VARIABILITY, LANGUAGE CHANGE, AND THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH
| Autor: | Milroy, James |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2005 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | International Journal of English Studies (IJES), Vol 5, Iss 1, Pp 1-11 (2005) DIGITUM. Depósito Digital Institucional de la Universidad de Murcia instname |
| ISSN: | 1578-7044 |
| Popis: | In historical language scholarship, it has been usual to assume that The transmission of language from generation to generation is itself a linguistic, rather than a social, process, and that the focus should be on uniform language states. Here it is argued that transmission is necessarily social and that the history of a language is necessarily a history of variation. Firts, it is shown that the history of British Received Pronunciation is not one of direct descent from a single uniform ancestral variety. It is then demonstrated that pre-vocalic [h] and [hw] in English have a long history as variables and that loss of [h] in these combinations is not a recent event. Finally, it is suggested that closely similar variants of certain variables, such as [w] for (wh), have most probably recurred independently at various points in history and that we therefore need to review the methods used for dating sound changes. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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