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LINGUISTICA INGLESE
2° semestre
English as a Germanic language. Languages can be classified in two different ways:
- Typologically: typological classifications are language features that languages synchronically have in common. There is no reference to languages’ histories. With a typological classification we can distinguish: ➤ Synthetic (or inflectional) languages: grammatical categories and relations and verb inflections are expressed through case markers (inflections or endings) ➤ Analytic languages: grammatical and syntactic relations are expressed through word order and function/grammatical words (e.g. prepositions and auxiliaries)
- Genealogically: genealogical classifications are made in accordance with the origin of languages and their descent from a common linguistic ancestor or parent language —> English belongs to the Germanic family, which is one of the major groups of the Indo- European (IE) linguistic family The Germanic family itself has 3 different subgroups:
- North Germanic (It. Germanico Settentrionale)
- East Germanic (It. Germanico Orientale)
- West Germanic (It. Germanico Occidentale). The Germanic languages in the modern world are as follows:
- North Germanic: Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish;
- East Germanic: Gothic (parished, no longer extant);
- West Germanic: Modern High German, Yiddish, Afrikaans, Dutch/Flemish, English, Frisian. Modern Low German. So English is in the West Germanic subgroup along with several other languages. We have to be careful because “Germanic” doesn’t mean “German”. All Germanic languages have a common linguistic ancestor. The history of the Germanic group begins with the appearance of what is known as the Proto-Germanic (PG) language: PG is the linguistic ancestor of the Germanic group. It is supposed to have split from related Indo-European languages sometime between the 15th and 10th c. B.C. PG is an entirely pre-historical language, which means it was never recorded in written form In the 19th century, it was reconstructed by methods of comparative linguistics from written evidence in descendant languages. What does that mean? It means that linguists theorize the characteristics of PG through comparison of the written and spoken evidence of the modern languages that descended from it. Just like children who inherit features from their parents, so languages that share Germanic parentage have family characteristics. To understand better, we can compare “Good morning” in some of the Germanic languages. There’s the German "Guten Morgen", the Dutch "Goedemorgen", the Swedish "God morgon", and the Danish “Godmorgen”.. Don’t you see a family resemblance? It is believed that at the earliest stages of history PG was fundamentally one language, though dialectally coloured. In its later stages dialectal differences grew, so that towards the beginning of our era Germanic appears divided into dialectical groups and tribal dialects. Dialectal differentiation increases with the migrations and geographical expansion of the Teutons caused by overpopulation, poor agricultural technique and scanty natural resources in the areas of their original settlement.
What sort of linguistic evidence is needed to demonstrate genealogical relatedness and that English belongs to the Germanic family and is related to the other languages in its subfamily? Three types of evidence have traditionally been considered by linguists: sound correspondences, grammatical evidence and basic vocabulary. Of these, basic vocabulary is the least reliable, since contact-induced transfer (such as loanwords and processes of borrowing in general) is robustly attested. So we can say that a language’s genealogy is properly determined by its grammar, including its morphosyntactic system, and patterns of regular sound change. A characteristic of all old Germanic languages was Ablaut. Ablaut is an internal alternation of vowels used to distinguish between forms and categories of words. The Germanic ablaut was consistently used in a variety of contexts: inflecting the past tense and past participle forms of irregular verbs, turning nouns into the plural, the comparative form of adjectives, and coining nouns out of verbs. While traces in Present-Day English (PDE) include:
- the past tense and past participle forms of irregular. verbs (e.g.sing, sang, sung; write, wrote, written);
- irregular plural forms of nouns (e.g. man-men; tooth-teeth, etc.);
- irregular comparative forms of adjectives (e.g. old-elder);
- nouns from verbs (e.g. bear-birth; blood-bleed; etc.) Let’s see some grammar-related concepts and how they changed from Germanic to PDE. The Germanic verb had a well-developed system of categories, including the category of person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and the category of number (singular/plural), both in the present tense and also in the past tense. Also Germanic verb had mood: indicative, imperative, optative. But what remains of this complex system in PDE? These categories are only maintained in the present and past tense forms of the verb TO BE; while in all the other verbs the category of person and number is maintained only in the the 3rd person sing. of present tense. The Germanic nouns had a well-developed case system with 4 cases: nominative (subject), genitive (possessive), dative (indirect object and other cases) and accusative (direct object). What remains of this system in PDE? It is only maintained in:
- personal pronouns (e.g. I-me-my)
- relative pronouns (e.g. who-whom-whose)
Germanic nouns also had the category gender: feminine, masculine and neuter. In PDE it is maintained only in 3rd person sing. form of personal pronoun Germanic adjectives had two types of inflection: weak and strong. This difference is lost in PDE but still exist in German. Now, let’s see some syntax-related concepts, because syntax has robustly changed in PDE, in the sense that the syntactic characteristics that English had during the Old English period are now lost:
- verb second position after time adverbs:
“Today can we little about the future say” —> old English “Today we can say little about the future” —> PDE
- verb final position in main clauses if the auxiliary is in 2nd position, so if it’s after a subject
or a time adverb “We have in Berlin met” —> old English “We have met in Berlin” —> PDE
We can see the usefulness of these criteria in English if we look at problematic examples of word delimitation:
- Supermarket
- Travel agency
- Runner-up
- Forget-me-not
- Noteworthy
