Jürgen Kramer (Dortmund)

1
BEITRÄGE
IN THE YEAR 2525 ...
REFLECTIONS ON THE FUTURE SHAPE OF ENGLISH *
BERND KORTMANN, Freiburg
1. Introduction
1.1 It is an indispensable basis for developing sound ideas concerning the future
development of a language to consider first the major changes that this language has
undergone in its history, including changes that can currently be observed. The
complete subtitle of this paper thus is: "Reflections on the Future Shape of English
Based on the Past and the Present". The brief account of the history (section 3) and
the current shape of English (section 4) will be restricted in two ways. First of all, it is
the skeleton of the English language, or simply its grammar, that will be of central
concern. Phonological changes that English has undergone, is undergoing or is likely
to undergo in the future will be left out of consideration. Secondly, for the most part
only the major changes observable in the course of the last 500 years will be relevant.
Why? The reason for this is to be sought in the main title of this paper: "In the year
2525 ...", a famous song in the sixties which the present author was simply intrigued
by as a crisp title for a paper on the future of English. The totally arbitrary choice of
the year 2525 as a reference point in the future led to another idea: if one wants to
sketch possible or even likely developments in the course of the next 500 years, why
not first give an idea of what can happen in the course of five centuries, more exactly
of what has happened in English since the second half of the 15th century, the
beginning of the Early Modern English period?
1.2 But besides historical linguistics, there are other strands of research which,
explicitly or implicitly, will be drawn upon for the purpose of daring a look into the
future. The most important of these are the following:
*
This is a revised and updated version of the inaugural lecture the author gave at the University of
Freiburg on 3 July, 1996. For helpful comments on the prefinal version the author would like to thank
Manfred Krug and Christian Mair.
There are two reasons for publishing this lecture now. To start with, the beginning of a new
millennium seems to be a suitable occasion for daring a look into the future. But this is only secondary.
The real reason is the 60th birthday of Ekkehard König (Berlin) on 15 January, 2001 (see also Porträts,
this issue). It is to him that this paper is dedicated. As his assistant from 1985 until 1995, the author
enjoyed the privilege of learning about English and other languages from and with Ekkehard König.
More generally, his views have significantly shaped the author's outlook on the study, teaching and
politics of linguistics. Most importantly, Ekkehard never acted the boss during all those years, but
always was an inspiring fellow linguist, a wonderful colleague, and soon a friend, all of which, the
author is glad to say, he still is.
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BERND KORTMANN
(i) the study of contemporary (standard and non-standard) varieties of English, most
importantly analyses of the grammar of modern English dialects (including
comparisons of the standard Englishes spoken in England, Ireland, Scotland and the
United States) 1 , but also comparisons of written and spoken English as well as formal
and informal English.
(ii) corpus linguistics, which allows us to make claims and develop hypotheses on
areas in which varieties of English differ from each other in significant ways. In
documenting, for example, the spread of rules and constructions, i.e. the extent to
which a given rule, rule change or new construction has caught on in the language,
corpus linguistics allows us to identify possible grammatical changes at an early
stage. In English linguistics we are in a privileged position in this respect, given the
existence of historical corpora like the Helsinki-Corpus and ARCHER (A
Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), 2 and corpora of English in the
1990s like the FLOB and FROWN corpora and, of course, the British National
Corpus (BNC).
(iii) language typology, i.e. the study of the patterns and limits of variation across the
languages of the world (cf. Croft 1990). On the one hand, typology offers us a bird's
eye view on the English language by allowing us to determine the position of English
as a language type among the Germanic, the European and the world's languages. On
the other hand, typology can tell us what is a possible natural language or, in other
words, based on the empirical study of a wide range of languages it allows us to
formulate constraints on language change, to set the limits within which a language of
a given type can or cannot be expected to change (cf. also Kortmann 1997). In making
predictions of this kind typology will be assisted by a junior partner, namely the study
of grammaticalization, which explores the genesis and evolution of grammatical
elements.
The rationale underlying the selection of these five strands of research, i.e.
historical linguistics, the study of the modern varieties of English, corpus linguistics,
typology and grammaticalization, is simply this: the findings, claims and hypotheses
which have been formulated in these areas, especially in the course of the last two
decades, provide as solid a basis, always relatively speaking, as one can possibly
expect for projections into the future.
2. Basic assumptions
The reflections on the future shape of English that will be offered in section 5 are
based on five major assumptions concerning general conditions for and directions of
language change. It seems appropriate to draw the general picture first, in which then
the grammatical phenomena and processes sketched in later parts of this paper will
find their place.
1
2
Analyses of this sort stand at the centre of the present author's DFG-project "English dialect syntax
from a typological perspective", which started in January 2000. Compare Kortmann (1999) for the
research programme underlying this project. For more information consult the following homepage:
http://www.uni-freiburg.de/philfak3/eng/.
An expansion of ARCHER is currently under way due to a research collaboration between the English
and linguistics departments of the University of Southern California (Los Angeles) and the universities
of Flagstaff (Arizona), Freiburg, Helsinki and Uppsala.
