two ways. If computer facilities are
adequate, learners can be actively involved in exploring corpora; if adequate facilities do not
exist, teachers can bring in printouts or results from corpus searches for use in the classroom.

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Lecture 5 : PRAGMATICS

An operational definition of an insecure science is: "a science whose leaders say they are in
quest of a paradigm, or have just found a paradigm" Hacking 1995 . None of the many
pragmatic theories and frameworks comes close to being a generally accepted paradigm and, in
fact, there is no consensus as to the domain of pragmatics.
Charles Norris (1938) suggested that : pragmatics is ‘the science of the relation of signs to
their interpreters’. In other words, pragmatics is concerned not with language as a system or
product, but rather with the interrelationship between language form, (communicated) messages
and language users. It explores questions such as the following :
• How do people communicate more than what the words or phrases of their utterances might
mean by themselves, and how do people make these interpretations?
• Why do people choose to say and/or interpret something in one way rather than another?
• How do people’s perceptions of contextual factors (for example, who the interlocutors are,
what their relationship is, and what circumstances they are communicating in) influence the
process of producing and interpreting language?
Pragmatics thus questions the validity of the ‘code-model’ of communication that was developed
within the discipline of semiotics. In the code-model, communication is seen as an encoding–
decoding process, where a code is a system that enables the automatic pairing of messages (that
is, meanings internal to senders and receivers) and signals (that is, what is physically transmitted
(sound, smoke signals, writing) between the sender and the receiver).
According to this view, communication is successful to the extent that the sender and the
receiver pair signals and messages in the same way, so that the message broadcast in the form of
a given signal is identical to the one received when that signal is decoded. The code model has
the merit of describing one way in which communication can be achieved (Ex : between bees or
machines), but it is wholly inadequate as an account of how people actually communicate.

Modern approaches to pragmatics

Modern approaches to pragmatics recognize that human communication largely exploits a code
(a natural language such as English, German or Japanese), but they also try to do justice to the
fact, illustrated in the next section, that human communicative behaviour relies heavily on
people’s capacity to engage in reasoning about each other’s intentions, exploiting not only the
evidence presented by the signals in the language code, but also evidence from other sources,
including perception and general world knowledge.
Presumably, the task of ‘semantics’ is to describe and explain linguistic meaning (what a given
utterance means by virtue of the words used and the ways in which they are brought together) .
Whereas Pragmatics is concerned with the study of the meaning that linguistic expressions
receive while being used.

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One of the tasks of pragmatics is to explain how participants in a conversation move outside the
decontextualized (that is linguistically encoded) meanings of the words and phrases to a grasp of
their meaning in context. The process can undergo several aspects. This process can involve
several aspects:
• Assigning reference : what does a word stand for (technically refer to).
• Figuring out what is communicated directly , what does a word used mean in the context.
• Figuring out what is communicated indirectly , implicitly .
• What is the illocutionary force of an utterance?
Assigning Reference
reference is not simply a relationship between the meaning of a word or phrase and an object or
person in the world. It is a social act, in which the speaker assumes that the word or phrase
chosen to identify an object or person will be interpreted as the speaker intended.
Figuring out what is communicated directly
The meaning of any utterance is not full determined by the words that are used. There is a gap
between the meaning of the words used by the speaker and the thought that the speaker intends
to represent by using those words on a particular occasion. Sometimes the meaning of an
utterance underdetermines the communicator’s intended meaning. This gap is filled by the
addressee’s reasoning about what the communicator may have intended to convey. Hence,
pragmatics plays a role in explaining how the thought expressed by a given utterance on a given
occasion is recovered by the addressee.
Figuring out what is communicated indirectly
Sometimes the import of an utterance does not lie in the thought expressed by the utterance, but
rather with thought the hearer assumes that the speaker intends to suggest or point to.
Technically speaking it lies in what is implicated or communicated indirectly.
Pragmatics tends to explain what is implicitly communicated

‘Co-operative Principle’ and maxims of conversation

In response to this issue Paul Grice, the British philosopher, suggested a solution in the mid-
1960’s. He argued that people are disposed to assume that communicative behaviour is ruled by
certain norms. He named these norms ‘ the Co-operative Principle and Maxims of
Conversation’. Deriving an interpretation that satisfies the co-operative principle is effected
through four maxims which the communicator is supposed to abide by :
Conversation Maxims
• Truthfulness (communicators should do their best to make contributions which are true).
• Informativeness (communicators should do their best to be adequately informative).

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• Relevance (communicators should do their best to make contributions which are relevant).
• Style (they should make contributions which are appropriately short and clearly expressed).
Grice labelled the maxims using terms which are, perhaps, less intuitive: ‘quality’, ‘quantity’,
‘relation’ and ‘manner’, respectively. According to Grice, not all people can observe these
maxims, but they are understated assumptions that underlie communication.
If a speaker gives little information when an informative one is expected , then he is prompting
the listener to look for a meaning that is different from or additional to the meaning that is
verbally expressed ; (i.e.) to work out the ‘ conversational implicature. Grice’s approach provides
a reasonably neat account of implicated (that is, indirectly communicated) meaning.
Nevertheless, Grice’s theory has a number of limitations; for example, it does not incorporate the
impact of social or interpersonal factors. Moreover, Grice’s approach does not explain the fact
that context plays an extremely important role in determining the thought expressed by an
utterance, (i.e.) it does not explain pragmatic aspects of what is communicated.

Explaining the Impact of Social Factors

The Impact of Social factors
Grice’s theory of conversation ,that consolidates the idea that conversations are governed by
norms, pointed to the importance of the social regularities that are reflected in communicative
interaction. Relevance theory takes the view that such social factors which influence
communication are best analysed as part of the context (the set of assumptions which participants
use in producing and interpreting acts of communication), so they do not need to be taken
account of by positing special mechanisms (for example, additional principles or maxims).
In contrast to the cognitive framework of relevance theory, work within social pragmatics has
sometimes led to the introduction of additional communicative norms. For example, Leech
(1983) maintains that the ‘Politeness Principle’ is a necessary supplement to Grice’s Co-
operative Principle, arguing that people often break the Co-operative Principle for ‘politeness’
reasons; in other words, ‘to maintain the social equilibrium and the friendly relations which
enable us to assume that our interlocutors are being cooperative in the first place’. Leech
proposes a set of ‘politeness maxims’, such as the ‘modesty maxim’ and the ‘agreement
maxim’, which operate in conjunction with the co-operative maxims. They are worded as ‘rules’
(for example, minimize praise of self, maximize dispraise of self; minimize disagreement
between self and other, maximize agreement between self and other), but in fact they aim to
describe the interactional principles that underlie language use.
Pragmalinguistic perspective and Sociopragmatic perspective (suggested by Leech) :
The pragmalinguistic perspective focuses on the linguistic strategies that are used to convey a
given pragmatic meaning,
The sociopragmatic perspective focuses on the socially-based assessments, beliefs and
interactional principles that underlie people’s choice of strategies.

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For example, suppose I am a dinner guest and want to reach the salt which is placed at the other
side of the table. I have various options available: I could stand up and reach for it, I could say
‘Pass the salt, will you’, or ‘Can you pass the salt, please’, or even ‘I like my food quite salty’.
A sociopragmatic perspective focuses on the social judgments associated with such a scenario;
for example, what the relationship between the participants is (for example, close or distant,
equal or unequal), and the social acceptability of reaching for food in such a context. A
pragmalinguistic perspective, on the other hand, focuses on the linguistic strategies used to
operationalize the request: for example, whether it is a direct request (‘Pass the salt, will you’), a
conventionally indirect request (‘Can you pass the salt please?’) or a non-conventionally indirect
request (‘I like my food quite salty’).
Additionally, Brown & livinson have tried to explain what impact can social factors have on
people’s use of language with regard to Model of Politeness ‘Face’ ; ‘the public image that every
member wants to claim for himself’, drawing a distinction between positive and negative face.
Positive face is every person’s need to have his/herself image appreciated and approved of.
negative face reflects every person’s territories, rights, claims and personal preserves to be
respected ; having a freedom of actions and freedom from imposition.
Brown and Levinson (1987) argue that speakers take three main variables into account when
deciding how to word a face-threatening utterance such as a request or a challenge:
• The power differential between the hearer and speaker(amount of equality/inequality, labeled P
• The distance–closeness between them (labeled D).
• The degree of imposition of the content of the utterance (confusingly labeled R for rank)
Conversational Patterns and Structure
Conversational analysis / discourse analysis is an approach from the observation that people take
turns in conversation where pairs of utterances are proceeded. These pairs are called adjacency
pairs in the sense that the first member of a pair requires the presence of the second member.
Hence, a question requires an answer. Conversational analysis is an approach to discourse
analysis, but patterns as insertion sequence can also be treated from a pragmatic point of view,
where case factors , such as ‘face’ are included and justification for such an occurrence is
justified. Meanwhile, within cognitive-psychological approach , it could be argued that these
observed patterns follow the general principles of human cognition and communication.

