Professor Bettelou Los

Details of Professor Bettelou Los' inaugural lecture.

Event details

Lecture title: "Changing English"

Date: 6 May 2014

Time: 5.15pm

Venue: Lecture Theatre 175, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh, EH8 9YL

Lecture abstract

No language ever stays the same, and no part of it is immune. Changes affect not only sounds and vocabulary, but also grammar, word order, pragmatics, giving rise to different varieties and different dialects all the time. Some of these changes are conspicuous to other speakers; variations in pronunciation tend to get noticed (and often condemned). Other changes tend to fly under the radar and only become clear in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight over many centuries: word order changes typically fall into this category, with some patterns that used to be the norm becoming less frequent, and reinterpreted as special constructions. An extreme example of this is the jocular expression I kid you not; its unusual grammar -beside the usual I am not kidding you - is immediately recognized as archaic, “Shakespearean”, and it is this contrast between elevated language and the banality of the obviously modern verb to kid that accounts for some of its effects.

But recent psycholinguistic research has shown that changes in word order may not just involve constructions becoming less frequent. Beneath the surface of those low-flying changes in word order in the history of English lies a more dramatic difference between the English of a thousand years ago and the English spoken today, involving how speakers decide what to say, and how to say it.

Lecture video