In the Year 2525 ... Reflections on the Future Shape of English
3
2.1 First of all, all predictions are based on the assumption that the English language
is allowed to develop naturally. There are two points that are relevant here. A natural
development of the English language would imply, for example, that there will be no
new waves of invasions and settlements on the British Isles comparable to the
Scandinavian and Norman ones in medieval times. In other words, a scenario is
excluded where English is again subject to changes due to massive and long-term
contact with a foreign language spoken by socially equal or superior groups. Now this
assumption of a natural development may seem far-fetched, but just think of the
increasing importance of Spanish in the United States, especially in the Southwest. So
far it looks as if English is hardly in danger of undergoing Spanish-induced changes
in its grammar, given that English is the prestigious language, the language spoken by
those who have the political and economic power. Nevertheless, massive language
contact and bilingualism of a large and increasing proportion of a given language
community must not be ignored as important sources of language change. Indeed,
Trudgill (1986: 147) is convinced that "it is highly likely that the learning of English
as a foreign language by millions of adult immigrants to America has [already, B.K.]
had some influence on the language", notably in the shape of simplification of forms
and rules.
Perhaps of more immediate importance is the following point concerning a natural
development of the English language. English, especially spoken informal English,
will continue to be subject to comparatively little interference by prescriptivists, be
they school grammarians, government officials or self-proclaimed guardians of the
English language on the grounds that its grammar is considered as a part of the
cultural heritage of the Anglo-American world that is not to be meddled with – not
even, the cynical observer may add, by the native speakers of the language. The
"good guys" in this "League against language change" are the teachers. For
understandable reasons, teachers are the natural enemies of language change (cf. in a
similar vein Otto Jespersen (1905: 198)). Thus there are surely many teachers of
English that would still side with Jonathan Swift, who in 1712 suggested that once the
necessary changes for the correction and improvement of English have been made the
language should be fixed forever (Swift in Bolton 1966: 117). And especially given
the fact that English is the world's most important international language, a teaching
model of English grammar which is stable and not subject to change is absolutely
essential for the needs of teaching English as a foreign language. Indeed there are not
few who believe that the future of English rests on the practicability of its teaching on
a mass scale (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 9). However, it is the present author's contention
that the spoken informal language will remain largely unaffected (or least affected) by
prescriptivism and that, if we think in terms of several centuries, even change in the
written language cannot be prevented.
2.2 A second basic assumption is that English will not undergo another typological
change as dramatic as the one from a synthetic language with a fairly free, basically
subject-object-verb word order in Old English to an increasingly analytic language
with a fairly fixed subject-verb-object word order from Middle English onwards.
Although we know that language change may be likened to a cycle, or more
appropriately, as Georg von der Gabelentz (19012) put it, to a spiral, there is no reason
to assume that English is likely to turn to any significant extent more synthetic again.
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BERND KORTMANN
Rather, evidence from a wide range of currently spoken regional and social varieties
of English suggests that at least spoken English will even gain in analyticity. Likewise
that major historical development of the English language which accompanied the
shift from a synthetic to an analytic language and which Edward Sapir (1921) labelled
"the drift towards the invariable word" is still clearly observable in Present-Day
English.
With regard to other typological parameters, too, English is predicted to remain
stable. It suffices to mention English as a language with a functional (vs. transparent)
encoding of grammatical relations like subject and direct object (cf. Plank 1983),
English as a non-Pro-drop (vs. Pro-drop) language, and English as an essentially
'conjunctional' (vs. converb) language – three typological parameters which make
English significantly different from, for example, German, Italian and most Caucasian
languages respectively. Consider, for example, English as a 'conjunctional' language,
i.e. English as a language where adverbial clauses are generally finite and introduced
by an adverbial conjunction like after, because or if. The major reason for predicting
that English will remain a conjunctional language is the following. Despite the fact
that Present-Day English makes significantly more use of so-called adverbial
participles, as in Sitting on the bench I was eating a sandwich, than any other modern
Germanic language, adverbial participles are widespread only in written language (cf.
