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1.The English language today Knowing about the language (subtitle of the slide) We start with a general idea of what English is and why it is important. We need to know not only the language but about the language, things about the language. The first thing that we need to know when we want to describe an object is: How big is it? Who speaks English today? If we look at the First Elizabeth who reigned from 1558 (from the first half of the fifty hundreds) to the beginning of the seventeen century there were between five and seven million people who spoke English, they spoke it as first language mostly, as a mother tongue. (first language, mother tongue: is the same). But, if we look at the Second…the space between the first Elizabeth (and the history of Britain) and the second one, we see how big the phenomenon of English speakers has become. So, from 1952 (nineteen fifty-two) to today the number of mother tongue speakers has grown to count two hundred and fifty million (250 million) plus one hundred million (100 million) who speak English as a second or foreign language. The reign of Elizabeth the First is, more or less, the time in which William Shakespeare was active. Naturally, things didn’t stay the same since 1952. Things also changed during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the Second. This phenomenon has continued in its growth, not as big it was between the two Elizabeths, but it is still growing, especially the second part (the people who speak English as a second or foreign language). [You have to think about this distinction between mother tongue, second language, foreign language and you might picture it as concentric circles. So, you have the first small circle (the small one) with the mother tongue speakers, around the mother tongue speakers you have another circle with speakers of English as a second language and then, the outer circle is the one consisting of speakers of English as foreign language. You have three different levels not necessarily of linguistic competence but three different levels of the importance of the language in a certain setting.] We have four hundred million (400 million) mother tongue speakers today and five hundred million ( million) speakers who speak English as a second or foreign language. It is a big phenomenon. In this reign of Queen Elizabeth the Second both the speakers of English as a mother tongue and the speakers of English as a second or foreign language have become more and more. Let’s see why, what is the reason for this growth. First of all, for English as a mother tongue. English as a mother tongue We have to look at what happened in the United States. Remember that everything about English from certain point on is related to its imperial past, because it was a sort of big empire. What happened to the language is tied to the fortunes of the Empire. Because in the United States we started with a population around two hundred and eighty-four million, the number of English speakers as a mother tongue grew but remember also that this balance between American citizens who have English as their mother tongue and American citizens who do not have English as their mother tongue is changing. The estimated population of the USA was 284 million in 2001, of whom about 240 million spoke English as a mother tongue. 284 against 240 million, it’s a minority but things are changing rapidly in the States and especially in some states in the United States. The other mother tongue that is prevalence in the States now is Spanish, another imperial language in a way. In 1952 when Queen Elizabeth started to reign, from that moment on things in the population has changed a lot, because there has been a growth everywhere, people didn’t die that much anymore, there was the economic boom, vaccines, new medicines, so population grew everywhere and the growth of population in places such as Britain, The States, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand etc. also had implications for the growth of the number of mother tongue speakers of English. We need to take that into consideration. What about English as a second language? English as a ‘second’ language
We said it is the second circle. Who stays in this second circle? In this circle there are all those countries that have English as the official language or one of the official languages. For example, you have a place like South Africa (the place where Nelson Mandela was born) where English is an official language, not the official language, English is an official language together with eleven other languages. But even so what is important in this case it is the language of the administration, it is mostly the language that you see spoken on tv. It is a language that you are exposed to since a very first years of your life, even if unlike as in Italy. Sometimes English is actually the first language, the official language of the country and you have examples still in the African continent, for example Nigeria or Ghana. In Nigeria and Ghana you only have English as a second language, as an official language, so the signs on the roads are in English etc. The fact that you have English as an official language in places such as Ghana or Nigeria is again part of the colonial past of Great Britain. English language was chosen because others African states were formed with not taking into account the differences between the people who inhabited the land, so you had different nations (if you want to call them like that) that were put together in a state, and for example in Nigeria you have Fulani, Ibo, all these languages that correspond to peoples (popoli) and you can’t really say which one is the prevailing one. So, when they had to choose their official language, paradoxically when they gave independence from the colonizers, and they had to choose what language to put in their constitutions as the official language, they had to choose English because it was equally difficult for everyone. You couldn’t choose among one of the local languages, you had to choose something outside and the easiest, in a way, was the language of the colonizer. We talk about English as a second language for geographical and geopolitical settings in which English is an official language. Many countries in which English is spoken as a second language are countries in Africa for example. To name just two of them we can name Ghana and Nigeria. You have Nigerian English and Ghanian English in these countries. Here English is a second language, it