Testing the performance of S-curves for language change

Reviewed by: Quantitative historical linguistics: A corpus framework by Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray Dirk Geeraerts Quantitative historical linguistics: A corpus framework. By Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiii, 229. ISBN 9780198718178. $88 (Hb). The early twenty-first century has witnessed a major shift toward quantitative approaches in the methodology of linguistics. Specifically, whereas quantitative methods have long been a staple of sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic research, the past two decades have seen their expansion toward descriptive and theoretical grammar. In usage-based approaches to language in particular, like cognitive and probabilistic linguistics, a ‘quantitative turn’ has occurred that applies the statistical testing of hypotheses to data derived from text corpora. The central inspiration for Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray’s book is the observation that this turn toward quantitative corpus studies has not yet penetrated historical linguistics to the same extent as some other subfields of linguistics. It accordingly sets out to introduce ‘the framework for quantitative historical linguistics’. The seven chapters fall roughly into two parts. In Chs. 1 to 3, a general argumentation in support of quantitative historical linguistics is developed, whereas Chs. 4 to 7 deal with the implementation of the ensuing program. The discussion of ‘why’ thus leads naturally to a discussion of ‘how’. Two threads run through the first part of the text: a specification of the kind of quantitative historical linguistics that the authors intend to propagate, and an argumentation in favor of the model in question. Important features of this argumentation are a description of the actual situation in historical linguistics and a conceptual defense of the approach against potential objections. Organizationally, Ch. 1 introduces both threads, Ch. 2 develops the first thread, and Ch. 3 the second. With regard to the first thread, the first chapter introduces the authors’ notion of quantitative research in historical linguistics by means of a double contrast. On the one hand, quantitative research differs from the conventional use of evidence in historical linguistics that rests on example-based categorical judgments about the existence of specific linguistic phenomena but does not look into probabilistic, distributional data about trends of variation and change of the phenomenon in question. On the other hand, quantitative historical research needs to go beyond raw frequencies, in the sense that the multidimensional nature of language requires a multivariate statistical approach. In the second chapter, this conception is further developed in terms of the distinction between corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches. Whereas the former turn to corpora primarily for illustration and confirmation, the latter use corpus data at two stages of the empirical process: corresponding to the distinction between exploratory and confirmatory statistics, quantitative distributional evidence is initially used to generate hypotheses, and subsequently for testing them. With regard to the second thread, the text provides quantitative data (appropriately, one could say) to the effect that such a method is less entrenched in historical linguistics than other fields of linguistics. This argumentation rests on a comparison of the 2012 volume of Language with six journals with a (not necessarily unique) focus on language change, such as Diachronica, Folia Linguistica Historica, and Language Variation and Change. As an explanation for the observation that historical linguistics seems to be lagging behind, the book invokes early negative experiences with glottochronology, plus the influence of structuralist and generative theories (though this is of course a factor that is not specific to historical linguistics). At the same time, it is demonstrated how the rise of quantitative linguistics goes hand in hand with the growing availability of electronic corpus materials—a trend that obviously creates an opportunity for historical linguistics just as for the other branches of linguistics. [End Page 190] Next to the ‘the time is ripe, we shouldn’t lag behind’ argument, the plea for quantitative corpus research in historical linguistics includes a ‘nothing is wrong with it’ type of argumentation, in the form of a systematic rejection of potential objections. Section 3.7 skillfully refutes counterarguments from convenience, from redundancy, from scope limitations, from principle, and from pseudoscience. Crucially, it is argued that a quantitative approach is not incompatible with a categorial...

