accepted by the speech community. 4. Assimilation
Assimilation refers to the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound, which is more specifically called “contact” or “contiguous” assimilation. 3.3.3 Morpho-syntactical change 1. Morphological change
The form of inflectional affixes may also change. 2. Syntactical change
There are more instances of changes in the syntactical features of words 3.3.4 Semantic change 1. Broadening
Broadening is a process to extend or elevate the meaning from its specific sense to a relatively general one. 2. Narrowing
Contrary to broadening, the original meaning of a word can be narrowed or restricted to a specific sense. 3. Meaning shift
All semantic changes involve meaning shift. Here meaning shift is understood in its narrow sense, i.e. the change of meaning has nothing to do with generalization or restriction as
mentioned above. 4. Class shift
By shifting the word class one can change the meaning of a word from a concrete entity or notion to a process or attribution. This process of word formation is also known as zero-derivation, or conversion.
5. Folk etymology
Folk etymology refers to a change in form of a word or phrase, resulting from an incorrect popular notion of the origin or meaning of the term or from the influence of more familiar terms mistakenly taken to be analogous. 3.3.5 Orthographic change
Changes can also be found at the graphitic level. Since writing is a recording of the sound system in English, phonological changes will no doubt set off graphitic changes.
Chapter 4 Syntax
4.1 The traditional approach 4.1.1 Number, gender and case 4.1.2 Tense and aspect
[For these two sections, please consult materials on traditional English grammar. – icywarmtea]
4.1.3 Concord and government
Concord (a.k.a. agreement) may be defined as the requirement that the forms of two or more words in a syntactic relationship should agree with each other in terms of some categories. E.g. in English the determiner and the noun it precedes should concord in number as in this man, these men. And the form of a subject should agree with that of the verb in terms of number in the present tense, e.g. He speaks English; They speak English.
Government is another type of control over the form of some words by other words in certain syntactic construction. It differs from concord in that this is a relationship in which a word of a certain class determines the form of others in terms of certain category. E.g. in English, the pronoun after a verb or a preposition should be in the object form as in She gave him a book; She gave a book to him. In other words, the verb, or the preposition, governs the form of the pronoun after it. The former is the governor, and the latter is the governed. 4.2 The structural approach
4.2.1 Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations
Syntagmatic (a.k.a. horizontal / chain) relation is a relation between one item and others in a sequence, or between elements
which are all present, such as the relation between weather and the others in the following sentence: If the weather is nice, we’ll go out.
Paradigmatic (a.k.a. vertical / choice) relation is a relation holding between elements replaceable with each other at a particular place in a structure, or between one element present and the others absent.
4.2.2 Immediate constituent analysis (IC analysis) 1. How to do it
Immediate constituents are constituents immediately, directly, below the level of a construction, which may be a sentence or a word group or a word.
Immediate constituent analysis, IC analysis for short, refers to the analysis of a sentence in terms of its immediate constituents – word groups (phrases), which are in turn analyzed into the immediate constituents of their own, and the process goes on until the ultimate sake of convenience. The IC analysis of a sentence may be carried out with brackets or shown with a tree diagram. E.g. Poor John ran away. →
(1) ((Poor) (John)) ((ran) (away)). (2)
Poor John ran away
2. Its advantages
Through IC analysis, the internal structure of a sentence may be demonstrated clearly, any ambiguities, if any, will be revealed in that IC analysis emphasizes not only the linear structure of the sentence but also the hierarchical structure of the sentence. E.g. the sentence Leave the book on the shelf. is ambiguous. It has two meanings: (1) Put the book on the shelf; (2) Don’t touch the book on the shelf. These two meanings can be shown by the following tree diagrams. (Omitted. See the textbook p125~128.) 3. Its problems
However, IC analysis has three disadvantages. First, at the beginning, some advocator insisted on binary divisions. Any construction, at any level, will be cut into two parts. But this is not possible. E.g. Old men and women is ambiguous in that it may mean old + men and women or old men + and women. It’s impossible to combine with only the preceding part or only the succeeding part. Second, constructions with discontinuous constituents will pose technical problems for