is a language that is used in the courts, it is used in politics, it is used at newspaper, television etc. So, people in Ghana and Nigeria for example they may learn a very first language which could be Hausa or Yoruba for example in Nigeria as a mother tongue when they are very small, but very soon they start to get exposed to the English language. As soon as they live in the house, they start also using English in preschool and school and they find it everywhere in their cities. And this is something that derives from the colonial past of Great Britain. In Accra you will see the people can actually speak English a lot, they use it in everyday conversation, they are fluent, they actually manage to create their own English but If you go in a village in Ghana, you will find that people might only know a couple of words in English, but because they live in the village they won’t have the same competence in the English language as the ones who live in the cities, so this complicates things when we try to count, when we try to say how big this phenomenon is, because you can’t put in the count the all population of Ghana because if they are in the city they may speak English, If they live in the villages probably they don’t. This starts to complicate the estimates. It is something that comes from the colonial past of Great Britain. Once Britain is not the colonizing power anymore, once for example Nigeria and Ghana get their independence from Britain, the state is confronted with making a very hard decision. These countries, these form of colonize, they were created not along national borders. The boarders of these states were chosen and created by the colonial powers. What happened is that people who spoke different languages ended up been citizens of the same country. For example, if you are the newly independent Nigerian state or the Nigerian government you have to decide on an official language your problem is: what am I going to do? Am I going to choose one language among the many languages that people speak in my country? But then If you choose one, you are creating a problem for mother tongue speakers of other languages. And also, any decision in this regard that you can make, can be subverted by all people who speak a minority language put together. So, they have numbers to block any decision on any of the mother tongue languages that people speak. So, English comes in as a third party, and this is why that puts everyone in the same position. And this is why get chosen as an official language in these formers colonize. Indeed, English has a privilege status, it is officially recognized as a language of the country around seventy countries in the world. English has a privilege status in seventy countries around the world. [It is very important that you keep these distinctions in mind: mother tongue speakers are the inner circle, internal circle. Then we have speakers of English as a second language which is an outer circle].
I want to introduce a difference to understand how important a linguistic phenomenon is, or a language is. It’s not the absolute numbers that are important because if you look at the absolute numbers probably mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in the world, point is that you don’t have all these circles for Chinese as you have for English. Chinese…you have a lot of people who speak it, but they are only in China. The point is that English manage to get this status especially thanks to the economic success of the Unite States of America and people around the world speak English and they think they have to learn it. If for English as a second language the issue was the colonial past, for English as a foreign language the issue is another kind of imperialism, even if it’s not something that comes from the will of someone, it’s not programmed to be like that but still it is part, it is the result of another type of prevalence which is economic. Indeed, the number of speakers of English as a foreign language is now growing because of the importance of the United States of America in the global economy. Everyone needs to be able to speak English. For example, Japanese farms set up meetings (business in Arabic peninsula) and they do that in English. None of them has English as a first/as a mother tongue nor as a second language but English is used because it is a valuable tool in order to go on with business and this is because of the predominance of the United States of America in the global economy. “Over two thirds of the world’s scientists write in English. Three quarters of the world’s mail is written in English. Eighty percent of all the information stored in the electronic retrieval systems of the world is stored in English.” English has become important in the global business world and also in other aspects of our lives. Over two thirds of the world scientists write in English. Not just someone who studies English and its aspects. All these people (even for example the academics who deal with Italian literature) write their resources in English, in order to be part of a larger community. Eighty percent of all the information stored in the electronic retrieval systems of the world is stored in English so the globalize world, the advent of the internet is predominantly defined by the English language, and this is why you are in this predicament of having to learn English. CONSEQUENCES What are the consequences of this phenomenon? There are different types of consequences. One of them is that if we put together first (mother tongue) language, second language and foreign language speakers the last date that we have is one billion and a half speakers of English, but again we don’t know what the level of these people is. But still, it is a big number - a billion and a half - it is a big number. But then we know that we are more than six billion people. Who does it mean? It means that only one quarter of the world’s population speaks English. It is a stereotype that “everyone speaks English now”, because even if the number in general is a big number - bigger than the number of any other language - but if you have a group of four people, only one of them speaks English. If you take all the people in the world and you put them together in groups of four you only have one out of four who speaks English. Centre vs. periphery People who had/got an education vs. people who didn’t. Another consequence of this is that the number of courses of English grew very much and sometimes also you have courses that are not as good as they seem. It