Reviewed by: Motives for language change Marc Pierce Raymond Hickey , ed. Motives for language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. ix + 286. US$65.00 (hardcover). This book, a Festschrift in honour of Roger Lass, contains 15 papers covering a wide range of subjects, from the role of the speaker in language change to processes in new dialect formation. The book is divided into six sections, and there is also a brief introduction by the editor, which offers a brief historiographical perspective on the study of language change and describes the contents of the book, as well as an index. The first section, "The phenomenon of language change", consists of two papers. In "On change in 'E-language' ", Peter Matthews raises a number of questions regarding the Chomskyan distinction between "I-language" and "E-language" (roughly, the idiolect and "external linguistic production", to borrow a definition from Lightfoot 1999:66) and [End Page 72] the modelling of change in its terms. Frederick New meyer then turns to an old and still-difficult problem, in his "Formal and functional motivations for language change". Issues discussed here include whether a formal account of language change really "explains" anything, and the sometimes rather loose links between a functional explanation and the data it is meant to account for. The second section, "Linguistic models and language change", contains four papers. In "Metaphors, models and language change", Jean Aitchison concentrates on the use of metaphors in shaping the study of language change (cf. Lass 1997). She seeks to understand why particular metaphors associated with language change have arisen and whether such metaphors (e.g., trees, waves/ripples, games, buildings) have "helped or hindered our understanding of language" (p. 40). David Denison's "Log(ist)ic and simplistic S-curves" discusses the use of S-curves in historical linguistics; his arguments are illustrated with data drawn from the history of English. The title of Richard Hogg's paper, "Regular suppletion", seems to be an oxymoron, as suppletion is normally assumed to be irregular by definition. Hogg argues that suppletion can sometimes in fact be regular, or even cause regularity, and supports his claims with examples like English went, where suppletion has won out over regularity, and English be, where suppletion has led to "the creation of a new regular inflection" (p. 80). The final paper in this section, "On not explaining language change: Optimality Theory and the Great Vowel Shift", by April McMahon, is another in a series of works by McMahon critically examining the use of Optimality Theory in the study of language change (e.g., McMahon 2000). McMahon rejects the use of constraint reranking to model language change (the only such formal device available to OT, given that all constraints are universal), calling it "descriptive at best, fortuitous at worst, and post hoc either way" (p. 93). Section III, "Grammaticalisation", opens with David Lightfoot's "Grammaticalisation: Cause or effect". The status of grammaticalisation remains controversial; while some historical linguists appear happy to rely on its principles in their analyses, others categorically reject grammaticalisation as an explanatory principle (cf. Haspelmath 1999, Janda 2001, and Joseph 2001 for some relevant discussion). Lightfoot reviews a number of changes to the modal auxiliary verbs in English, but proposes "local causes" for them, instead of "invoking any general tendency to grammaticalise as an explanatory force" (p. 107). The next paper, "From subjectification to intersubjectification", is by one of the most prominent scholars of grammaticalisation, Elizabeth Closs Traugott (cf. Hopper and Traugott 2003). Here Traugott argues persuasively that there is a unidirectional tendency for intersubjectification to develop from subjectification, and supports this claim with evidence from the history of English. The fourth section, "The social context for language change", consists of one paper, "On the role of the speaker in language change", by James Milroy. Milroy discusses both internal and external factors in language change, and then examines certain developments in African-American Vernacular English as spoken in Detroit which, in his view, can only be adequately accounted for by reference to social factors. Section V, "Contact-based explanations", contains four papers, beginning with "The quest for the most 'parsimonious' explanations: Endogeny vs. contact revisted", by Markku Filppula. Filppula...

