Changes in Language: Progress or Regression

Author: (English) Aitchison / Xu Jiaren
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1997-06-01
Features: The topic of language change is arguably more extensive than most other topics. For this reason, papers on this topic are often disconnected and contradictory, as many scholars, like Jane Austen, tend to polish only their own square inch of ivory rather than addressing the entire subject. This book attempts to weave together various perspectives into a coherent whole, providing readers with a comprehensive view of the phenomenon of human language change. The book will discuss: Where does our evidence for language change come from? How does change occur? Why does it happen? And how and why do languages arise and die? These questions are addressed within the framework of a central issue: Is language change a symptom of progress or a symptom of decline? In recent years, the character of research on language change (often labeled as "historical linguistics") has undergone significant changes. Traditionally, scholars were concerned only with how to reconstruct the earliest possible forms of a language and describe how phonetics changed as historical scrolls were opened. For this reason, they paid relatively little attention to recent changes, syntactic changes, pidgin and creole languages, dying languages, or the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors behind many changes. In the last twenty-five years or so, these neglected subjects have become the focus of attention first. This book attempts to integrate both old and new research emphases into a unified whole. In short, the book aims to combine traditional historical linguistics with updated research methods to give readers a general understanding of the current state of research in this field.