Shakespeare's Language from E.C. Drury H.S.

http://diachronisminshakespeare.blogspot.com.br/ from babi90210

Analysing Sonnet 126 O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power

O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power

Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour;

Who hast by waning grown, and therein show'st

Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow'st;

If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,

As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back,

She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill

May time disgrace and wretched minutes kill.

Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure!

She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure:

Her audit, though delay'd, answer'd must be,

And her quietus is to render thee.

Famous Shakespearean sonnet, or short poem, entitled William Shakespeare Sonnet 126 O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power.
In this sonnet,the words in bold and underlined aren't used anymore, they are called archaic. These words changed, below are the actual forms.

In Northern English and Scots English, thou is still used as the second person singular pronoun.

Thou is the nominative, while the objective form is thee and the possessive is thy or thine.

The verbs that follow thou normally end in -st or est, as you can see in this sonnet.

Thou having been replaced by the pronoun You.

Thy having been replaced by the possessive adjective Your.

Dost having been used as the 2nd person singular present indicative of Do.

Hast having been  used as the 2nd person singular present indicative of Have.

Mistress having been used as an archaic or dialect title equivalent to Mrs.

Mistress having been used as an archaic or dialect word for Sweetheart.

Pluck having been used as the verb to pull(something) forcibly or violently(from something or someone).

Thee having been replaced by the pronoun You and reflexive pronoun Yourself.
Audit having been used as an audience.

Change and linguistic theory

Why does language change at all? Accounting for language change in linguistic

theory is a long-standing problem in linguistics, dating from at least

the Neogrammarians. As we have noted, Saussure famously denied the relevance

of diachrony to synchronic linguistic theory, and his position has

been widely emulated for a century. Nevertheless, linguists of all theoretical

camps have been unhappy with this drastic division of the field, and many

have attempted (even if uneasily) to model change within whatever theoretical

framework they favoured. Thus in the structuralist framework, sound

changes were characterised as involving phonemic mergers, allophonic

splits, alterations in phonetic values, and the like (cf. Hoenigswald 1960).

In the generative period, changes were described in terms of rule additions,

losses, reorderings, and so on (cf. King 1969). Recent theoretical developments

such as optimality theory (e.g. Anttila 1997) and exemplar theory (e.g.

Bybee 2001) have often sought to explicitly incorporate accounts of linguistic

change within their models.

Optimality theory has proven to be an exceptionally flexible framework for

modelling change. The theory postulates a universal inventory of constraints,

each stating some desirable phonological state of affairs; where languages differ

is merely in the hierarchical rankings of these constraints (plus, of course,

differing lexical inventories). Since any change in ranking defines a different

grammar, and a different potential ‘language’, both variation and change can

be subsumed into the OT account of language typology. Variable realisation

of a final consonant, such as final€–s and€–r deletion in Caribbean Spanish and

Brazilian Portuguese, and final€–t deletion in English and Dutch, are modelled

as variable rankings of constraints that militate against syllabic codas and those

that favour faithful surface realisations of underlying segments. When faithfulness

constraints are more highly ranked, the segment surfaces, but when

the ‘no coda’ or ‘simple coda’ constraints prevail, surface realisations without

the final segments are preferred. This is the typological difference between

languages with open syllables (e.g. Yoruba), and those with closed syllables

(English, Spanish, etc.), so the same mechanism can be pressed into service

to account for variation and change. Variation is modelled by postulating variable

ordering between the relevant constraints, and change across time is modelled

by postulating a diachronic reordering of the relevant constraints .

Exemplar theory is a recent development that places variation and change

at the core of the model, relying on the naturally occurring variation in the

input as the driving force (cf. Bybee 2001; Pierrehumbert 2002). This theory

eschews abstract representations, postulating instead that speakers remember,

in rich phonetic detail, the tokens of words that they hear pronounced, or produce

themselves. Therefore, speakers have memories of the full range of variants

they have encountered, and use these memories (the ‘exemplar cloud’) as

targets for their own production, which then necessarily varies as well. The

theory emphasises natural phonetic processes such as lenition and assimilation

as the driving force in phonological change; words that are often repeated are

more subject to these processes, altering the exemplar clouds of speakers in the

direction of the change produced by the process. This model emphasises the

importance of lexical identity and lexical frequency in variation and change,

predicting that lexical items may differ (i.e. lexical diffusion), and that frequent

words should lead sound change. Lexical diffusion has long been advocated in

historical linguistics as an alternative to the exceptionless sound change model

of the Neogrammarians , based on a number of empirical cases where lexical irregularities are found in historical changes.
Exemplar theory provides a formal model to account for such facts.