Kortmann 1991 and 1995). In the spoken language, except for certain fairly fixed
constructions (like frankly speaking, putting it mildly, etc.), these non-finite
constructions are relatively rare. The basic claim thus is that natural language change
will not be triggered from above, but from below. The typical situation for language
change is not to spread from writing to speech, but from speech to writing. Spoken
language will always remain our primary mode of communication and thus it is here
that changes in language use will first be observable and spread most quickly. This
links up with the following basic assumption:
2.3 We are bound to witness what Biber/Finegan (1992), analyzing different written
and speech-based English genres from the 17th to the 20th centuries, described as "a
single underlying … 'drift' towards more 'oral' linguistic characterization" (1992:
688), and Mair (1997) has called the "colloquialization" of the norms of written
English. As a reflex of a growing informality in modern society, written English will
increasingly allow for constructions otherwise only found in spoken informal
language. It is indeed the major result of the research by Christian Mair and his
Freiburg team on changes in British and American English in the course of the last
thirty years that the increasing frequency of, for instance, the progressive form, the
going-to future, and contractions like he'll, I've, or I'd in written English shows that
"informal options which have been available for a long time are chosen more
frequently today than would have been thirty years ago" (1997: 203). Mair's research
group investigated mainly newspaper language, and it is certainly not wise to
extrapolate for all grammatical and semantic phenomena from newspaper language to
what is happening in the language in general. Nevertheless, with regard to the
pervasive tendency of colloquialization one must agree with Mair's statement that "it
seems plausible to generalise the observation to written English as a whole" (1997:
203). Just think of the way in which we communicate via electronic mail or the
Internet. And note also the link between the tendency towards colloquialization and
In the Year 2525 ... Reflections on the Future Shape of English
5
the earlier remarks on spoken language as the primary locus of language change and
as being largely immune to prescriptivism. Colloquialization only has the effect that
the relevant changes will permeate into the written language faster, i.e. that new forms
and rules will spread faster than they tended to do in the past. In short,
colloquialization speeds up language change.
Over the next decades it will be interesting to explore the limits of this
colloquialization. As described by Stein (1997), for example, there exist a number of
filtering processes preventing syntactic features characteristic of non-standard spoken
varieties from entering the (written) standard. For example, when codified in the
written standard the relevant spoken features tend to be stripped off of emotive
meanings and, in general, meanings and uses serving an interpersonal function,
creating for example involvement (in the sense of Tannen 1989: 12) in face-to-face
interaction (cf. Cheshire 1997). On top of that, regardless of how widespread and
frequent (and old) the use of individual syntactic phenomena in spoken language may
be (e.g. double negation, invariant don't, ain't; cf. Anderwald forthcoming), the
stigmatization of many of these phenomena is so high that, now and in the future,
their creeping into the standard seems to be out of the question. Thus, in all
likelihood, most of the thirteen grammatical features that Cheshire/Edwards/Whittle
(1993: 64f.) identified as the currently most widespread grammatical features in
British urban dialects, "familiar to native speakers of English as are the features that
are normally considered to be typical of standard English" (1993: 83), will not make it
beyond what the authors call a "'standardizing' non-standard variety of English"
(1993: 82).
Detailed quantitative analyses of a great variety of British and American texts by
Douglas Biber have clearly shown that there is "a substantially greater use (or
tolerance) of informal, colloquial, and interactional features [such as contractions,
B.K.] in American writing" (1987: 111f.) This is just one of several factors leading to
the fourth and fifth guiding assumption: Of the national varieties of English it is
American English that will, as throughout the second half of the 20th century, continue
to set the model for the future shape of English (cf. 2.4) . Not only, but especially due
to this we are bound to witness an even higher degree of uniformity of English
grammar (cf. 2.5)
2.4 In recent years there has been a discussion whether, given the emergence of new
Englishes and L2 varieties, English will fragment or whether a single world standard
for English will develop, and what the role of the national varieties of English,
especially American English, will be in all this (cf. Crystal 1997: 134-139, Graddol
1997: 56; cf. also Svartvik 1998). First of all, fragmentation is much less likely
anyway in the domain of grammar than in lexis and phonology. But even apart from
that, there is ample reason to agree with these and other authors that instead of an
increasing fragmentation the most likely scenario will rather be one of a continued
competition among the national standards of English, with American English as the
most influential variety. As Randolph Quirk put it thirty years ago (1972: 73 f.): "We
must be in no doubt that the linguistic centre of gravity for the English-speaking
world remains in the place it has securely occupied for a good many decades, and that
it will remain in North America as we pass ... into the twenty-first century.
Specifically, the United States, of course." American English is thus also the prime
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BERND KORTMANN
candidate for shaping the future World Standard English we can expect to develop,
i.e. that variety which (supplementing, not replacing the national varieties) meets best
the demands of (teaching, learning and, above all, successfully speaking and writing)
English as a second and international language (cf. Crystal 1997: 137f.).
What about British English then? Given the ever-increasing economic and cultural
influence of the United States, especially its influence in the electronic media since
the Second World War, it is a fairly safe prediction that of the two currently
dominating standards (as teaching models of English), American English will prove
to be much more influential even if the economic power of the United States might
one day decline due to, for example, the Asian competition (cf. Graddol 1997: 9).
This view is shared by many observers of the English language. Witness, for example,
Anthony Burgess, author not only of A Clockwork Orange but also of an introduction
to linguistics, who states in 1964 that "no British speaker of English can fail to have
noticed the tendency of transatlantic (i.e. American) English to assume a greater and
greater hegemony" (19752: 195).
