Seminar paper from the year 2022 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar), course: Historical Linguistics, language: English, abstract: Concise overview over different mechanisms in the sphere of Language change. English is looking back onto a long and rich history of development. Being part of the Indo-European language family, the origins of the language could be argued to date back as much as 6000 years. However, most scholars seem to agree that the ‘true’, traceable genesis of English starts somewhere around the time of the Anglo-Saxon migration to the British Isles in in the fifth century CE. Thus, English can be understood as part of the Germanic language family tree. Today, only a relatively small part of the lexicon of English still reflects this beginning, as, over the course of many centuries, the language underwent a multitude of internally, externally and extra-linguistically motivated changes. Some followed major historical events such as the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the subsequently existing French influences or the Middle Ages and renaissance, which brought with them a great emphasis on Latin. While these mainly influenced the lexicon of English through loanwords, other developments, such as Sound Shifts (most notably the First Sound Shift, which is described by Grimm’s Law that illustrates the differences between Germanic and other Indo-European languages), or the transition from Old English as an inflectional language to Middle English becoming an isolating or analytic language, had lasting influences on every major linguistic field of English.

Frequency has been identified as one of the most influential factors in language processing, and plays a major role in usage-based models of language learning and language change. The research presented in this volume challenges established models of linguistic representation. Instead of learning and processing language compositionally, larger units and co-occurence relations are at work. The main point taken by the authors is that by studying the effect of distributional patterns and changes in such patterns we can establish a unified framework that explains the dynamics of language systems with a limited set of processing factors.

The volume contains a collection of studies on how the analysis of corpus and psycholinguistic data reveal how linguistic knowledge is affected by the frequency of linguistic elements/stimuli. The studies explore a wide range of phenomena , from phonological reduction processes and palatalization to morphological productivity, diachronic change, adjective preposition constructions, auxiliary omission, and multi-word units. The languages studied are Spanish and artificial languages, Russian, Dutch, and English. The sister volume focuses on language representation.

Re-examines frequency, entrenchment and salience, three foundational concepts in usage-based linguistics, through the prism of learning, memory, and attention.

Frequency is a critical factor in shaping emerging linguistic systems, be it in individual's first or second language learning, or in the historical or social dimensions of language change. This volume comprises studies that show how and which patterns are abstracted from what the language speakers hear, and what makes them adopt new usages or constructions.

A mainstay of functional linguistics has been the claim that linguistic elements and patterns that are frequently used in discourse become conventionalized as grammar. This book addresses the two issues that are basic to this claim: first, the question of what types of elements are frequently used in discourse and second, the question of how frequency of use affects cognitive representations. Reporting on evidence from natural conversation, diachronic change, variability, child language acquisition and psycholinguistic experimentation the original articles in this book support two major principles. First, the content of people’s interactions consists of a preponderance of subjective, evaluative statements, dominated by the use of pronouns, copulas and intransitive clauses. Second, the frequency with which certain items and strings of items are used has a profound influence on the way language is broken up into chunks in memory storage, the way such chunks are related to other stored material and the ease with which they are accessed to produce new utterances.

Frequency has been identified as one of the most influential factors in language processing, and plays a major role in usage-based models of language learning and language change. The research presented in this volume challenges established models of linguistic representation. Instead of learning and processing language compositionally, larger units and co-occurence relations are at work. The main point taken by the authors is that by studying the effect of distributional patterns and changes in such patterns we can establish a unified framework that explains the dynamics of language systems with a limited set of processing factors.