is problematic sometimes. So, people think they are learning English but sometimes they don’t. This is one bad consequence of this power of the English language. CONSEQUENCES 2 Look at the consequences for people who speak English as a mother tongue. What is the problem for them? The problem for them is that sometimes they hear English spoken very badly and they get offended by this. On one hand they are proud because their language has become a world language but at the same time, they are also worried because what they define as true English is undergoing a prosses of change. Change is a neutral word but for them what we call change is a deterioration, it’s not an evolution for them. The situation we are in now makes British English a minority dialect because British people are not so many, and this is worrying for them. We can also try to imagine other consequences for these spreads of the English language: we can foresee imagine that English will have the same evolution that Latin had. Latin was widespread in all Europe but
then little by little national languages such as French, Italian, Spanish etc. started to develop from Latin and they became mutually unintelligible. French and Italian are too different languages, the same issue for Spanish and Italian. English becomes the basis of different languages just what has happened for Latin. But there are limits to this because when Latin was dismissed and neo-Latin languages start to be used (Italian, Spanish, French for example) the internet was not there. Nowadays we are so exposed to English that irradiates from the two centres which are the two main producers of content that you can find on the internet: the United States of America and Britain. The internet was not there when Latin was undergoing this process. So, it is possible that this is a tendency that will not find the same result as what happened with Latin. There are contrasting pushes into different directions. Finally, another consequence of the widespread and success of the English language is these two types of languages that start to be created and we talk about Pidgins and Creoles. This is an answer to that lack of the common language that we were referring to post-colonial setting. In places, especially in border places - the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe for example - If you don’t have a common language and you need to communicate especially for trade/in order to trade goods you create a language which is limited in its scope, you only have the few words that you need in order to exchange goods, and these languages are called pidgins. These languages are created and used in the basis of the colonial language and then some insurgence from the local languages for example, that’s why we talk about pidgin English, pidgin French, pidgin Spanish. There are different pidgins around the world. But most of the times these pidgins have a very limited life, they don’t last much, they don’t have a long life because at some point a new language is created and what was the pidgin becomes a creoles and becomes something different, a language used in many different aspects of life for example, a language that is used, is taught to children and so it becomes their mother tongue. But sometimes creoles just disappear because trade between these two parts, these two nations does not go on, so pidgins are created and die very rapidly. We have two varieties of pidgin Englishes, one is the Atlantic one, so we referred to them with the name of the Oceans in which they are placed. The Atlantic variety is the variety that touches the two sides of the Atlantic (West Africa, where the slave trade flourished) and the other side of the Atlantic (The Caribbean Islands, where the slaves used to land). These pidgins are pidgins tied to the slave trade. And then you have the other side, which is the Pacific varieties, the varieties that we can find in the east. You can lose a Pidgin because either it disappears, or it becomes a Creol.
2. GRAMMAR Knowing about language We need to consider, we need to keep in mind that we can know the grammar of the language, we can be able to express meanings trough the grammar of the language, but it is not to take for granted that we also know about language. Knowing a language and knowing about that language are two different issues. And this is why we are looking at the English language as an object. But before we go on with this discussion, I want to give you some extracts, some phrases, some words that describe the relationship of mother tongue speakers with their grammar, with the grammar of their language. These are closes and concepts that were expressed by British people. [The public that David Crystal had in mind was a public of someone who knew the grammar but didn’t know about the grammar. This is important to keep in mind]. There are different perceptions of the grammar of the English language depending on whether you are a mother tongue speaker or a learner of English as a second or foreign language. IDEAS ABOUT GRAMMAR (MOTHER TONGUE SPEAKERS) There are some ideas about grammar presented by mother tongue speakers. Let’s see how British people perceive their own grammar, the grammar of their language. What do they (mother tongue speakers) say? They say, for example, they advertise English courses with these words: BASIC ENGLISH COURSE
eighteenth century) and what did these grammars do? They looked at the English language through the lens of Latin because Latin was The Language, the Language for excellence. They looked at the English language which is a more analytical language trough the lenses of a synthetic language such as Latin. So, because there was a limited number of word endings (suffissi) that meant, for them, that English didn’t have much grammar because they thought that word endings and grammar were the same thing. Another stereotype that was created in those years and it was created because people looked at English with the lenses of Latin was that everything seemed irregular in the grammar of the English language. This is the issue. I used it (a video) in order to explain the difference between an analytic language and a synthetic language. Languages can be classified in analytic or synthetic. English has been a synthetic language for some time and then it became more analytic. The moment people started to look at English they looked at a language through the synthetic lens, through the lens of a synthetic language. The lens through which the English grammar was looked at was that of a very