2.5 Moreover, the very structure of British English has been affected by this
American hegemony. This leads us back to the uniformity issue. For example, Sidney
Greenbaum writes at the end of the 1980s: "In the last few years, ... , the British
standard is being influenced by the American standard, so that the two national
standards are now converging rather than growing apart" (1990: 18), a tendency
which can safely be assumed to continue in the future. Many similar judgements have
been made in the relevant literature (cf. for example Gordon/Deverson 1985: 53; for a
slightly different view cf. Trudgill 1990: 10). In all fairness it should be added that the
structural differences between British and American English have always been fairly
slim, very much a matter of degree, of differences in tendency rather than in the
presence or absence of a given construction. 3 Also Mair (1998: 155) is right in
warning us to conceive of "the Americanisation of British English, undisputed fact of
recent British linguistic history," simply as "a straightforward taking over of
American norms and preferences". Rather, Mair continues, this process of
Americanisation is "embedded in a very broad drift in which the two varieties are
taken in the same direction at slightly differential speeds", with American English
typically taking the lead. 4
An increase in the (already high) uniformity of English grammar we are bound to
witness not only when talking about an emerging World Standard of international
English or diminishing differences between the grammars of Standard British and
American English. This development will affect all national standards of English (e.g.
3
4
One proposal which has recurrently been made in the recent literature for a general property capturing
the way in which the grammar of American English differs from the one of British English is
regularity, American English being said to exhibit more regularity and to be still undergoing further
regularization in various domains of its grammar. Recall at this point what was said in section 2.1
about the alleged simplification of American English as a consequence of the great number of
immigrants to the United States: rule simplification or at least a greater consistency in rule application
are almost natural concomitants of regularization, which in turn offers many advantages for the
teaching of a language.
Besides, as pointed out in Mair (1998, 1999), we do of course find innovations in British English
syntax that are not found, at all, in American English.
In the Year 2525 ... Reflections on the Future Shape of English
7
the so-called Celtic Englishes, Australian English, New Zealand English, South
African and Canadian English), their grammars, it is important to stress again, not the
relevant accents. This process will reach its limits where individual grammatical
features have acquired the status of markers of national identity (e.g. the after-perfect
and and-subordination in Irish English). What is true on the level of standard
Englishes is even more true on the level of regional variation within individual
Englishes, i.e. on the level of dialects. On that level there is nothing daring in
predicting an ever-increasing linguistic uniformity in the future. Languages and
dialects are dying every year; and where dialects do not die out completely they are at
least watered down, as it were, due to dialect mixture and ultimately dialect levelling,
especially in and near the big urban centres (cf. Cheshire/Edwards/Whittle 1993). As
a result we get regional standards, certain features of which may increasingly acquire
the status of social and/or register markers that can no longer be assigned to a
particular region. In light of what was said in section 2.3 about a developing
"'standardizing' non-standard variety of English" (Cheshire/Edwards/Whittle 1993:
82), on the one hand, and the colloquialization of the norms of written English, on the
other hand, it may well happen that some of these supra-regional features of nonstandard varieties ultimately find their way into the spoken and, given time, even
written standard in the future.
That much for basic assumptions underlying the reflections in section 5. But
before exploring in more detail the changes that the structure of English is likely to
undergo in the future, we should first take a look at the facts from the past and the
present.
3. The Past
3.1 The most fundamental changes that the English grammar underwent from Old
English up to the Late Modern English period have already been mentioned: (i) the
radical typological shift from a synthetic, very much Modern German-like, language
to an analytic language; after the Old English period only very few grammatical
categories continued to be inflectionally marked whereas there was a great increase in
periphrastic constructions and hence in importance of functional word classes like
prepositions and auxiliaries; (ii) the change from a relatively free to a relatively fixed
word order; (iii) the change of the basic word order from SOV to SVO, and (iv),
correlating with these three developments, the drift of English towards the invariable
word. The result of this drift can be seen from the fact that in English one form can do
service for many different functions. Take, for example, run: first of all, run cannot
only be used as a verb but also as a noun, for instance in She took the dog for a run or
There was a run on icecream; secondly, as a verb run can either be a present tense
form for the 1st and 2nd person singular (I run, you run) as well as in the plural (we
run, you run, they run), or a past participle in he had run. Third, it should be noted
that run normally is an intransitive verb, but that it can also be found in clearly
transitive (more exactly causative) uses as in to run the water or He ran a horse in the
Derby. It is this great productiveness of what is known as conversion or functional
shift that is perhaps the clearest indication of the continuing significance of Sapir's
drift. To the four major developments outlined so far one may add a fifth one, which
probably correlates with the almost complete loss of case marking and the fixing of
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BERND KORTMANN
word order. This development gave rise to a property of Present-Day English that
Frans Plank (1983) has called the functional encoding of grammatical relations.
Compared with German, for example, English allows a greater variety of nonagentive semantic (or thematic) roles to be mapped onto the subject function. Just
consider the examples in (1):
(1)
a. This tent sleeps five people. (location)
b. The car burst a tyre. (possessor)
c. This will sell us a lot of dog food. (instrument)
In none of these examples is the referent of the subject the agent. Correspondingly, a
greater range of non-patient roles can be mapped onto the direct object, as is
illustrated in (2):
(2)
a. They fled the capital.
b. She swam the Channel in one day.
c. The albatros was riding the wind.