- Try out
- Pins and needles
Why are they problematic? According to orthographic criteria, “travel agency”, “try out” “pins and needles” must be considered as multiple words or phrases. The fact that this one is not reliable is particularly evident if you compare “supermarket” with related concepts such as “toys store” or “grocery store” According to semantic criteria, the words in a phrase all appear to be equally unified conceptually and that is not the case. According to phonological criteria, the word “noteworthy” should have only one stress but it has two stresses because each element is stressed. According to the morphological criteria, “forget-me-not” behaves as a single word for possessive (“forget-me-not’s”) and plural (“forget-me-nots”), while “runner-up” behaves as a single word for possessive (“runner-up’s”) but as a phrase for plural (“runners-up”), so it has an internal modification which is not possible by this criteria. So, after this discussion, we can conclude that what qualifies as word in English is a sound- meaning connection, so whenever we discuss new words we basically discuss a sound- meaning connection. When do we have a new word? WOTYs and new words in English. Lexical inventory of English changes from year to year and there are many societies whose main objective is to provide description of how English is used around the world in real time by focusing on how words change over time in different subject areas or different contexts, and one such society is American Dialect Society. In their website they have a section called “Words of the year”, where they select a variety of titles from a list of relatively new words or phrases that had become popular in the past 12 months. We say “relatively new” because these words may not be new but they usually are newly prominent, that means that the words and phrases had attracted a deal of interest around the world, and from these words the American Dialect Society selects the one that had attracted the greatest deal of interest and awards it the title of “word of the year”. According to the American Dialect Society, a WOTY is “a word, or expression, that we can see has attracted a great deal of interest during the year to date. Every year, candidates for Word of the Year are debated and one is eventually chosen that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance”. In 2002 American Dialect Society voted “weapons of mass destruction” as WOTY, but every year beside voting for the WOTY, American Dialect Society also chooses words in a sense than to particular categories. These categories include words that are most likely to succeed, those that are the most useful, the most creative, the most unnecessary, the most inspirational.. for example in 2002 “blog” was chosen as the most likely to succeed, or in 2004 “carb-friendly” was chosen as the most unnecessary.
Who decides which words become popular, which words fall out of fashion, which stay and go? Obviously not the American Dialect Society, because they just observe what happen and not decide what will happen. Most new words are created by some innovative manipulation of already existing words. A problem we face when discussing a word that appears or disappears in a language, is deciding what counts as a genuinely new words. The meaning of a particular word can change gradually over time, until the connection between the original and the modern meaning is so distant that one is justified in saying that it’s not the same word anymore, so we can say that language has a new word but it’s hard to say exactly when a new word occurs. One example in English is represented by the word “bully”, which was used to mean “lover, sweetheart” but gradually came to an opposite meaning: “someone who hurts or frightens somebody smaller or less powerful”. This process took a very long period of time, but the question is: does the language have a new word?. Is “bully” meaning “someone who hurts or frightens somebody smaller or less powerful” a totally new and different word from “bully” meaning “lover, sweetheart” or it’s simply the same word with a changed meaning? We already said that a new word is a new sound-meaning connection, so if a change in meaning is radical enough as in the case of “bully”, it means that an old and familiar sound sequence counts as a new word. The next step is: which strategy do English speakers use to create a new word? New words in English. Folk etymologies, Acronyms and Abbreviations. When we are talking about folk etymologies we are talking about words created by means of folk etymologies, so it’s a deep process called “Folk Etymology”, which is when someone doing their best to make sense of an unfamiliar word/expressions matches it as closely as possible to words already in their vocabulary. Here is an example: there is an expression “waiting with bated breath”, that means “waiting while holding one’s breath”, which uses an old verb “bate” related to “abate” and the whole expression is supposed to connote anticipation or apprehension. Many people now write the expression in this way: “waiting with baited breath”, misinterpreting the unfamiliar verb “bate” as the homophones “bait” —> since bate and bait are homophones, folk etymology “waiting with baited breath” has been created. Some folk etymologies almost completely replaced their original word: a recent example is “straightjacket” and “straight-laced”, both spelled with a “gh”, which replaced “straitjacket” and “strait-laced” —> “strait” means “narrow” and “straight” means “tidy, honest”, but the first one has fallen out of use and the second one is more familiar, they are homophones so the folk etymology has been created. Now let’s talk about acronyms and abbreviations, which are a relatively new source of new words that are becoming increasingly important. Both represents kinds of extreme economizing and they are the initial letters of words in a set phrase and stand for the whole phrase. Some examples: NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), DIY (Do It Yourself), UN (United Nations), AIDS(Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), BBC (British Broadcasters Corporation), PIN (Personal Identification Number). Words created by means of these processes originated in English in the 1800, but these acronyms and abbreviations really took off as new means of word formation only in the second half of the 1900. The whole family of lexemes that consist of a number of first letters, where are included acronyms and abbreviations, is called “initialism”.
