Specific parts of speech are systematically more susceptible to rapid linguistic change than others
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Linguistic resources and discussions show that while parts of speech are studied for stability, there is an ongoing debate about whether certain structures systematically change faster than others.
Within linguistics, there is an ongoing debate about whether some language structures remain stable over time, which structures these are and whether they can be used to uncover the relationships between languages. However, there is no consensus on the definition of the term ‘stability’. I define ‘stability’ as a high phylogenetic signal and a low rate of change. I use metric D to measure the phylogenetic signal and Hidden Markov Model to calculate the evolutionary rate for 171 structural features coded for 12 Japonic, 2 Koreanic, 14 Mongolic, 11 Tungusic and 21 Turkic languages. To more deeply investigate the differences in evolutionary dynamics of structural features across areas of grammar, I divide the features into 4 language domains, 13 functional categories and 9 parts of speech. My results suggest that there is a correlation between the phylogenetic signal and evolutionary rate and that, overall, two-thirds of the features have a high phylogenetic signal and over a half of the features evolve at a slow rate. Specifically, argument marking (flagging and indexing), derivation and valency appear to be the most stable functional categories, pronouns and nouns the most stable parts of speech, and phonological and morphological levels the most stable language domains.
# What parts of speech are the most, and least, susceptible to linguistic change? And why?
Tags: language-change, parts-of-speech
- Score: 6
- Views: 866
- Answers: 3
- Answered: yes
- Asked by: curious-proofreader
- Asked: 2014-07-11
- Edited: 2014-07-16
- Site: linguistics
## Question
What parts of speech are the most susceptible, and the least susceptible, to linguistic change? And why?
I would think that nouns are the most susceptible, and that closed word classes, such as articles and conjunctions, are the least susceptible. For example, when was the conjunction “and” anything other than “and”?
And have there been cases of the parts of speech that are the more conservative elements suddenly changing?
Any ideas? Or maybe suggestions for where I can look for such a discussion?
## Answers
### Answer by robert (score: 3)
TLDR: Personal pronouns (I, you), interrogative pronouns (who, what), quantifiers (all, many, one) , negative particles (not) and determiners (this, that) are less likely to change over time than most nouns, adjectives and verbs.
There is a broad distinction between open-class and closed-class words. Open-class are those that easily admit new members, s
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