For none of the sentences in (1) and (2) is it possible to give a literal translation into
German because German rather follows the principle of a transparent encoding of
grammatical relations, i.e. the subject will typically be an agent and the direct object a
patient.
3.2 Following these general developments, the perspective will now be narrowed to
what has happened in individual areas of the grammar. For this purpose, Ernst Leisi's
distinction between weakened and strengthened categories in the evolution of English
grammar will be made use of (cf. most recently in Leisi/Mair 1999). The grammatical
categories in (3) have been weakened, while those in (4) have been strengthened:
(3)
Weakened grammatical categories
gender, case, number, mood (especially subjunctive);
voice (cf. also the transitive/intransitive distinction):
1. the distinction between active and passive; e.g.
(i) medio-passive as in This dog food doesn't sell or
(ii) verbs with no difference between active and passive,
e.g. He simply doesn't compare;
2. the distinction between active and reflexive (e.g. for verbs of
grooming: he dressed/washed instead of he dressed/washed
himself)
(4)
Strengthened grammatical categories
word order (relatively fixed; dummy subjects required, dummydo in questions, double object construction as in Mary gave the
boy her book)
within the VP: active form (vs. passive, reflexive), Progressive,
Present Perfect vs. Simple Past, Future tense/future time
markers, auxiliaries, non-finite forms (participles, infinitives,
gerunds)
In the Year 2525 ... Reflections on the Future Shape of English
9
3.3 What is important to note with regard to the major historical developments in 3.1
and most of the weakening and strengthening processes in 3.2 is that the crucial
period of transition was Middle English. The dramatic change in language type that
English underwent was by and large completed by 1300. By the middle of the 15th
century, which is when we can speak of English as a language with an established
literary standard and a language in official use, at least the major steps in most of the
individual strengthening and, especially, weakening processes had been taken. What
followed in the more than 500 years since then was for the most part the further
spreading of already existing forms and rules, a clearer division of tasks among
rivalling constructions and, overall, the development of more consistency and
regularity in the application of rules, for instance from a formerly optional to an
obligatory use of a given construction. 5 In (5) a list is provided of the relevant
processes that took place in the course of the Early and Late Modern English period.
Most processes affect verbal categories (5a-h) and the pronominal system (5i):
(5)
Changes in English grammar in Early and Late Modern English
(a) future time marking:
development of a neutral (analytic) future with the "proper"
distinction between shall and will; use of the Simple Present
only in exceptional cases; spread of other constructions for
future time marking (incl. Present Progressive, be going to)
(b) (present) perfect:
division of tasks between Present Perfect and Simple Past; loss
of be-perfect (e.g. I was walked out) in Late Modern English
(c) progressive:
spreading use; Late Modern English: progressive with
predicative adjectives and nouns (He's being polite, Am I being
an idiot?), with have (John is having tea), "dynamic" passive
(The vase was being broken), combinations with the perfect and
future will/shall
(d) do-support:
gaining ground especially in negations and questions, fully
established by 1700; further regularization in Late Modern
English: loss of non-emphatic do in affirmative sentences and of
causative do (I did him go 'I made him go')
(e) modal verbs:
further loss of morphological and syntactic properties of full
verbs; result: strict formal distinction between auxiliaries and
full verbs
(f) further loss of inflectional endings (say-eth, know-est) and
irregular verb forms (e.g. holp)
5
Note however that in Late Modern English several of the relevant developments were not the result of
natural language change, but subject to the influence of prescriptive grammars.
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BERND KORTMANN
(g) spread of participial constructions (e.g. adverbial
participles) and the gerund
(h) verb + particle constructions:
increase in phrasal verbs and so-called multi-word verbs like
have a bath/look/try, especially in Late Modern English
(i) modern pronominal systems of personal, possessive,
interrogative and relative pronouns (e.g. you ousting ye and thou
in subject position; its (for his); emergence of relative who,
relative who vs. relative which; who instead of whom except
after prepositions (*For who did he do it?)
4. The Present
4.1 "Predicting the future depends on understanding the present." This quotation from
Jean Aitchison (19932: 210) sets the scene for this section: ongoing changes in the
grammar of late 20th century English. As it is from variation in language synchrony
that we can learn a lot about language change, it is useful to take into consideration
different kinds of grammatical variation in English: (a) differences between Standard
British and Standard American English, (b) a comparison of these two with other
national and regional varieties of English, and (c) differences between spoken and
written as well as formal and informal English. Especially with regard to (a) and (c),
but increasingly also for (b), 6 there exist various statistical studies based on the
analysis of computer-stored corpora of contemporary English, e.g. Laurie Bauer's
Watching English Change (1994). Along with these studies have been consulted nonstatistical, but nevertheless very interesting accounts of ongoing developments,
including Charles Barber's Linguistic Change in Present-Day English (1964). A third
source were comparative grammatical accounts of the Celtic Englishes (Irish, Scottish
and Welsh English) as well as of regional varieties in England. In the following, only
a selection of four instances of synchronic variation in Present-Day English will be
discussed, all of which have in common that it is in these areas of grammar that
Standard English is very likely to look different in the future from what it is now. The
relevant instances of ongoing change are the Progressive, the Present Perfect,
contractions, and the system of personal pronouns. In a second step (cf. section 5),
these four and other areas of currently observable variation will be made the basis for
predictions concerning the future shape of English. Crucial to note with regard to
these projections of the past and, especially, of the present into the future is that for
most of them the facts from the different kinds of variation converge, i.e. point to
change in the same direction. It is the grammar of one English dialect, in particular,
that recurrently turns out to behave differently from most of the grammars of the other
varieties, namely the grammar of (written) Standard British English.
