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SECONDO SEMESTRE – LINGUISTICA INGLESE
What kind of language is PDE (Present Day English)? It is the latest record stage in the english history. It has a POOR GRAMMAR? English has its own grammar, which is not simple as many people think. It has a poor inflectional grammar/morphology , since English tends to realize its grammatical categories in ways different from other languages. English is a PREDOMINANTLY SYNTHETIC LANGUAGE: “Predominantly” does not mean “exclusively” or “solely”. Most of its grammatical and inflectional notions are expressed by means of word order and periphrasis, the remaining part by means of inflection. Language can be classified according to two main principles:
- TYPOLOGICALLY = classification on the basis of shared syntactical and morphological features; there is no reference to the history of the language. According to this criteria, we distinguish:
- SYNTHETIC (INFLECTED) = the language combines multiple concepts into a single word ; this happens by means of grammatical and syntactic relationships realized trough inflection and affixes. Examples of synthetic languages are Latin, German ...
- ANALYTIC = the language breaks up concepts into separate words by means of word order and function words. They rely very little or do not rely on inflection at all. An example is English.
- GENEALOGICALLY = classification according to the origin and the genetic relatedness. Languages are linked by bonds similar to those bonding members of the same family. The reason why English is predominantly analytic, with some traces of inflection, is closely linked to its history. It is the result of factors which have to do with the internal evolution of the language, but also with external events and contaminations with other languages. For instance:
- the use of do/does and did in questions is an influence of the Celtic language
- the use of continuous forms is a trace of the Latin influence
- the influence of Vikings in English can be seen in the loss of the morpheme -en at the end of verbs, whereas German maintains it (to bring - zu bringer). OE (Old English, up to the 11th century) was a highly inflected language, while PDE (Present Day English) is predominantly analytic with traces of inflection.
GENETIC RELATEDNESS/RELATIONSHIP
When we classify languages according to the historical classification, we consider them as family members who descend from a common linguistic ancestor → they share some features. Therefore we talk about parental language, daughter language, sister language, which together belong to a specific language family. So we can distinguish between:
- GERMANIC = English, Icelandic, German, Austrian, Norwegian, Swedish. These are all sisters language, in the sense that they show their descent from a common
language (German).
- ROMANCE = Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian. The Indo-European language family is the biggest ever studied. In this family we can identify many subfamilies (ex. Celtic, Germanic, Romance etc..). English belongs to the Germanic language family (like German, Swedish and so on).
THE GERMANIC FAMILY
This family can be divided in 3 branches:
- North Germanic , in north-European countries: Danish, Iceland, Swedish …
- East Germanic , with Gothic (dead language)
- West Germanic , divided in:
- High German, with Modern High German and Yiddish
- Low German, with Dutch, Afrikaans, Modern Low German and English There are general characteristics that English shares with every language of the Germanic family, while there are only some characteristics that it shares with the group in which it belongs. In terms of its origins, English is a Germanic language that shares plenty of features with other languages. English has a fixed word order, because if you reverse the elements of a sentence, it doesn’t make sense anymore. Instead, German can. In this case, English is more analytic than German. So, even though they descend from the same family, German has maintained its original Germanic features more than English. This also happens because English has been influenced strongly by Romance languages and other varieties.
COMMON FEATURES OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES
PHONETIC FEATURES
Sound correspondences: in old English every letter was pronounced, but after many processes many consonants aren’t pronounced in PDE. Anyways, you can see many similarities in the transcription of words of PDE and PDG. Moreover, despite the spelling,
GENDER
- PERSONAL PRONOUNS: only 3rd^ pers. sing
- NOUNS: only received natural gender VERB TO BE:
- Past tense: singulas vs plural is maintained
- Present tense: 1 st , 2 nd , 3 rd person singular is maintained OTHER VERBS:
- Present tense: 3 rd person singular only
- Past tense: lost
PHONETIC EVIDENCE
- I-UMLAUT
It is a phonetic process by which the root vowel of a word is affected by a sound -i in the follwing syllable. This is generally the case of singular nouns when they were turned into the plural. This process, after affecting the root vowel, the -i disappeared. Phrases of this process continue in present day english in the plural form of some irregular plural nouns: F oo t / F ee t ; M ou se / M i ce ; G oo se /G ee se … and also in the passage from a nound into a verb: Bl oo d /Bl ee d. The I-UMLAUT, which is also known as I-MUTATION , performs the same function as inflectional endings on just a small group of word-classes in present day english, because the plural form of nouns in present day english can be actually expressed by the only regular form for the plural (-s), but we have got plenty of examples of irregular nouns which are inflected in the plural form by changing the internal vowel. Traces of this process known as I-mutation or I-umlaut continues for example in present day modern german by some words in the plural exibit and diacritic (i due puntini sopra certe vocali) → this means that the vowel which receives this segn it's not pronounced as the same vowel without the sign. The equality of the sign is affected.
