Deflexion is a diachronic linguistic process in

inflection In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...

al languages typified by the degeneration of the inflectional structure of a language. All members of the

Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...

language family are subject to some degree of deflexional change. This phenomenon has been especially strong in Western European languages, such as English, French, and others. Deflexion typically involves the loss of some inflectional affixes, notably affecting word endings ( markers) that indicate noun cases, verbal tenses and

noun class In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...

es. This is part of a process of gradual decline of the inflectional

morpheme A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...

s, defined as atomic semantic units bound to abstract word units (

lexeme A lexeme () is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms ta ...

s). Complete loss of the original subset of affixes combined with a development towards

allomorph In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant phonetic form of a morpheme, or in other words, a unit of meaning that varies in sound and spelling without changing the meaning. The term ''allomorph'' describes the realization of phonological variatio ...

y and new morphology is associated in particular with creolization, i.e. the formation of

pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified form of contact language that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn f ...

s and

creole language A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable form of contact language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form (often a pidgin), and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fl ...

s. Directly related to deflexion is the languages becoming less synthetic and more analytic in nature. However, the ways in which languages undergo deflexion and the results of these developments are by no means uniform. For example, the modern

Romance languages The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...

all continue to feature a complex verb system, while having strongly deflected their nouns, adjectives, and pronouns. German, on the other hand, has further simplified the already simple Germanic verb system (even radically so in some dialects) but has preserved the three genders and four cases of early Germanic languages. Deflexion is a common feature of the history of many Indo-European languages. According to the Language Contact Hypothesis for Deflexion, supported by the comparison between Germanic languages (for instance, Icelandic and Afrikaans), this process is attributed to language contact. Specifically, the phenomenon occurs in the presence of large, influential groups of speakers that have acquired the leading idiom as a second language (L2) and so is limited to economical trade-offs widely considered acceptable. Though gradual, English experienced a dramatic change from Old English, a moderately inflected language using a complex case system, to Modern English, considered a weakly inflected language or even analytic. Important deflexion changes first arrived in the English language with the

North Sea Germanic North Sea Germanic, also known as Ingvaeonic ( ), is a subgrouping of West Germanic languages that consists of Old Frisian, Old English language, Old English, and Old Saxon, and their descendants. These languages share a number of commonalitie ...

(Ingvaeonic) shifts, shared by Frisian and

Low German Low German is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language variety, language spoken mainly in Northern Germany and the northeastern Netherlands. The dialect of Plautdietsch is also spoken in the Russian Mennonite diaspora worldwide. "Low" ...

dialects, such as merging accusative and dative cases into an objective case. Viking invasions and the subsequent Norman conquest accelerated the process. The importance of deflexion in the formative stage of a language can be illustrated by modern Dutch, where deflexion accounts for the overwhelming majority of linguistic changes in the last thousand years or more. Afrikaans originated from Dutch virtually by deflexion. According to the unidirectionality hypothesis,Hopper, Paul J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott: Grammaticalization, 1993, Cambridge University Press. deflexion should be subject to a semantically driven one-way cline of grammaticality. However, exceptions to the gradual diachronic process have been observed where the deflexion process diminished or came to a halt, or where inflexional case marking was occasionally reinforced. There are also a few cases of reversed directionality, e.g. in the evolution of the common Romance inflected future and conditional (or "indicative future-of-the-past") from earlier periphrastic suppletive forms for the loss of the corresponding classical Latin tenses.

References

{{reflist Linguistic morphology

See also

References