nowadays) of “large four-legged wild animal which eats grass and leaves” because the French borrowing “beast” came to be commonly used for the meaning “animal”.
- Amelioration & Pejoration: part of the information connected to a word it’s a note about its register: word can be polite, rude or neutral and suitable for a formal or an informal context. We all know that using a word from a particular register in the wrong context can lead to negative social consequences. But register can change over time and when a word moves from a lower to a higher register it has undergone amelioration (e.g. “nice” used to have a negative meaning of “stupid, simple” while now it’s a positive adjective, or “fond” meant “foolish, crazy” but over time the meaning changed to “dazed with love”, then “in love with” and now it means “affectionate towards”), when it moves from a higher to a lower register and moves downwards, socially or emotionally, it has undergone pejoration (“bully” used to mean “lover, sweetheart” but now it means “abusive person”. It also underwent to a widening process because from “lover” went to “pimp” and then to “abusive person”). Pejoration is particularly revealing about the underlying attitudes of a given culture at a given time. Social linguistics of English have noted that terms that were originally neutral ways of referring to the female equivalents of male roles/entities, acquired a negative tone: mistress vs master / spinster vs bachelor / princess vs prince —> in each case there is at least one use of feminine term that has a negative tone, so the female terms have undergone pejoration. Still though, we haven’t really seen any cases where a word has been created out of nothing because generally people get new words by modifying old words, but there are a few cases of words being made up out of nothing: “kodak” or “google” (actually 10^100 is “googol” and was invented by a mathematician nephew when he was asked what he thought a 10 with 100 zeros should have been called). New words in English via Borrowing. If we adopt the notion of new word as any new sound-meaning connection, we can easily realize why the borrowing process is considered as the primary source of genuinely new words in English. It occurs when a community that speaks one language comes into contact with a community that speaks another language and adopts a word from that community. Depending on the history of a given language, borrowing can be a very important or almost negligible source of new word. It happens that the number of new words introduced to English by borrowing makes the combined number of new words added to English by all the previous methods look truly titchy. Borrowing is always the result of some language contact between two or more languages, so borrowing results in some foreign influence on different aspects of the language Because of this, it is often described as an external cause of lexical innovation. The borrowing process has affected the language at different levels:
- Spelling conventions and graphemes, which now exist in English thanks to the contact with other languages —> for example the graphed “-gm” was introduced with the advent of printing press
- Morphology —> suffixes and prefixes. Here are some examples of foreign affixes: -ess, - ment, -age, -ance, -ous, -(e)ry
- Syntax —> for example the continuous form of verbs has it model on latin
- Vocabulary —> over 120 languages all over the world are recorded as sources of the vocabulary of PDE, they involve the whole history of the language. The borrowing process shows in two main categories of any language:
- Loan words/Loanword/Loan-word = prestiti: a word adopted from one foreign language and incorporated into another language without translation. Loan words can be old, recent
or very recent. Some example of old ones: “city” (which was introduced during the Middle English period via Anglo-Norman and the word used in the Old English was “tūn”), “they”, “take”, “beef” Some examples of more recent ones: “datum/data”, “alcohol”, “Arabic”, “pizza” Some examples of very recent ones: “maquiladora”, “Vuvuzela” Whenever a loan word is borrowed from a foreign language, it goes through two different stages: first of all it’s adopted from the source language, then it’s adapted to the target language at a phonological, orthographic and morphological level. However, some words don’t undergo any adaptation process (e.g. “spaghetti”).
