A CASE OF MORPHOLOGICAL ELABORATION: THE HISTORY OF DUTCH -baar

Abstract

In his contribution to the volume Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Change Kay broaches the time-honoured topic of style differences in language and he ventures to formulate a hypothesis bearing upori language evolution which crucially involves this distinction of Speech styles (Kay, 1977). He Starts from the idea that not only a distinction can be drawn between an elaborated and a restricted Speech style, ljut that this distinction can also be shown to correspond with certain formal differences in actual usage. The elaborated Speech style is e.g. claimed to contain longer sentences and a more varied vocabulary than the restricted one. This distinction between an elaborated and a restricted speech style — which, of course, figures in one way or another in the work of many other * linguists äs well and which, moreover, forms part of the philological tradition — is reinterpreted by Kay in a 'functionaF (ibid. : 22) manner by calling the elaborated speech style autonomous speech and the restricted speech style nonautonomous speech'.