The Role of Context

All approaches to pragmatics have recognized the major role that context can play in the process
of communication. For pragmatic meaning , context contributes both to what is communicated
directly and to what is communicated indirectly. In social pragmatics, the following features of
situational context have a great influence on people’s use of language :

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• The participants : their roles, the amount of power differential (if any) between them, the
degree of distance–closeness between them, the number of people present.
• The message content : how ‘costly’ or ‘beneficial’ the message is to the hearer and/or speaker,
how face-threatening it is, whether it exceeds or stays within the rights of the relationship.
• The communicative activity (such as a job interview, a lecture..) : how the norms of the
activity influence language behaviour such as right to talk or ask questions, level of formality.
Brown and Levinson’s three variables, P, D and R have been widely used in social pragmatic
studies, and have been manipulated in various ways to find out how they influence language use.
Unfortunately, context is sometimes taken to be the concrete aspects of the environment in which
an exchange takes place and that have a bearing on the communication process. But in
pragmatics, a more psychological notion of context is crucial. The physical environment (the
time, the place, and the objects and people present) does not impinge directly on utterance
production and interpretation; it does so only indirectly via people’s representations of it.
For example, if you do not want your colleague in the next office to hear what you are about to
say, you may speak in a low voice. However, your decision to speak in this way depends not so
much on whether your colleague is actually in the next office or not as on your beliefs about
his/her possible presence and ability to overhear your conversation.
So in pragmatics, context can be defined as the set of assumptions (that is, mental
representations capable of being true or false) that have a bearing on the production and
interpretation of particular communicative acts.
The formerly discussed points along sections presumes the existence of two broad approaches to
pragmatics ; a cognitive-psychological approach and socio-psychological approach.
Cognitive-Psychological Approach
Cognitive pragmaticists tend fundamentally to ask the question ‘ What is communication
?’,‘How communication is possible ?’ They primarily attempt to investigate the relation between
the decontextualized meaning of an utterance. What speakers mean by their utterance on
given occasions and how listeners interpret those utterances on those given occasions.
Primarily, such an approach declines large scale data collection, but contented itself to specific
examples of communicative utterances that are assessed to be valid , reliable and enough for
theorizing. Consequently, pragmatics research owed the majority of its insights to philosophers,
for instance ; Grice, Austin and Searle.
Socio-psychological approach
Social pragmaticists tend to emphasize on the ways in which particular communication
exchanges between individuals are embedded and contained by contextual factors ; social,
cultural and others.... Social pragmatics tends to take an empirical approach, and emphasizes
the collection of pragmatic data, partly for descriptive purposes, and partly so that existing
theories (e.g. Brown and Levinson’s (1987) face model of politeness) can be tested modified).

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Master 2/ Semester 2 Applied Linguistics Dr Touati

Lesson 1: Second Language Acquisition

What is the Study of Second Language Acquisition?

In second language learning, language plays an institutional and social role in the community.
It functions as a recognized means of communication among members who speak some other
language as their native tongue.
In foreign language learning, language plays no major role in the community and is primarily
learned in the classroom.
The distinction between second and foreign language learning is what is learned and how
it is learned.
It is the study of:
How second languages are learned;
How learners create a new language system with limited exposure to a second language;
Why most second language learners do not achieve the same degree of proficiency in a
second language as they do in their native language; and
Why some learners appear to achieve native-like proficiency in more than one language.
Learners acquire a second language by making use of existing knowledge of the native
language, general learning strategies, or universal properties of language to internalize
knowledge of the second language.
These processes serve as a means by which the learner constructs an interlanguage (a
transitional system reflecting the learner’s current L2 knowledge).
Communication strategies are employed by the learner to make use of existing knowledge
to cope with communication difficulties.
Individual differences affect L2 acquisition. These may include: (1) the rate of development
and (2) their ultimate level of achievement.
Learners differ with regard to variables relating to cognitive, affective and social aspects of a
human being.
Fixed factors such as age and language learning aptitude are beyond external control. Variable
factors such as motivation are influenced by external factors such as social setting and by the
actual course of L2 development.
Cognitive style refers to the way people perceive, conceptualize, organize and recall
information.
Field dependent learners operate holistically. They like to work

Learner Strategies
Learner strategies are defined as deliberate behaviours or actions that learners use to make
language learning more successful, selfdirected and enjoyable.
- Cognitive strategies relate new concepts to prior knowledge.
- Metacognitive strategies are those which help with organizing a personal timetable to
facilitate an effective study of the L2.
- Social strategies include looking for opportunities to converse with native speakers.
Natural Order of Strategies of Second Language Development
- Repetition
- memorization
- formulaic expressions
- verbal attention getters
- answering in unison (responding with others)
- talking to self (engaging in internal monologue);
- elaboration (information beyond what is necessary);
- anticipatory answers (completing another’s phrase orstatement);
- monitoring (self-correcting errors);
- appeal for assistance (asking someone for help);
- request for clarification (asking the speaker to explain or repeat); and
- role-playing (interacting with another by taking on roles).

1- Universalist Theory defines linguistic universals from two perspectives:

The data-driven perspective which looks at surface features of a widerange of languages to
find out how languages vary and what principles underlie this variation. The data-driven
approach considers system external factors or input as the basis.
The theory-driven perspective which looks at in-depth analysis of the properties of language
to determine highly abstract principles of grammar. System internal factors are those found in
cognitive and linguistic processes.
Several Characteristics of the data-driven approach include the following:
- It has language typology which delves into patterns which exist among languages and how they
vary in human languages.
- Language universals focus on what is common. For example, subject/verb/object.
- Implicational universals which refer to the properties of language such as “all languages have
vowels” without looking at any other properties.
Several Characteristics of the theory-driven approach include the following:
- Language is acquired through innateness. Certain principles of the human mind are biologically
determined.
- There are sets of principles and conditions where knowledge of language develops.
- Universal grammar is seen as part of the brain.

2- Behaviourist Theory dominated both psychology and linguistics in the 1950’s. This
theory suggests that external stimuli (extrinsic) can elicit an internal response which in turn can
elicit an internal stimuli (intrinsic) that lead to external responses.
The learning process has been described by S-R-R theorists as a process forming stimulus-
response-reward chains. These chains come about because of the nature of the environment and
the nature of the learner.
The environment provides the stimuli and the learner provides the responses. Comprehension
or production of certain aspects of language and the environment provide the reward.
The environment plays a major role in the exercise of the learners’ abilities since it provides
the stimuli that can shape responses selectively rewarding some responses and not others.
When the learner learns a language, this learning includes a set of stimulus response- reward
(S-R-R) chains.
Imitation provides the learner with a repertoire of appropriate, productive responses. The
learner learns to imitate or approximate the productive responses provided by the environment.
The characteristics of human and non-human learners include the ability to:
1. respond to stimuli in a certain way;
2. intuitively evaluate the reward potential of responses;
3. extract the important parameters that made up the stimulus response (positive reward chains);
4. generalize these parameters to similar situations to form classes of S-R-R chains.

3- Nativist Theory views language acquisition as innately determined. Theorists believe

that human beings are born with a built-in device of some kind that predisposes them to acquire
language.
This predisposition is a systematic perception of language around us, resulting in the
construction of an internalized system of language.
Nativists are on the opposite end of the theoretical continuum and use more of a rationalist
approach in explaining the mystery of language acquisition.
Chomsky (1965) claimed the existence of innate properties of language that explain a child’s
mastery of his/her native language in a short time despite the highly abstract nature of the rules
of language.
This innate knowledge, according to Chomsky, is embodied in a “little black box” of sorts
called a Language Acquisition Device (LAD).
McNeill (1966) described the LAD as consisting of four innate linguistic properties:
- The ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds in the environment;
- The ability to organize linguistic events into various classes that can be refined later;
- Knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible and that other kinds
are not; and
- The ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing linguistic system in order
to construct the simplest possible system out of the linguistic data that are encountered.
Nativists have contributed to the discoveries of how the system of child language works.
Theorists such as Chomsky, McNeill, and others helped us understand that a child’s language, at
any given point, is a legitimate system in its own right.

4- Cognitivist Theory views human beings as having the innate capacity to develop
logical thinking. This school of thought was influenced by Jean Piaget’s work where he
suggests that logical thinking is the underlying factor for both linguistic and non-linguistic
development.
The process of association has been used to describe the means by which the child learns to
relate what is said to particular objects or events in the environment. The bridge by which
certain associations are made is meaning. The extent and accuracy of the associations made
are said to change in time as the child matures.
Cognitivists say that the conditions for learning language are the same conditions that are
necessary for any kind of learning. The environment provides the material that the child
can work on.
Cognitivists view the role of feedback in the learning process as important for affective
reasons, but non-influential in terms of modifying or altering the sequence of development.
Language Learning as a Cognitive Process
1. Learning a language involves internal representations that regulate and guide performance.
2. Automatic processing activates certain nodes in memory when appropriate input is present.
Activation is a learned response.
3. Memory is a large collection of nodes.
4. Controlled processing is not a learned response. It is a temporary activation of nodes in a
sequence.
5. Skills are learned and routinized only after the earlier use of controlled processes have been
used.
6. Learner strategies contain both declarative knowledge i.e. knowing the ‘what’ of the language-
internalized rules and memorized chunks of language, and procedural knowledge i.e. know the
‘how’ of the language system to employ strategies.