- Loan translation/Shifts/Calques = calchi: a word or a phrase whose meaning is adopted from another language by word-for-word translation into existing words of recipient language Some examples: “forgive” (which is a rendering word-for-word of Latin “perdonare”), “almighty” (which is a rendering word-for-word of Latin “omnipotens”), “holy spirit” (which is a rendering word-for-word of Latin “Spiritus Sanctus”), “it goes without saying” (which is a rendering word-for-word of French “ça va sans dire”). A very reliable source we can use in order to find out wether a word is a loan word or a loan translation is the Oxford English Dictionary. Thanks to the history of language, we know that PDE vocabulary is positioned into two main groups: Germanic and Latinate, the second one is because French and Latin lent the greatest amount of words to English. So it’s clear that the impact that different languages have had on English can be observed in its present day vocabulary, and it’s particularly evident when it comes to kinship terms and lexical doublet/triplets. The basic kinship terms of Anglo-Saxon origin are, for example, “father”, “mother”, “husband”, “wife”, “son”, “daughter", “sister”, “brother”, but other kinship terms that are still used in English are from a different origin, such as French or Latin and they include “aunt”, “uncle”, “niece”, “nephew”, “family”. Apart from these, there are also what are called “hybrid formations”, in the sense that one of the two elements are from Old English and the other one is from a foreign language: “grandmother” (“grand” has Anglo-Saxon origin, “mother” has French origin). “grandfather” (“grand” has Anglo-Saxon origin, “father” has French origin). Lexical doublets and triplets are groups of 2 or 3 words which have a different phonological form, different etymological roots, have entered the language through different routes but they have more or less the same meaning. They has given words the rise to two or three levels of synonymy. Two examples of the two levels of synonymy: “Warranty vs. guarantee”: “warranty” comes from Anglo-Norman “warantie” and was first recorded in English in the 14th century, “guarantee” comes from central French “Garantie” and was first recorded in the 17th century, this is a more recent borrowing than “warrantie”. “Frail vs fragile”: “frail” comes from the old French “fraile” and Latin “fragilis” and entered the English language in the 14th century, “fragile” comes from the 14th century French “fragile” and Latin “fragilis” and entered the English language in the 17th century and so it’s a more recent borrowing. Another examples of borrowings: “beef”/ “cow”, “veal”/“calf”, “mutton”/“sheep”. The underlined words are borrowed from French, while the others have Anglo-Saxon origin. When the underlined words were first introduced into English they had the exact same meaning as the other ones, they were synonyms for different types of animal, but sequently they specialized to refer to the edible flesh of those animals —> In European languages there’s a process which can be widely observed: whenever a language borrows a word
inflectional affixes (also known as endings —> -ing, -ed, -s, -er, -est), enclitics and clitics (contracted auxiliaries and contracted negatives —> ’s, ‘m, ‘re, ‘ve, -vn’t) and bound roots (often foreign borrowings which were free in source language but not in English —> dent- from Latin “dens, dentis”). When it comes to bound morphs, a very important notion is their productivity: they can be productive or non-productive. They are productive if they are still used to either coin new words or to inflect forms: -s, -ed, -ing, -er, -est. Two non-productive morphs are “-hood” and “-ship” and words which contain them are not new. So far we’ve discussed about multi morphemic words which are compositional words, but in English there are several examples of words that are multimorphemic but non-compositional: cranberry, raspberry, blueberry and blackberry —> “berry” seems to be a subpart of them, and if “blue” and “black” could refer to the color of the fruit, we can’t say the same thing about “cran” and “rasp” because they are meaningless morphs, which in linguistics are often called “cran-morphs”. Ironically, marketing companies started using them productively to form juice names: “Cran- tropical” and “Cran-apple”, which indicate a blend of cranberries and other fruits’ juices. At least these companies’ innovation does make the point that “cran” is a morph, although now it’s a more independently meaningful and productive one than it used to be. (to recap: roots > some are free and some are bound, stems > all bound, affixes > all bound
- productive or non-productive) Lexical vs grammatical morphemes; morphemic rules. Each morph realizes a different type of information, which is termed “morpheme”: so when they realize lexical information they are called “lexical morphemes”, when they realize grammatical information they are called “grammatical morphemes”. Grammatical morphemes:
- They represent a closed set since they carry grammatical information
- They represent grammatical categories motivated by grammar/syntax and they are:
- Number (e.g. count nouns, demonstratives, personal/possessive/reflexive pronouns, 3rd person of present tenses, past tense of “to be”)
- Case (nominative, genitive, objective, for personal/interrogative/relative pronouns)
- Person (e.g. personal/possessive/reflexive pronouns, possessive determiners, singular present tense, indicative of verbs)
- Tense
- Aspect
- Mood
- Voice
- Definiteness
- Degree
- Gender: Unlike many inflectional languages where gender is determined by the endings, in English the grammatical distinction of the gender depends on the sex of the object in the real world: this means that English distinguishes feminine, masculine and neutral gender, and gender is expressed by inflections only in personal pronouns and in the 3rd person singular. However, there is nothing in the internal structure of nouns which would indicate that they are masculine or feminine gender, instead gender is shown by the co-occurrence of relevant pronouns, she and he, which go back to the nouns —> gender in English is a covered category Gender in nouns can be expressed also in other ways: derivational suffixes (hero-ine, godd- ess, suffrag-ette), compounds (lady friends, woman doctor, girlfriend, boyfriend,) or separate forms (rooster/chicken, uncle/aunt). As we can see, none of this is systematic.
