A Typological Study Of English Change From Inflected Language To Isolating Language

The notions of isolating language and inflected language are originated from early typology which classifies world languages into several types by grammatical structures. This thesis focuses on English type change from typological perspective. English type changes from inflected language (synthetic language) into isolating language (analytic language). The complicated inflected endings (cases) decline more while the word order becomes more fixed.Based on the theory of typology, the thesis has discussed the change of language types. Word order and constituent order are distinguished. Then word order universals and its principles are explained for the analysis of English word order change. The change of word order of English can be performed in NP level and clause level. Then hierarchies and flexibility of word order are developed to illustrate the phenomenon of English language: English is in a process of rigidification.Starting from typological classification, this thesis focuses morphological change of English language. Indices of synthesis and fusion are applied to express the change process of morphological trends. Whaley's hypothesis of language type changes has been attempted to develop into a new model. Diachronic change of English lexical inner-factors: free and bound morphemes, roots and affixes, etc. are utilized into the study of grammaticalization and diachronic inflected change. The relationship among morpheme, word order and function word is explored and found: if a language has rich morphological change, then it has rather flexible word order and relative less usages of function words; or if a language has poor morphological change, then it has relative rigid word order and considerable usages of function words. In addition to this, the thesis has also generalized these morphosyntactic features of different periods of English history. And it has been proved again that language change has its own laws, i.e. primitive isolating languageâ†'agglutinative languageâ†'inflected languageâ†'advanced isolating language. There are three attempts in this thesis. The first, based on former scholars'studies, features of language types can be summed up into changeability, connectivity, graduality and unidirectionality. The second, isolating language is deliberately sorted into primary isolating language and advanced kind, thus the hypothesis of language type changes can be refined or improved, which grows into a new model. The third, word order is also hierarchical according to grammatical hierarchy and the language universals in linguistic typology. Word order hierarchy refers to adaptability of word order in various grammatical units, which obeys some grammatical cline. Meanwhile, Futurolinguistics can be ideated on the basis of predictability of language type changes, which is considered as a certain reverie.