Language Change: Progress or Decay? (Cambridge Approaches to Linguistics) [Paperback]

Jean Aitchison (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 30, 1991 | ISBN-10: 0521422833 | ISBN-13: 978-0521422833 | Edition: 2

Why do people sometimes leave off the ends of words when they speak? Is it sloppiness, progress, or inevitable erosion? This book attempts to answer such questions by giving a lucid and up-to-date overview of language change. It discusses where our evidence about language change comes from, how and why changes happen, and how and why languages begin and end. It considers not only changes which occurred many years ago, but also those currently in progress. It does this within the framework of one central question - is language change a symptom of progress or decay? It concludes that language is neither progressing nor decaying, but that an understanding of the factors causing change is essential for anyone involved with language alteration. For this substantially revised and enlarged second edition Jean Aitchison has included details of recent research on a number of key topics, and also discusses data from a wider variety of languages: but the work remains non-technical in style and accessible to the reader with no previous knowledge of linguistics.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'The book is a very good and readable introduction to the discipline of historical linguistics and covers a very large number of questions.' The Linguist --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Book Description

Why do people sometimes leave off the ends of words when they speak? Is it sloppiness, progress, or inevitable erosion? This book attempts to answer such questions by giving a lucid and up-to-date overview of language change.

Product Details

• Paperback: 270 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 2 edition (August 30, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521422833
• ISBN-13: 978-0521422833
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,909,797 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Written at a fairly simple level, but the information is useful even to experienced students, October 22, 2006

By 

Christopher Culver - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Language Change: Progress or Decay? (Cambridge Approaches to Linguistics) (Paperback)

While it's title might make the book seem a collection of papers taking sides in a debate, LANGUAGE CHANGE: Progress or Decay is a textbook written by Jean Aitchison introducing contemporary study of language change to beginning students of linguistics. The book has proven quite popular for its gentle tone and its clear summarization of important work in the field, and is now in its third edition.

This reviewer is a graduate student of historical linguistics, and I've several years of experience in the field. For all its simplicity, however, Aitchison's book was relevatory. Those with training in the Indo-European or Uralic language families tend to think of language change as some abstract sequence of events that are cleanly reconstructed with the comparitive method. Our traditional handbooks are rather divorced from contemporary research and don't consider the "why" and "how" of language change. Aitchison remedies this by considering language as a product of human beings, with all of their social pressures and insecurities. She first presents the work of William Labov, who viewed language change in progress in 20th-century new York. His work tells us about how varying standards of pronunciation in a given population spread or die depending on social prestige.

Another matter this student of historical linguistics was unclear about is exactly why sounds tend to change along the same lines in all language families. Everyone knows that final consonants tend to be lost, labiovelars stops may become /p/ or /b/, and /l/ often shifts to /w/. Aitchison explains the physical causes for these common phonetic and ultimately phonological changes. By far the most rigorous and useful chapter for me was "The Mad-Hatter's Tea Party", an admirably easy-to-grasp explanation of push chains and drag chains with plenty of examples.

As for the question in the subtitle, Aitchison ceaselessly stresses that language change is natural and unavoidable. She quotes from a long line of English-language purists, from Jonathan Swift to William Safire to show the absurdity of seeking to freeze language at a given moment. At the same time, she emphasises that languages do not evolve towards some ideal, but rather endlessly wheel about from one configuration to another.

I highly recommend this book to any student of historical linguistics. Even if you have some training in the field, you're bound to find something new and exciting in Aitchison's text.