This chapter is about change in grammar. A number of grammatical changes in the history of English are unpacked and explained. They give appreciation and understanding of the ways in which grammars can change. Through the exposition of major grammatical changes in the history of English, readers gain an understanding of the mechanisms of grammatical change, reanalysis, extension, and grammatical borrowing. Grammaticalization is also demonstrated.

This chapter is dedicated to borrowed words. Its mission is to explain how and why languages borrow words from other languages and how loanwords are dealt with. It is organized around the loans in English from particular languages, presented in such a way that the contents of the loanwords dealt with reveal the stories of the language contacts that led to the borrowings.

Fiscal states, defined by their capacity to tax and borrow, had to negotiate the dilemma of economic interdependence – how to balance the benefits of economic interdependence with the desire for as much strategic autonomy as possible. How different governments negotiated this dilemma revealed much about their position within the international economic order. Some states sought to repatriate debt by borrowing from their own citizens, others saw advantages in borrowing abroad. Fiscal capacity was shaped by economic interdependence and became yet another site of competition between states. States compared their fiscal capacity by looking at bond yields, savings rates, and trade. New categories of comparison such as national income emerged in the context of great power competition.

American English is part of a historical process. Within its own time, American English can be divided into periods that correspond to important stages in its development. Before that time, we begin with the ancient history of language and then move on to the beginnings of English. The chapter ends as American English begins, in the first years of the seventeenth century.

Once confined to the margins of discussion about linguistic variation and change in the history of American English, recent years have seen an explosion of work on language contact. We review and synthesise recent work and present original evidence on how contact has shaped many facets of American English across many regions, reaching from the lexicon and phonology through syntax and pragmatics. We draw especially on features less widely discussed until now and look at how these enrich our broader understanding of contact in American English. We pay special attention to the challenges of identifying features that do and do not come from language contact and begin to trace the paths by which features have found their way into American speech and writing. Ultimately, we argue that, in some sense, many distinct forms of American English have been and are being shaped by contact.

Puerto Rican English (PRE) in Puerto Rico (PR) and in the continental United States emerged, at the end of the nineteenth century, from the socio-economic and political relations between the territory and its overseeing country. From virtual non-existence before the US invasion, English has appeared in PR’s linguistic landscape and areas of daily life, particularly among educated, upper-class residents. Frequent changes in official and educational language policies have affected English use in schools: it has decreased in the public school system but has grown in private and bilingual schools. Circular migration and contact with other language varieties, as well as language attitudes, have influenced PRE in PR and in the United States. Puerto Ricans display a range of language dominance, from minimal English knowledge to English monolingualism, along with diverse phonological and morphosyntactic traits and bilingual practices. The global dominance of English and its linguistic hegemony in PR’s colonial context will continue to affect its interaction with Spanish in PR and the United States, surfacing as mutual influence, resistance and transformation.

In its unfamiliar role of minority language, Quebec English (QcE) is subject to discourse that characterises it as threatened and distinctive, purportedly due to intense contact and convergence with French. The popular and academic basis for these claims comes almost entirely from catalogues of ‘gallicisms’: incorporations from French held to be incomprehensible outside of the province. Based on variationist analysis of spontaneous speech, this chapter offers an empirical assessment of the impact of French on QcE, as instantiated in borrowing, code-switching and convergence. It shows not only that French-origin lexis is vanishingly rare in spoken usage, but that the morphosyntax likewise fails to bolster claims of influence from French at the grammatical level. These results suggest that the features qualified as peculiar to QcE are no different in nature from the regionalisms present in all varieties of English, and highlight the gulf between language ideology, sociolinguistic stereotypes and language use.

The questions of how and why words change meaning are integral to any history of English. Semantic change is complex, since it always takes place in a particular social and historical context, and one change in the system may lead to others. Words also have different meanings at different times for different speakers, and the neat descriptions of changes that are often presented in the literature do not always take account of the polysemy that is always involved. After a summary of the evolution of this branch of historical linguistics, this chapter describes different tendencies in semantic change, and the ways in which changes can be motivated, offering a structural classification of such change. It goes on to consider change in each period of the history of English, exploring the meaning of compounds in Old English, the relationship between the meanings of borrowed words and their etymons in Middle and Early Modern English, and the impact of conscious efforts to change the meanings and usage of socially sensitive words in Late Modern English. Each section is informed by detailed discussions of varied semantic histories, drawn from a range of historical and contemporary dictionaries, corpora and text collections.

This chapter introduces strategies for building new words from existing pieces in the language. The first section introduces the concept of lexical gaps, some of which may be filled by expanding the lexicon using word-formation processes. The second and third sections discuss the two most common word-formation processes, compounding and derivation. The fourth section introduces conversion and semantic extension, which are methods for expanding a lexicon without creating new word forms. The chapter ends with a discussion on borrowing (though borrowing will not be appropriate for every conlang). By the end of this chapter, you will expand the vocabulary of your conlang to include words that have been derived and/or compounded and will consider how you might expand the definitions of existing words to include new meanings.

