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Substratum Theory

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The departure point of the lecture was a quotation by Webster (1789) about the future of English, as historical sociolinguistics assists with predicting where the English Language moves by looking back to historical data. Overall, Webster (1789) assumes that there would be a convergence of the languages in Europe due to mobility and close interactions of languages, whereas Englishes would get separated due to physical separation of languages, since real linguistic distance supports the split. However, Webster did not take into account such factors as globalization, political situation, ideological issues that have prevented his scenario. According to Wright (2012: 552) divergence is “a natural and probably inevitable process whereby languages …show more content…

Wright (2012) introduces the Substratum theory that proposes “the divergence of Romance languages could be traced to the influence of the different languages spoken in different areas before the Romans arrived”, as the language change is caused by contact with other languages, though there is little evidence on it except for some peculiarities of intonation and lexical items. There is some adstratum language influence such as the usage of the allophone [h-] rather than [f-] as the realization of Latin /f-/ by the bilingual speakers of Basque Latin. Further, there is an example of the role of the superstratum languages on separation such as Germanic’s influence on Old French on the basis of the writing …show more content…

There is an interconnection to Latin, as a standardized written form is valuable to the unity of the English language. Ongoing changes create a great deal of heated interest among linguists. Mair and Leech (2006) investigate current changes in English syntax. They stress that there are two important aspects in which syntactic change is different from lexical change, as it “unfolds much more slowly, sometimes taking hundreds of years to run its course to completion, and secondly, it tends to proceed below the threshold of speakers' conscious awareness, which makes impressionistic or introspection-based statements on ongoing changes in English grammar notoriously unreliable. A third difficulty in pinning down syntactic change in present-day English is that a rather small number of alleged syntactic innovations are strongly stigmatized” (318). They introduce a typology of the ongoing changes mostly adapted from Barber (1964). Verb phrase changes include: a tendency to regularize irregular morphology (e.g. dreamt → dreamed); revival of the “mandative” subjunctive; elimination of shall as a future marker in the first person; development of new, auxiliary-like uses of certain lexical verbs; extension of the

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