The most widely used theoretical framework in studies of variation and

change, growing out of Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968, is the ‘variable

rule’ (VR) model, a broadly generativist model in which optional elements in a

grammar are probabilistically quantified (see Cedergren and Sankoff 1974 and

Sankoff 1978 for further discussion). This is the dominant model in variation

studies, and its extension to modelling change is straightforward, but has subtle

and substantive implications.

The VR model postulates that any variable process may be subject to two

conceptually different quantitative forces. First are contextual conditions:€most

variables have a lumpy distribution across the language, occurring often in

some context and rarely in others:€tensed and raised variants of /æ/ in English

dialects, for example, are more common in pre-nasal contexts, and rarer or

less advanced before voiceless stops. Deletion of final€–t, and€–d in English is

more frequent before a following word beginning with a consonant, and rare

before a following vowel. But second, there are also overall differences in the

rate of use of any given variant, in different speakers, social-class groupings,

speech styles, age cohorts, and so on. A particular dialect may have tensed

/æ/ more frequently or more advanced phonetically than another dialect, even

though both favour tensing in the pre-nasal context. A working-class speaker

may delete /–t,–d/ more than a middle-class speaker, even while both delete

more before consonants than before vowels.

This distinction between overall rate of use and contextual effects is captured

in the VR model by two kinds of factors. Each process is associated with

an ‘input’ probability, or p0, which captures overall rate of use. In addition, a

process may be associated with multiple contextual constraints, capturing the

quantitative effects of favouring and disfavouring environments that promote

or retard the selection of a particular variant. These are factor weights or partial

probabilities associated with contexts, pi, pj, pk, etc.

Given this model of variation, what changes across time is typically the overall

rate of use of the innovative variant. Just as speakers and social groups differ

in overall use while preserving the same constraint effects, and vary their overall

rate in different speech styles while leaving contextual effects unaltered,

successive age cohorts across the course of a change will increment the overall

rate of use, leaving context effects unchanged. Change is change in the value of

p0, while the constraints on variable selection (pi, pj, pk …) do not change.

The constancy of contextual effects across time has been demonstrated in

a number of empirical studies, beginning with the work by Kroch .
 Kroch formulates this observation as his ‘constant rate

hypothesis’€ – the claim that the rate of change in all contexts is the same.

Kroch shows that the rate rises in English periphrastic do in all the contexts

investigated in the figure are mathematically equivalent; that is, the logistic

transform of each of the curves is a straight line with an essentially identical

slope. Therefore, the most plausible interpretation is not that each context

represents a separate change proceeding at an independent pace, but rather that

there is only one change, following a single time course, governed in variable

rule terms by a single p0.

Syntactically, this single change can be described as a loss of V-to-I (verb

to INFL) raising; in old and early Middle English, in sentences without auxiliaries,

a main verb could move up to the high position (a.k.a. INFL) in the

clause an auxiliary would occupy, thus preceding a negative, for example (e.g.

They know not what they do, with main verb know preceding not, parallel to

They must not know, where auxiliary must precedes not). In Modern English,

however, a main verb cannot occupy that position; instead do is inserted as a

dummy auxiliary just when the main verb becomes separated from that position

by some other material, such as a negative (You INFL not eat fish → You

do not eat fish), or an inverted subject (INFL you eat fish? → Do you eat fish?).

The several contexts of the change show differences in their intrinsic favourability

to the innovative variant that are stable across time. Each successive age

cohort across the 400 years of the change was less and less likely to permit

V-to-I raising, triggering the alternative solution of do-periphrasis at progressively

higher rates.

The constant rate hypothesis follows directly from the VR model, distinguishing

overall rates of use from contextual effects. Indeed, the constancy

of the rate of change across different contexts constitutes important evidence

in favour of VR for both variation and change. Alternative models of change

such as the OT treatment involving constraint re-ranking, lack any overall parameter

comparable to p0. This implies that change in an OT model should

not be a smooth S-curve, but rather, a step function with inconstant contextual

rates:€each time a pair of constraints is re-ranked, the contexts they affect

should show abrupt changes in the rate of occurrence of the variant realisations,

while unaffected contexts would show no change. This is at odds with

the empirical evidence.

8.6 Conclusion

Work on language variation has, since its earliest inception, addressed questions

of language change. Nearly fifty years of research on these problems

has turned up a substantial body of knowledge demonstrating that variation

and change are in essence a single phenomenon viewed from different perspectives.