synthetic language such as Latin. Where do we put present day English? English has mood in the continuum from the days of old English where it was more a synthetic fusional language up to become more and more analytical with the passing of time and this is why it’s important to look at how the history of the language evolved, because you can see how this process were took place. English language has both analytic and synthetic aspects. One of the problems and one of the commonsensical ideas that we have about English language in particular, is that in order to speak you don’t need grammar, so you can be fluent speakers of English without knowing grammar. And as most commonsensical ideas about things this is a wrong idea and this idea was based on another wrong perception that is that grammar is only made by inflections, word endings. So, because in English you don’t have so many word endings it means it doesn’t have grammar. The reason why people have this idea about the grammar of the English language is that they look at English through the wrong lenses. England is one of the nations in the island of Great Britain (England, Wales, and Scotland). Great Britin is the great isle. When we talk about the UK (United Kingdom) – the political entity - we talk about Great Britain and Northern Ireland, so another island that also belongs to the reign of Queen Elizabeth the Second. When you talk about England you’re not talking about the country, you are talking about one of the nations that inhabit the country, England is just one part of Great Britain. When you refer to England you are referring to the central southern part of the big Isle, but Great Britain is made up by other nations. In the triangle we see the flag of England because we are talking about the English language. Why is the flag placed here? Because we made a distinction: the way in which people looked at the English language was based on an idea of a synthetic language, indeed it was based on the idea of Latin, on the structure of Latin (we see the flag of the Vatican State). We have two big families of languages that there are in the world: analytic languages and synthetic languages. Analytic languages are those languages (in slide you have Vietnam and mandarin Chinese as examples) in which you can’t divide the words, it’s very difficult to divide the words, each word is a unity, so you cannot divide it into morphs or morphemes. Each word is self-standing, and you can’t really add bits and pieces to the words to make them different. You have all the words, separated words, that give you that information, or, if you want to make a plural, for example ‘chirurghi’ ‘chirurghe’, you can do that in Italian, but in order to make the plural in other languages that are analytic you have to add a word before or after the noun; so, this is the idea of an analytic language. Synthetic languages are languages like Italian that you add suffixes and prefixes, something before and something after the word and you can change its meaning. English is more analytic than synthetic, we are allowed to say this simply because this is a continuum, it’s not an either-or choice, it’s not like either you are an analytic language or you are a synthetic language, there is a continuum, there is a climb, so you have one line and along this line you can have different degrees of analyticity and syntheticity. There are aspects of the English language that fall into the category of synthetic and others that fall into the category of analytic, but you can say that English is more analytic than Latin or German, or French, or Italian.
There is a distinction among synthetic languages between agglutinating and fusional. In agglutinating languages each little piece that you can add to a word has a distinct meaning, you can’t change it, it has that meaning and only that. In fusional languages the same word ending for example can have different functions and give different meanings to the word to which it has been added. FUSIONAL ASPECTS OF ENGLISH English language has both analytic and synthetic aspects. Let’s look at the fusional elements, the fusional aspects that we can find in the English language, the aspects that make it more similar to Latin, German, Italian also. We have some endings. And we put English on the fusional side because some of these endings that you can add have different meanings. We have the letter “ s ” which has many functions, it has more uses, it is used to do many things, it is used to create the plural, and this is something that came from French, it is used to create the genitive so to attribute a possession and it is also used in verbs for the third person singular. We have “ ed ” that is an ending that is used in English to create the past tense and the past participle. We have “ ing ” that is something that we used in verbs to express duration. We have “ n’t ” that is a word ending and is used to deny something, to create a negative. We have “ er ” is used to create a comparative. We have “ est ” that is used to create a superlative. English is synthetic and fusional; it has aspects that put it in the group of synthetic and fusional languages. ANALYTIC ASPECTS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE There are also analytic aspects of the English language. What are the analytics aspects of English? Such aspects are the ones that mostly work with the word order. For example, a representation of reality depends on where I put the words (word position in the clause): Dog bites postman vs. Postman bites dog. There is a difference. Postman and dog, I am describing something different, an event that is very different. If I say that dog bites postman, I am saying that it is the postman who suffers. If I say “postman bites dog” I am saying that is the dog who suffers. What is important to remember is that depending on the order in which I put the elements I am describing an event which is very different. In languages that are more analytic than synthetic, word order is important because it tells us what exactly happens. There is a difference in the piece of reality that I am trying to describe, it’s different who does what to whom, in this case. In Latin the order in which the words appear is not that important because whether it is the postman that does the action of biting or it is the dog, what we know is that at the end of the word for dog, we will have a final, we will have a word ending that tells us whether the dog is the subject or the object of the action of biting. And it was true for Old English. It