AO1 for language change

Lexis 

Borrowing – Taking words from other languages, e.g. karaoke

Affixation – Meaning ‘to fasten’ – attaching parts of words to others to form a new one, e.g. microbiology, eco-warrior

Compounds – Words formed from joining together two other words with or without a hyphen, e.g. laptop, see-through

Blends – When parts of words are chopped off and put together to form a new word, e.g. smog, frappe

Proprietary names – When a word is coined from a company name/ the name of the inventor of a product, e.g. Hoover, Walkman

Acronym – A word made up of the first letters of a phrase, which is pronounced as if it were a usual word, e.g. RADAR (Radio Detection And Ranging) or TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space)

Initialism - A word made up of the first letters of a phrase, where the letters are individually pronounced (e.g. CD, FBI)

Coinage/neologism – The creation of completely new words

Back-formation – The removal of part of a word, e.g. editor/edit

Clipping – A more drastic form of back formation, creating new words by extracting an arbitrary portion of a longer word.

Jargon – Lexis specific to a particular job or interest. Requires previous knowledge.

Semantics

Narrowing – When the meaning of a particular word becomes more specific.

Broadening – When a word takes on additional new meanings.

Amelioration – When the meaning of a word becomes more positive, e.g. how ‘pretty’ used to mean sly or cunning, ‘wicked’ can now mean great.

Pejoration – When the meaning becomes less favourable/more negative, e.g. how ‘hussy’ used to be a housewife. 

Metaphorical extension/idiomatic usage – When words acquire new meanings because they have been used metaphorically, e.g. ‘over the moon’, ‘under the weather’, ‘in the doghouse’.

Euphemism – An inoffensive way of describing something distasteful.

Cliché – An overused expression or idea

Antithesis – A figure of speech with sharply contrasting ideas

Grammar

Negation – Today multiple negatives (e.g. double negatives) are considered incorrect grammar but in the past they were considered quite acceptable and were used for emphasis. They were even used in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Clauses – Subordinate Clauses (an additional piece of information which couldn’t stand on its own and is often parenthesised).

Pronouns – The pronouns ‘thou’, ‘thee’ and ‘thine’ have generally disappeared from English. Interestingly, in some regional dialects a distinction still exists between singular and plural second person pronouns, with the use of ‘youse’ as a plural word.

The be-ing construction – progressive – this has massively increased in usage, e.g Hamlet’s “What do you read my Lord?” would now be “What are you reading?” The progressive suggests instant action, involves the reader and focuses on the speaker’s immediate feelings. 

“Shall” or “Will” – There used to be more of a distinction between when “shall” and “will” should be used (“shall” with 1^st persons and “will” with other persons).

Contractions – The increase in the use of contractions suggests a more informal/conversational style today and non-contracted forms now suggest a degree of formality or emphasis.

Inflections – The indication of the grammatical form (tense, person or number) of a word, usually at the end of the word. With adjectives, inflections are used for comparatives and superlatives, as in ‘fast’, ‘faster’, ‘fastest’. Although there are still inflections in modern English, there were once many more. Old English was very reliant on them, but most Old English inflections disappeared during the Middle Ages.

Word Order – In Old English, inflections would indicate whether a word was the subject of a sentence of the object. This meant that, compared with modern English, the expression of meaning was less reliant on word order, so construction of sentences was freer and word order showed more variation.

The subjunctive – expresses ‘unreal’ conditions such as wishes, doubts, etc. but has recently declined in usage (“If I were you” is becoming “If I was you”)

The active voice – “The dog chased the cat”

The passive – “The cat was chased by the dog” – used to disguise blame but has decreased in popularity, particularly in American English, where it is discouraged (e.g. US Microsoft Word Auto correct)

Pragmatics

Implication – The intended message of a text 

Shared Knowledge – Allows for the use of jargon, as the reader/audience of a text shares an understanding of the topic being discussed.

Orthography - Spelling

Einar Haugen’s stages of standardisation:

1. Selection of an existing language as the basis for the standard.

2. Codification involving the reduction in variability and the establishment of ‘norms’

3. Elaboration which ensures the standard can be used for a range of functions

4. Implementation – more texts become available, pride in the standard and the discouragement of alternatives.

Irregular spellings developed from the fact that Christian missionaries tried to use their 23 letter alphabet for the 35 phonemes of the Old English dialect.

Discourse

- The way that a text is set out, be it with a clear narrative, chronological, in a question and answer format, etc.

Phonetics

Accent levelling – People’s accents converge (become more similar to those around them). Upward convergence is where a person’s accent becomes more ‘upper class’, i.e. in a formal situation, whereas downward convergence is where a person’s accent becomes less received, perhaps as a method of decreasing social class differentiations.

Accent strengthening – People’s accents diverge (become less similar to those around them). This has often been considered to be a reflection upon the desire to emphasise differences in dialect and status.

Vowel Shift – (1300-1500) a change in the pronunciation of all long vowel sounds that took place between the Middle English and Early Modern English period. This explains why words like “nail” and “name” have different spellings – they were once pronounced differently, though they are not anymore.

Estuary English - A term coined as long ago as 1984 by David Rosewarne, a teacher, characterised as 'a variety of modified regional speech... a mixture of non-regional and local south-eastern English pronunciation and intonation. If one imagines a continuum with RP and London speech at either end, "Estuary English" speakers are to be found grouped in the middle ground.' Basically, it is a name given to the form(s) of English widely spoken in and around London and, more generally, in the southeast of England — along the river Thames and its estuary.

Graphology

Fonts – different fonts can be used to portray different tones and meanings, e.g. sophistication, power, childishness and informality.

Layouts – Layouts can make a page busy, easy to follow, formal or informal and often reflect the context in which they would be found.

Colours – Different colours connote different moods and feelings, for example red suggests violence and blue suggests calm and serenity.

Images – Photos, graphs and diagrams provide additional information to the written text and also grab the reader’s attention.