5- Social Interactionist Theory supports the view that the development of language
comes from the early interactions between infants and caregivers.
Social interactionists stress:
 the importance of a child’s interactions with parents and other caregivers;
 the importance of “motherese”;
 contributions of context and world knowledge; and
 the importance of goals
Glew (1998) claims that learners have to be pushed in their negotiation of meaning to
produce comprehensible output. The classroom context needs to provide adequate
opportunities for target language use to allow learners to develop competence in the target
language.
Comprehensible output provides opportunities for contextualized, meaningful use of language.
Social interactionists believe that:
 Human language emerged from the social role that language plays in human interaction;
 The environment plays a key role in language development;
 Adults in the child’s linguistic environment are viewed as instrumental in language
acquisition.
 Social interactions are the key element in language processing and input from social
interactions provides a model for negotiation opportunities.

Krashen’s Five Hypotheses for Second Language Acquisition

1- The Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis claims that we have two independent ways of
developing language ability:
 Language Acquisition is a subconscious process. It occurs very naturally in a non-
threatening environment. The research strongly supports the view that both children and adults
can subconsciously acquire languages.
 Language Learning is what occurs at school in an academic setting. It is a conscious
process. When we talk about rules and grammar of language, we are usually talking about
learning.
2- The Natural Order Hypothesis claims that we acquire parts of a language in a predictable
order. Some grammatical items tend to come earlier in the acquisition than others. For example,
the –ing progressive is acquired fairly early in first language acquisition, while third person
singular –s is acquired later.
3- The Monitor Hypothesis attempts to explain how acquisition and learning are used.
Language is normally produced using our acquired linguistic competence. Conscious learning
has only one function…as the “Monitor” or “Editor.” After we produce some language using the
acquired system, we sometimes inspect it and use our learned system to correct errors. This can
happen internally before we actually speak or write, or as a self-correction after we produce
the utterance or written text.
4- Comprehensible Input Hypothesis contends that more comprehensible input results in more
acquisition.
5- The Affective Filter Hypothesis claims that affective variables do not impact language
acquisition directly, but can prevent input from reaching what Chomsky called the Language
Acquisition Device. The LAD is the part of the brain that is responsible for language acquisition.
Lesson 2: Psycholinguistics Language and psychology

1. Some Important Definitions

Psychology is both an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of mental
processes or mental functions ( such as perception, introspection, memory , creativity,
imagination, conception , belief , reasoning , volition, and emotion — in other words, all the
different things that we can do with our minds) and behaviour ( the actions or reactions of an
object or organism, usually in relation to the environment; which can be conscious or
unconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary ).
Psychologists study such phenomena as perception, cognition, emotion, personality, behaviour,
and interpersonal relationships.
Psychology also refers to the application of such knowledge to various spheres of human
activity, including issues related to daily life—e.g. family, education, and work—and the
treatment of mental health problems.
The social science branch of psychology (mainly social psychology) attempts to understand the
role human behavior plays in social dynamics (e.g., culture, economics, and politics). Although
the natural science branch of psychology differs from biology which is the branch of science that
studies life.
This broad spectrum of empirical fields studies (Empirical data is data that is produced by
experiment or observation ) and classifies living organisms and biological phenomena and
neuroscience (a field that is devoted to the scientific study of the nervous system.
Such studies may include the structure, function, evolutionary history, development, genetics,
biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, and pathology of the nervous system.)
Psychological science has a long tradition of incorporating physiological and neurological
processes into its conceptions of mental functioning.
Psychology includes many sub-fields of study and application concerned with such areas as
human development, sports, health, industry, forensics, and spirituality.
As such, psychology is not a unified scientific discipline, with many different perceptions of
what the field entails, and many different standards of what constitutes scientific research.
Definition of psycholinguistics or psychology of language
Psycholinguistics is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors ( the study of cells
of the nervous system and the organization of these cells into functional circuits that process
information and mediate behavior. ) that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand
language. Initial attempts to study psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due
mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned.
Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience , cognitive science, and information theory
to study how the brain processes language. There are a number of subdisciplines; for example, as
non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain become more and
more widespread, neurolinguistics ( the science concerned with the human brain mechanisms
underlying the comprehension, production and abstract knowledge of language, be it spoken,
signed (body language) or written.) has become a field in its own right.
Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical
and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes
that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc.
Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's ability to learn language, usually
with experimental or at least quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic observations such
as those made by Jean Piaget ( Swiss philosopher, natural scientist and developmental
psychologist, well known for his work studying children, and for his theory of cognitive
development ( in his research on the development of children).

First Language Acquisition

Language acquisition is one of the central topics in cognitive science. Every theory of cognition
has tried to explain it.
Possessing a language is an essential human trait: all normal humans speak, no nonhuman animal
does.
Language is the main vehicle by which we know about other people's thoughts, and the two must
be intimately related.
Every time we speak we are revealing something about language, so the facts of language
structure are easy to obtain; these data hint at a system of extraordinary complexity.
Nonetheless, learning a first language is something every child does successfully in a matter of a
few years and without the need for formal lessons.
Language acquisition takes place mainly before the age of 5 years old. No child fails to learn a
language (pathologies aside); and language acquisition is carried out in much the same way.
In acquiring language, the child’s linguistic knowledge passes through stages; each stage
resembles the adult’s linguistic knowledge until the child gains full competence. Children do not
acquire their mother tongue by memorisation and repetition of sentences they hear in their
immediate environment.
Quite the reverse, children are continuously involved in the creative activity of constructing and
comprehending new sentences which they have never experienced before .
In fact what they do is building a grammar of the language they are learning, a mental system of
rules and principles, a theory of their language which makes them able to produce and
understand all the sentences of the language.
The very difficult task and the very short time in which it is acquired , added to the poor quality
of the language material the child is exposed to ( parents ,mothers in particular, sometimes even
imitating child’s language ) confirm the assumption that human beings are born with the
disposition to learn language.
However, the role of the environment is very important. With no linguistic input- i.e. speech
from the surrounding environment- to provoke the acquisition process, a child will not learn a
language.

Lesson 3: Stages of language develoment

A- Babbling
Approximately by the age of six months, all normal children start to babble; making long
sequences of varied vowels and consonants. Per se , babbling is a linguistic universal. Children at
this stage do not produce sounds proper to their mother tongues.
Babbling belongs to infants of all communities. Babbling is not a true language though it
shares with adult language the property of being stimulus -free .Infants do not babble to express
a physical need. They rather do it for pleasure.
Babbling sequences are usually stretches of vowels, or stops followed by vowels. They
generally have the structure of ( CV) or ( VV) e.g. / gaa/, / boo/. / aa/etc…., these sequences
usually have the intonation patterns that are similar to the intonation of the adult language they
hear.
Babbling is considered as the first stage of the acquisition process.
B- The First Words
Towards the age of twelve months- sometimes later- the child produces his/ her first words with
some overlapping with babbling sequences at first.
The first words the child produces are monosyllabic and are not different from babbling
sequences except in their symbolic function. They are of the form / CV(V)/ / daa/ , / maa/, etc…
and may be similar to adult words
For about six months, children seem to pass this stage in which the single words which they
produce represent full adult sentences.
In the case of English, / waa/ means water, or I want water or this is water. Here a variety of
functions and intentions are conveyed through these single words.
C- The Two- Word Stage

Between 18 and 24 months, children begin to use two-word utterances. They first utter two
single word utterances one after the other, with a pause in between. Later, the two words are
uttered with no pause. E.g. Baby sleep - Mommy sock. These utterances are used with no
syntactic markers.
D- The Hierarchical Stage
After the two-word stage, children combine their two words together to produce longer
utterances.
At the beginning, the utterances don not contain function words and syntactic markers but
only words which carry important information, e.g. mommy eat bread. Though they lack
function words these utterances are sentence –like.

The Acquisition of Linguistic Subsystems

Phonology
Infants respond to speech sounds a few days after their birth. Experiments carried on
infants’ perception demonstrate that they are able to perceive contrasts on voicing, place of
articulation, nasals, and stops. Infants do this without any previous experience with language
which is evidence that human beings are born with an innate ability to acquire language.
The production of sounds in infants starts with babbling. Most of babbling sequences start
with stops and end with vowels or voiceless stops, and there are non consonants clusters.
At about 10-12 months, the infant starts copying accurately the sounds he hears from the
adults around him. At this age, the child pronounces the same words differently when trying to
imitate adult pronunciation.
The child can discriminate between sounds but cannot contrast in production.
Comprehension is not problematic for him/her whereas production is.
Individual sounds are produced gradually; some are acquired earlier than others, and therefore
substituted for them. The sound system is fully acquired by the age of 7.
The early words are generally monosyllabic (until the age of 2), of the form/ CV/ or/ CVC/
.However, consonants clusters appear later. Children shorten adult words by deleting final
consonants, or by reducing clusters and omitting unstressed syllables.
Morphology
The child learns early the morphological rules of the language. In the two-word utterances
production we can notice that they lack affixes and function words.

Children learn them later when they start constructing rules for using morphemes. At the
beginning over generalise, but later they perfect their rules.
Inflections or grammatical morphemes are learned in order, depending on their regularity,
transparency, and frequency of use. In English, / ing/ is acquired earlier than the present tense /s/
In the same way productivity and regularity in derivational morphemes are factors affect the
order of acquisition. In English for example the agentive / er/ is learned early e.g. writer, teacher,
baker, etc.
Over generalisation with irregular forms is usual in children’s speech. Goed and breaked are
typical examples.
Before the stage of over generalisation , the child may use the forms went and broke without
associating them with present forms .
Later ,over generalisation is restricted to regular forms, and irregular forms reappear.