- Can be free (function words such as and, but, by, in, the, it, me, each, someone..) or bound (inflectional affixes, enclitics and clitics) Lexical morphemes:
- Realize lexical information, so they are used to reference things, qualities, events, actions etc.
- They form a large, open set: nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs
- They can be free (content words, to which bound morphs can be added, such as dog, child, laugh, ear, witness, love etc) or bound (derivational affixes such as -ish, -ly, -able, dis-, mis- etc. and bound roots) Samples sentences:
- “These cows are eating grass” —> there are 2 morphs: “cow”, which references the animal so it realizes a lexical morpheme, and “-s”, which stands for a plural quantity so it realizes a grammatical morpheme.
- “The new laptop is slower than the old one” —> there are 2 morphs: “slow”, which is an adjective that references a quality so it realizes a lexical morpheme, and “-er” which realizes the comparative form of the adjective so it realizes a grammatical morphemes
- “She is taller than me” —> same as “slower” In these sentences we have 2 morphs and 2 morphemes, this means that each morpheme is realized by a distinct morph and morphs are simply glued together by the agglutinative rule
- “She caught a taxi to the station yesterday” —> there’s only 1 morph that realizes 2 different morphemes: “catch”, which is the action, and the past tense. The fact that there is 1 morph and 2 morphemes means that morphs don’t remain distinct and they follow the fusional rule, whenever this happens the morph it’s called “portmanteau morph”. Further examples of English words which display the fusional rule are:
- “we” (1 morph - 3 morphemes: person > 1st, number > plural, case > nominative)
- “him” (1 morph - 4 morphemes: person > 3rd, number > singular, gender > masculine, case
objective),
- “its” (2 morphs - 4 morphemes: person > 3rd, number > singular, gender > neutral, case > possessive)
- “teeth” (1 morph - 2 morphemes: tooth, number > plural)
Whenever there is a change in the vowel or consonant of the root and whenever this change signals some differences in terms of number, for example, this process is called “root allomorphy”. Here are examples of what traditional grammars of English label as irregular past tenses or past participle: Buy > Bought —> the past tense and past participle are realized through the dental suffix -t + root allomorphy Sweep > Swept —> the past tense and past participle are realized through the dental suffix -t
- root allomorphy Sing > Sang/Sung —> the past tense and past participle are realized through root allomorphy Root allomorphy, actually, is no longer productive in PDE and English words which display root allomorphy are linguistic fossils or foreign borrowings. Many irregularities can be better explained from a historical perspective, so comparing Old English with Present Day English. Another type of allomorphy in English is represented by suppletive allomorphs: If we take the adjective “hot” we can say that this is the positive form, “hotter” is the comparative form and “hottest” is the superlative form according to English grammar. But if we take the adjective “good”, we can see that the comparative form is “better” (not “gooder”) and the superlative forme is ”best” (not “goodest”). The same phenomena applies to verbs also: If we take the verb “work”, both the past tense and the past participle forms are “worked”. But if we take “go”, the past tense form is “went” and the past participle form is “gone” (not “goed”). These (good and work) are all examples of suppletive allomorphs, so different ways of different morphs which realize the morpheme of past tense or comparative and superlative forms. Suppletion is a phenomenon which occurs in all European languages with more or less the same concepts/meanings. (“andare” > io vado/ noi andiamo). English is not rich in allomorphy, nevertheless root allomorphy it’s the most common type of allomorphy. We can realize the process which brought about root allomorphy by simply looking at the history of the English language. Word formation: derivation and zero-derivation in English. (we have to do compounding on our own because it occurs in many European languages) Derivation is a process by means of which a new lexeme is created from an existing one, and it is brought about by attaching derivational affixes to root/stem. In English derivational affixes are prefixes or suffixes (infixes are not relevant at all) and they are bound morphs which provide lexical information, they can either be native or foreign (borrowed) and range from being unproductive (preserved in just a few lexemes and are no longer used to create new lexemes: -th, a-, be- en-) to being extensively productive (found in many lexemes and are still used to create new ones: -able, -er, -ist, -ism). Which affix attaches to which root? This is quite arbitrary and unpredictable, it must be stated separately for each root, even though there are some predictable trends. New lexemes which are coined by means of prefixes have undergone a word formation process called “prefixation” = prefix + free morph General remarks regarding prefixes:
- They are class maintaining: they do not affect the part of speech which new lexemes belong to, if the original word is a verb also the new one will be a verb. The only exceptions are “en-“ (enlarge, ensure), “be-“ (befriend, betoken) and “a-“ (abroad) which can change the grammatical category of the new lexeme.