On change in Language and change in language Brian D. Joseph [Correction] Language change, we are taught, is inevitable, and so too, it seems, is Language change, that is, changes of one sort or another in this journal. Being a historical linguist, I reflect on and confront changes in language on an almost daily basis and thus can't help but be struck by the ways in which changes in Language that have been instituted in recent months, as detailed below, mirror change in language. Like language change, they are in part arbitrary, they often fit into existing patterns, they are to some extent (but not entirely) functionally driven, they sometimes reflect changes in a larger social enterprise, and so on. Each one is a discrete innovation, perhaps small in scope and maybe even virtually unnoticeable by itself; yet, when taken together they can add up to a subtle shift in the character of the journal, though not a radical one—that is, there clearly is continuity with preceding instantiations of Language. Without wanting to overstate such parallels, I feel it is useful to chronicle these changes for you, the journal's readership: 1 Beginning to use italics for books, journals, and dissertations in the references at the end of articles and reviews: for years, in fact, since the middle of 1966 when William Bright (taking over as editor after Bernard Bloch's death) changed the format for references from the footnoted variety seen in the journal from its 1925 inception to their collective placement at the end of the article, Language, virtually alone among major journals in our field, has had a very 'down' style in its references, that is, with no quotation marks or italics. This format posed a 'parsing' problem in some instances, as it was not always clear where a chapter or article title ended and where the title of the book, journal, or proceedings volume containing it began; moreover, the title of a volume might seem like a subtitle for an article, or vice-versa, adding to the potential confusion. As a boundary marker between article/chapter and volume, we have introduced in this issue italics for book and journal titles.1 This move has the added benefit of bringing Language more in line with the style used in a good many other journals in the field, and thus is a step, admittedly a small one, towards a uniform discipline-wide standard format.2 2 Alphabetizing the book notice table of contents by book title: we started doing this a few issues ago but have now refined our technique so that the table of contents is always alphabetized (and generally the order of notices in the pages of the journal is likewise); this step allows readers to see at a glance if a book that interests them is given a notice. The presentation of this information has changed over the years: for a number of years (into the late 1980s), there was generally noalphabetizing by author or title, and then for several years (at least up through 1996) there was alphabetizing by book author; more recently, there was alphabetizing by book notice author, which [End Page 381] seems less useful. Thus, in this case, we are undoing a change, as it were, and reverting to a presentation style found earlier. These changes have a clear functional basis, being motivated by a desire to make these parts of the journal (references and book notices) more 'reader/user-friendly'. Other changes respond to changes in society at large, regarding technology and professional training: 3 Beginning to ask for electronic versions of hard copy submissions (thus altering the stance I enunciated in this column in Language 78.2.218, 2002, where we explicitly asked for no electronic versions); note that we still ask for hard copy as electronic copies are not infallible (with potential for font problems, unopenable files, and the like). These 'e-submissions' can facilitate aspects of the review process and thus seem to be an important step forward into the twenty-first century. 4 Another technologically motivated move: expansion of the journal's website (www.lsadc.org/language) to include a link listing forthcoming articles...

The title of this review article is inspired by Jean Aitchison's (1981) textbook, Language change: Progress or decay?, although I do not intend to discuss her book here. By including historical linguistics, I want to focus attention on the question of whether there has been any progress in the discipline of historical linguistics rather than whether, as Aitchison queries, language change can be thought of in terms of progress or decay (although that question, too, had its heyday [see, for example, Jespersen 18941]). I will start with a simplistic view of “progress” and assume that the notion can be coherently applied to a discipline or research paradigm: assuming that a central goal of historical linguistics is to “explain” language change, if historical linguistics can provide an answer to this question, then the discipline has “progressed.” The two books which I will discuss here, David Lightfoot's Principles of diachronic syntax (1979) and Roger Lass's On explaining language change (1980), bear on this issue although in rather different ways.

The International Conference on Historical Linguistics has always been a forum that reflects the general state of the art in the field, and the 2009 edition, held in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, fully allows the conclusion that the field has been thriving over the years. The studies presented in this volume are an expression of ongoing theoretical discussions as well as new analytical approaches to the study of issues concerning language change. Taken together, they reflect some of the current challenges in the field, as well as the opportunities offered by judicious use of theoretical models and careful corpus-based work. The volume's contributions are organized under the following headings: I. General and Specific Issues of Language Change, II. Linguistic Variation and Change in Germanic, III. Linguistic Variation and Change in Greek, and IV. Linguistic Change in Romance.

