Competing Motivations in the Process of Language Change

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics grade: 20 http: //uni-jena.de/ (Institut fr Anglistik/Amerikanistik) course: Historical Linguistics language: English abstract: Language change is a steadily continuing process. Languages were changing 2000 years ago. They are changing today and they will certainly be changing in the future. So we are able to determine different steps in the development of the English language: roughly speaking Old English Middle English and Modern English. All of them are different from each other in terms of semantics phonology or morphology. In this manner morphological and syntactic phonological lexical and semantic characteristics of a particular language are altering all the time. These processes may happen consciously or unconsciously. They may be perceived by the speakers of the respective language or they may be not. However this process is always going on. Furthermore there are lots of motivations causing those changes. As an example the ambition to ease pronunciation - that is the reduction of effort that is necessary for moving the speech articulators - causes changes in phonology. The contact between several languages may cause lexical and semantic change as well as phonological change. Social pressures may be equally influential. Lexical items additionally may take over grammatical functions losing their original meaning due to frequent usage of the particular word or phrase. Thus a language as will be explained in this paper is generally shaped and altered by using it. In fact a number of linguists claim that language change is caused by competing motivations which [...] can never all be satisfied at once. This seminar paper deals with the processes of language change and these competing motivations. Hence the various types of language changes - lexical and semantic morphological and syntactic as well as phonological changes - will