- They systematically affect meaning
- They do not affect orthography
- They do not produce phonological change Prefixes can be subdivided in semantic categories according to the piece of information they add to the root:
- Time and order: pre-, after- post-, ex-
- Numerical valuer: bi-, tri-, multi-
- Place: in-, inter-, trans-, sub-, under-
- Degree: super-, over-, under-
- Privation = reverse of action: a-, up-, un-, counter-
- Negation: un-, anti-
- Size: micro-, mini-
- Pejorative: mal-, mis-, pseudo-, dis
- Attitude: pro-, anti- (antiwar)
- Repetition: re-
- Subordination: vice- There are some prefixes which belong to more than one semantic category at one time and others which belong to more than one part of speech. Many of native prefixes are also independent prepositions and adverbs (over-, under-, out-, in-). New lexemes which are coined by means of suffixes have undergone a word formation process called “suffixation” = free morph + suffix. General remarks about suffixes:
- They are class changing: they affect the grammatical classes which the new lexemes belong to, except for some class maintaining suffixes such as -ess, -let, -hood, -kind, -ship and - ism.
- They affect meaning
- They affect orthography (e.g. deny/denial)
- They produce a phonological change in the root (sometimes words stress is also affected): reduce/reduction, clear/clarity, electric/electricity Suffixes can be subdivided in semantic categories according to the piece of meaning they provide to the root:
- Diminutives: -ling, -let, -y, -ie
- Femmine: -ess, -ette, -rix, -ine
- Abstarct: -ship, -hood, -ism
- Denoting people: -(i)an, -ist, -er
- Meaning “nearly, not exactly”: -ish
- Expressing “resemblance”: -ly, -ish Suffixes can also be subdivided in grammatical categories:
- Nominalizer: -ment, -er, -aion, -al, -ance, -ness, -ity
- Verbalizer: -ize, -ify, -ate, -een,
- Adjectivalizer:y, -ous, -ful, -ive, -able, -ent, -ant
- Adverbalizer: -ward, -ly, -way
So: the process by means of which an existing lexeme is assigned to a new grammatical category without changing anything in terms of its internal structure, in morphology is called zero-derivation, conversion or functional shift. Even if they refer to the same process, they differ from each other in sense of the theoretical frame they rely on: zero-derivation is a derivative process which is brought about by means of a zero-morph, conversion or functional shift is a derivative process through which new lexemes are formed by assigning an existing lexeme to a new class/part of speech without changing its form in any way. Other examples since we saw only noun to verb:
- Wet > To wet = adjective to verb
- To doubt > Doubt = verb to noun
- If/but > the ifs/buts = conjunction to noun
What makes us say that zero-derivation work in the same way as prefixation or suffixation do? We can easily realize how zero-derivation works by simply comparing new lexemes created by means of this process to other lexemes which have the same derivative relationship expressed by an overt morph (which is a morph that have a concrete phonetical and orthographical realization) In each pair of examples there is the same syntactic pattern and the same semantic pattern. Zero-derivation, as we said, is typical of English and is a result of the loss of inflectional endings in Middle English (1100-1500). Recently has become very productive, particularly in advertising and on social media. How do we know which is the original word and which one is the converted? —> problem of directionality. There are 3 different clues we have to focus on in order to find an answer:
- Semantic: according to those who are in favor of this clue, the converted lexeme includes the meaning of the original one, but there are linguists who have criticized this approach and they tried to explain their claim through some examples:
- “To butter” from “butter”, which only means “to smear or spread with butter” according to the semantic clue, but this is not always true: in the sentence “to butter toast with margarine/marmalade”, the verb “to butter” doesn’t include any butter at all.