This essay prescribes some broad ‘Cartesian‐Uniformitarian’ boundary conditions for linguistic hypotheses about Creole formation. These conditions make constructive connections between Creole studies, historical linguistics and language‐acquisition research. Here ‘Cartesian’ has a mentalist sense, as in ): I consider the formation of so‐called ‘Creole’ languages to be ultimately reducible to the creation, in certain sociohistorical contexts, of certain idiolects (i.e., individual internal, or ‘I‐’, languages) in the minds of the ‘first “Creole” speakers’. To avoid circularity, my use of the term ‘Creole’ in the phrase ‘first “Creole” speakers’ combines some of its original ethno‐historical senses: I use the word ‘Creole’, in this particular context, to refer to the non‐indigenous people of African or European descent that were born and raised in the colonial New World, in opposition to those that were born and raised in the Old Worlds of Africa and Europe. The term ‘Uniformitarian’ evokes Neogrammarian approaches to language change, as advocated, for example, by and . It summarizes my fundamental working assumption that no sui generis or exceptional linguistic processes need to be postulated in order to explain the creation of these languages that have come to be labeled ‘Creole’: these languages were created by the same psycholinguistic mechanisms that are responsible for the creation of (I‐)languages, and for linguistic diachronic patterns, everywhere else. Therefore, ‘Creole’ languages cannot be distinguished a priori from non‐‘Creole’ languages on any linguistic‐theoretical criteria – and ‘Creole’ languages can be genetically classified by the Comparative Method, on a par with non‐‘Creole’ languages. Such assumptions go against popular claims about Creole genesis such as those in, for example, , and . In establishing these Cartesian‐Uniformitarian guidelines, I correct category mistakes that fail to distinguish explanations that apply to I‐languages from explanations that apply to E(xternal)‐languages and other social‐group phenomena that I‐languages are implicated in. One such category mistake concerns the ontology and time course of innovations in specific I‐languages vs. their spread across populations of I‐languages and into E‐language communal norms. Then I investigate the possible – and impossible – contributions of first‐language acquisition and second‐language acquisition to ‘creolization’. In particular, I take my cues from: (i) studies of language‐ and dialect‐contact situations where children and adults seem to play observably distinct roles; and (ii) recent discoveries about instances of Sign Language acquisition and creation where the Primary Linguistic Data seem remarkably restricted. As for elucidating the limits on the restructuring capacities of children and adults, and their respective contributions to language creation and change, it is epistemologically safer to investigate instances of diachronic development that are more recent than the now unobservable early stages of ‘creolization’. Throughout this essay, I use the term ‘creolization’ strictly as an a‐theoretical abbreviation for the longer phrase ‘development of these languages that, for sociohistorical reasons, have been labeled “Creole” ’. In the perspective sketched here, creolization is just another instance of language change – or ‘language evolution’, in ) sense – the investigation of which is to shed light on Universal Grammar.

The papers in this volume aim at facilitating exchange between three fields of inquiry that are of great importance in historical linguistics: language change, (socio)linguistic research on variation, and contact linguistics. Drawing on a range of recently-developed methodological innovations, such as methods for quantifying the linguistic variation (that is a prerequisite for language change) or new corpus-based methods for investigating text-type variation, the contributors are able to trace linguistic change in different periods and contact situations, demonstrate how variation occurs, and in how far language change results out of this variation. Thus, the chapters go beyond core issues of language variation and change, focusing on the boundary between word and grammar, discourse and ideology in the history of the English language.