worked also for Old English. Modern day English, current English doesn’t do that anymore, but in Old English you could have any order because you knew who was biting and who got bitten depending on the word endings that you would find. We see a very important distinction that happens through the use of/ using word order: They are here vs. Are they here? We can change the type of clause that we have depending on the order in which we present an element in English. Word order is there also to help us distinguish between a statement (a description of reality) and a question. You all know that If I say “They are here” (If I put the subject before the verb) I’m making a statement, I am saying that something is true in a way. If I put the verb or the auxiliary before the subject, I’m not making a statement, I’m asking a question. I’m changing the type of clause, so word order is important for this. Remember what the foreign learners said “Oh, these tiny changes in word order make all the difference!”. They make all the difference because they change a statement into a question for example. The order/ word order makes all the differences. Word order is also important when you try to give a clear idea of what happened: Only I kissed Joan vs. I only kissed Joan. We have a difference in the event that is described. Because If I say “Only I kissed Joan” it means that among all the people who were at the party the only one who gave a kiss to Joan was me, myself (the
The point is that when we write we have the possibility to plan what we are going to write, to go back, to change things etcetera. In writing we have the opportunity to plan and review and so the grammar that we use is the same grammar but used in a different way, in a more precise way if you wish. When we write we have all the time and all the possibilities to think twice what we are going to write, we can choose a word carefully and we can go back and forth, we can also plan it in advance. When we speak, on the contrary, we don’t really have time to plan. In speech there is no time to plan and revise, but one can correct oneself en route if one perceives the risk of misunderstandings. When we talk, we do not have time to plan or we might have planned what we want to say but at the same time things change while I speak, things change in the course of the dialogue. I can change what I am saying while I said because I can see the reaction of the people who are listening to me, so I can avoid misunderstandings. The grammar is the same for written and spoken but we use different tools when we are speaking and when we are writing. This is demonstrated by this text that you can see here (slide): The first one on white background is not a written text, it is the representation in writing of an oral text, something that a person said. It is a representation of a spoken message written down. This is an attempt to put spoken language into written form. The slashes mean a break in rhythm, the rhythm changes here. And the hyphen means a pose, when the speaker takes a pose, its stops for a moment. I know that I can’t go back, I know that I cannot take my word back, I need to find the right word and because I am improvising in a way – because I’m speaking – I have to think of the right word, and that’s why we have all these poses in a speech. Because we look for the word. This is why we have all these poses in a spoken language. The first thing that we notice is that we have parenthetic phrases, we have situations such as ‘erm’, we have a lot of interjections (erm, I mean, you know), all these are things that you don’t find in written language, let’s say, purely written language. We find these interjections in writing but only when the writer wants to mimic, wants to imitate the oral language. It is only in that situation that we find these interjections. You can call them also parenthetic phrases. And you have more conjunctions that link one clause to the other, because it is all something that comes after the other, you can’t create a complex sentence. Things change while you are speaking, so you change the word. You have many conjunctions because you also need them to think, so you use the conjunctions so that you make up mental space and time in order to think about your words. If you look at the normalized version (written to be written) in the orange background you see punctuation: you see full stops, you see capital letters, and everything is more organized. You have less words, less conjunctions, and it is more precise. Linguists were able to determine that when we write we use forty percent less words than when we speak. Naturally, if you were to speak like that it would be awkward (strano), so you can’t speak like the text in the coloured background. The grammar is the same, but it’s used differently and there are things there are acceptable in spoken language that are not acceptable in written language. When we translate, we need to understand whether the author of the English text that you are trying to translate wants to imitate spoken/oral language and we will translate oral language differently from how we translate spoken language, so we have to keep this in mind. The idea about the difference between the way in which grammar is used in spoken and written language – the case is English, but for all languages there are different uses of the grammar – is that the grammar that we use to make sense is the same. We use the same idea of the order of auxiliary and subject to create a question - the rule is the same - but when we use it in spoken communication, we also have other elements that we can use, for example we have interactions. When we speak, because we are in the moment and we are improvising, we might even change our mind and we can start with a statement (with the subject and then the verb), but we change our mind in the meantime, and we make a question. In the written form we have to go back and change the order. In the spoken language we are allowed to just change the intonation of what we are saying and might become a question. GRAMMAR AND YOU
