Diachronic reconstruction

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 578.

The dichotomy of diachrony and synchrony was postulated by a Swiss philologist Ferdinand de Saussure ( 1852- 1913).

He proposed the hypothesis that the long vowels had developed from a short vowel plus a sonant coefficient.

Diachrony (from Greek ilia through and chronos time) deals with the study of language change over a period of time. The chief task of diachrotiic linguistics is to reconstruct language systems at separate stages of their development. When contrasted with synchronic linguistics diachronic linguistics is often called historical linguistics.

Synchrony (from Greek syn together and chronos time) is a conventional isolation of a certain stage in the development of a language as an object of linguistic investigation.

Roman Jacobson (1896-1982), one of the representatives of the Prague School of linguists. To him, the goal of the synchronic analysis of a language is to define the principles of language as a system, which is dynamic and static at one and the same moment.

Modem diachronic linguistics aims at:

a) studying phonological, grammatical and semantic changes;

b) reconstructing earlier changes of languages;

c) applying methods by which genetic relationship among languages can be demonstrated.

The principle methods of diachronic reconstruction are:

a) comparative reconstruction, which is of special importance in pre-historic reconstructions: based on comparison of genetically related elements from cognate languages and dialects of the same language, it draws evidence from different linguistic systems;

b) internal reconstruction: based on comparison of genetically and structurally

related elements from the same language and the same dialect, it takes none of the outside languages into account;

c) graphic reconstruction', a contrastive evidence based on graphic data;

d) external reconstruction: based on language contacts.