This discovery requires linguists to develop new methodologies and

theoretical approaches that make possible an integrated understanding of what

the orthodoxy of twentieth-century linguistics treated as belonging to opposed

and unrelated synchrony and diachrony. This is part of a broader integrative

trend in twenty-first-century linguistics, bringing the insights of many disciplines

together to tackle big issues that they were unable to resolve separately.

At the centre of this integration are questions about stability and dynamism in

language:€why do languages change, and why do they (sometimes) remain the

same? These are the questions that research on variation and change is helping

to answer.

Analysing Variation in English- Edited by Warren Maguire and April McMahon
Cambridge University Press, New York
Chapter 8 Variation and change- Gregory R. Guy
8.5- Change and linguistic theory- Pages 195,196,197.
8.6- Conclusion- Page 198.

Variation and change and historical linguistics

The deepening engagement of sociolinguistics and variation studies with

language change has brought these fields into close contact with the traditional

discipline of historical linguistics. Initially, these were complementary

approaches to diachronic questions. Historical linguistics focused on real-time

data, used written evidence (necessarily, since no sound recordings of speech

existed prior to the late nineteenth century), and dealt with completed changes

across large-scale time spans€ – change across centuries and millennia. The

focus on completed changes typically implied invariant, categorical models

and descriptions. Variationist studies introduced the use of apparent-time evidence,

focused on speech, and dealt with changes in progress, over shorter

time spans€– decades and generations€– using quantitative models and descriptions.

But more recently, this neat division of labour and focus has eroded.

Variationist analyses have been conducted of documentary evidence from

times long past. Quantitative approaches have been brought to bear on completed

long-term changes using written materials to study their time course and

the variation that occurred while they were in progress. Sociolinguistic models

of the mechanisms of change have illuminated historical questions. Whereas

traditional historical linguistics sought, in effect, to use the past to explain the

present, the addition of the variationist perspective to diachronic research has

also, in Labov’s words (1994:€9), made it possible to ‘use the present to explain

the past’.

Particularly noteworthy examples of the fruitfulness of this fusion of variation

and diachrony have occurred in research on historical syntax, such as

the previously mentioned work of Kroch on English, and other studies on languages

as diverse as Yiddish (Santorini 1993), Greek (Ann Taylor 1994), and

Portuguese (Tarallo 1996). Phonological change is less amenable to this kind

of approach, because of the limitations of orthographic evidence; nevertheless,

some fruitful work has been undertaken, such as Toon’s study of ‘the politics

of early Old English sound change’ (1983).

The principal impact of variation research on historical linguistics, however,

may be less methodological and empirical, and more theoretical. The

variationist perspective has had little impact on the comparative method and

the reconstruction of proto-languages, but understanding that variation is an

essential way station in the course of change has substantial implications for

evaluating the plausibility of the changes that are postulated and their social

settings. For example, change-in-progress studies show that the period of variation

can last for a long time, and multiple changes may be underway simultaneously.

This has implications for reconstructing the sequencing of events (e.g.

chain shifts). Contemporary variables sometimes exhibit lexical conditioning

or irregularity, with implications for the regularity of sound change. Studies of

the sociolinguistic types of change have implications for evaluating prior language

contact. The transmission of lexical items, for example, implies borrowing

as a primary mechanism of language change; hence in England after the

Norman conquest, the huge inventory of French loanwords in English implies

that native speakers of English were borrowing from French, while the paucity

of phonological and syntactic effects suggests that Norman accents had very

little impact on the English of descendants of the conquerors who underwent

language shift. By comparison, English in India, which shows phonological

characteristics common in Indian languages, such as retroflex consonants, and

syntactic phenomena such as an invariant tag question ‘isn’t it’, is a case in

which the main mechanism of change was imposition.

A significant consequence of the variationist perspective in historical studies

has been the development of quantified models of change. Yang (2001) is a

noteworthy example of this trend. Treating syntactic change as the product of

the interaction between the distribution of syntactic structures in the input and

the choices that child language learners face in their construction of a mental

grammar, Yang proposes a probabilistic model of grammar competition that

drives change forward along an S-shaped time course. The model crucially

depends on variation:€child language learners do not construct a single, static,

invariant grammar to account for all the facts they encounter; rather, they entertain

multiple alternatives, and select among them probabilistically.

Another significant contribution of variationist studies to historical linguistics

is the refined view they permit of the stages of change. Conventional historical

studies, relying on reconstruction from fragmentary evidence, typically

account only for the endpoints of a change; a diachronic statement like x → y

tells us that an early form x is realised centuries later as y, but gives no perspective

on what happens during the intervening years. But synchronic studies of

changes in progress make it possible to investigate triggering events and onsets

of change (the actuation phase), and subsequent expansion of the innovation

(the implementation phase).

Actuation appears to involve both social and linguistic factors; thus Labov

(2010) attributes the original generalised tensing of /æ/ in the Inland North of

American English to a social event:€ the early nineteenth-century mixture in

north central New York state of speakers coming from several different dialect

regions (including New England and southern New York), during the construction

of the Erie Canal. These source dialects had different contexts for /æ/

tensing. The new communities that emerged from this mixture koinéised these

conflicting patterns by tensing /æ/ in all contexts. The completion of the Erie

Canal provided the pathway to settlement of the Upper Midwest, disseminating

the new vowel phonology across a wide area. The tensed /æ/ vowel subsequently

raised, vacating the low front corner of the vowel space; this provided a

linguistic trigger for the fronting of the other low vowels. 

Analysing Variation in English- Edited by Warren Maguire and April McMahon 

Cambridge University Press, New York

Chapter 8 Variation and change- Gregory R. Guy

8.4- Variation and change and historical linguistics- Pages 193,194

Are Shakespeare's works written in Old English?

Are Shakespeare's works written in Old English?

Shakespeare's complex sentence structures and use of now obsolete words lead many students to think they are reading Old or Middle English. In fact, Shakespeare's works are written in Early Modern English. Once you see a text of Old or Middle English you'll really appreciate how easy Shakespeare is to understand (well, relatively speaking). Take, for example, this passage from the most famous of all Old English works, Beowulf:

Articles
Hwät! we Gâr-Dena in geâr-dagum
þeód-cyninga þrym gefrunon,
hû þâ äðelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scêfing sceaðena þreátum.

(Translation)
Lo! the Spear-Danes' glory through splendid achievements
The folk-kings' former fame we have heard of,
How princes displayed then their prowess-in-battle.
Oft Scyld the Scefing from scathers in numbers...

Old English was spoken and written in Britain from the 5th century to the middle of the 11th century and is really closer to the Germanic mother tongue of the Anglo-Saxons.

With the arrival of the French-speaking Normans in 1066, Old English underwent dramatic changes and by 1350 it had evolved into Middle English. Middle English is easier but still looks like a foreign language much of the time. Here is an example from Chaucer’sCanterbury Tales, the most famous work in Middle English:
Ye seken lond and see for your wynnynges,
As wise folk ye knowen all th'estaat
Of regnes; ye been fadres of tydynges
And tales, bothe of pees and of debaat. (The Man of Law's Tale)

(Translation)
You seek land and sea for your winnings,
As wise folk you know all the estate
Of kingdoms; you be fathers of tidings,
And tales, both of peace and of debate.

By about 1450, Middle English was replaced with Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare, which is almost identical to contemporary English.

Mabillard, Amanda. Shakespeare's Language Shakespeare Online. 17 Set. 2012.

< http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/shakespearelanguage.html >.

Words Shakespeare Invented

Words Shakespeare Invented

The English language owes a great debt to Shakespeare. He invented over 1700 of our common words by changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting words never before used together, adding prefixes and suffixes, and devising words wholly original. Below is a list of a few of the words Shakespeare coined, hyperlinked to the play and scene from which it comes. When the word appears in multiple plays, the link will take you to the play in which it first appears.

academe	accused	addiction	advertising	amazement
arouse	assassination	backing	bandit	bedroom
beached	besmirch	birthplace	blanket	bloodstained
barefaced	blushing	bet	bump	buzzer
caked	cater	champion	circumstantial	cold-blooded
compromise	courtship	countless	critic	dauntless
dawn	deafening	discontent	dishearten	drugged
dwindle	epileptic	equivocal	elbow	excitement
exposure	eyeball	fashionable	fixture	flawed
frugal	generous	gloomy	gossip	green-eyed
gust	hint	hobnob	hurried	impede
impartial	invulnerable	jaded	label	lackluster
laughable	lonely	lower	luggage	lustrous
madcap	majestic	marketable	metamorphize	mimic
monumental	moonbeam	mountaineer	negotiate	noiseless
obscene	obsequiously	ode	olympian	outbreak
panders	pedant	premeditated	puking	radiance
rant	remorseless	savagery	scuffle	secure
skim milk	submerge	summit	swagger	torture
tranquil	undress	unreal	varied	vaulting
worthless	zany	gnarled	grovel

Mabillard, Amanda. Words Shakespeare Invented Shakespeare Online. 17 Set. 2012.< http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.html >.