In the field of linguistics, syntactic change is the evolution of the syntax, or structure, of a natural spoken language. In many languages, it is most easily observed in the transformation of irregular verb forms. For instance, in English, the past tense of the irregular verb "to go" is not "goed", which is what a non-native speaker would probably expect. Instead, the verb has undergone a syntactic change to "went", a borrowing from the past tense of the verb "to wend". Over time, syntactic change is usually the greatest modifier of a particular language.
Syntactic change is seen as creating a gradual shift in language patterns over time. It is also subject to cyclic drift.
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Famous quotes containing the words syntactic and/or change:
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