Syntax
A Holophrases or one-word sentence used by the child to express what adults would use
sentences for are the first step in the syntactic development.
Though children posses only single words, they use them for different functions: naming,
asking, requesting, etc…. They intend their utterances to be understood a full sentences. Any
way they understand full sentences when they hear them.
With the two –word stage ,the structure in the child’s utterances comes into existence. The
two words are usually linked with some word order. However the structure of these utterances is
semantically determined.
The variety of relations between the two words can be exemplified in the following English
examples:
- Daddy sleep(agent-action)
- Daddy car(possessor-possession)
- Kick ball black car( action –object)
- Mommy bed( subject –location)
These examples indicate the child is aware of the different semantic relations.
After this stage when there is a lack of inflections and function words, the child ‘s sentences
develop to look like adult sentences.
In the stage of the acquisition of syntax, the child moves from simple to more complex
sentences by learning the negative , passive, questions ,etc…

The acquisition of syntax progresses until the age of ten or beyond where some syntactically
complex sentences develop longer than others.

Semantics
The acquisition of meaning is more complicated than the acquisition of phonology and syntax.
Semantics is a never-ending process. We always learn vocabulary and store it continuously.
Children produce their first words at the age of one and associate each word with its
meaning through the process of trial and error. By the age of six, children acquire about 14000
words.
The progress of vocabulary acquisition is so rapid that it is impossible to give statistics at
any time, add to this the fact that the person/ child possess two types of vocabulary: active and
passive . Active, which the person actually uses in his speech, and passive, which he does not use
in his speech, but recognises when he hears it. The former is larger in number.
There are many things specific to children’s acquisition of vocabulary. There is a certain
order in learning words.
The first words a child learns are those which include words that the child can act on, or
things that can act for themselves, and names of large objects that exist in his environment.
The meanings of the words acquired by the child are different from their adult’s meanings.
This is a proof that the child has not acquired the semantic system of the language.
The child’s language is full of cases of over generalisation . A child may use an item for a
wider range of things than he should. The word doggie is used by an English-speaking child to
refer to dogs, horses, cows, sheep ,etc…This demonstrates that a general feature is acquired
which covers all these things.
Lesson 4: Speech and Language Disorders

1- What are speech and language disorders?

Speech and language disorders are inabilities of individuals to understand and/or
appropriately use the speech and language systems of society.
Such disorders may range from simple sound repetitions or occasional misarticulations to
the complete absence of the ability to use speech and language for communication.

2- What are some types of speech and language disorders?

Speech disorders may include:
-Fluency disorder-an interruption in the flow or rhythm of speech characterized by
hesitations, repetitions, or prolongations of nouns, syllables, words or phrases.
-Articulation disorder-difficulties with the way sounds are formed and strung together
usually characterized by substituting one sound for another (wabbit for rabbit), omitting a sound
(han for hand) and distorting a sound (shlip for sip).
-Voice disorder-characterized by inappropriate pitch (too high, too low never changing
or interrupted by breaks; quality (harsh, breathy or nasal); loudness, resonance, and duration.
Language disorders may include:
- Aphasia-the loss of speech and language abilities generally resulting from stroke.
- Delayed language-characterized by a marked slowness in the development of language
skills necessary for expressing and understanding thoughts and ideas.
3- What are the causes of speech and language disorders?
- Some of the causes of speech and language disorders are related to hearing loss, short memory
span, and other neuromuscular disorders, severe head injuries, stroke, viral diseases, certain
drugs, physical impairments such as cleft lip or palate, and inadequate speech and language
models in the home environment.
- The majority of voice disorders in children usually result from frequent vocal abuse associated
with excessive throat clearing, coughing, or screaming.
- This abuse can cause inflammation of the larynx (vocal cords), or the formation of nodules and
polyps, which are small growths, on the vocal cords.
- Allergies, smoking, and the consumption of alcoholic beverages are other factors which may
adversely affect the larynx (vocal cords) resulting in varying degrees of voice disorder.
- In the following sections different types of aphasia will be discussed.
A- Broca’s aphasia
In this type of aphasia, speech is hesitant and not fluent, with many stops and deficient
intonation.
Both speech and writing lack grammar. This kind of aphasia also is characterised by the
incorrect use of grammatical morphemes (function words).Lexical morphemes are used but
phonologically deformed.
B-Wernicke’s aphasia
A lesion in an area in the brain called Wernicke’s area causes this aphasia. Generally,
language comprehension and expression are affected. The person may be quite fluent but his
speech is meaningless.
The utterances are made of indefinite noun phrases sequences of actual or non-actual words.
Comprehension and the ability to read and to repeat are damaged.
C- Anomic aphasia
This type of aphasia is characterised by the difficulty to find words. Some patients block
and may substitute the words they want to say. Others block even in writing.
D- Conduction aphasia
While production and comprehension are whole, the ability is impaired. It is
phonological . There are errors in the sequencing and selection of segments.
5- Alexia and agraphia
The patient can speak and understand correctly but unable to read and write (alexia and
agraphia respectively). He / She can recognise individual letters but totally unable to read them
in combination.
There is another type of aphasia that is characterised by word deafness. The patient can
speak, read, and write, but cannot understand spoken language.
From the above brief presentation of the types of aphasia , we can deduce that linguistics can
provide the description, analysis and classification of language disorders.
The latter are described in terms of the linguistic abilities of the patient- i.e. the four
language skills: speaking, comprehension, reading and writing.
Lesson 5: Competance and Performance

Components of Communicative Competence

Canale and Swain (1983) identified four components of communicative competence:
1) grammatical competence
2) sociolinguistic competence
3) discourse competence
4) strategic competence
Grammatical competence means understanding the skills and knowledge necessary to
speak and write accurately. Grammatical competence includes:
1) vocabulary
2) word formation
3) meaning
4) sentence formation
5) pronunciation
6) spelling
Sociolinguistic competence involves knowing how to produce and understand the
language in different sociolinguistic contexts, taking into consideration such factors as:
1) the status of the participants
2) the purpose of the interaction; and
3) the norms or conventions of the interaction.
Discourse competence involves the ability to combine and connect utterances (spoken)
and sentences (written) into a meaningful whole. Discourse ranges from a simple spoken
conversation to long written texts.
Strategic competence involves the manipulation of language in order to meet
communicative goals. It involves both verbal and non-verbal behaviors. Speakers employ this
competence for two main reasons:
1) to compensate for breakdowns in communication such as when the speaker forgets or
does not know a term and is forced to paraphrase or gesture to get the idea across; and
2) to enhance the effectiveness of communication such as when a speaker raises or lowers
the voice for effect.
Competence Vs. Performance
According to Chomsky (1965), competence consists of mental representations of linguistic rules
that constitute the speaker-hearer’s internal grammar.
This internal grammar is implicit rather than explicit. It is evident in the intuitions, which
the speaker-hearer has about the grammaticality of sentences.
Performance consists of the use of this grammar in the comprehension and production of
the language.
Communicative competence is that aspect of the language user’s competence that enables
them to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally within specific
contexts.
Language is a form of communication that occurs in social interaction. It is used for a
purpose such as persuading, commanding, and establishing social relationships. No longer is the
focus on specific knowledge of grammatical form. Instead, the competent speaker is recognized
as one who knows when, where, and how to use language appropriately.
Language Learning
Behaviorist’s views of language learning and of language teaching were pre-dominant
in the two decades following the second world war. These views drew on general theories of
learning propounded by psychologists such as Watson (1924), Thorndike (1932), and Skinner
(1957).
Dakin (1973) identifies three general principles of language learning derived from these theories.
According to the law of exercise, language learning is promoted when the learner makes active
and repeated responses to stimuli.
The law of effect emphasizes the importance of reinforcing the learners’ responses and correcting
non-target-like ones.
The principle of shaping claims that learning will proceed most smoothly and rapidly if complex
behaviors are broken down into their component parts and learned bit-by-bit.
Underlying these principles was the assumption that language learning, like any other kind of
learning, took the form of habit formation, “a habit consisting of an automatic response elicited
by a given stimulus.
 Learning was seen to take place inductively through analogy rather than analysis.
 According to behaviorist theories, the main impediment to learning was interference from
prior knowledge.
 Proactive inhibition occurred when old habits got in the way of attempts to learn new ones. In
such cases, the old habits had to be unlearned so that they could be replaced by the new ones.
 The notion of unlearning made little sense as learners did not need to forget their L1 in order
to acquire an L2.
 For this reason, behaviorist theories of L2 learning emphasized the idea of “difficulty.” This is
defined as the amount of effort required to learn an L2 pattern.
 The degree of difficulty was believed to depend primarily in the extent to which the target
language pattern was similar to or different from a native language pattern.

Input and Interaction

 L2 acquisition can only take place when the learner has access to input in the second
language. This input may come in written or spoken form.
 Spoken input occurs in face-to-face interactions. Non-reciprocal discourse includes listening
to the radio or watching a film.
 Behaviorists claim that presenting learners with input in the right doses and then reinforcing
their attempts to practice them can control the process of acquisition.
 Chomsky pointed out that in many cases there was a very poor match between the kind of
language found in the input that learners received and the kind of language they themselves
produced.
 Comprehensible input (Krashen’s, 1985 Input Hypothesis) proposed that learners acquire
morphological features in a natural order as a result of comprehending input addressed to them.
Long (1981a) argued that input which is made comprehensible by means of the conversational
adjustments that occur when there is a comprehension problem is especially important for
acquisition.
 Swain (1985) proposed the comprehensible output hypothesis which states that learners need
opportunities for “pushed output” in speech or writing that makes demands on them for correct
and appropriate use of the L2.