Children learn languages by imitation but what is good for children is not necessarily good for adults. Adults might need to have grammar rules explained to them, they need to have references, explicitly stated rules that help them for example take comparison with their mother tongue. It might be easier to remember a rule if you compare it with the way/how things are done in Italian. Not only that, but knowing why English is so different from Italian can help you remember how things work in English. You need grammar and some thinking and knowledge about grammar. But also, the history of the language. “From the 1760s grammarians laid down rules which they thought should govern correct grammatical usage. This is the period when the rules were first formulated about such matters as saying I shall rather than I will , avoiding double negatives ( I don’t have no interest in the matter ) […]”. What does it mean? That at some point in the history of the language grammarians started to be prescriptive, they started to prescribe, like a doctor with medicines, what you have to do, but nowadays and what I’m trying to do is to describe the way speakers of the language use the rules of grammar. Nowadays most of grammars take a descriptive position, that’s why sometimes you find things such as ‘grammar in use’, not ‘grammar’ in general, the grammar that is in use, the grammar that people use in order to communicate. Most of the grammars that you will find nowadays are grammars that are not prescriptive but descriptive and this is a big change because it means that we are looking at language as a living thing. Prescriptive grammar is a discipline that provides strict and precise rules on what is correct or incorrect in written and spoken language. This approach to grammar deals with the creation of grammatical rules that can be used to define spoken or written language as grammatically correct or grammatically incorrect. Prescriptive grammar is also called prescriptivism or normative grammar. Descriptive grammar is a branch of grammar that describes how language acts. It deals not only with written language but also with spoken language, thus incorporating those constructions that would never be taken into account/considered by normative grammars. Descriptive grammar focuses on describing how native or non-native speakers use language on a daily basis. Therefore, it includes a set of rules about language based on how it is actually used, not how it should be used. WORDS TO TALK ABOUT GRAMMAR – UNITS OF A SENTENCE – PART OF SPEECH (POS) There are words that you need to learn to be able to talk about language (we are learning about language). While we learn about language, we also learn language. In order to be able to speak about the language we have to use the correct terms of the specialized lexicon, we have to learn some specific vocabulary. We have to be able to give names to things. We need to be able to talk about units of a sentence which we can also call parts of speech. Units of a sentence that are also called parts of speech or POS. What are the units of a sentence? We start from the smallest unit of meaning that we can find in a language. That unit is called a morpheme. Morpheme : the minimal unit of language that has a specific function. The morpheme is the basic unit of meaning in the language. We define a morpheme the basic unit, the minimal unit that has a specific function. What do I mean with that? The letter “p” for example in English is not a morpheme because it doesn’t have a specific function, it doesn’t do anything. But on the opposite the letter “s” is a morpheme, it is a bound morpheme because it can’t live alone but it is a morpheme because it does some work in the sentence, it plays a specific function. What is the function? It makes a singular noun plural for example. It performs a function. The stem or root (radice) of a word is a morpheme. What is a stem? like “man”, it is a free morpheme because it can stand alone. Bound morphemes are the ones that we saw -er for the comparative, -est for the superlative, these are bound morphemes. A bound morpheme cannot stand alone, they don’t have meaning if you leave them alone. We also have words and words are the unite, the combination of one or more morphemes. If we have two or more morphemes we have a word. If we put together two or more morphemes we get a word. And we have different types of words. Words can be – depending on what they do in the sentence – nouns (sostantivi in italian), they can be pronouns (pronomi), they can be verbs etc. We have nouns : words that identify something, but we also have pronouns that are still words but that can substitute, they can stand
From Scotland we have words such as “loch” which means “lake” and “wee” which means “small”. Do we place in the dictionary? Varietà post-coloniali indaba and robot - from South Africa And also because Britain has been an imperial power, a colonial power what do we do with those words that were created in the colonies and that people use in their varieties? For example, you have an Indian English, you have a South African English, and you also have different words. We can have words such “indaba” which means a “meeting” or “robot” from South Africa. “Robot” is an important word, it means “traffic light” (semaforo), in South Africa is called “robot”, so when you go there and you ask for direction and people tell you “Ok, past the first robot, past the second robot” they are not mad, they are talking about traffic lights, so pay attention. And it is just normal, they don’t realise that you don’t know what a robot is, because they are speaking English, the English that is speak in South Africa. The big dictionaries do contemplate the insertion of words that come from different Englishes. Varietà sociali (social varieties) Whose English? Again, whose English depending on social varieties, so social groups, not geographical differences but social varieties. What do we do? The problem with slang words is that sometimes they get very famous for some time and then they just disappear. You have for example a slang that comes from the world of computers such this one High res and a slang that comes from the world of cars High maintenance. They are used in slang to talk about girls. Men use them to talk about girls. And when young boys said that someone is a girl, she is “high res” which is a shorten form of “high resolution” they mean that she’s bright, she is an alert girl (una ragazza sveglia), so it’s a good thing, whereas “high maintenance” is an expression that means that the woman or the girl is a difficult one and also that you have to spend a lot of money on her. “High maintenance” is normally referred to cars (A Ferrari is high maintenance, because in order to keep it going you have to spend a lot of money), if you applied to a woman it means for example that this woman wants to go to an expensive restaurant or that she wants expensive gifts. You have social varieties that are tied to the field of work so there