David Hornsby > Quotes

“We are left with what has become known as the ‘gender paradox’, namely that women appear both to favour conservative prestige forms and to lead innovation in the direction of new non-standard forms.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“In many words where Latin has [p], the Germanic languages have [f], as in the examples below.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“The first syllable in photograph for example has the diphthong [əɷ] but in unstressed position in photography this reduces to”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Belgium’s chequered linguistic history shows that neither principle, even when sensitively applied, is without difficulties. Dutch speakers resent the fact that French now dominates in the capital, a city squarely in the Dutch-speaking zone. They also complain of the tache d’huile (oil slick) effect, in which Brussels-based francophones take residence in officially Dutch-speaking suburbs, and turn them into de facto francophone areas. French speakers, on the other hand, resent being required to use Dutch in areas where they have become the majority language group.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“The surprise here is that the social classes just below the top of the hierarchy actually use more of the prestigious (r)-1 variants in formal styles than the classes above them. This unexpected pattern, in which intermediate social classes ‘overreach’ their social superiors, is called hypercorrection in one of its two meanings (see Spotlight on p. 237), and Labov has suggested that it may be indicative of ongoing change from above, i.e. in the direction of an overtly prestigious norm. Such changes, he argues, are most likely to be led not by the highest social class but by the lower middle or upper working classes further down the hierarchy, i.e. precisely those who hypercorrect for the New York (r) variable above. Being acutely aware of their precarious position between the established middle and working classes, these groups are more sensitive to social variation than those in more secure or entrenched class positions.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“In fact, historically the very opposite was true: the dialectal divisions were present all along, and the codified standard language we now call ‘English’ emerged from contact between a number of them.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“But while most linguists would now, for a variety of reasons, reject the strong version of the hypothesis, many would nonetheless accept a weaker version, which sees language as subtly influencing our modes of thought”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“But corpus planning may also be a proxy for other political ends, as for example in the Nazis’ attempts to ‘purify’ the German language of French loan words.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Mandarin or Vietnamese, have little or no inflectional morphology: the concept of ‘plural’ in Mandarin for example has to be deduced from context (one dog, two dog, many dog and so on) and is not marked on the noun itself. Russian or Latin, by contrast, are examples of highly inflecting languages: both Latin and its daughter language, Portuguese, for example, have full verbal paradigms in which all persons in all tenses are marked by a suffix (compare English, which marks only third person singular in the present tense). In both Latin and Russian, nouns are additionally marked for case, indicating by means of a suffix their function within a sentence. English, which has lost most of its case marking except in pronouns (compare she as a subject or nominative form, and her as an accusative or object form), achieves this through word order (subjects tend to precede verbs, objects follow them), or by prepositions. In Russian, these endings vary according to the gender of the noun, and there is a separate plural form.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Phonemes and allophones can be determined by the minimal pair test: if commuting two sounds in a word results in a change of meaning, then the sounds are in phonemic opposition; if they do not, the sounds are allophones of the same phoneme.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“…the idea of morphemes with constant phonetic and semantic identity is fully appropriate only to the agglutinative languages. Morpheme analysis, therefore, is essentially an attempt to mould all languages (including those that are inflectional) into the form of the agglutinative”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Where the Port-Royal Grammars of the seventeenth century (see below) proposed universal linguistic categories on the basis of those found in the Classical languages, the North American Descriptivists of the twentieth century celebrated linguistic relativity, i.e. the view that each language conceptualizes the world in its own way. The pendulum was to swing back in favour of universalism with the publication of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures in 1957 (see Chapter 8), heralding the emergence of the generative paradigm, which started from the belief that human beings are innately equipped to learn language, and that therefore at an underlying level all languages must be structurally similar.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Indeed, if our criterion were grammatical complexity, it might be easier to make the opposite case, namely that languages spoken in isolated, ‘primitive’ societies are often more complex than those used in technologically advanced societies which have been subject to high levels of contact”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Related changes saw PIE voiced stops [b, d, g] become voiceless [p, t, k] (hence Latin duo, but English two; Swedish två).”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“In polysynthetic languages, strings of bound morphemes can be combined to form words which would correspond to clauses or sentences in languages such as English, as in this example from the Australian language Tiwi, cited by Blake”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“English is far from alone in its poor fit between speech and writing: all languages with alphabetic writing systems present inconsistencies of this kind to a greater or lesser degree. The reason, in a nutshell, is that pronunciation changes too rapidly for spelling to keep up, with the result that writing systems are often a better guide to the way languages used to sound than to the way they are spoken now.