The Role of the Native Language in Second Language Acquisition

 The role of native language in second language acquisition has come to be known as
“language transfer.”
 It has been assumed that in a second language learning situation learners rely extensively on
their native language.
 According to Lado (1957) individuals tend to transfer forms and meanings, the distribution of
the forms and meanings of their native language and culture to the foreign language and culture.
 This transfer is productive when the learner attempts to speak the language.
 This transfer is receptive when the learner attempts to grasp and understand the language and
culture as practiced by native speakers.
 Lado’s work and much of the work of that time (1950’s) was based on the need to produce
pedagogically relevant materials. A contrastive analysis of the native language and the target
language was conducted in order to determine similarities and differences in the languages.
Framework for Explaining L1 Transfer
 The L1 system is used for both comprehension and production.
 The interlanguage system is also used in comprehending and receiving messages.
 The L1 system is used in hypothesis construction responsible for interlanguage development.
 Comprehensible input serves as a major source of information for hypothesis construction.
 L2 output may be used for hypothesis construction.
Toward a Theory of First Language Transfer
 An important distinction not always made in discussions of transfer is between transfer in L2
communication and transfer in L2 learning.
 Transfer in communication involves the use of the L1 either to receive incoming messages
(reception) or to process output (production).
 Transfer in learning occurs when the learner uses the L1 in an attempt to develop hypotheses
about L2 rules.
 There are several possibilities for transfer:
- It is primarily a characteristic of communication
- It is primarily a feature of learning
- Both communication and learning transfer are significant and interrelated aspects of L2
acquisition.
Language Transfer
 Where the two languages were identical, learning could take place through positive transfer to
the native-language pattern.
 Where the two languages were different, learning difficulty arose and errors occurred
resulting from negative transfer.
 Chomsky (1959) set in motion a re-evaluation of many of the behaviorists claims. This
reevaluation included area such as:
- the dangers of extrapolating from laboratory studies of animal behavior to the language
behavior of humans were pointed out;
- the terms stimulus and response were exposed as vacuous where language behaviour was
concerned;
- analogy could not account for the language user’s ability to generate totally novel
utterances; and
- studies of children acquiring their L1 showed that parents rarely corrected their children’s
linguistic errors, thus casting doubt on the importance of reinforcement in language
learning.
 All this led to the reconsideration of the role of L1 in L2 learning.
Msila University

Master 2 Linguistics

Module :
Historical Linguistics

Dr Touati
Dr. Touati Historical Linguistics Coeff 2

Lecture One: What is historical linguistics?

Historical linguistics studies language change. It involves some of the hottest topics in linguistics
that have been avoided formerly and it has important contributions to by which it enriches
linguistic theory and help us understand of human nature.
There are many reasons why historical linguists believe in their linguistic research:
 - Firstly , a grasp of the ways in which languages can change provides the student with insights
on understanding of language in general, of how languages work, how their pieces fit together.
- Secondly, historical linguistic methods have been looked to for models of rigour and excellence
in other fields and historical linguistic findings have been utilised to solve historical problems of
concern to society which extend far beyond linguistics.
 Those dedicated to the humanistic study of individual languages would find their fields much
impoverished without the richness provided by historical insights into the development of these
languages –
 Just imagine the study of any area of non-modern literature in French, German, Italian, Spanish
or other languages without insights into how these languages have changed.
A very important reason why historical linguists study language change and are excited about
their field is because historical linguistics contributes significantly to other sub-areas of
linguistics and to linguistic theory.
For example, human cognition and the human capacity for language learning are central research
interests in linguistics, and historical linguistics contributes significantly to this goal.
 - As we determine more accurately what can change and what cannot change in a language, and
what the permitted versus impossible ways are in which
languages can change, ...
We contribute significantly to the understanding of universal grammar, language typology and
human cognition in general-
All these are very fundamental to understanding our very humanity
What Historical Linguistics is not?
Let's begin by clearing away some possible misconceptions, by considering a few things that
historical linguistics is NOT about, though sometimes some non-linguists think it is.
1- Historical linguistics is not concerned with the history of linguistics, though historical linguistics
has played an important role in the development of linguistics – being the main kind of
linguistics practised in the nineteenth century – and indeed historical linguistic notions had a
monumental impact in the humanities and social sciences, far beyond just linguistics.
2- Another topic not generally considered to be properly part of historical linguistics is the
ultimate origin of human language and how it may have evolved from non-human primate call
systems, gestures, or whatever, to have the properties we now associate with human languages in
general.
Many hypotheses abound, but it is very difficult to gain solid footing in this area.
Finally, historical linguistics is also not about determining or preserving pure, 'correct' forms of
language or attempting to prevent change.
The popular attitude towards change in language is resoundingly negative. The changes are often
seen as corruption, decay, degeneration, deterioration, as due to laziness, as a threat to education,
morality and even to national security.
We read laments in letters to newspapers stating that our language is being destroyed, deformed
and reduced to an almost unrecognisable remnant of its former and rightful glory. These are of
course not new sentiments, but laments like these that existed throughout history.
However, change in language is inevitable, and this makes complaints against language change
both futile and silly.
All languages change all the time (except dead ones). Language change is just a fact of life; it
cannot be prevented or avoided.
Indeed, the changes going on today which so distress some in our society are exactly the same in
kind and character as many past changes about which there was much complaint and worry as
they were taking place, but the results of which today are considered enriching aspects of the
modern language.
Since it is always taking place, those who oppose ongoing changes would do their stress-levels
well just to make peace with the inevitability of language change. Of course, society can assign
negative or positive value to things in language (be the new changing ones or the old ones), and
this can have an impact on how or whether these things change.
This sociolinguistic conditioning of change is an important part of historical linguistics.
A moment for review :
 Is is possible to avoid language change? Yes/ No , try to develop a ten lines composition.
 State the position of Historical Linguistics vis-a-vis ( history of language, human
language origins, language preservation).
 Historical linguistics and its contributions to understanding linguistic and non-linguistic
studies.
Lecture Two: What is Historical Linguistics About?

As already mentioned, historical linguistics deals with language change. Historical linguistics is
sometimes called diachronic linguistics (from Greek dia- 'through' + chronos 'time' +-ic), since
historical linguists are concerned with change in language or languages over time.
This is contrasted with synchronic linguistics, which deals with a language at a single point in
time.
There are various ways to study language diachronically. For example, historical linguists may
study changes in the history of a single language, for instance the changes from Old English to
Modern English, or between Old French and Modern French, to mention just two examples.
Modern English is very different from Old English.
Often the study of the history of a single language is called philology, for example English
philology, French philology, Hispanic philology and so on. (The term philology has several other
senses as well).
The historical linguist may also study changes revealed in the comparison of related languages,
often called comparative linguistics.
We say that languages are related to one another when they descend from (are derived from) a
single original language, a common ancestor: for example, the modern Romance languages
(which include Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and others) descend from earlier
Latin.
In the past, many had thought that the principal domain of historical linguistics was the study of
'how' languages change, believing that answers to the question of 'why' they change were too
inaccessible.
However, since the 1960s or so, great strides have been achieved also in understanding 'why'
languages change . Today, we can say that historical linguistics is dedicated to the study of 'how'
and 'why' languages change, both to the methods of investigating linguistic change and to the
theories designed to explain these changes.
Some people imagine that historical linguists mostly just study the history of individual words -
and many people are fascinated by word histories, as shown by the number of popular books,
newspaper columns and radio broadcasts dedicated to the topic, more properly called etymology
(derived from Greek etumon 'true' (neuter form), that is, 'true or original meaning of a
word').
The primary goal of historical linguistics is not etymologies, but accurate etymology is an
important product of historical linguistic work.
Let us, for illustration's sake, consider a couple of examples and then see what the real role of
etymology in historical linguistics is.
Glamour is a changed form of the word grammar, originally in use in Scots English; it meant
'magic, enchantment, spell', found especially in the phrase 'to cast the glamour over one'.
It did not acquire its sense of 'a magical or fictitious beauty or alluring charm' until the mid-
1800s.
Grammar has its own interesting history. It was borrowed from Old French grammaire, itself
from Latin grammatica, ultimately derived from Greek gramma 'letter, written mark'.
In Classical Latin, grammatica meant the methodical study of literature broadly. In the Middle
Ages, it came to mean chiefly the study of or knowledge of Latin and hence came also to be
synonymous with learning in general, the knowledge peculiar to the learned class.
Since this was popularly believed to include also magic and astrology, French grammaire came
to be used sometimes for the name of these occult 'sciences'.
English Rramarye, grammary means ', occult learning, magic, a word revived in literary usage
by late grammar, learning in general; it is clearly archaic and related to the cases of vocabulary
What is of greater concern to historical linguists is not the etymology of these words per se, but
the kinds of changes they have undergone and the techniques or methods we have at our disposal
to recover this history.
Thus, in the history of the words glamour and grammar we notice various kinds of change:
borrowing from Greek to Latin and ultimately from French (a descendant of Latin) to
English, shifts in meaning, and the: sporadic change in sound (r to I) in the derived word
glamour.
Changes of this sort are what historical linguistics is about, not just the individual word
histories.
Goodbye as a second example. This everyday word has undergone several changes in its history.
It began life in the late 1500s as god be with you (or ye), spelled variously as god be wy ye, god
b 'uy, and so on.
The first part changed to good either on analogy with such other greetings as good day, good
morning and good night, or as a euphemistic deformation to avoid the blasphemy of saying
god (taboo avoidance) - or due to a combination of the two.
The various independent words in god be with you were amalgamated into one, goodbye, and
ultimately even this was shortened (clipped) to bye.
Historical linguists are concerned with all these things broadly and not merely with the history
behind individual words.
For that reason, etymology is not the primary purpose of historical linguistics, but rather the
goal is to understand language change in general; and when we understand this, then
etymology, one area of historical linguistics, is a by-product of that understanding..
A moment for review
 How would you defferenciate between -- Historical Linguistics, Etymology/ Historical
Linguistics & Comparative Linguistics?
 Trace the routes of change of the two mentioned words : grammar/glamour, Goodbye