6
For the regional varieties of the British Isles, the Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects (FRED),
currently comprising some 1.5 million words, is the first computerized corpus which allows large-scale
comparative, partly even statistical studies of dialect grammar (especially for high-frequency
phenomena).
In the Year 2525 ... Reflections on the Future Shape of English
11
4.2 The Progressive belongs to the strengthened grammatical categories in the history
of English. It has conquered more and more territory especially in the last two
hundred years, and even in the course of the last thirty years. As Mair/Hundt (1995)
were able to show, there has been a significant increase of progressives both in British
and American English if we compare the press corpora from 1991 with those from
1961. Important to note is that this is not due to new uses of the Progressive, but only
to a growing preference for the Progressive where formerly the simple form was
chosen. As an informal stylistic option it is used more and more frequently in written
Standard English; this fits in with the overall tendency towards a colloquialization of
the written norms. After all, the Progressive is used in spoken language much more
frequently than in written language. The success story of the English Progressive, it
thus seems, has not come to its end yet. Especially the often-mentioned restriction of
the Progressive to dynamic predicates is increasingly weakened. This is also a wellknown fact if one considers other Englishes, for example Scottish and Irish English
(cf. Miller 1993 and Harris 1993 respectively), where the Progressive can be used in
more constructions (for example, in the imperative) and with a much wider range of
verbs than in Standard British English. 7 Just consider the examples in (6) and (7):
(6)
Scottish English
a. He's not understanding a single thing you're saying.
b. I wasnae liking it and the lassie I was going wi wasnae liking it.
(7)
Irish English
a. They're not believing it.
b. Don't be talking.
c. We're living here since 1980.
4.3 Example (7c) leads us on to the Present Perfect, another clearly strengthened
category in the evolution of English grammar. Where Irish English (cf. especially
Filppula 1999: 90-130) can simply use the Simple Present or Present Progressive,
similar to German Wir wohnen hier (schon) seit 1980, Standard British English
demands the use of the Present Perfect (We´ve lived here since 1980). In the latter
variety the Present Perfect is also required for the so-called experiential perfect or
indefinite past in sentences like Have you seen the Picasso exhibition yet?, and is at
least preferred in contexts where something has happened in the recent past, as in He
has just left. Again this is different in Irish and Scottish English and, not altogether
surprisingly, in American English: 8 here the Simple Past is the normal option. This is
also the situation in many other regional varieties of English. It looks then as if the
7
8
The extension of the use of the progressive with all verbs can also be observed in many varieties of
English outside Europe and in English-based pidgins and creoles. Interesting in this respect is the
following prediction by Gachelin (1997: 43f.): "That high frequency is often accompanied by a twofold
aspectual value turning 'be + -ing' into a general imperfective, which is likely to 'devalue'... the EF
[Expanded Form, B.K.]. Its generalization, already at work in modern SE [Standard English, B.K.],
may herald what will be World English usage in the next century. Less and less context-bound, the EF
may soon become... reduced ... to a mere 'signal of verbality' acting as a tense marker."
Compare Montogomery (1999) on grammatical parallels between the Celtic Englishes and varieties of
American English (e.g. habitual be, heavy use of the progressive) which are strong candidates for
features imported by settlers from Ireland and Scotland.
12
BERND KORTMANN
strict division of tasks between the Simple Past and the Present Perfect is typical only
of Standard British English, and that there is a good chance that in the future certain
of its tasks will be fulfilled either by the present tense (as in 7c) or, what is more
likely, by the Simple Past. This means that English will not follow the Germanic
pattern, which is particularly pronounced in the South of Germany, in Yiddish and in
Afrikaans, where the present perfect has developed into a narrative tense, i.e. where
the present perfect is used instead of a simple past.
4.4 The examples in (6) and (7) may also serve as a transition to a third area of
ongoing change, since we find at least one contraction in each of them (e.g. he's,
they're, don't, we're). Contractions are characteristic of spoken and informal language.
Statistical analyses of the press corpora of British and American English compiled in
1991 show a significant increase in contractions of all sorts compared with press
language in 1961 (cf. Krug 1994). So contractions are clearly another indicator of
colloquialization.