Reviewed by: Why do languages change? Jean Aitchison Why do languages change? By R. L. Trask. Revised by Robert McColl Millar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 9780521546935. $27.99. Larry (Robert Lawrence) Trask was a well-known member of the linguistics community and a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex. His premature death in 2004 at the age of 59 (from motor neurone disease) was a cause of deep regret to many. He was admired above all for his scholarly work on the Basque language (a tongue that prior to his work had inspired more than its share of bizarre ideas), but also for his clearly written introductions to both general and historical linguistics. Those of us who also write on these topics (e.g. Aitchison 2001, 2010) are saddened to have lost someone who contributed so clearly and helpfully to these fields. Sadly, the book under review will be the last written by him. It was finally published in 2010, having been left incomplete, and the manuscript was revised by Robert McColl Millar, a senior lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. According to the publisher, it is impossible to disentangle the roles played by each, though Trask is named as the author, and I continue to refer here to the author as T, even though M may well be responsible for some of the good (and not as good) points found in the book. [End Page 221] The text shows the customary clarity of T’s work. The book is really an introduction to an introduction, as it is written at a more elementary level than his chunky 430-page book on historical linguistics, which he himself claimed to be ‘an introductory textbook’ (Trask 1996:ix). Indeed, this final book might be better titled An intro to language change since it clearly does not just address the question of Why do languages change?, as ‘Why are languages always changing?’ forms only one chapter (Ch. 2). The book contains eight chapters, which are arranged in a coherent order. Ch. 1, ‘How do languages change?’, provides a sample of different types of change. The sample begins (sensibly enough) with word meaning, since this is probably the easiest way to introduce language alterations to beginning students. The chapter then moves on to changes in grammar. The selection of the progressive passive as a linguistic example is useful, outlining the historical move from My house is painting to the more recent My house is being painted. There follow ten examples of the stages of the change, from 1662 to 1983. The linguist David Denison, we are told (8), was the source of almost all of the examples, yet Denison’s widely read book (Denison 1993) is not properly referenced anywhere, nor is it mentioned in the ‘Further reading’ (187–89), although all ten examples are easily found in Denison’s well-organized chapter on the progressive (Denison 1993:389, 391). Similarly, the very next page (9) contains two more unreferenced examples from Denison in a discussion of the perfect (Denison 1993:359). Surely it was the task of M to check these easy-to-find references in his revision—whatever that entailed—since a sick T might understandably have postponed this task. The chapter then moves on to the changing sounds of the language. Yet disappointingly, in spite of an outline discussion of the American Northern Cities Shift and recent changes in the UK’s Received Pronunciation (RP), there are no lists of phonetic symbols anywhere in the book, and no phonetics books are referenced even in the further reading section. There is a single phonetics figure (1.1) illustrating the geographical distribution of the American cot/caught merger (14). The best section of this chapter is probably the useful discussion of the increase in ‘uptalk’, the informal name for high-rise terminals (rising intonation at the ends of statements), as in Well, we went canoeing on the lake? (18). Unfortunately, however, no further information is provided about those who have worked on this phenomenon, beyond mention of an article in The Guardian (21 September 2001). Extra references on this topical issue could usefully have been added to the section...

Historical linguistics is a discipline with strong interdisciplinary connections to sociocultural anthropology, ethnohistory, and archaeology. While the study of language change and etymology can be traced back to ancient societies in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Asia, a number of important methodological approaches emerged in the late 18th century, when European scholars who were engaged in colonial administration set the foundations for research in Indo-European languages. Contemporary historical linguistics has maintained a focus on several large-scale questions, such as the origins of the language faculty; the classification and typology of the world’s languages; the time depth of major language changes; ancient writing systems; the impact of linguistic and cultural contacts on language change; the emergence of pidgins and creoles; the influence of colonial expansion and evangelization projects on language change; and the interface among literacy practices, language change, and the social order. This article outlines all of these important inquiries, with a particular stress on the sustained interaction among historical linguistics, anthropology, and ethnohistory. This survey has two focii: the first one is languages of the Americas, and the second one is ethnohistorical and philological methodology. This choice in focus conveys existing historical strengths and showcases our current knowledge about language contact and language change in the Americas.