- Another phonetic feature, which old and present day english shared and still share with other germanic languages, is the fact that word stress tens to be placed on the root/first syllable of the word → typical characteristic of all germanic languages. English (and old english) has a tendency to place word stress on the very first syllable of the word. This becomes an issue whenever word consists of at least 2 syllables, because the problem is where do I have to place word stress, does it go on the first or on the second syllable. The issue become more complex when the word consists of more than 2 syllable. In english, this phenomena has conseguences that other germanic languages have not: if word stress tends to be place on the very first syllable, the other syllables following the root are always unstressed and weak → this means that the syllable loses its phonetic prominence. According to its grammatical function of the unstressed syllable, it is also weak. (se una sillaba diventa atona/non accentata, anche la funzione grammaticale che svolge si perde e si indebolisce). As a result of this process, the syllables became unstress and weak. That means that in the
case of syllable represented grammatical properties (inflectional endings), word become weak and they were progressively lost. Even though old english used to be an highly inflected language, the tendency of germanic languages and of english to place word stress on the very first syllable of a multi-syllabic word has led to the loss inflectional endings.
GRAMMATICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL EVIDENCE
- Present day english relies on a verb system which consists of irregular and regular verbs. They are a continuation of weak and strong verb :
- modern irregular verbs are the continuation of strong verbs of the old english
- modern regular verbs are the continuation of weak verbs of the old english This is a feature that english shares with many germanic languages. In old english and in all germanic languages, strong verbs were subdivided in 7 classes. On the other hand, in present day english we have no more to classifie iiregular verbs into classes → we say simply that the verb is irregular. In modern german, on the contrary, there is still the division into classes of irregular verbs.
- In present day english as in most modern germanic languages, weak verbs or regular verbs are inflected in the past tense by simply added a dental suffix (-d or -ed) and whose pronunciation depends on the finals sound of the verbs to which this dental suffix is added. E.g. play → played pay → payed want → wanted Also in modern german, this feature is still mantained → regular verbs in the past tense add the dental suffix.
- In old germanic languages the c omparative and the superlative degree of adjectives and adverbs is basically formed by adding the inflectional ending -er (for comparative) and -est (for superlative) or by placing an adverb more / most in front of the adjective or the adverb. Modern germanic languages has still the same feature (also english).
- Another feature which english has always shared and still shares with modern germanic languages (in particularly modern german) is the flexibility and resourcefulness of vocabulary → by word formation processes such as compounding and derivation (the addition of prefixes and suffixes), we actually can create new words out of existings ones. ⸨partendo da una parola già presente nel lessico della lingua, ne aggiungiamo un'altra altrettanto esistente e si forma una parola nuova. Oppure da una parola esistente, aggiungiamo prefissi e suffissi e otteniamo una parola nuova, senza dover ricorrere ad altre parole completamente nuove⸩. Sometimes this process leads to the creation of synonyms.
LEXICAL CORRESPONDENCES
→ represent the reliable criteria to talk about genealogical reletiveness, because apart from sharing the same origin, lexical correspondences can also be the result of the borrowing process. (a volte delle corrispondeze lessicali non sono semplicemente perchè due lingue derivano dalla stessa origine, ma possono essere legate al fatto che delle parole possono essere legate alla lingua per prestito)
words that are being contiously coined by word formation processes: by using a word which is already part of the lexicon of the language (it can be either a native or a foreign/borrowed word) and through prefixes or suffixes, new words are created. E.g. grandmother - grandfather → the native words “mother - father” are preceded by “grand” which is a foreigned/borrowed word.
- Phonosymbolism → words which play on the sounds of the language. For examples onomatopoeic words, word replication (flip-flop ; willy-nilly) or word that belong to the language of children. From a lexical point of view, even though english used to be purely germanic language, in the sense that it only consisted of words that english shared with other germanic languages by simply sharing a common linguistic ancestor, present day english vocabulary is a melting pot of costribution of a variety of foreign languages → it is HYBRID. So the anglosaxon layer represents the basic vocabulary of the language, it is the language used in ordinary interactions. (The native layer è anche chiamato basic vocabulary. D essere una lingua puramente germanica che conteneva elementi germanici uguali alle altre lingue, l'inglese moderno è ibrido dal punto di vista lessicale, perchè nel corso della sua storia ha assimilato moltissimi elementi stranieri dalle varie lingue e culture con le quali è entrata in contatto). According to the lexicoghraphers of the Oxford English Dictionary, around 7.000 new english words surface annually and most of these words are the results either of borrowing or of one of the several word-formation processes which are still productive in the present day english.
BASIC VOCABULARY
When we talk about the basic vocabulary of the language and native words that represented the basic vocabolary of present day english, we are talking about words which shows some resistance to borrowability → ordinary words used in ordinary interactions which exhibites a semnatic stability: likely to be replaced by other words as a language evolves. Leipzig-Jakarta list of Basic Vocabulary : it is used to investigate and find out which words and semantic notions are covered in present day english by the basic vocabulary. This is a list of the basic vocabulary of 41 languages worldwide and provides an overview of the words which are covered by the basic vocabulary.
Examples of borrowing in the vocabulary of PDE
Borrowed words from foreign languages:
- supermarket - ocean nibbles
- they - them Borrowed words from foreign languages:
- Minster - turned
- silence - very
- front - café
- irritated Borrowed words from foreign languages:
- switch - invariably - performance - though
- radio - transports - recording - doubtless
- supper - concert - casts
- catch - evocative - because
- symphony - power /powerful - accident
- music - suppose - induced
When we think of borrowing, it is lexical borrowing that immediately comes to our mind → the vocabulary of the language is the area which is most likely to be affected by borrowing. However, PDE also exhibits traces of borrowing of spelling conventions / graphemes → sometimes PDE exhibits insensations of graphemes and spelling conventions, which have been borrowed from foreign languages. E.g. <-ch-> <-ie-> <-c-> for /s/ ... Morphology There are some prefixes and suffixes in present day english which have been borrowed from foreign languages. E.g. -ment from french. Syntax The use of auxiliaries do and does in questions and in negative sentences is very likely to be a result of cheltic influence of the english language. The use of continuous/progressive tenses: for some scholars these uses are the result of cheltic influence, for other these uses are the result of the latin influence in english. → in every case is the result of borrowing! The use of -s for the present tense of the third person singular verbs is a result of Scandinavian influence on english because the inflectional ending in OE was -f. LEXICAL BORROWING → comes from different forms :
- Loan words : words borrowed from foreign language both in their form and in their meaning. Sometimes borrowed only in their form, although the meaning is still present in the language. E.g. Weekend – fine settimana
- Loan translations
- Semantic loans LOAN WORDS A word in a donor language has a meaning and a form and it is simply borrowed by the receiving language, where this word can undergo (sottoporsi) several staps of adaptation to phonological, orthographical and grammatical rules of the receiving language. DONOR LANGUAGE (A) RECEVEING / BORROWING LANGUAGE (B) Word (form + meaning) Process of adaptation This means that loan words exhibit in the borrowing language varying degrees of adaptation : there are some words which don't exhibit any adaptation at all, other words which exhibit degrees and certain forms of adaptation. This happen because it depends on the contexts. In formal context, borrowed words may not exhibit adaptation to receiving language because of the prestige of the donor language. In more specialized context (scientific or technology) the notion expressed and convened by Only the meaning of a foreign word is replicated in the receveing language
the loan word is so specific that the foreign word is maintained without any form of adaptation. Ex. flirt → flirtare ; scan → scannerizzare they add the ending -are typical of the italian language (adaptation). Also because of globalization. Another reason is TIME : it is the extent of which a word as a process of adaptation depends on when the word was borrowed. That means that the old word has been adapted in the receiving language. Church vs archive → they exhibit the same spelling (ch), but they have different origins and they entered into the language in different stages through the recorded history of the language:
- “church” entered into the language very early. English borrowed it from greek/latin when the germanic moved from the continent and settled on the British aisles. In greek/latin, it was “chiriche” → in english under a process named palatalisation, the ch sound (suono duro) became ch (ordinary sound in english).
- “archive” (suono duro) entered into the language more recent - 17th-18th^ century when the process of palatalisation was concluded around the 10th^ century. This word doesn't exhibit the process of adaptation. These examples represent instantiations of a borrowing process, known as LOAN TRASNLATION (translation of a loan word by resulting lexical units of the receiving language) → translates compositional elements of a word in A using words of B. SEMANTIC LOANS: is a process where the receiving language replicates one of the several meanings of a word in the foreign language and adds this meaning to a word which already possesses some of the meaning of the foreign word. Ex. a word in a donor language has a meaning and has the same meaning with a word in the receiving language → we have two different words in two different language which are the same in meaning. The word in the donor language has an additional meaning → by the semantic transfer the word in the receiving language gets also the second meaning from the donor language. ((Due parole in due lingue diverse hanno lo stesso significato. In una delle due lingue quella parola non ha solo il significato che condivide con l'altra parola, ma ha anche un altro significato. Quindi per mezzo di questo trasferimento semantico, anche la parola
Ex. grandmother – grandfather In the vocabulary of PDE, there are LEXICAL DOUBLETS and LEXICAL TRIPLETS as regards some semantic fields of PDE vocabulary. There are some semantic fields which exhibit synonims (2 or 3) that has more or less the same meaning, but whose origins are different. The semantic fiels which exhibit the existence of lexical doublets and lexical triplets in PDE more or less share the same meaning, but one word has anglo-saxon origin and the other word or words have either french or latin origin. The words of germaic / algo-saxon origin are less formal (low register), while the words of latin / french origin are more formal (high register) → there is a distribution of the interplay between the anglo-saxon and french ones contisted in a distribution of words across the different context. ANGLO-SAXON FRENCH LATIN Guts Courage Clothes Attire Fire Flame Conflagration Holy Sacred Consecrated Kingly Royal Regal The firsts are lexical doublets → 2 synonims The others are lexical triplets → 3 synonims Suffixes that english has borrowed from foreig languages, especialy from French:
- -ess
- -ment
- -age
- -ous
- -ance
- …. Word-formation layer → words which have been created with an english speaker by combining native elements with foreign ones or simply combining foreign elements.
THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH WORDS: MORPHS
We can better makes sense of how word-formation process work in PDE. → explorationists : it is a word used by the american president Bush in one of his public speeches, instead of using “explorers”. Even though this word doesn't sound right, it is basically a word which Bush himself coined and he manage to coined this word using his own language (he play with the language). It can be broken down into its costituent elements: explore – ation – ist – s When we can break down a word into its costituent element, it means that the word is called MULTIMORPHEMIC (or complex word). Each component is a MORPH. So the word “explorationists” is composed of 4 morphs.
Moreover, each component has its own meaning:
- explore : to conduct a systematic search
- -ation : the action or process of something
- -ist : refers to the person who performed an action that is linked to a specific field of experties
- -s : plural number, more than one Morph : each component into which multimorphemic words can be segmented. This is the reason we say that the morph is the smallest unit in morphological structure, because it cannot ben further segmented. Different types of morphs in multimorphemic word according to their:
- Meaning and function they performed → we distinguish:
- Root (radice): is the central element of a multimorphemic word, it is the core meaning of the word. Ex. In “explorationists” the root is “explore”. Most roots in PDE are free morphs.
- Stem (tema)
- Affix (affisso): can be subdivided in before the root: prefixes (un-, dis-, mis- …) after the root: suffixes (-ation, -ist …) and endings (-s, ….) E.g. Plays-played vs player → -s, -ed, -er are all suffixes with the same root, but the function and meaning they have are different. The distinction between the verbs is the tense, the person, but we’re referencing the same type of action. But if we consider player , it refers to the person who performs the action represented by the verb. The morph responsible for this shift in meaning and grammatical property is
- er. Grammatical information (tense, number, degree, case) can only be realized by means of endings. Endings are also called inflectional suffixes. While there are suffixes whose function is to create a new word different from the original (in terms of word class and meaning), these are affixes. Prefixes do not have any inflectional function.