But in some cases contractions are indicative of even more, namely of
grammaticalization, i.e. the development of a formerly lexical element to a
grammatical element, or from an already grammatical to an even more grammatical
element. Three instructive examples in this respect are the contracted forms gonna (<
going to), wanna (< want to) and let´s (< let us). The going-to future has increasingly
gained ground in general, and in informal British and especially American English in
particular, where it is well on its way to developing the neutral predictive sense of the
will-future. The fact that in informal spoken language going to is increasingly
contracted to gonna is fully in line with this tendency towards a fully grammaticalized
future time marker (cf. Krug 2000: 174f., 218). This tendency is also increasingly
reflected in written English, especially in press language.
For similar reasons wanna is interesting: especially when contracted the form
want to combining with non-first person subjects is developing into a modal or at
least semi-modal verb. Wanna in example (8) no longer expresses a wish or
preference on the speaker's side but a piece of good advice, thus doing service for
deontic modals like should or ought to:
(8)
You look terrible. You wanna see a doctor.
Let's finally take a look at let's. This contraction is showing signs of developing
into what has been called an adhortative marker, that is a marker involving urging or
encouraging like come on! (cf. Hopper/Traugott 1993: 10-14, Krug 1994). In other
words, English – and again American English is taking the lead – seems to be
developing an analytic means for what formerly was expressed by an inflectional
marker, namely the subjunctive. This emerges most clearly when let´s is used in
utterances where the full form let us is impossible, as in (9b) and (9c). So whereas
let's in (9a) still allows for two interpretations ('Come on, you and me wash your
hands' and 'Come on, you wash your hands'), the speaker is clearly not referred to by
let´s in (9b) and (9c):
(9)
a. Let's wash your hands. (ambiguous)
b. Let's you go first, then if we have any money left I'll go.
c. Let's you and him fight.
In the Year 2525 ... Reflections on the Future Shape of English
13
4.5 A fourth area of variation in modern varieties of English is the system of personal
pronouns. As pointed out in (5i), the personal pronoun you developed into the sole
second person pronoun, both for singular and plural and both for serving in subject
and object position. The pronouns ye and thou, still used in Early Modern English,
were completely ousted. But ousted they were only in Standard English. Many
regional varieties of English around the world either retained or re-established at least
the distinction between second person singular and plural, as you can see in (10):
(10) y'all, you 'uns, you guys; youse; you lot (informal BrE); unn, yinna
(in the Caribbean)
In American dialects we thus encounter forms like y'all or you 'uns (these two
especially in the South) or you guys. An even wider distribution has the plural
pronoun yous(e), which is found in North America, Australia, South Africa, Scotland,
England (e.g. Merseyside) and especially Ireland (cf. Trudgill/Chambers 1991: 8 and
Wright 1997). It is one of the more daring predictions in this paper that, given the
apparent functional and communicative need to employ different pronouns according
to whether we want to refer to a single addressee or to more than one, Standard
English too will at some point re-establish a minimal formal distinction in its
pronominal system as it is found in many varieties of English and many languages of
the world.
5. The Future
Against the background of what has been said in the preceding sections, it is now high
time to open the curtain and present the most likely candidates for future changes in
the grammar of Standard English. Given the previous explanations, the relevant
candidates will be commented on only briefly.
Concerning prospective developments in the English verb phrase, it turns out soon
that there is bad news for anyone sharing Otto Jespersen's view that with regard to its
"standard of logic... there is perhaps no language in the civilized world that stands so
high as English" (1905: 12). This is because the two formal oppositions which led
him to this statement are the one between the simple and the progressive form and the
one between the Simple Past and the Present Perfect. As argued earlier, both of these
oppositions will lose (or rather continue to lose) in discriminating power. This is spelt
out in (11a and b). Further changes in the verb phrase (including issues of agreement)
are listed in (11c) to (11i):
(11) Changes in the verb phrase
(a)
progressive: further expansion of territory (due to the use with an
increasing number of stative verbs and predicates); result:
neutralization of semantic contrast Simple Form - Progressive in an
increasing number of contexts (possible endpoint of this
development: the Progressive will predominantly be used for the
expression of emotional nuances, a high degree of speaker
involvement, and as a marker of informality; cf. also Gachelin 1997
in fn. 7)
BERND KORTMANN
14
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
(f)
(g)
(h)
present perfect: weakening of grammaticalized opposition with
Simple Past; two possible paths of development, with the one in (a)
being more likely:
(a) American English pattern: Simple Past gaining ground;
(b) normal Germanic pattern (including Irish English, Scottish
English): Present Perfect as a narrative tense
future: complete loss of shall-future; further expansion of the goingto (gonna) construction to neutral prediction
modals: (i) loss of the auxiliary construction of dare, need, ought
(to), and possibly used to; loss of shall for mere prediction and
should for mere hypotheticality; (ii) new modals (< full verbs):
wanna ('should'), gotta (epistemic 'must'), let's (adhortative); (iii)
further increase in contractions
passive: further spread of the get-passive as a dynamic passive (i.e.
