Hypothetical and real change

Languages change over time, and, in Saussurian terms, languages are “social institutions”. This does not mean, however, that all the modifications that a language undergoes are immediately and directly correlated to the modifications undergone by the community.The language-society correlation is stronger in the case of semantic and lexical modifications than it is in the case of morpho-syntactic changes.In fact, the modifications concerning grammatical tools used by the speakers in the communicative relationship with other speakers are more linked to historical-social events than they are to the broad relationship between language and society.