Blog - Paper 3 Question 1

Paper 3 Question 1

Text A is an excerpt from a  collection of letters written by Edward Berens. It was written in 1832, which places the text in the Victorian era or at the start of the late modern era of English. The writing seems to be heavily reserved and explains how you need to conserve yourself and what you speak about at Oxford. While such a statement remains mainly true in modern days the way the way it would be delivered has completely changed.

In the first paragraph of text A, the phrase ‘are apt to’ is the perfect example to discuss. While the word ‘apt’ still exists it is much less used. There are many reasons why this word is no longer in frequent usages, such as the functional theory. The functional theory explains how language will change simply to be more functional to its users. In this case, the word ‘apt’ would be replaced with other words like ‘likely’ or ‘tend’ as seen in source C. This change in language could also be explained by the substratum theory, in which other forms of English may have caused this change over a period of interactions. The crumbling castle perspective also shows how this perfect English eventually crumbled into multiple different words besides ‘apt.’

Source C, further shows this semantic change through an n-gram graph. Around 1930, the word ‘apt’ began rapidly falling as ‘likely’ and ‘tend’ became much more widely used. The word ‘tend’ could have been explained by Guy Deutscher and his book ‘The Unfolding of Language.’ Part of his book explains how language evolves to be expressive in an attempt to achieve a greater effect or reaction. It is possible that the word apt became too bland and uninteresting for news stations and they tried a new term to spark interest or make sentences flow better when speaking fast.

In reference to source B, we can also see a change in the collocate for ‘taste’ and ‘judgment.’ In text A, it says, ‘good taste and correct judgment.’ For the word ‘taste,’ we can see that the word ‘good’ is still in usage as of 1993. But ‘good’ is also the second most popular collocate to ‘bad’ which may mean that the words underwent semantic derogations. But for ‘judgment,’ the word ‘correct’ is no longer a common collocate for judgment. This could be due to many reasons, possibly through the introduction of new technology and when clinical and professional judgments became much more valuable than personal judgment.

Another example of the change of language between this text and a modern one could be seen in the word ‘inmate.’ In early modern English, the word inmate was used solely to describe someone you shared a room with. Through semantic broadening, this term also refers to a person confined by an institution, such as a prison. The change in this word is also supported by the functional theory. A word was needed to describe these people and so, such a word was created to fill the gap.