Blurb:

Chapter 6, ‘Language Change’, provides ways of approaching the study of language diachronically, as it varies over time. While it opens with a brief look at how language might have developed in humankind, the main focus is on how and why human language as we know it today changes. It moves from how the comparative method has been used to arrive at well-documented and specified conjectures of a proto-Indo-European language, through a brief history of the English language, and on to the ways in which languages change lexically, morphologically, syntactically, pragmatically and generically. It touches on language loss and on reasons for language change, as well as on language change within the life of an individual.