Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense ISSN: 1133-0392

2000, 8: 303-309
TEJADA CALLER, P., El Cambio Lingüístico. Claves para Interpretar la Lengua
Inglesa. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. 1999. (240 pp). ISBN: 84-206-8657-3 (Pb)

El Cambio Lingüístico. Claves para Interpretar la Lengua Inglesa is a clear proof

that Historical Linguistics (HL) is at the core of linguistic research today, as Tejada
states in the introduction of the book, and that there is still much more to be said about
both language change and the history of the English language.
Tejada’s book is not another introductory book to the field nor another textbook,
nor is it simply a contribution to language change theory. El Cambio Lingüístico.
Claves para Interpretar la Lengua Inglesa is all that: an introduction, a textbook, a
theoretical contribution, and more. The book bridges the gap between traditional
teaching companions or introductory books (Culpeper 1997, Blake 1996, Trask 1994,
Barber 1993, Leith 1983, Berndt 1982, Fernández 1982) and more theoretical
approaches to language change (Crowley 1997, Fox 1995, Aitchison 1981). It is
evident that Tejada’s intention is less to offer a detailed study of the different periods,
varieties and levels of grammar than to encourage a holistic and open approach to
English Historical Linguistics. The book provides a comprehensive up-to-date insight
into the present state of research in the field and, what is more important, the author
applies recent linguistic theoretical models to the explanation of some of the most
complex and controversial issues of the history of the English language such as the
emergence of the standard, semantic change or grammaticalization processes. The
result is that El Cambio Lingüístico. Claves para Interpretar la Lengua Inglesa
constitutes a thought-provoking approach to English HL and processes of language
change, dealing with the most recent and polemical issues under discussion in the
field, due, among other things, to their inherent interdisciplinary nature.
The overall plan of the book at first sight looks similar to other textbooks on the
history of the English language: (Chap. 1) introduces the book with a survey on the
nature of language change and of the most recent linguistic theories that are being
applied to the field. A description of the scope of HL, its main sources, present and past
methods and main research problems is presented in (chap. 2); the Germanic
backgrounds of the English language are summarised in (chap. 3), where both the main
linguistic and cultural backgrounds of the language-family are presented, as well as the
specific characteristics of English within the branch. The sociohistorical and cultural
contacts and movements of speakers and their influence on the language are described
in (chap. 4), in addition to the role of literacy, the printing press and the influence of
different authorities on the development and codification of English. (Chap. 5) gives a
detailed account of the interdependent factors which have influenced the emergence of
the standard and of the other varieties of the British Isles during the different periods
of the language. (Chap. 6) explains the semantic and lexical processes which conform
Present-day English vocabulary: a highly dynamic level of grammar, both as regards
semantic and lexical innovation, in comparison to other Germanic languages. Recent
developments of pragmatics and cognitive linguistics explain, in (chap. 7), some of the
most controversial morphosyntactic changes of the English language, such as changes
in word order and the grammaticalisation of verbal forms into modals and future
markers. Finally the gradual divergence between English phonology and spelling
throughout its history is described in terms of the oral and written nature of the
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different periods of the language in (chap. 8). A closer look at the contents of the book,
however, especially at the headings and subheadings of each chapter, reveals a new
approach to the different topics, an approach we are not used to in this field. Some of
the most noticeable subheadings which illustrate this innovation are, for example:
Change: catalyst of perspectives and linguistic issues in chapter 1; Travels and
intellectual travellers in chapter 2; Morphosyntax: the codification of saliency or
Productive or receptive orientation of linguistic structure in chapter 7, and Visual
stability of words in chapter 8, among others.
It is almost impossible to summarise the contents of this book because of the
great variety and complexity of topics analysed by the author, and because it would
imply, besides, paraphrasing Tejada’s well-structured and well-written ideas, which is
not my intention. What I will do is call the reader’s attention to those topics which are
either dealt with in an innovative way, or simply not found in other books in the field.
The order I will follow is not the conventional linear order of chapters but that of the
main theoretical approaches described and their application throughout the book.
The author opens the book with a chapter on the most recent linguistic theories
applied to HL, theories that, she claims, are being developed and corroborated by HL.
In my opinion this is one of the best conceived and most innovative chapters of the
book. Such a comprehensive theoretical description does not exist in the literature 1, as
far as I know.
Language change has always fascinated experts and non-experts. In the past
change has been described by both linguists and laymen, who, however, were not able
to explain its causes. Nowadays, we have new methodological and theoretical tools to
apply for this problem. From a methodological point of view, computer corpora such
as The Toronto Microfiche Concordance to Old English or the Helsinki Corpus of
English Texts have greatly facilitated work in older periods of the English language.
But it is from the theoretical point of view that HL has gained most. The revival of the
discipline can be clearly seen in the number and quality of publications which have
appeared in the last 15 years. Topics such as grammaticalization, semantic extension,
place and applications of HL today are core issues in International Conference
discussions (ESSE, Debrecen 1997 and 5th and 6th International Conferences of
Cognitive Linguistics, Amsterdam 1977 and Stockholm 1999, for instance). In spite of
this, Tejada states, it is interdisciplinary research which has mainly contributed
towards this revival. HL occupies a leading position within Theoretical Linguistics
today and especially within Sociolinguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, New
Structuralism or Complex Systems Theory and Language Typology 2. As a result,
insists the author, the scope of HL has been extended from what traditionally has been
interpreted as purely linguistic studies to include a great variety of disciplines such as
semiotics, cultural studies, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and history, among
others.
Sociolinguistics (SL) has contributed to provide a new methodology for the
study of the origin and spreading of changes, Tejada explains. This new methodology,
although it should be used with caution (Labov 1994 in Tejada), intends to explain the
past by applying factors or principles operating in present day changes -the ‘uniformity
principle’. In addition, SL has “put speakers back into the picture” 3. That is, by
readdressing concepts like parole, SL research introduces real speakers in real
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sociolinguistic situations and tries to give linguistic explanation from that position. In
other words, SL looks at the why of changes, not only the how. A direct consequence
of such an approach is that the field of study now becomes broader, vaguer and more
difficult. But this is precisely the new challenge: to describe and explain the marginal,
changing and fuzzy edges of language.
The close and interdependent relationship between SL and HL comes from the
interdisciplinary character of science today and is made evident in the birth of the new
discipline: Sociohistorical Linguistics (Labov 1994, Romaine 1982, Milroy 1992). In
this line, one of Tejada’s major contributions to the theoretical study of English HL, in
addition to the application of the most recent linguistic theories, is her insistence on the
new relationship between language and history based on a new, active approach to
historical studies in general (p. 63-68). As sociolinguists, historians are putting
‘individuals back into the picture’; that is, they are changing the focus of study from
abstract structures to real socio-cultural situations, revising everything: canons,
methods and texts. As Tejada points out, the history of ideas, ideology, is back.
Sociolinguistic explanations illuminate many of the issues presented in El
Cambio Lingüístico. Claves para Interpretar la Lengua Inglesa. Especially worth
mentioning are the explanations of how and why English, throughout its history, from
being a rural and insular language has been transformed into an urban and international
one, or how and why its varieties, originally geographical, have become social. Chapter
4, thus, includes not only traditional ‘external’ explanations such as: migrations, contact
between languages and dialects or the effects of Christianisation on the linguistic make-
up of English, but explains it as a panoply of interacting sociolinguistic, political and
psychological factors, which have shaped the concept of standard English. That is, how
and why the concept of the standard moves from being considered on purely linguistic
grounds, a necessary device for communication, to being seen as a social institution,
which has to be protected. Socio-psychological factors, then, would also explain why
there is a change in the attitude of English speakers towards their language throughout
history: from apology to self confidence. This change marks, in addition, the beginning
of the centripetal stage of English, XVth century onwards, the author explains, referring
to the progressive absorption of varieties by the standard within the British Isles, and its
dominance abroad. Another example in the same line, is the Great Vowel Shift which, in
chapter 8, is explained as the interaction of sociolinguistic factors, such as prestige,
functioning together with cognitive and natural articulatory tendencies, and modified, at
the same time, by pragmatic and communicative forces. Nevertheless, Tejada insists
that, if we want to bring language research back to reality, we must not forget that real
speakers have real minds. In other words, the cognitive aspects of language have to be
included in language change explanations.
Of all theoretical frameworks, Cognitive Linguistics is the model which has
contributed most to the revival of HL (and vice versa, since evidence from studies of
language change is corroborating many of the principles of this model) 4. Integration
and multidisciplinarity are the keywords of Cognitive Linguistics (CL). Within CL,
language is not understood an independent, autonomous cognitive ability but an
integrated one within the other human cognitive abilities, which can only be studied as
the interaction of experiential, psychological, communicative and functional factors.
Another basic premise, according to CL, is that linguistic categories are not abstract,
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stable entities but are ever-changing, dynamic and flexible. In addition, changes are
not arbitrary: semantic change and grammaticalisation processes not only show that all
three levels of grammar are closely interrelated in language change, but also indicate
that these changes are motivated in most cases; that is, they follow universal, regular
patterns of change -they are not arbitrary. A third major issue in CL has been the
breaking down of traditional linguistic dichotomies, since these linguists are
convinced that the relationship between langue and parole, literal and non-literal
meaning, stability and change, synchrony and diachrony is a matter of degree rather
than discreteness.
In the area of semantic change, then, we see how meaning and lexical change is
structured by cognition. Especially interesting is the work which shows how temporal
vocabulary emerges from spatial vocabulary, knowledge vocabulary from sense-
perception words or emotion terms from colour vocabulary. In sum, we have now
evidence of how whole domains, usually the more abstract, are conceptualised in terms
of more concrete, physical or experiential ones or, in other words, how most semantic
changes or extensions can be understood in terms of metonymical or metaphorical
mappings and in terms of changes within prototypes or radial models (Geeraerts 1997,
Sweetser 1990).
Furthermore, these regular evolutionary patterns do not belong only to the realm
of semantics. Bybee et al. 1994, Heine et. al. 1991, Traugott 1989 and Givón 1984
have given particularly interesting pragmatic, functional and cognitive explanations of
how lexical-content words develop and take on grammatical morpheme status. There,
Tejada’s chapter 7 on “Morphosyntax: the codification of saliency” is a good example
of integration of approaches, levels of grammar, and conditioning factors in the
explanation of highly complex linguistic processes such as, for example, the move
from a more synthetic (speaker oriented) to an analytic (hearer oriented) language type
or, the changeover from a more aspectual or stative verb system to one more temporal
or dynamic. A third example, explained in the chapter, could be the development of a
modal-auxiliary system to mark irrealis and subjective meanings.
This interdisciplinary and inter-theoretical approach, a dominant feature in El
Cambio Lingüístico. Claves para Interpretar la Lengua Inglesa, presents the
diachronic study of English morphosyntax from an original perspective. Instead of
considering Old and Modern English two different periods of the same language in
which similar grammatical categories can be contrasted, Tejada suggests a linguistic-
typological model which analyses precisely the main differences or lack of
correspondences between systems or categories throughout time (p. 170). Old English
would, therefore, be a semantically oriented language, more similar to Present Day
Spanish5 than to Present Day English, which is more syntactically oriented. Languages
belonging to the first type such as Old English are pragmatically and semantically
structured languages, more text based than the syntactically oriented, which would
explain why linguistic categories overlap, why they show a wider variety of meanings
and functions or why word order is freer (more speaker-oriented). Present Day
English, a syntactically oriented language, on the other hand, shows a higher degree of
codification and conventionalisation and has, therefore, a more rigid word order than
Old English, and, in consequence, is more hearer oriented, and less transparent and
more sentence based.
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Finally, Tejada applies the most recent theoretical concepts and terminology of
Self-Regulating or Complex Systems Theory to the history of the English language.
Most of the linguistic processes explained within this frame would show that language
change and use exhibit many features of this theoretical model, such as its open
character, its partial regularity and stability, its ability to adapt to changes in its psycho-
physical environment by means of changes within the system itself, its dependency on
the initial conditions which will determine its future behaviour and its tendency to
keep its overall expenditure of energy at an optimal-minimum state. In other words, the
book shows that language is basically heterogeneous, dynamic and processual
(Bernárdez 1995, Lass 1997 6). By using the theoretical concepts of this mathematical-
philosophical theory, HL, thus, has integrated linguistics within the ‘hard sciences’,
especially within mathematics and biology.
In short, we can say that El Cambio Lingüístico. Claves para Interpretar la Lengua
Inglesa represents a valiant attempt to explain the most complex and controversial
issues of the history of English from a general, holistic and, thus, a more difficult
perspective than that taken by the traditional approach in HL, that limited itself to
rigorous description of the most objective and unquestionable changes of the language,
and the author certainly succeeds. Tejada does not reduce the history of English to a
detailed description of ideal stages and processes but offers a general and open
approach which includes all the complexity inherent in real language use and change.
The processes presented are far from being ‘closed’; on the contrary, they invite further
thinking and research. This is in fact the author’s main objective: to have readers write
their own book, substituting examples, applying them to new situations and
completing the network with their own illustrations and favourite models (p. 9). Such
a task would mean that the reader has fully assimilated the content of the book and has
reflected upon language and language change.
In addition, proposals and explanations given in the book are enhanced by copious
examples, both in English and Spanish, which allow readers to bring language change
even closer to their own reality; that is, to think about and see how their own language
is changing. Also worth consulting is the clear summary of universal processes or
paths of language change presented in chapter 1 and the comprehensive and up-to-date
commented bibliography at the end of the book, which includes a list of the leading
journals in the field, both national and international. The footnotes and further reading
selection for each chapter send readers to both basic readings and their expansions in
related fields, facilitating the learning task.
The book is evidently the result of laborious research in the field and many years
of thoughtful teaching. What Tejada demonstrates is that no single method of linguistic
research nor single theoretical framework is sufficient to address the broad and
complex range of issues involved in language change. Consequently, what is required
is an integrating approach like the one presented here. What Tejada displays in this
publication is methodological breadth and tolerance, qualities which seem to have
been absent in many historical linguistic studies till recently.
My last words are for the publishers who deserve to be congratulated for the series
in linguistics which has been initiated with this innovative and useful book. A
collection like this was needed in the Spanish market. Although the book, the author
tells us in page 9, has been written for Spanish university students, that is students
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equipped with basic linguistic concepts, I believe that El Cambio Lingüístico. Claves
para Interpretar la Lengua Inglesa will also interest anybody concerned with
sociolinguistic and functional-cognitive explanations of language, both from a
synchronic and a diachronic perspective. The book should, thus, be translated into
English so that it would have the distribution it deserves. A final note to the editors: it
is a pity there is no index (a necessary part of any modern publication). I would also
recommend that in future editions the book is given its original title El Cambio
Lingüístico. Claves para Interpretar la Historia de la Lengua Inglesa; it is a book that
deals with the history of English, it is not an introduction to the English language. The
present title may be misleading.

NOTES
1
Except for Tejada 1997.
2
We could also mention recent work in Functional Linguistics, Discourse Analysis or
Pragmatics on grammaticalization processes in spoken language, for instance.
3
Following the title of Joseph’s 1992 article.
4
It is not surprising to find a chapter titled “Language across time: Historical Linguistics”
in one of the most recent publications in the field: Cognitive Exploration of Language and
Linguistics by René Dirven and Marjolijn Verspoor (1999). In it, different lexical, phonological
and morphosyntactic changes are explained in terms of changes in radial networks and schemas,
for instance.
5
In spite of the fact that differences between both languages are obvious, the similarities
presented by Tejada are very usuful for Spanish students of English Philology.
6
Even though he does not recognise it formally nor defend such an approach in HL, Lass
1997 uses theoretical concepts and terminology coming from Complex Systems Theory.

Manuela Romano Mozo

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

REFERENCES

Aitchison, J. (1981). Language Change: Progress or Decay? London: Fontana Press.

Barber, Ch. (1993). The English Language. A Historical Introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bernárdez, E. (1995). Teoría y Epistemología del Texto. Madrid: Cátedra.
Berndt, R. (1982). History of the English Language. Leipzig: VEB Verlag
Enzyklopädie.
Blake, N. (1996). A History of the English Language. London: McMillan.
Bybee, J., Perkins, R. and W. Pagliuca. (1994). The Evolution of Grammar. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Crowley, T. (1997). An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford
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Culpeper, J. (1997). History of English. London: Routledge.
Dirven, R. and M. Verspooor. (1999). Cognitive Exploration of Language and
Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Fernández, F. (1982). Historia de la Lengua Inglesa. Madrid: Gredos.

Fox, A. (1995). Linguistic Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Geeraerts, D. (1997). Diachronic Prototype Semantics. A Contribution to Historical
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Givón, T. (1984). Syntax: A Functional-Typological Introduction. Amsterdam: John
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Heine, B., U. Claudi and F. Hünnemeyer (1991). Grammaticalization. Chicago:
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Joseph, B. D. (1992). Diachronic Explanation: Putting Speakers back into the Picture.
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Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 123-144.
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Leith, D. (1983). A Social History of English. London: Routledge.
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