- “To garage” from “garage”, which only means “to park a vehicle in the garage” according to the semantic clue, but this is not always true: in the sentence “to garage the car in the shed” (shed is a small building which is not especially built for keeping a car) the verb has nothing to do with the original noun from which it comes from.
- Morphological: according to linguistics the converted lexeme generally takes the regular productive inflection of the part of speech it belongs to, so if the original lexeme is a noun, then the converted verb takes the productive inflection of all regular verbs in the past tense and past participle. So if we want to know if “highlight” was originally a verb turned into a noun or vice versa, we can see that both the past tense and the past DERIVATION ZERO-DERIVATION legal ( adj ) > to legal-ize ( v ) = to make something legal clean ( adj ) > to clean ( v ) = to make something clean atom ( n ) > to atom-ize ( v ) = to do something using atoms skype ( n ) > to skype ( v ) = to do something using Skype to bake ( v ) > bake-r ( n ) = somebody who bakes to cook ( v ) > a cook ( n ) = somebody who cooks
participle forms are “highlighted” = inflection of all regular verbs, so the original lexeme was the noun which was converted in a verb, the same happens with “highstick” —> “highsticked” Some linguists say that neither this clue works: “ring” can be either a transitive verb meaning “to provide with a circle” or an intransitive verb meaning “to call”. In the first case the past tense and past participle forms are “ringed” and that means it was a noun converted into a verb. But in the second case, the past tense and past participle forms are “rang” and “rung”, so this means that the verb has not been converted from a noun but it’s an original verb
- Word history: we simply have to look at the history of the word to find out which word comes before the other Further examples of zero-derivation in English:
- Word stress: there is a large set of converted forms in which the zero-definition is realized by a shift in word stress. This happens:
- whenever you turn a phrasal verb into a noun: tàke òver > tàkeover, màke ùp > màkeup
- whenever you turn a 2-syllabe verb into a noun: condùct > cònduct, rebèl > rèbel, permìt > pèrmit, recòrd > rècord
- Commonization: a process whereby an original proper noun (real/fictional person/place) is converted into a common word. (noun/verb/adjective). The largest category is noun > noun: cashmere, china, sandwich, odyssey..
- Secondary shift: a process whereby one subclass lexeme is converted with another within the same word class, like:
- when a mass noun is converted into a count nouns: “the American press” > “how many press were there?” In the second one it means “journalists”.
- when a transitive verb is converted into an intransitive verb with a passive meaning: “she sells second-hand cars” > “this book sells well” in the sense that people buy it regularly/ “the novel has sold a million copies” (=a million copies of the novel have been sold) —> pseudo-transitive verbs Word formation: shortening in English. Shortening is a label which includes 3 words formation processes, they all have in common that the new lexeme is shorter than the original one:
- Back-formation: it’s often defined as a process which gives birth to new words by “mistake”. Let’s see some examples starting from 3 words categories:
- words which end in “or”, “ar” and “er”: editor > to edit, burglar > to burgle, babysitter > babysit, typewriter > to typewrite
- words which end in “ion”: transcription > transcript, television > to televise, orientation > to orientate
- words which end in “y”: greedy > greed, foggy > fog How does back-formation work and how do we know that, for example, it’s “to edit” which comes from “editor” and not the other way round? Backformation is a result of another process known as misparsing, which consists in incorrectly placing word boundaries in a contiguous sequence of letters: in “fatalbert” the correct boundary is between “fat” and “bert”, but on social media we can see “fatal#bert” which is wrong even if “fatal” is an adjective. Misparsing is a learning process which is popular among language learners and children. Misparsing occurs whenever a speaker encounter a word which contains a sound sequence that sound and looks like a derivational suffix, but that is a presumed derivational suffix so it’s a part of the root. What does the speaker do in these cases? He simply strips off the presumed suffix and invents a meaning for the leftover part by
- The most common way is separate forms for different genders, also known as covert category. This can only be applied to nouns. Some examples: uncle/aunt, boy/girl/child, rooster/hen/chicken,
- Suffixation: “feminine suffixes” are used to turn masculine nouns in feminine ones (-ine, -ess > heroine, goddess), “common gender suffixes” are used to coin nouns of common gender from other nouns, verbs or adjectives (-ian, -ist, -er, -ard > librarian, artist, baker, drunkard). This is an overt category.