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Languages differ more in morphology than in syntax. The variety is so great that no simple scheme will classify languages as to their morphology.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“When the British government presents proposals for Royal Assent, the responses on behalf of the Monarch are still given in Anglo-Norman, for example: ‘La Reyne remercie ses bons sujets, accepte leur benevolence, et ainsi le veult’ (The Queen thanks her good subjects, accepts their bounty, and wills it so) or ‘La Reyne/Le Roy le veult’ (The Queen/King wills it).”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“English vocabulary was hugely influenced by Norman French as a result of the Norman conquest of 1066, while the Frisian language has seen extensive lexical borrowing from Dutch. But nonetheless, close similarities to English are still evident”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“in the first millennium BCE the first alphabet in the modern sense of the term was adapted by the Greeks from Phoenician script.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“In English, for example, the sequence of segments in the noun increase and its corresponding verb increase is the same, but the two forms sound different because a different syllable (underlined here) is stressed in each case.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“The simple past (or ‘past historic’) forms on the left locate an action entirely in the past, while the perfect tense forms on the right signal that a past action has present relevance. In spoken French, only the perfect tense is used, so j’ai fait now means both ‘I did’ and ‘I have done’, and the subtle distinction between the two, generally retained in English (see Spotlight above), has been lost from the tense system.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“In multilingual states, the Personality Principle enshrines the right of a citizen to use whichever language he/she chooses, while the Territory Principle recognizes only one language in a given area.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“The chain shift appears to have been triggered by a change in realization of the /i:/ vowel in words like bite and side, which would once have been pronounced [bi:tə] and [si:də], but diphthongized to [əI], and later [aI] similar developments affected the back vowel /u:/ in, for example, house [hu:sə], and mouse [mu:sə], which diphthongized to [əɷ] (and later [aɷ]) This left a space in the area formerly occupied by /u:/ and /i:/, into which the vowels immediately below them, i.e. half-close /e:/ and /o:/ of beet and boot respectively, could move. This is called a drag chain effect, in that a movement in one position frees up space into which other vowels may move, but the converse push chain effects appear also to have been involved in GVS. The open front vowel /a:/ of mate ([ma:tə]) shifted initially to [æ:] and then to [ε:], forcing the vowel in the existing [ε:] set (e.g. beat) to move up into the /e:/ position. Similar developments affected long back vowels. The overall effect of these changes from a systemic point of view has been to maximize available space for vowel oppositions in the vocal tract, without changing the overall number of oppositions available. A consequence is the rather chaotic mismatch between sound and grapheme which we witness in English spelling.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Particular attention has been paid in recent years, however, to exploring the outcomes of contact between speakers of different varieties of the same language. This interest has been fuelled in part by increasing urbanization, which brings together speakers of different varieties in new and unfamiliar settings (the world’s officially urban population crossed the 50 per cent threshold for the first time in 2009).”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Another important internal process is grammaticalization, by which a full lexical word acquires a grammatical function. An example here is back, which in its original meaning refers to the rear of the human torso, a meaning lost in the complex preposition at the back of, meaning ‘behind’. Similarly, the negative particle pas in French originally had only its full lexical meaning of ‘step’, and was used to reinforce the negative ne with some related verbs, e.g. il ne marcha pas (‘He did not walk a step’). But gradually in negative contexts it lost the meaning ‘step’ and became a general marker of negation, e.g Il ne parle pas (‘He does not speak’, not ‘He doesn’t speak a step’). The loss of lexical meaning that accompanies grammaticalization is known as semantic bleaching; very often phonetic reduction is also involved as the item evolves from lexical to functional unit (see Case study below).”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Key idea: Koinés Koinés are new compromise varieties which emerge from contact between speakers of different varieties. Koinéization is driven primarily by two processes: •  Levelling – the retention of forms which are used by a large number of speakers •  Simplification – the retention of forms which are morphologically simple or more regular, and therefore easier for post-adolescent learners to acquire.”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“Diglossia may or may not involve individual bilingualism. In many diglossic situations, speakers control both varieties and use them according to the circumstances of the speech situation. Early-nineteenth-century Tsarist Russia, on the other hand, was a diglossic society with very little bilingualism: the French-speaking elite generally did not speak Russian (L) and the peasantry generally had little French (H).”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“our knowledge of Sanskrit likewise derives largely from descriptions designed to preserve religious texts from the Vedic period (1200–1000 BCE).”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

“At one extreme is a completely analytic language, like modern Chinese, where each word is a one-syllable morpheme or compound word or phrase-word; at the other, a highly synthetic language like Eskimo, which unites long strings into single words (…) This distinction, however, except for cases at the former extreme, is relative; any one language may be in some respects more analytic, but in other respects more synthetic, than some other language.’ (Bloomfield 1933:”
― David Hornsby, Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself