Language Change: Progress or Decay?

Citation

Aitchison, J. (2013). Language Change: Progress or Decay? (4th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Chapter Summary

The fourth edition appeared in the Cambridge Approaches to Linguistics series at the end of 2012 (the copyright page says 2013), about 300 pages long. It has sixteen short chapters, most of about fifteen pages, arranged in four parts and a closing chapter, followed by a set of optional questions, chapter notes with suggestions for further reading, references and an index. The opening chapter sets out the plan: Part 1 deals mainly with how historical linguists get their evidence, Part 2 with how change happens, Part 3 with why it happens, and Part 4 with how languages begin and end. Each chapter opens with an epigraph and a short summary paragraph.

Part 1, Preliminaries: Chapter 1: The ever-whirling wheel (The inevitability of change)

The chapter starts from the fact that every language changes and from the long tradition of complaining about it. It traces the worry about "corruption" to eighteenth-century grammarians such as Lowth and to admiration for Latin and written forms, sets it beside present-day press complaints, and distinguishes prescriptive from descriptive grammar.

Chapter 2: Collecting up clues (Piecing together the evidence)

How linguists reconstruct the past: the kinds of clue that reveal earlier pronunciation, the assumptions of comparative historical linguistics, and the further methods of internal reconstruction (working from irregularities inside one language) and typological reconstruction (working from what languages generally do).

Chapter 3: Charting the changes (Studying changes in progress)

The shift from comparing snapshots of past states to observing change as it happens. The chapter introduces William Labov's work, linguistic variables, stylistic variation in interviews, the distinction between real and apparent time, and how to obtain a representative sample of a speech community.

Part 2, Transition: Chapter 4: Spreading the word (From person to person)

How a change passes between speakers, through Labov's classic studies of r in New York City department stores, a change made with some awareness, and of the diphthongs of Martha's Vineyard, which spread below conscious awareness as one group took another as its model. Hypercorrection by the lower middle class is discussed as a sign of change in progress.

Chapter 5: Conflicting loyalties (Opposing social pressures)

Changes pulled in different directions by competing social pressures, with studies of Belfast speech and social networks (Lesley and James Milroy) and of Norwich. Accommodation between speakers and the role of weak links between networks are presented as routes by which changes travel.

Chapter 6: Catching on and taking off (How sound changes spread through a language)

How a sound change moves through the vocabulary, where frequently used words are often affected early. The chapter tests the Neogrammarian claim that sound changes are regular and simultaneous against lexical diffusion, concluding that the Neogrammarians were mostly wrong but right in some circumstances.

Chapter 7: Caught in the web (How syntactic changes work through a language)

Syntactic change compared with sound change: variation as the precondition of change, changes spreading to groups of words (such as non-standard verb -s among teenagers), the new use of the progressive with verbs like know, and Tok Pisin save "know" becoming an auxiliary.

Chapter 8: The wheels of language (Reductions and abbreviations)

Grammaticalization, presented as covering far more than a word becoming an affix, together with the reductions and abbreviations of text messaging and email, which the chapter places in a long history of language play.

Chapter 9: Spinning away (Change of meaning)

The history of the study of meaning change since Bréal, why older classifications of causes fail, and how new meanings join old ones as layered polysemies rather than replacing them.

Part 3, Causation: Chapter 10: The reason why (Sociolinguistic causes of change)

Proposed causes such as fashion, foreign influence and social need. The chapter's conclusion is that many of these are not real causes but accelerating agents that exploit weaknesses already present in the language.

Chapter 11: Doing what comes naturally (Inherent causes of language change)

The deeper layer of causes: tendencies arising from the vocal tract and from how humans process language. The chapter's image is of social triggers firing a gun that inherent tendencies have already loaded.

Chapter 12: Repairing the patterns (Therapeutic changes)

Language as a self-regulating system that restores patterned equilibrium, mainly in the sound system, and invents uses for apparently useless leftovers.

Chapter 13: Pushing and pulling (Chain reaction changes)

Chain shifts: the Great Vowel Shift, the difference between drag chains and push chains, and two vowel shifts under way now, one in the United States and one in southern Britain associated with "Estuary English".

Part 4, Beginnings and endings: Chapter 14: Language birth (How languages begin)

Ideas on the origin of language, then the birth of pidgins in contact situations and their development into creoles, followed in detail through Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea.