Reviewed by: Historical linguistics 1999 ed. by Laurel J. Brinton Marc Picard Historical linguistics 1999. Ed. by Laurel J. Brinton. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001. Pp. xii, 389. Cloth $105.00. This book contains 23 of the papers that were presented at the International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL 14), Vancouver, BC, August 1999. These papers, which range in length from 11 to 26 pages, are arranged in alphabetical order by the authors’ names and are followed by an index of languages and language families, an index of names, and an index of subjects. Most of the articles can be roughly divided into those that deal mainly with (morpho)phonology and those that are concerned primarily with (morpho)syntax. In the first category, we find ‘Recent advances in the reconstruction of the Proto-Munda verb’ by Gregory D. S. Anderson and Norman H. Zide, ‘On ablaut and aspect in the history of Aramaic’ by Vit Bubenik, ‘Language change and the phonological lexicon of Korean’ by Young-mee Y. Cho, ‘Distinctive vowel length in Old French: Evidence and implications’ by Randall Gess, and ‘Remains of a submerged continent: Preaspiration in the languages of Northwest Europe’ by Gunnar Ólafur Hansson. Papers in which the languages dealt with are not obvious from the title include Janice M. Aski’s ‘Multivariable reanalysis and phonological split’, which examines the variable outcome of Latin /tj/ and /dj/ in a variety of Tuscan dialects, and Johanna Nichols’s ‘Why “me” and “thee”?’, which looks at the worldwide distribution of these pronouns as well as ‘mama’–‘papa’ lexemes in terms of phonosymbolism. Among the papers that have (morpho)syntax as their major theme, there is ‘How far has far from become grammaticalized?’ by Minoji Akimoto, ‘Are Old English conjunct clauses really verb-final?’ by Kristin Bech, ‘Alternation according to person in Italo-Romance’ by Delia Bentley and Thórhallur Eythórsson, ‘On the origin of the Portuguese inflected infinitive: A new perspective on an enduring debate’ by Ana Maria Martins, ‘Innovation of the indirect reflexive in Old French’ by D.Gary Miller, ‘The English s-genitive: Animacy, topicality, and possessive relationship in a diachronic perspective’ by Anette Rosenbach, ‘Coreference in the Popolocan languages’ by Annette Veerman-Leichsenring, and ‘Atlantis Semitica: Structural contact features in Celtic and English’ by Theo Vennemann. Other languages that are the focus of research in this area are English in David Denison’s ‘Gradience and linguistic change’, Romanian in Maria M. Manoliu’s ‘The conversational factor in language change: From prenominal to postnominal demonstratives’, Mohawk in Marianne Mithun’s ‘Lexical forces shaping the evolution of grammar’, and Vedic in Gregory Stump’s ‘Default inheritance hierarchies and the evolution of inflectional classes’. The four articles that do not fit into these two general categories are ‘Animals and vegetables, Uto-Aztecan noun derivation, semantic classification, and cultural history’ by Karen Dakin, which seeks to establish the direction in which certain borrowed terms were diffused in a number of unrelated Mesoamerican languages; ‘Rapid change among expletive polarity items’ by Jacob Hoeksema, which explores the semantic development of certain collocation relations in Dutch; ‘On the eve of a new paradigm: The current challenges to comparative linguistics in a Kuhnian perspective’ by Marie-Lucie Tarpent, wherein the author speculates on the possible emergence of a new paradigm in historical linguistics to remedy what she sees as its present-day crisis; and ‘Modeling koineization’ by Donald N. Tuten, which argues that this process should not be seen as a ‘mere reduction to a “least common denominator” ’ since it ‘can also lead to the introduction of novel features not found in any of the established contributing dialects’ (325). According to the editor, the selection of these particular articles for publication (less than 15% of the total number of presentations) was ‘intended to display the state of current research in the field of historical linguistics’ (xi). Indeed, a remarkable...

Historical linguistics as a concept has come to be used in a number of ways. First, in referring to a discipline investigating the development of single languages from an earlier to a later point in time, e.g. two or more stages of Ancient Egyptian, the language of Pharaonic times, whose written records date back four and a half millennia, and which probably became extinct as a spoken language (known as Coptic) several centuries ago. A second way in which the term historical linguistics has come to be used is as a short hand for historical-comparative linguistics – more specifically the comparative study of genetically related languages, hence the alternative term genetic linguistics. This is the way in which the term is used in the present study. In historical-comparative linguistics, or simply comparative linguistics, one reconstructs “upstream”, i.e. one works backwards from today’s languages in order to establish genetic relationships and in order to reconstruct earlier stages by studying collateral relationships. Even though as a discipline historical (or dia-chronic) linguistics grew out of philology, one does not necessarily depend on written documents or texts in order to be able to reconstruct historical changes in languages, as should become clear from the following chapters. What is needed to begin with are solid analyses of individual languages. This chapter sets out to list a number of reasons why languages may manifest similarities in their lexical and grammatical structures. After a discussion of chance, sound symbolism, borrowing and shared inheritance, basic principles of the comparative method are explained. As a first step, these involve setting up sound correspondences between cognate roots in languages assumed to be genetically related, and reconstructing historical changes in these forms.