Chapter 4 presents the lexical dimension to Balkan linguistic convergence, treating first loanwords from various sources, Balkan and non-Balkan, into the Balkan sprachbund languages, at successive historical periods, e.g. from Greek and Latin in ancient times, from Slavic in Byzantine times, from Romance languages during the Crusades, from Turkish in the Ottoman period, and, more recently, from West European languages. The borrowing material surveyed includes both words and affixes. A key innovative construct is introduced for the typology of loanwords by focusing on a significant group of items that must have been borrowed through the medium of conversational interaction. Such conversationally based loans, neologistically referred to as “ERIC” loans (for those “Essentially Rooted In Conversation”) are exemplified through the borrowing of various closed class items, including both grammatical forms like complementizers and pronouns and discourse markers, many of which come from Turkish. Particular attention is given as well to taboo words in the Balkans, to shared phraseology—including shared idioms and proverbs—to shared semantics (isosemy), to shared expressive forms involving reduplication and onomatopoeia. Finally, the lexical side of shared style and register is discussed.

Bilinguals change their way of communicating when they are with monolinguals and when they are with bilinguals who share their languages. Whereas they avoid using their other language(s) with monolinguals (they are in a monolingual mode), they may call upon it (or them) when interacting with bilinguals, either by changing over completely to the other language(s) or by bringing elements of the other language(s) into the language they are speaking (they are then in a bilingual mode). The author reviews how he developed the notion of language mode, which, at the cognitive level, implies a change of activation of the languages and processing mechanisms. He summarizes some of the basic elements of language mode as described in a 2001 seminal chapter, discusses how language mode has fared since, and presents additional evidence for it. He then proposes some follow-up comments that deal with the level of activation of the deactivated language(s) in a monolingual mode, the complex nature of the variable that is language mode, and how it compares to the adaptive control hypothesis. He ends with reactions to language mode – many positive and some critical.

Chapter 2 analyses the negotiation of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC, 1998–2003). It illustrates that evidence was a key element of the negotiations and argues that the FCTC was developed as an evidence-based treaty to counteract the attacks on evidence by the tobacco industry. After a historical introduction, Section 2.2 outlines the theoretical background of the chapter, introducing the notion of ‘treaty entrepreneurs’. Sections 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5 proceed to delineate and analyse how the strategy on evidence unfolded during the FCTC negotiations. Section 2.3 illustrates how legal expertise from international environmental law was borrowed to build a treaty that could embed and develop evidence. Section 2.4 describes how evidence was mobilised to build the treaty. First, the treaty entrepreneurs relied on existing knowledge within the WHO; second, they served as a catalyst for the production of additional evidence from other relevant actors, most notably the World Bank. Section 2.5 reviews how the treaty entrepreneurs framed the available evidence and how the label ‘evidence-based’ started being used. Section 2.6, finally, draws some conclusions on the implications of adopting a strategy on evidence to push forward the negotiations of a treaty.

The Magic Flute stands out for its eclectic blend of musical styles. While only one scene – the duet of the Armored Men in Act 2 – includes a confirmed musical quotation, some scholars have posited that the opera contains a multitude of musical borrowings and allusions. Flute’s referential character owes much to Mozart’s ingenious use of musical topics. However, allusions to specific works have also been proposed throughout the opera’s history. In 1950, A. Hyatt King assembled an inventory of Flute’s “sources and affinities,” suggesting many plausible but largely unsubstantiated melodic precedents in works by Mozart and others. Scholars have particularly disagreed about the “source” from which Mozart allegedly derived Papageno’s aria “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen.” As in the case of the duet of the Armored Men (which quotes a Lutheran chorale), the desire to link Mozart and J. S. Bach has led to divergent claims about the melody’s provenance.

Informal borrowings are defined as expressions taken from a foreign language and used in informal American English. They conform to the traditional typology of borrowings and include such main types as loanwords and loan translations, but there are other finer distinctions, much as there are certain terms often confused with borrowings, such as code switches or nonce borrowings. Informal language, in turn, refers to a type of vocabulary which is stylistically “lower” than the standard language and “below” the formal and neutral registers on the formality scale. It includes two subsets: colloquialism, which is composed of moderately informal and casual expressions, and slang, which is composed of highly informal and unconventional expressions, strongly linked with a sociocultural context. Again, there are numerous similar terms to account for this type of lexicon, but their semantic scopes are different.

The aim of this book is to provide a linguistic description of borrowings in informal American English and to serve as a practical resource documenting this type of language. These foreign-origin expressions, comprising both slang and colloquialism, constitute a vibrant sociolinguistic phenomenon resulting from language contact, and function as an important yet rarely discussed lexical contribution to American English. Their significance stems from the sociolinguistic significance of informal language in the United States, the strong presence of borrowings in American speech reflecting the immigrant nature of the country and the growing role of ethnic minorities, as well as the increasingly common use of this type of lexicon among larger segments of American society.