Lecture Three: Kinds of Linguistic Changes:

There are An Example in English Language

many kinds of linguistic change. Any aspect of a language structure can change, and therefore
we are concerned with learning to apply accurately the techniques that have been developed for
dealing with these kinds of changes, with sound change, grammatical change, semantic
change, borrowing, analogy and so on, and with understanding and evaluating the basic
assumptions upon which these historical linguistic methods are based.
We can begin to get an appreciation for the various sorts of changes that are possible in language
by comparing a small sample from various instances of English. This exercise cited in (lyle
Campbell.1999) compares Matthew 27:73 from translations of the Bible at different time
periods, starting with the present and working back to Old English.
This particular example was selected in part because it talks about language and in part because
in translations of the Bible we have comparable· texts from the various time periods which can
reveal changes that have taken place:
 1. Old English (The West-Saxon Gospels, c. 1050):
I'a refter lytlum fyrste geneatreton I'a oe I'rer stodon, cwredon to petre. Soolice I'u eart of hym,
I'yn sprrec I'e gesweotolao.
[Literally: then after little first approached they that there stood, said to Peter. Truly thou art of
them, thy speech thee makes clear.]
 2. Middle English (The Wycliff Bible, fourteenth century):
And a litil aftir, thei that stooden camen, and seiden to Petir, treuli thou art of hem; for thi speche
makith thee knowun.
 3. Early Modern English (The King James Bible, 1611):
And after a while came vnto him they that stood by, and saide to Peter, Surely thou also art one
of them, for thy speech bewrayeth thee.
 4. Modern English (The New English Bible,1961):
Shortly afterwards the bystanders came up and said to Peter, 'Surely you are another of them;
your accent gives you away!'
In comparing the Modern English with the Early Modern English versions, we note several
kinds of changes.
(1) Lexical: in Early Modern English bewrayeth we have an example of lexical replacement.
This word was archaic already in the seventeenth century and has been replaced by other words.
It meant speak evil of, to expose (a deception)'. In this context, it means that Peter's way of
speaking, his accent, gives him away.
(2) Grammatical (syntactic and morphological) change: from came vnto [unto] him they to the
Modern English equivalent, they came to him, there has been a syntactic change.
In earlier times, English, like other Germanic languages, had a rule which essentially inverted
the subject and verb when preceded by other material (though this rule was not obligatory in
English as it is in German), so that because and after a while comes first in the sentence, they
came is inverted to came they. This rule has for the most part been lost in Modern English.
Another grammatical change (syntactic and morphological) is seen in the difference between
thou. .. Art and you are. Formerly, thou was 'you (singular familiar)' and contrasted with ye/you
'you (plural or singular formal)" but this distinction was lost. The -eth of bewrayeth was the
'third person singular' verb agreement suffix; it was replaced in time by -(e)s (giveth> gives).
(3) Sound change: early Modern English was not pronounced in exactly the same way as
Modem English.
(4) Borrowing: the word accent in Modern English is a loanword from Old French accent
'accent, pronunciation’.
Amoment for review
 Re –read the illustration introduced above and try to sort out :
 - a grammatical change
 -a lexical change
Lecture Four: Borrowing

Introduction
It is common for one language to take words from another language and make them part of its
own vocabulary: these are called loanwords and the process is called linguistic borrowing.

Borrowing, however, is not restricted to just lexical items taken from one language into another;
any linguistic material - sounds, phonological rules, gramatical morphemes, syntactic
patterns, semantic associations, discourse strategies or whatever -- which has its origin in a
foreign language can be borrowed, that is, can be taken over so that it becomes part of the
borrowing language.
Borrowing normally implies a certain degree of bilingualism for at least some people in both the
language which borrows (sometimes called the recipient language) and the language which is
borrowed from (often called the donor language).

We will attempt to illustrate with some examples to answer the questions below.
 (1) what are loanwords?
 (2) why are words borrowed?
 (3) what aspects of language can be borrowed and how are they borrowed?
 (4) what are the methods for determining that something is a loanword and for identifying
the source languages from which words are borrowed? and
 (5) what happens to borrowed forms when they are taken into another language?

What is a Loanword?
A loanword is a lexical item (a word) which has been 'borrowed' from another language, a word
which originally was not part of the vocabulary of the recipient language but was adopted from
some other language and made part of the borrowing language's vocabulary.
French borrowed words from English, for example bifteck ‘beefsteak’, among many others.
Loanwords are extremely common; some languages have many.
There are extensive studies of the many Scandinavian and French loans in English;
German and Arabic loans in Spanish; Native American loanwords in Spanish and
Spanish loans in various Native American languages (called hispanisms);
Arabic in various languages of Africa and Asia. Just consider these examples ;
 Coffee (Arabic qahwah 'infusion, beverage', originally said to have meant some kind of
'wine', borrowed through the Turkish pronunciation kahveh from which European languages get
their term
 Potato (Taino (Caribean language of Haiti) patata, borrowed through Spanish batata,
patata to many other languages.
 Sugar (ultimately from Arabic sukkar, through Old French f'ucre.
Why do Languages Borrow from One Another?
1- Languages borrow words from other languages primarily because of need and prestige.
When speakers of a language acquire some new item or concept from abroad, they need a new
term to go along with the new acquisition; often a foreign name is borrowed along with the new
concept.

This explains for; 'coffee' (Russian kofe, Finnish kahvi, Japanese kohii);

'tobacco' (Japanese tabako 'cigarette, tobacco', ultimately from Arabic tabiiq 'a herb which
produced euphoria' via Spanish tabaco, since languages presumably needed new names for these
new concepts when they were acquired.
2- The other main reason why words are taken over from another language is for prestige,
because the foreign term for some reason is highly esteemed. Borrowings for prestige are
sometimes called 'luxury' loans.
For example, English could have done perfectly well with only native terms for as well as many
other terms of 'cuisine' from French – cuisine itself is from French cuisine 'kitchen' - because
French had more social status and was considered more prestigious than English during the
period of Norman French dominance in England (l066.-1300).
3- Some loans involve a third, much rarer (and much less important) reason for borrowing, the
opposite of prestige: borrowing due to negative evaluation, the adoption of the foreign word to
be derogatory.
English assassin and the similar words with the same meaning in a number of other European
languages (French assassin, Italian assassino, Spanish asesino 'assassin') may be another
example; assassin is ultimately from Arabic lJaffiijin 'hashish-eater' (for the name of an
eleventh-century Muslim sect who would intoxicate themselves with hashish or cannabis when
preparing to kill someone of public standing; they had a reputation for butchering opponents,
hence the later sense of 'murderer for hire or for fanatical reasons.

Lecture five: How do Words get Borrowed?

Introduction

Borrowed words are usually remodelled to fit the phonological and morphological structure of
the borrowing language, at least in early stages of language contact.

The traditional view of how words get borrowed and what happens to them as they are
assimilated into the borrowing language holds that loanwords which are introduced to the
Borrowing language by bilinguals may contain sounds which are foreign to the receiving
language, but due to phonetic interference ........
the foreign sounds are changed to confonn to native sounds and phonetic constraints.
This is frequently called adaptation (or phoneme substitution).
- In adaptation, a foreign sound in borrowed words which does not exist in the receiving
language will be replaced by the nearest phonetic equivalent to it in the borrowing language.
However, there are many different kinds of language-contact situations, and the outcome of
borrowing can vary according:

......to the length and

.....intensity of the contact,

......the kind of interaction, and

......the degree of bilingualism in the populations.

In situations of more extensive, long term or intimate contact, new phonemes can be
introduced into the borrowing language together with borrowed words which contain these new
sounds, resulting in changes in the phonemic inventory of the borrowing language; this is
sometimes called direct phonological diffusion.

