VARIABILITY, LANGUAGE CHANGE, AND THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH
Abstract
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.Downloads
The works published in this journal are subject to the following terms:
1. The Publications Services at the University of Murcia (the publisher) retains the property rights (copyright) of published works, and encourages and enables the reuse of the same under the license specified in item 2.
2. The works are published in the electronic edition of the magazine under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike 4.0.
3.Conditions of self-archiving. Authors are encouraged to disseminate pre-print (draft papers prior to being assessed) and/or post-print versions (those reviewed and accepted for publication) of their papers before publication, because it encourages distribution earlier and thus leads to a possible increase in citations and circulation among the academic community.
RoMEO color: green