are some words that coming to the English into the general language from professional practices, but also the opposite, so if you read “ sympathetic ” just in isolation it means “empathetic” someone who feels other people feelings, who is open to sympathises with other people. But sympathetic in the specialized language of psychology for example refers to one specific nerve, the sympathetic nerve. There is an exchange between specialized language and general language. What do we do with Acronyms and Initialisms? The difference is that Acronyms can be read as they are, so you read PIN - ROM – NASA , whereas initialisms you read them BBC , you read each letter, you don’t read it as a word, you read each letter, URL, DVD. What do we do with these? Do we insert the first word, do we open the Acronym, or do we just create entries for this? That’s also a problem and a difference that will change the number of words that we have in a dictionary. I don't know whether "high res" and "high maintenance" are still in use when I presented them to you. Clearly with slang that is something that can happen quite frequently and paper dictionaries have a problem keeping up with the changes, so it's not only that you add things to dictionaries, sometimes you also have to take the things out. Adding words If we have to update a dictionary it means that we can add new words to any language and also to the English language. There are ways in which we can do it, there are mechanisms that we use in order to add new words to the English language. If we want to add words we have as a first possibility conversion which means to change the part of speech. What do we mean when we say conversion? We can change – without changing anything else – we can use a noun as a verb, or we can use an adjective as a noun. Again, we can use a noun as an adjective and so on. These are all the parts of speech. And we can change a word from using it as a preposition to using it as a verb. Why can we do this? The reason behind this possibility of using conversion as a tool to enlarge the vocabulary of the English language is because of the analytic aspects of the English language. Analytic aspects are the ones that make word order and source of meaning in the sentence.
From noun to verb: (To)Tape; (to) Butter. The reason why we understand that tape or butter are used as verbs and not as nouns (remember that the shape of the word is the same), you can say it be used as verb because of the position in the sentence, it’s not “Take the butter” but “Butter the bread”, it comes before, is a different part of the sentence, but also because it takes the “s” of the third person or because it takes the “ed” of the past “Buttered” or “Taped” so you understand that this which started as a noun is been used as a verb so you can say that because of the position in the sentence and because of its behaviour. From adjective to noun: They are regulars. We can find the same mechanisms also when we transform the words which started as adjectives and become nouns. For example, “They are regulars”, “regulars” means “regular customers” so someone who goes to a pub often, every evening after work, he or she is a regular. And you can say that “regulars” has been used as a noun and not as an adjective not only again for its position in the sentence but also because you have the “s” of the plural that you can’t have in an adjective. The adjective does not take the plural “s”, if I see “regulars” it means it is a noun but also because of the word order. From noun to adjective: Paper lamp. This issue of the word order and of the analytic aspect of the English language is even more visible when we change a word from noun to adjective. Paper is a noun, it means paper but if I put it before another noun, it becomes an adjective, an adjective that normally get translated in Italian with the proposition “di”. Paper lam = lampada di carta. Most of the times when you have nouns used as adjectives the translation in Italian tends to be noun di qualcosa. From preposition to verb. And finally, you can make prepositions work as verbs and this is an example: “To down tools”. “down” is a preposition but here it is used as a verb. “Amazon workers in Italy downed tools” (hanno scioperato). From the way in which the clause is organised that “down” is working as a verb. Now in the dictionaries you find “tape” and “butter”, you find them also as verbs because this innovation has been accepted and inserted in the dictionaries but at same point someone will have added them to the dictionary of the English language by operating a conversion. At one point in the history of English, because there are these analytical aspects of the English language that allow us to do so, someone decided to use a noun as a verb. This worked its way into dictionaries. So now you search and find “tape noun” “tape verb” and all these things. There is another way in which we can add new words to the English language: coinage. You start with a proper name (nome proprio) and you get a common name that is called also eponym. For example, Aspirin that doesn’t just mean the Aspirin, it means any painkiller that you can get. Kleenex is started been a brand, but you can ask for a Kleenex to someone on the street, so you are asking for a piece of paper that you can use, and you call it Kleenex even you don’t know what brand you will be given. In Italian we have the same with Scottex. Scottex is a brand but when you have to going do your shopping, to wherever you say “I have to buy Scottex” (Devo comprare lo Scottex), that doesn’t mean that you are going to buy that brand, you are going to buy the thing. It is a way of adding words to the language. Hoover is the vacuum cleaner; it was a brand. Hoover means any vacuum cleaner. So much so that it has also someone converted it. After having coined the word from “hoover”, someone also converted it from noun to verb, because now if you look in the dictionary you will find “hoover” as a verb and people say “I need to hoover my room”, so it’s two processes one out to the other. First it was coined as a noun and then converted into a verb. This is how the language works, how it moves and becomes bigger. Just remember coinage which metaphorically applies what you do with coins (monete) to words, so you can coin coins (you can coin money) and you can coin words. And words are similar to coins in many other ways that we will see. You can coin words and the money and this way of giving birth to both things, this similarity also keeps on in the behaviour.