- Compounding: a common gender word can be turned into feminine gender (woman-, girl-, -woman > woman doctor, girlfriend, chairwoman) or masculine gender (boy-, male-, -man,
boyfriend, male nurse, chairman). This is an overt category
- Inflection: this is the case of pronouns but not all of them. In fact, gender can be expressed by inflection only in the 3rd singular person of personal pronouns (he, she, it). There is no common gender because “it” is neuter, but if we look at the other personal pronouns “I”, “we”, “you” they are common gender; “they” is common gender in sentences like “the people.. they” because it refers to a common gender word, but is neuter in sentences like “the boats.. they” because it refers to a neuter word None of these means is systematic, but there are some recognizable patterns: very often the feminine gender is derived from the masculine (except for widow > widower which is the other way round and waiter > waitress because waiter is common gender) and it is something that often applies to means of expression such as suffixation and compounding. It is also very common for the masculine nouns to double as the common gender form: “dog” it’s not just the masculine form but also the common gender one, while the feminine one is “bitch”. The are 3 exceptions where it’s the feminine form which doubles as common gender form: “cow”, “goose” and “duck”, the respective masculine forms are “bull”, “gander” and “drake”. English grammatical categories: case. Case is particularly interesting in English. It indicates the function of a word or the relationship of 2 or more words to each other in a sentence. The notion of case applies to personal, relative and interrogative pronouns and to nouns. In English there are 5 cases: nominative (it represents the function of subject), genitive (it represents the function of possessor), objective (it represents the function of object), dative, instrumental (the last two represent the function of indirect object and other functions). Case can be expressed by means of:
- Inflection: for what concerns about personal, relative and interrogative pronouns
- nominative case pronouns are: I, we, you, he, she, it, they, who
- genitive case pronouns are: my, mine, our, ours, his, her, hers, its, their, theirs, whose
- objective case pronouns are: me, us, you, him, her, it, them, whom The only exception to the pronouns’ system is the fact that the dative and instrumental cases are not expressed by means of inflection by means of periphrasis. For what concerns the nouns, the genitive case is the only case on English nouns which is expressed by means of inflection (-’s, -‘).
- Periphrasis: dative and instrumental case on English nouns are expressed by periphrasis, in particular with the distinction of prepositions
- Word order: nominative and objective case on English nouns are expressed by word order only. These means of expression are not systematic, in the sense that there are cases which are realized by:
- Mixed forms: sometimes the same function is realized by different cases and means of
expression (e.g. possession can be realized by inflection > BE + mine, yours etc. or by periphrasis > belong(s) + to me, you etc)
- One case: the same case realizes several functions and means of expressions at the same
time, this is the case of the genitive case. The reason why it’s very important to realize which type of genitive is occurring in a sentence is because it enables you to realize wether or not you can express the same functions realized by the genitive either by means of inflection or periphrasis or by both.
- Double genitive: in this inflectional and periphrastic forms co-occur —>
“A friend of mine / hers / Randy’s ” “One of my / Randy’s friends” Generally it has a partitive sense. English grammatical categories: mood. Mood is an indication of the speakers’/writers’ attitude to words what they are talking about, if it’s a fact or a non-fact (=different degrees of reality such as wishes, desires, requests, warnings, prohibitions, commands, predictions..). All these pieces of information are mainly realized by means of verb inflection. In English there are 3 main moods:
- Indicative: a.k.a the “fact mood” —> it’s used to talk about situations speakers and writers consider as facts and to make statements about real world. It covers the standard uses (= non-modal uses) of present and past tenses in English. It can be realized through two types of sentences:
- declarative
- interrogative, which can also be divided into closed (yes/no questions, alternative questions, tag questions) and open (wh-)
- Subjunctive: a.k.a the “thought mood” or “what-if mood” —> it’s used to talk about situations as contrary-to-fact occurrences or hypotheses. Beyond subjunctive, these situations can in English can also be expressed through modality (modal and semi-modal verbs), the modal past and the modal past perfect. Someone distinguishes this mood from the conditional mood but they both deal with hypotheses. In modern English there are 3 types of subjunctive:
- Formulaic subjunctive: typically used in formulas expressing wishes. Positive wishes or blessings are sometimes called “optatives” while negative ones or curses are sometimes called “maledictives” (God save the Queen/God bless America/Satan take your soul)
- Mandative subjunctive: it expresses some sort of obligation, orders or intentions and it typically appears after nouns, verbs and adjectives expressing requests, orders, compulsions and the like. It’s rare in BrE but used quite extensively in AmE (I demand that he be executed/ It is imperative that he show respect)
- “Were” subjunctive: it expresses that the situation is a hypothetical wish, it has the form “were” even with 1st and 3rd person singular subjects (If I were you../If Britney Spears were my girlfriend..)
- Imperative: a.k.a the “will mood” —> it’s used to talk about situations that are desired by the speakers/writers to become true to such a degree that they feel they can order people
