Deflexion (linguistics)

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Deflexion is a diachronic linguistic process in inflectional languages typified by the degeneration of the inflectional structure of a language. All members of the Indo-European language family are subject to some degree of deflexional change. This phenomenon has been especially strong in Western European languages, such as English, French, and others.

Deflexion typically involves the loss of some inflectional affixes, notably affecting word endings (markers) that indicate noun cases, verbal tenses and noun classes. This is part of a process of gradual decline of the inflectional morphemes, defined as atomic semantic units bound to abstract word units (lexemes). Complete loss of the original subset of affixes combined with a development towards allomorphy and new morphology is associated in particular with creolization, i.e. the formation of pidgins and creole languages. [1] [2]

Directly related to deflexion is the languages becoming less synthetic and more analytic in nature. However, the ways in which languages undergo deflexion and the results of these developments are by no means uniform. For example, the modern Romance languages all continue to feature a complex verb system, while having strongly deflected their nouns, adjectives, and pronouns. German, on the other hand, has further simplified the already simple Germanic verb system (even radically so in some dialects) but has preserved the three genders and four cases of early Germanic languages.

Deflexion is a common feature of the history of many Indo-European languages. According to the Language Contact Hypothesis for Deflexion, [3] supported by the comparison between Germanic languages [4] (for instance, Icelandic and Afrikaans), this process is attributed to language contact. Specifically, the phenomenon occurs in the presence of large, influential groups of speakers that have acquired the leading idiom as a second language (L2) [5] and so is limited to economical trade-offs widely considered acceptable. Though gradual, English experienced a dramatic change from Old English, a moderately inflected language using a complex case system, to Modern English, considered a weakly inflected language or even analytic. Important deflexion changes first arrived in the English language with the North Sea Germanic (Ingvaeonic) shifts, shared by Frisian and Low German dialects, such as merging accusative and dative cases into an objective case. Viking invasions and the subsequent Norman conquest accelerated the process. The importance of deflexion in the formative stage of a language can be illustrated by modern Dutch, where deflexion accounts for the overwhelming majority of linguistic changes in the last thousand years or more. Afrikaans originated from Dutch virtually by deflexion.

According to the unidirectionality hypothesis, [6] deflexion should be subject to a semantically driven one-way cline of grammaticality.[ clarification needed ] However, exceptions to the gradual diachronic process have been observed where the deflexion process diminished or came to a halt, or where inflexional case marking was occasionally reinforced. There are also a few cases of reversed directionality, e.g. in the evolution of the common Romance inflected future and conditional (or "indicative future-of-the-past") from earlier periphrastic suppletive forms for the loss of the corresponding classical Latin tenses.

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Related Research Articles

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In linguistics, declension is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and articles to indicate number, case, gender, and a number of other grammatical categories. Meanwhile, the inflectional change of verbs is called conjugation.

A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal groups consisting of a noun and its modifiers belong to one of a few such categories. For instance, in English, one says I see them and they see me: the nominative pronouns I/they represent the perceiver and the accusative pronouns me/them represent the phenomenon perceived. Here, nominative and accusative are cases, that is, categories of pronouns corresponding to the functions they have in representation.

A lexeme is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single root word. For example, in English, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, which can be represented as RUN.

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Morphology (linguistics)</span> Study of words, their formation, and their relationships in a word

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Creole language</span> Stable natural languages that have developed from a pidgin

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Unserdeutsch, or Rabaul Creole German, is a German-based creole language that originated in Papua New Guinea as a lingua franca. The substrate language is assumed to be Tok Pisin, while the majority of the lexicon is from German.

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In linguistics, the unidirectionality hypothesis proposes that grammaticalisation works in a single direction. That is, pronouns and prepositions may fuse with verbs or nouns to create new inflectional systems, but inflectional endings do not break off to create new pronouns or prepositions. The hypothesis is not universally applicable, with some rare counterexamples appearing in unusual circumstances.

In linguistics, word formation is an ambiguous term that can refer to either:

The language bioprogram theory or language bioprogram hypothesis (LBH) is a theory arguing that the structural similarities between different creole languages cannot be solely attributed to their superstrate and substrate languages. As articulated mostly by Derek Bickerton, creolization occurs when the linguistic exposure of children in a community consists solely of a highly unstructured pidgin; these children use their innate language capacity to transform the pidgin, which characteristically has high syntactic variability, into a language with a highly structured grammar. As this capacity is universal, the grammars of these new languages have many similarities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inflection</span> Process of word formation

In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension.

A regular verb is any verb whose conjugation follows the typical pattern, or one of the typical patterns, of the language to which it belongs. A verb whose conjugation follows a different pattern is called an irregular verb. This is one instance of the distinction between regular and irregular inflection, which can also apply to other word classes, such as nouns and adjectives.

References

  1. ↑ Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Elsevier, 2004, Pidgins affix dropping (6:3187)
  2. ↑ Morphology in pidgins and Creoles, Ingo Plag, University of Siegen, Version of June 28, 2004,
  3. ↑ What are the factors that cause deflection? In order to answer this question, the Meertens Institute (KNAW) and the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (UvA) have started a research program called Variation in Inflection, or simply Variflex. “The loss of inflectional distinctions and the language contact hypothesis have often been discussed in the literature, but have never been the subject of extensive and integrated research. This is probably due to the need for a complex, multidisciplinary approach. Such a research programme would have to combine theoretical linguistics, diachronic linguistics, dialectology, first language acquisition and second language acquisition.” (The original Variflex proposal)
  4. ↑ Jóhanna Barðdal, “The Development of Case in Germanic,” in Barðdal & Chelliah, eds., The Role of Semantic, Pragmatic & Discourse Factors in the Development of Case, Studies in Language Companion Series, No. 108 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009 [in press]), pp. 123–160, "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-01-11. Retrieved 2019-07-21.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link).
  5. ↑ Weerman, F. (1993), The diachronic consequences of first and second language acquisition
  6. ↑ Hopper, Paul J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott: Grammaticalization, 1993, Cambridge University Press.
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