Chapter 15: Language death (How languages end)

The ways languages disappear, including heavy borrowing from a dominant related language, Nancy Dorian's study of the decline of Scottish Gaelic, and decreolization; the chapter stresses that language death has many routes.

Chapter 16: Progress or decay? (Assessing the situation)

The closing chapter returns to the title question and weighs the evidence of the whole book, arguing that change is neither progress nor decay.

Key Concepts

Part 1 (Chapters 1–3)

• Complaint tradition: the centuries-old habit of treating change as corruption, which the book explains historically.
• Internal and typological reconstruction: inferring earlier stages from irregularities in one language or from cross-linguistic tendencies.
• Real time and apparent time: studying change by revisiting a community over years, or by comparing age groups at one time.

Part 2 (Chapters 4–9)

• Hypercorrection: overshooting a prestige form, taken by Labov as a sign of change in progress.
• Social network and weak links: how ties between speakers channel the spread of change.
• Lexical diffusion: a sound change spreading word by word rather than everywhere at once.
• Grammaticalization and polysemy: words becoming grammatical items, and meanings layering on top of older ones.

Parts 3–4 (Chapters 10–16)

• Social triggers and inherent causes: the two layers of causation that the book separates.
• Therapeutic change: change that restores a pattern disturbed by earlier change.
• Push chains and drag chains: chain shifts started by a sound moving into, or out of, another's space.
• Pidgin, creole, decreolization: restricted contact languages, their growth into full languages, and their pull back towards the base language.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Readable argument. Reviews quoted by the publisher praise the combination of theoretical sophistication with clear, simple expression (Jeremy J. Smith, University of Glasgow) and lucid explanation through analogy, graphics and examples from many languages (Ilse Wischer, Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik).
• Change in progress at the centre. Chapters 3–5 and much of Chapters 6, 7 and 13 draw on change observed as it happens, from Labov's New York and Martha's Vineyard studies to Belfast networks and current vowel shifts, so students see how change is studied, not only its results.
• A clear framework for causation. Part 3 separates social triggers from inherent tendencies and adds therapeutic and chain-reaction changes, giving a usable structure for discussing why change happens.
• Self-test questions. Wischer singles out the questions added in this edition: three per chapter at the back of the book, asking students to explain terms such as apparent time, hypercorrection or push chains.

Limitations

• Not a methods textbook. Reconstruction gets one chapter in Part 1, and the book has no data problems or exercises in applying the comparative method; the questions test understanding of ideas, not technique.
• Much of the sociolinguistic core is classic work. Smith notes that the edition keeps classic discussions alongside current issues; many central case studies date from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the notes are the place to find later research.
• English at the centre of many case studies. Although examples come from many languages, most of the extended case studies concern English (New York, Martha's Vineyard, Belfast, Norwich, the Great Vowel Shift, Estuary English); Tok Pisin is the main non-European language followed in depth.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is the most essay-like book on the historical linguistics list and the gentlest way in. Read it first, or alongside the opening weeks, to understand why change happens and how it is observed in communities. Trask's Historical Linguistics is the natural companion: an introductory textbook with exercises that teaches the types of change and the methods of reconstruction that Aitchison only sketches.

Crowley and Bowern's An Introduction to Historical Linguistics is a fuller textbook with problems and datasets for practice, and Hock and Joseph's Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship is a large general introduction to historical and comparative linguistics. Campbell's Historical Linguistics gives a detailed, methods-based treatment for students who already know phonology, and Ringe and Eska's Historical Linguistics ties change to formal theory and acquisition for readers with prior courses.

How to Use This Book

The book assumes no previous linguistics and suits first-year students, students taking historical linguistics as an option, students of the history of English, and general readers. A little phonetic transcription helps with Chapters 6, 12 and 13; the book opens with a short list of symbols and technical terms.

• Core: Chapters 1–7 and 10–11. They give the attitude problem, the evidence, the spread of change through society and through the language, and the two layers of causation.
• Choose by interest: Chapters 8–9 for grammaticalization and meaning change; Chapters 12–13 for sound systems and chain shifts; Chapters 14–15 for pidgins, creoles and endangered languages.
• Close with Chapter 16, which ties the threads together.

After each chapter, answer its three optional questions without looking back, then reread the parts that caused trouble. The chapter notes point to the original studies. Students who need technique should pair Chapter 2 with the reconstruction chapters of a methods textbook and work its exercises.