Studying Language Change in the Present, with Special Reference to English

The methodology of the study of language change cut its teeth on the study of Indo-European in the nineteenth century. Dealing with change in the present is, therefore, not paradoxical at all: it is simply looking at a different aspect of change. The morphological change is subject to prescriptive interference, but that is not a new force in language change. This chapter discusses one phonetic change, one morphological change, and one syntactic change which seem to be taking place in current English. The phonetic change is the unrounding of the FOOT vowel, so that foot is pronounced something like [fit]. The morphological change is one affecting the paradigms of verbs like swim. The syntactic change (which we might think of as being semantico-syntactic) is the question of change affecting the countability system in English noun phrases.