Babysitter is the word that started in the language and then people created the verb “to babysit”. work related terms (take out suffix and get verb): edit (editor); sculpt (sculptor) Metaphore Another very productive way of creating new words is by using metaphors. Metaphors which mean transferring the meaning from one field to another by looking at similarities between the two semantic fields. For example, mouse. Acronyms are an important way to add new words to the language. Prestito lessicale - Lexical Borrowing Another way of inserting new words in a language is to borrow them. You take it ((the word) in your language but you don’t give it back. Let’s look at lexical borrowing in English. Let us look at lexical borrowing in English. The book calls English a vacuum cleaner, because English takes all the words, let's say its imperial past, and all these explorations mean that English has been able, and this is why it is so great, to expand the vocabulary of the English language, especially since the 15th century]. It works as vacuum cleaner because it imports new words from many languages. These are some examples: Tomato (Nahuatl, via Spanish) Algebra (Arabic) Safari (Swahili) Justice (French) Pork (French) Kingly (anglo-saxon); royal (french); regal (latin) Tomato comes from Nahuatl via Spanish, and it comes together with the thing, together with the fruit or the vegetable (some people in Britain call tomato fruit). It comes with the object because the object didn’t exist. Tomatoes did not exist; they were imported from the Americas. So, the moment in which you have this new thing, and you don’t know how to call it, one of the possibilities that a language has is to import the word/the name together with the object, so that’s one way, and the same is true for algebra which is not mathematics, it is a particular side of mathematics that was imported from Arabic because it was Arab scholars developed it/ it was Arab scholars who developed it. When you import a word and you are not importing it because you don’t have it, because you don’t have the object, you give it a different meaning. Safari in Swahili which is a language of Southern Africa means trip (viaggio), but British people in English had word to talk about a trip clearly, they only imported it with the specific meaning of a trip into the wild to look at animals in Africa specially. They imported it with a slyly different meaning. “Justice” came from French and the word for justice that existed in the English language when “justice” was imported disappeared, this is one possibility. The word for “people” in Old English was “leod”, people was imported from French and “leod” just disappeared. “Pork” comes from French. “Pork” only refers to the meat, what you eat, “pig” is the live animal. “Pork” comes from French and stayed in one part/in one semantic field and “pig” that was Old English stayed in another semantic field and they live together, and they refer to two different things. A third possibility that happens when you import words is for example: Kingly, royal, and regal. They all have the same meaning. They refer to the same thing, it’s not like pork and pig, the thing that they refer to is the same, the only difference that we have is a difference in register, in the sense that the anglo-saxon word (kingly) is used in more everyday speech; the originally French word (royal) is used in the legal sphere most of the times, you are someone who has an higher culture if you use royal; regal (latin) is even more prestigious and it can be used for example in literature mostly. They stay all together, they mean the same thing, it is register (where you use it) that makes the difference. There is this difference when you borrow words. You can borrow out of necessity (prestito di necessità) because the thing is new and you don’t have the word for it, or you can borrow because of prestige (prestito di prestigio), so the word that you import is more elegant or you like it more and it gives another sense to what you’re saying even if you have if you have the word and that is a prestige borrowing.
You can have these three different outcomes when you borrow: either the preexisting word disappear, or the preexisting word exists with a different meaning in the language (they coexist together but with different denotations) or, last possibility, is that the words coexist but it is the register that changes, they mean the same thing but the register changes, the context in which you can use that word changes.