For example, before intensive contact with French, English had no phonemic /3/. This sound
became an English phoneme through the many French loans that contained it which came into
English, such as rouge /ru3/ « French rouge 'red')
In the case of v, formerly English had an allophonic [v] but no phonemic Iv/. It became
phonemic due in part to French loans containing v in environments not formerly permitted by
English.
The sound [v] occurred in native English words only as the intervocalic variant (allophone) of
/f /; a remnant of this situation is still seen in alternations such as leaf-leaves, wife-wives and so
on, where the suffix -es used to have a vowel in the spoken language. Words with initial v of
French origin - such as very from French vrai 'true' - caused /v/ to become a separate phoneme
in its own right, no longer just the allophonic variant of / f / that occurred between vowels.
While there may be typical patterns of substitution for foreign sounds and phonological
patterns, substitutions in borrowed words in a language are not always uniform.
The same foreign sound or pattern can be borrowed in one loanword in one way and in another
loanword in a different way.
This happens for the following reasons.
-- In most cases, borrowings are based on pronunciation, as illustrated in the case of Finnish
meikkaa- 'to make up (apply cosmetics)" based on English pronunciation of make /meik/.
However, in some cases, loans can be based on orthography ('spelling pronunciations'), as seen
in the case of Finnish jeeppi [ji:pi] 'jeep', which can only be based on a spelling pronunciation
of English 'jeep', not on the English pronunciation (/Jip/) - borrowed nouns that end in a
consonant add i in Finnish.

Loan words are not only remodelled to accommodate aspects of the phonology of the borrowing
language, they are also usually adapted to fit the morphological patterns of the borrowing
language.

How do We Identify Loanwords and Determine the Direction of Borrowing?

An important question is: how can we tell (beyond the truly obvious cases) if something is a
loanword or not? In dealing with borrowings, we want to ascertain which language is the source
(donor) and which the recipient (borrower).
2.1. Phonological clues
The strongest evidence for loanword identification and the direction of borrowing comes from
phonological criteria.
Phonological patterns of the language. Words containing sounds which are not normally
expected in native words are candidates for loans.

Phonological history. In some cases where the phonological history of the languages of a family
is known, infonnation concerning the sound changes that they have undergone can be helpful for
detennining loans, the direction of borrowing, and what the donor language was

- Morphological complexity
The morphological make-up of words can help determine the direction of borrowing.
In cases of borrowing, when the form in question in one language is morphologically
complex (composed of two or more morphemes) or has an etymology which is
morphologically complex, but the fonn in the other languages has no morphological
analysis, then usually
the donor language is the one with the morphologically complex fonn and the borrower is
the one with the monomorphemic fonn.
Spanish borrowed many words from Arabic during the period that the Moors dominated Spain
(901-1492). Many Arabic loans in Spanish include what was originally the Arabic definite
article.
For example,
- English alligator is borrowed from Spanish el lagarto 'the alligator'; since it is
monomorphemic in English, but based on two morphemes in Spanish, el 'the' + lagarto
'alligator', the direction of borrowing must be from Spanish to English.
- al- but are monomorphemic in Spanish. A few examples of this are: albanil 'mason'
(Arabic banna), albaricoque 'apricot' (Arabic barquq),
 - algodon 'cotton' (Arabic qutn 'cotton'; English cotton is also ultimately from Arabic),
 almacen 'storehouse' (Arabic makhzin 'granary, storehouse [plural]" derived from
elmakhazan [singular] English magazine is ultimately from the same source),
 almohada 'pillow' (Arabic milkhadda, derived from (khad 'cheek'). Since these are
polymorphemic in Arabic, composed of the article al- + root, but each is monomorphemic in
Spanish, the direction of borrowing is seen to be from Arabic to Spanish.
 - Vinegar in English is a loan from French vinaigre, which is from vin 'wine' + aigre
'sour'; since its etymology is polymorphemic in French but monomorphemic in English, the
direction of borrowing is clearly from French to English
This is a very strong criterion, but not full proof.
It can be complicated by cases of folk etymology, where a monomorphemic loanword comes to
be interpreted as containing more than one morpheme, though originally this was not the case.
For example, Old French monomorphemic crevice 'crayfish' was borrowed into English and
then later this was replaced by folk etymology with crayfish, on analogy with fish. Now it
appears to have a complex morphological analysis, but this is not original.

LECTURE SIX: CLUES FROM COGNATES

When a word in two (or more) languages is suspected of being borrowed, if it has legitimate
cognates (with regular sound correspondences) across sister languages of one family, but is
found in only one language (or a few languages) of another family, then the donor language is
usually one of the languages for which the form in question has cognates in the related
languages. Consider the examples,
Spanish ganso 'goose' is borrowed from Germanic gans; Germanic has cognates, for example
German Gans, English goose, and so on, but other Romance languages have no true cognate of
Spanish ganso.
Rather, they have such things as French oie, Italian oca, and others reflecting Latin iinser 'goose'
(which is cognate with Germanic gans 'goose', but not the source of borrowed Spanish ganso).
Thus, the direction of borrowing is from Germanic to Spanish.
Geographical and ecological clues
The geographical and ecological associations of words suspected of being loans can often
provide infonnation helpful to determining whether they are borrowed and what the identity of
the donor language is.
For example, the geographical and ecological remoteness from earlier English-speaking territory
of zebra, gnu, impala and aardvark – animals originally found only in Africa - makes these
words likely candidates for loanwords in English.
Indeed, they were borrowed from local languages in Africa with which speakers of European
languages came into contact when they entered the habitats where these animals are found
- zebra is from a Congo language (borrowed through French),
- gnu from a Khoe language,
- impala from Zulu.
Inferences from geography and ecology are not as strong as those from the phonological and
morphological criteria mentioned above; however, when coupled with other information, the
inferences which they provide can be useful.
Other semantic clues
A still weaker kind of inference, related to the last criterion, can sometimes be obtained from the
semantic domain of a suspected loan.
For example, English words such as squaw, papoose, powwow, and so on have paraphrases
involving 'Indian' Native American', that is, 'Indian woman', 'Indian baby', 'Indian house' and
so on; this suggests possible borrowing from American Indian languages. Upon further
investigation, this supposition proves true; these are borrowed from Algonquian languages into
English
This criterion is only a rough indication of possibilities. Sources for the borrowing must still be
sought, and it is necessary to try to determine the exact nature of the loans, if indeed borrowings
are involved.
Calques (loan translations, semantic loans)
In loanwords, something of both the phonetic fonn and meaning of the word in the donor
language is transferred to the borrowing language, but it is also possible to borrow, in effect, just
the meaning, and instances of this are called calques or loan translations, as illustrated by the
often-repeated example of black market, which owes its origin in English to a loan translation
of German Schwarzmarkt, composed of schwarz 'black' and Markt 'market'.
Other examples follow.
 (I) The word for 'railway' ('RAILROAD') is a calque based on a translation of 'iron'
'road/way' in a number of languages French CHEMIN DE FER (literally 'road of iron');
 German Eisenbahn (EISEN 'iron' + BAHN 'path, road')
 (2) - A number of languages have calques based on English skyscraper, as for example:
German
Wolkenkratzer (Wolken 'clouds' + kratzer
'scratcher, scraper'); French gratte-de ciel (gratte 'gratte, scrape' + ciel 'sky'.
Emphatic foreignisation
Sometimes, speakers go out of their way to make borrowed forms sound even more foreign by
substituting sounds which seem to them more foreign than the sounds which the word in the
donor language actually has.
These examples of further 'foreignisation' are usually found in loans involving slang or high
registers; it is somewhat akin to hypercorrection.
The English borrowing from French coup de grace (literally, 'blown hit of grace') is more often
rendered without the final s, as Iku de gra/, than as Iku de gras/, where many English speakers
expect French words spelled with s to lack s in the pronunciation and have extended this to
eliminate also the lsI of grace, though in French the s of grace is pronounced, [gras].
The phenomenon is illustrated in examples such the frequent news media pronunciations of
Azerbaijan and Beijing with the somewhat more foreign-sounding /3/, [azerbai'3an]
and [bei'3i :n], rather than the less exotic but
more traditional pronunciation with [azer'bai 3an] (with penultimate stress in the latter).
Cultural Inferences
It is not difficult to see how loanwords can have an important historical impact on a culture - just
consider what the evening news in English might be like without money and dollars, or religion,
politicians and crime.
These words are all loans:
(I) money: borrowed in Middle English times from French (Old French moneie; compare
Modern French monnaie 'money, coin'), ultimately from Latin moneta, from the name of Juno
moneta.
(2) dollar: borrowed into English in the sixteenth century from Low German and Dutch daler,
ultimately from High German thaler, in its full form Joachimsthaler, a place in Bohemia,
literally 'of Joachim's valley', from where the German thaler, a large silver coin of the 1600s,
came, from a silver mine opened there in 1516.
(3) religion: borrowed from French religion, first attested in English in 1200 (ultimately from
Latin religion-em, of contested etymology, said to be from either relegere 'to read over again'
or religare 'to bind, religate'. reflecting the state of life bound by monastic vows).