get developing auxiliary status)
active form: further strengthening (for example, more verbs will be
used as medio-passives; cf. The game will screen at 6 p.m. each
Saturday)
irregular verb forms: further decrease (down to the small core of top
frequency verbs)
agreement: there's, there was and there's been with plural subject
complements (cf. Cheshire/Edwards/Whittle 1993: 70, 82)
The most likely candidates for changes in other domains of English grammar are
listed in (12):
(12) Changes in the noun phrase
(a)
re-introduction of distinct 2nd person plural form (cf. Wright 1997)
(b)
use of they and them as sex-neutral personal pronouns for the third
person singular and of their as the corresponding sex-neutral
possessive pronoun (cf. Wales 1996: 125-133)
(c)
myself instead of I/me in coordinated noun phrases, especially in
non-initial position (John and myself) but also in that's-constructions
(that's myself and ...); myself increasingly used as prepositional
complement (cf. Hernández 2000)
(d)
who instead of whom (perhaps even after prepositions)
(e)
relative pronouns: whose used with non-human antecedents even
more than is the case now; increase in zero-relatives for the object
position (e.g. The man I know) and, in presentational constructions,
possibly also for the subject position (e.g. There's this man ran into
me...)
(f)
spread of 's-genitive (e.g. human nature's diversity)
In the Year 2525 ... Reflections on the Future Shape of English
(g)
(h)
(13)
(a)
(b)
(c)
15
regularization with regard to the comparison of adjectives: it will
become more predictable whether suffixation or periphrasis is the
appropriate strategy (cf. Bauer 1994: 60)
collective nouns: in the great majority of cases subject - verb
agreement with singular verb form only (e.g. The government has
decided)
Changes in complex sentences
tense-aspect-modality: relaxation of the sequence-of-tenses rule (e.g.
simple past instead of past perfect in after-adverbials); use of would
in conditionals (e.g. If he would come, ...)
increase in for-to complements (e.g. I want for Mary to come with
us)
prepositions and conjunctions:
(i) fuller integration of deverbal prepositions and subordinating
conjunctions into the core of their syntactic categories (e.g. during in
This must be the lecture I slept during); due to as a full-fledged
preposition;
(ii) new subordinating conjunctions like moment or minute (< the
moment < the moment that; parallel to the history of while) or same
as '(just) as'; like 'as if'
A general development will be the one in (14):
(14) The continuing productivity of conversion (both total and secondaryclass conversion) and phrasal(-prepositional) verbs as well as multiword verbs
With regard to (14), it may be interesting to note that George Orwell criticized exactly
these two processes as deplorable habits in American English. Nevertheless, or maybe
because of this, he made conversion one of the two central characteristics of
Newspeak in his dystopian novel 1984 (cf. also Bolton 1984: 46-52). Thus the verb
think can also be used as a noun, as in doublethink. Note also that Orwell identifies as
the second 'outstanding peculiarity' of the grammar of Newspeak its regularity (1948:
305f.). Here he mentions explicitly several of the predictions in (11) and (12). From
these parallels between Orwell's predictions and those above, it should not be
concluded, however, that in general the imagination of authors of utopian or science
fiction may be of help to the professional linguist when developing ideas on the future
shape of English. Where authors are concerned with future language change at all, i.e.
where there is at least the insight that it is not very likely that in ten thousand years
from now practically the same kind of English will be spoken as in the year 2000, it
seems that grammatical changes play no role whatsoever. Moreover, what few
predictions are made with regard to phonology and vocabulary are for the most part
linguistically extremely naive (for a similar conclusion cf. Meyers 1980: 36f.).
BERND KORTMANN
16
6. Concluding Remarks
The first of three concluding remarks concerns the rate of natural language change.
No one can predict how fast the changes and developments outlined in the previous
section will take full effect. All one can say is this: grammar does not easily respond
to changing fashions. In other words, for changes in the grammar of a language to
catch on typically takes several generations. It looks, though, as if the current
tendency towards the colloquialization of the norms of written English, provided it
continues to be a pragmatic convention for a considerable period of time, is likely to
speed up language change. In this context it is worth remembering Charles Barber's
statement that American English seems to be an accelerator for most cases of ongoing
structural changes in English (1964: 141).
Secondly, coming back to the year 2525, it does not seem likely that a native speaker
of English then and a native speaker of English now will no longer understand and be
able to communicate with each other. At least in the written medium a time span of
500 years will not lead to unintelligibility, just as, for example, reading and
understanding William Caxton's prose from the end of the 15th century does not
cause us great difficulty. This will be true to an even greater extent for a native
speaker of English 500 years hence when reading today's Guardian or New York
Times. The current core grammar of English is so highly standardized and uniform
that it looks as if it will be subject to only relatively minor changes which, even when
taken together, will not lead to a major typological change.
Thirdly and finally, the speculations on the future shape of English offered here may
suffer the same fate as so many (especially 18th and 19th century) speculations on the
future of English. In his Encyclopedia of the English Language David Crystal's final
comment on these speculations is the following: "Perhaps the only safe generalization
to be made is that predictions about the future of English have a habit of being wrong"
(1995: 112). With regard to most of the changes predicted in this paper, though, there
is no need to be that pessimistic. All of them represent the likely endpoints of changes
(some more, some less advanced) that are already under way. Let's wait and see.
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