USEFUL VOCABULARY

Constraints: what changes are possible and what are not

Embedding: how change spreads from a central point through a speech community

Evaluation: social responses to language change (prestige overt and covert attitudes to language, linguistic stereotyping and notions on correctness).

Transition: “the intervening stages which can be observed, or which must be posited, between any two forms of a language defined for a language community at different times” Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 101)

Actuation: Why particular changes take place at a particular time.

Diachrony: Diachronic linguistics views the historical development of a language. Thus, on the diachronic axis we can go back and forth in time, watching the language with all its features change.

Synchrony: Synchronic linguistics views a particular state of a language at some given point in time. This could mean Modern English of the present day, or the systematic analysis of the system of Shakespeare's English. However, no comparisons are made to other states of language or other times.
Modern linguistics, following Ferdinand de Saussure, is primarily interested in the synchronic point of view. Saussure postulated the priority of synchrony: no knowledge of the historical development of a language is necessary to examine its present system. He arrived at this radical viewpoint due to his conviction that linguistic research must concentrate on the structure of language. Later, the whole paradigm was hence called structuralism.

Diachronic versus synchronic view

The Neogrammarians (also Young Grammarians, German Junggrammatiker) were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change. According to this hypothesis, a diachronic sound change affects simultaneously all words in which its environment is met, without exception. Verner's law is a famous example of the Neogrammarian hypothesis, as it resolved an apparent exception to Grimm's law. The Neogrammarian hypothesis was the first hypothesis of sound change to attempt to follow the principle of falsifiability according to scientific method. Today this hypothesis is considered more of a guiding principle than an exceptionless fact, as numerous examples of lexical diffusion (where a sound change affects only a few words at first and then gradually spreads to other words) have been attested.

Lexical diffusion: is both a phenomenon and a theory. The phenomenon is that by which a phoneme is modified in a subset of the lexicon, and spreads gradually to other lexical items. For example, in English, /uː/ has changed to /ʊ/ in good and hood but not in food; some dialects have it in hoof and roof but others do not; in flood and blood it happened early enough that the words were affected by the change of /ʊ/ to /ʌ/, which is now no longer productive.

English pronunciation is divided into two main accent groups: A rhotic (pronounced /ˈroʊtɪk/) speaker pronounces the letter R in hard or water. A non-rhotic speaker does not. In other words, rhotic speakers pronounce written /r/ in all positions, while non-rhotic speakers pronounce /r/ only if it is followed by a vowel sound in the same syllable (see "linking and intrusive R").

In linguistic terms, non-rhotic accents are said to exclude the phoneme /r/ from the syllable coda. This is commonly referred to as the post-vocalic R, although that term can be misleading because not all Rs that occur after vowels are excluded in non-rhotic English. Pre-vocalic and post-vocalic rules only hold true at the syllable level. If, within a syllable, an R occurs post-vocalically, it is dropped from pronunciation in non-rhotic speech.

Dichotomy: is any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts. In other words, it is a bipartition of elements which are mutually exclusive, nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts, and everything must belong to one part or the other. The two ways to partition elements are themselves a dichotomy. They are either complements (subdivision creating subsets) or opposites.