LECTURE SEVEN: ANALOGICAL CHANGE

7.1 Introduction
Sound change, borrowing and analogy have traditionally been considered the three most
important (most basic) types of linguistic change.
In spite of the importance of analogy, linguistics textbooks seem to struggle when it comes to
offering a definition. Many do not even bother, but just begin straight away by presenting
examples of analogical change.
Some of the definitions of analogy that have been offered run along the following lines: analogy
is a linguistic process involving generalisation of a relationship from one set of conditions to
another set of conditions.
Analogy is change modelled on the example of other words or forms; and analogy is a historical
process which projects a generalisation from one set of expressions to another.
Arlotto (1972: 130), recognising the problem of offering an adequate definition, gives what he
calls 'a purposely vague and general definition':
'[analogy] is a process whereby one form of a language becomes more like another with
which it has somehow associated'.
The essential element in all these definitions, vague and inadequate though this may sound, is
that analogical change involves a relation of similarity (compare Anttila 1989: 88).
Analogy is sometimes described as 'internal borrowing', the idea being that in analogical
change a language may 'borrow' from some of its own patterns to change other patterns.
Analogy is usually not conditioned by regular phonological factors, but rather depends on
aspects of the grammar, especially morphology.
For the Neogrammarians, sound change was considered regular, borrowings needed to be
identified, and analogy was, in effect, everything else that was left over. That is, almost
everything that was not sound change or borrowing was analogy.
Analogy became the default (or wastebasket) category of changes.
In analogical change, one piece of the language changes to become more like another pattern in
the language where speakers perceive the changing part as similar to the pattern that it changes to
be more like.
By way of getting started, let us consider some examples of analogy. Originally, sorry and
sorrow were quite distinct, but in its history sorry has changed under influence from sorrow to
become more similar to sorrow.
Sorry is from the adjective form of 'sore',
Old English sarig 'sore, pained, sensitive' (derived from the Old English noun sar 'sore'), which
has cognates in other Germanic languages.
The original a of siirig changed to 0 and then was shortened to 0 under influence from sorrow
(Old English sorh 'grief, deep sadness or regret'), which had no historical connection to sorry.
This is an analogical change, where the form of sorry changed on analogy with that of sorrow.
Some equate analogical change with morphological change, though this can be misleading.
While it is true that many analogical changes involve changes in morphology, not all do, and
many changes in morphology are not analogical
Proportional Analogy
Traditionally, two major kinds of analogical changes have been distinguished, proportional
and non-proportional, (‘the distinction is not always clear or relevant.
Proportional analogical changes are those which can be represented in an equation of the form,
a : b = c : x, where one solves for 'x' - a is to b as c is to what? (x = 'what?').
For example: a : b = c : x,
ride: rode = dive: x,
Where in this instance x is solved with dove. In this analogical change, the original past tense of
dive was dived, but it changed to dove under analogy with the class of verbs which behave like
drive: drove, ride: rode, write: wrote, strive: strove, and so on.
Not all cases considered proportional analogy can be represented easily in this proportional
formula, and some cases not normally thought to be proportional analogical changes can be fitted
into such a formula.
In the end, the distinction may not be especially important, so long as you understand the general
notion of analogy
In English, the pattern of the verb speak/spoke/spoken ('present tense/'past tense/past
participle') developed through remodelling on analogy with verbs of the pattern break/
broke/broken.
In Old English, it was (compare the spake 'past tense' sprec/sprrec/gesprecen of Early Modern
English with present-day spoke).
Analogical Levelling
Many of the proportional analogical changes are instances of analogical levelling.
(Others are extensions; see below.)
Analogical levelling reduces the number of allomorphs a form has; it makes paradigms more
uniform. In analogical levelling, forms which formerly underwent alternations no longer do so
after the change.
(1) For example, some English 'strong' verbs have been levelled to the 'weak' verb pattern,
as for instance in dialects where ;
throw/threw/ thrown has become throw/throwed/throwed.
There are numerous cases throughout the history of English in which strong verbs (with stem
alternations, as in
sing/sang/sung or write/wrote/written) have been levelled to weak verbs (with a single stem
form and -ed or its equivalent for 'past' and 'past participle', as in bake/baked/baked or
live/lived/lived).
Thus cleave/clove/cloven (or cleft) 'to part, divide, split' has become cleave/cleaved/cleaved for
most, while strive/strove/striven for many speakers has changed to strive/strived/strived.
(Strive is a borrowing from Old French estriver 'to quarrel, contend', but came to be a strong
verb very early in English, now widely levelled to a weak verb pattern.
(2) Some English strong verbs have shifted from one strong verb pattern to another, with the
result of a partial levelling.
For example, in earlier English the 'present' /'past' / 'past participle' of the verb to bear was
equivalent to bear/bare/born(e), and break was break /brake/broke(n).
They have shifted to the fight/fought/fought, spin/spun/spun pattern, where the root of the
'past' and 'past participle' forms is now the same (bear/bore/born(e), break/broke/broken).
(3) In English, the former 'comparative' and 'superlative' forms of old have been levelled from
the pattern old/elder/eldest to the nonalternating pattern old/older/oldest. Here, 0 had been
fronted by umlaut due to the former presence of front vowels in the second syllable of elder and
eldest, but the effects of umlaut were levelled out, and now the words elder and eldest remain
only in restricted contexts, not as the regular 'comparative' and 'superlative' of old.
Near was originally a 'comparative' form, meaning 'nearer', but it became the basic form
meaning 'near'. If the original state of affairs had persisted for the pattern
'near'/'nearer' /'nearest', we should have had nigh/near/next, from Old English (neah
'near'/nearra 'nearer'/neahsta 'nearest'.)
However, this pattern was levelled out; nearer was created in the sixteenth century, then nearest
substituted for next. Both nigh and next remained in the language, but with more limited, shifted
meanings.
Similarly, far was also comparative in origin (originally meaning 'farther'), but this became the
basic form meaning 'far', which then gave rise to the new comparative farrer, which was
replaced by farther under the influence of further 'more forward, more onward, before in
position'.
The pattern late/later/latest is also the result of an analogical levelling without which we would
have had instead the equivalent of late/latter/last, with the 'comparative' from Old
English /retra/ and the 'superlative' from Old English latost.
(In this case,later replaced latter, which now remains only in restricted meaning; and
last, though still in use but different in meaning.
Analogical Extension
Analogical extension (somewhat rarer than analogical levelling) extends the already existing
alternation of some pattern to new forms which did not formerly undergo the alternation.
An example of analogical extension is seen in the case mentioned above of dived being replaced
by dove on analogy with the 'strong' verb pattern as in drive/drove, ride/rode and so on, an
extension of the alternating pattern of the strong verbs. Other examples follow.
(I) Modern English wear/wore, which is now in the strong verb pattern, was historically a weak
verb which changed by extension of the strong verb pattern, as seen in earlier English werede
'wore', which would have become modern weared if it had survived.
(2) Other examples in English include the development of the nonstandard past tense forms
which show extension to the strong verb pattern which creates alternations that formerly were
not there, as in: arrive/arrove (Standard English arrive/arrived), and squeeze/squoze (Standard
squeeze/squeezed).
From the point of view of the speaker, analogical levelling and extension may not be different,
since in both the speaker is making different patterns in the language more like other patterns
that exist in the language.
The Relationship between Analogy and Sound Change
The relationship between sound change and analogy is captured reasonably well by the slogan
(sometimes called 'Sturtevant's paradox'):
sound change is regular and causes irregularity; analogy is irregular and causes regularity
(Anttila 1989: 94). That is, a regular sound change can create alternations, or variant allomorphs.
For example, umlaut was a regular sound change in which back vowels were fronted due to the
presence of a front vowel in a later syllable, as in brother + -en > brethren; as a result of this
regular sound change, the root for 'brother' came to have two variants, brother and brethr-.
Earlier English had many alternations of this sort. However, an irregular analogical change later
created brothers as the plural, on analogy with the nonalternating singular/plural pattern in such
nouns as sister/sisters.
This analogical change in the case of brethren in effect resulted in undoing the irregularity
created by the sound change, leaving only a single form, brother, as the root in both the singular
and plural forms; that is, analogy levelled out the alternation left behind by the sound change
(brethren survives only in a restricted context with specialised meaning).
In this context, we should be careful to note that although analogical changes are usually not
regular processes (which would occur whenever their conditions are found), they can
sometimes be regular.

Lecture eight Language Families

Time-depth

 Proto-Indo-European: 5000-6000 years ago

+ Proto-Germanic: 2500-3500
 Oldest IE written documents
+ Hittite 1300 B.C.
+ Sanskrit 1200 B.C.
+ Greek 1000 B.C. (Mycenean earlier)
 English is part of the Germanic family.
Language Change Good or Bad ?
 Not an aesthetic question!
 All stages of language are validexpressions of our language instinct (Universal
Grammar)
 Just as all languages and dialectsare valid expressions of our language instinct

The End of Historical Linguistics Course.

Consider the following Questions:
Question one: Language borrowing has always been considered as healthy and positive, but
what is regarded as negative is always related to the people’s choice of borrowing? ( not more
than 12 lines)
Discuss the following:
1- what reasons do justify Historical linguisic studies?
2- Certain studies are taken for HL , but in fact they are not?
3- Do all people percieve language change in the same way?
4- Historical Linguistics Vs. Comparative Linguistics.
5- Why did linguists avoid studying language change before the 1960’0?
6- Etymology Vs. Historical Linguistics.
7- what techniques are used to determine language changes?
8- What are the levels of language borrowing?
9- In case of language borrowing investigation what are the questions a linguist should answer?
10- Why do languages borrow?
11- What does phonetic adaptation mean?
12- What are the charecteristics that can determine the outcome of borrowing between
languages?
13- Direct phonological diffusion Vs. Phonological adaptation.
14- how can we determine the direction of borrowing?
15- analogy?
16- Internal borrowing?
17- Proportional Analogy?
18- Analogical Levelling?
19 analogical Extension?
20- Germanic Languages?
21- Old English, Middle English