Bringing together experts from both historical linguistics and psychology, this volume addresses core factors in language change from the perspectives of both fields. It explores the potential (and limitations) of such an interdisciplinary approach, covering the following factors: frequency, salience, chunking, priming, analogy, ambiguity and acquisition. Easily accessible, the book features chapters by psycholinguists presenting cutting edge research on core factors and processes and develops a model of how this may be involved in language change. Each chapter is complemented with one or several case study in the history of the English language in which the psycholinguistic factor in question may be argued to have played a decisive role. Thus, for the first time, a single volume provides a platform for an integrated exchange between psycholinguistics and historical linguistics on the question of how language changes over time.

An overview of the current state of the field of historical linguistics is offered here, with an eye to identifying enduring questions and tested methodologies but also new opportunities and new methods. Historical linguistics can be characterized as both the study of language change and the study of language history. These are two distinct but related enterprises: we learn about language change by studying particular events in the history of individual languages but the history of these languages also includes more than just the study of change; there are also elements to be recognized that have stayed relatively stable and unchanged over time. Moreover, historical linguistics is interested in determining and exploring relationships that languages show with other languages, whether genetic or diffusionary in nature; the former sort of relationship can provide indirect evidence of change, if related languages, sprung from the same source, nonetheless show, as they typically do, some differences between one another, whereas the latter type of relationship allows for the determination of instances of language change through language contact. Thus there is a vast amount of material that provides grist for the historical linguistic mill; in a real sense, every language has a history and thus is of potential interest to the historical linguist, if even just at the level of description, with the recording of the details of a given language's historical development. Within the history of linguistics, there have been times when the venerable field of historical linguistics was linguistics, period, with little else of concern except the historical. During such times, it was almost impossible to engage in linguistics without being well-versed in historical methodology and without caring about the historical dimension to any description or account. So too, however, there have been times when historical linguistics has been virtually absent from the main stream of linguistic thought and practice, especially in the United States. The former period can be identified with the 19 th century and into the early to

All levels of language analysis are prone to changes in their phonology, morphology, graphology, lexis, semantics and syntax over the years. Tiv language is not an exception to this claim. This study investigates various aspects of phonological or sound changes in Tiv language. This paper therefore classifies sound changes in Tiv; states causes of sound changes in Tiv and explores implications of sound changes. The research design used in this paper is purposive sampling of relevant data. The instrument used in this paper is the observation method in which the author selected words that showed epenthesis, deletion and substitution. It has been noted that the use of archaic spellings in the Modern Tiv literatures shows their ancientness. Phonological change is not a deviation but a sign of language growth and changes in spellings result in changes in sounds. The author recommends that scholars should write papers or critical works on lexical/morphological, syntactic, semantic, graphological changes in Tiv language. Students should write projects, dissertations and theses on language change and diachronic linguistics. This study introduces Tiv historical linguistics and diachronic phonology which serve as catalysts for the study of Tiv language. The understanding of Tiv sound change provides students with a much better understanding of Tiv phonological system in general, of how Tiv phonology works and how the phonemes fit together

Abstract: All levels of language analysis are prone to changes in their phonology, morphology, graphology, lexis, semantics and syntax over the years. Tiv language is not an exception to this claim. This study investigates various aspects of phonological or sound changes in Tiv language. This paper therefore classifies sound changes in Tiv; states causes of sound changes in Tiv and explores implications of sound changes. The research design used in this paper is purposive sampling of relevant data. The instrument used in this paper is the observation method in which the author selected words that showed epenthesis, deletion and substitution. It has been noted that the use of archaic spellings in the Modern Tiv literatures shows their ancientness. Phonological change is not a deviation but a sign of language growth and changes in spellings result in changes in sounds. The author recommends that scholars should write papers or critical works on lexical/morphological, syntactic, semantic, graphological changes in Tiv language. Students should write projects, dissertations and theses on language change and diachronic linguistics. This study introduces Tiv historical linguistics and diachronic phonology which serve as catalysts for the study of Tiv language. The understanding of Tiv sound change provides students with a much better understanding of Tiv phonological system in general, of how Tiv phonology works and how the phonemes fit together.