- Distribution within word → on the basis that weather or not they can stand on their own as indipendent words. We distinguish:
- Free morphs – indipendent word on its own (morfi liberi)
- Bound morphs – not indipendent (morfi legati)
In modern English there are some productive inflectional affixes: s for plural number, s for possessive case, -s for present tense 3rd^ person singular, -ed for past tense/participle, ing for present participle, er for comparative degree, est for superlative degree. For example, when a word is borrowed from another language, it will adopt these affixes (a noun will form the plural adding the –s suffix). If they adopt other forms, either they are non English words, or they are in English for a long time and they represent a process no longer working in PDE ( remnant morphs , non-productive). An important notion is the one of morphemes. Some books don’t make a distinction between morphs or morphemes, using exclusively the second label. But it’s incorrect to do so: morphs are the concrete component of a word. The notion of morpheme, instead, is abstract. Morphs can realise lexical information (lexical morphemes) and grammatical information (grammatical morphemes). While grammatical morphemes are a closed set, lexical ones are an open set. GM include grammatical categories motivated by grammar and syntax: number, case, person, tense, aspect, mood, degree, etc. Grammatical morphemes can be realised by free morphs (function words) and by bound morphs (inflectional affixes) Lexical morphemes can be realised by free morphs (content words to which bound morphs are added) and bound morphs (derivational affixes). Those nouns which do not exhibit -s in the plural form, those verbs which do not exhibit -ed in the parst tense/past participle …. → This means that they are not recent additions to the english vocabulary, but they exhibit morphs which are no longer productive in the current stage of the language. Some linguistics call this morphs as NON-PRODUCTIVE MORPHS , others call them REMNANT MORPHS. However, what all this labels share is the fact that they refer to segments which are no longer used (they are no longer productive) whenever comes to inflecting lexemes according to either numbers or tens. DOGS → Productive morphs (-s) FEET FISH Non-productive / remnant morphs
These words are all word-forms of noun inflected in the plural. Worked, caught, cut → these are all word-form of verbs in the past tense WORKED → Productive morphs (-ed) CAUGHT CUT Morphs and morphemes combine with eglish word-form to realise multimophemic word- forms. Sometimes, we can distinguish the inflectional suffixes (the endings) with realise a specific piece of grammatical information from the root. Whereby, the moprh which relises the grammatical information of past tense or plural number can be separate from the root. The inflectional ending has an overt phonetic and orthographic relisation and the grammatical morpheme is relise by a bund-morph. Sometimes this is not possible, for example in “feet” and “caught” or in “fish” and “cut”. COWS → we distinguish two morphs:
{ Cow } + { -s }
SLOWER → there are 2 morphs slow + er It is a bound-morph. “-er” is an inflectional ending and it realises a grammatical information, which is comparative degree. “Slow” is an adjective and realise a lexical information (quality). → In this word there are 2 morphs and 2 morphemes : {SLOW} + {comparative} Each morpheme is realised by a distinct morph. These morphs are simply glued together (incollati insieme), so I can set clear cut bounderings between morphs and morphemes → morphological realisation rule, known as AGGLUTINATIVE RULE. CAUGHT: it is the simple past of the verb “catch” It consists of only one morphs (“caught”), but two morphemes : {CATCH}+ {past tense} → The same morph realises two morphemes at one time Morphemes are realised by morphs which do not remain distinct but are fused together → morphological realisation rule, known as FUSION(AL) RULE : two or more morphemes are fused within the same morph. Non productive / remnant morphs Information of the animal ↓ LEXICAL INFORMATION Information of the plural number ↓ GRAMMATICAL INFORMATION
Es. Men's Morphs: men + -s Morphemes: {MAN} + {pl} + {poss} → “Man” realises the notion of person, plural number, “-s” realises the notion of possession. So, “men's” exhibit the FUSIONAL and the AGGLUTINATIVE RULE
COMPOSITIONALITY within words: it is the fact that we can segment
multimorphemic words into their costituent element and the all meaning is represented by the sum of the meaning of each costituent element. Es. KINGDOMS → KING + -DOM + -S These words exhibit a property of principle, known as COMPOSITIONALITY, but not all lexemes within a language exhibit this principle. Blue berry Black berry Cran berry Rasp berry From a morphological point of view: “CRAN” is a bound morph “RASP” is a bound morph So, they behave like bound morphs, they don't have an isolated meaning, but bound with berry, it helps us to distinguish CRANBERRY and RUSPBERRY from BLUEBERRY and BLACKBERRY. They has something to do with the entity represented by the word in the real world. “Cran” and “Rasp” only occur in these words, so they are UNIQUE MORPHS → they do not occur in other words
To sum up morphemic rules
- Agglutinative: {TALL} + {comp} > taller; also cows, slower
- Fusional: {CATCH/WRITE} + {past tense} > caught/wrote
- Null: {NOUN} + {sing} Zero: {CUT} + {past tense} > cut; also put
- Fusional and agglutinative: men’s; also women’s
ALLOMORPHS
“Allo-” = different, other An allomorph is a variant morph, which realizes a morpheme. It is a predictable phonetic/orthographical realisation of the same morpheme → each of the several morphs that realizes a morpheme. Ex. past simple / past participle are realized by the morph -ed :
[d] [t] [əd]
stabb ed tripp ed hat ed digg ed pluck ed want ed lov ed miss ed mend ed prais ed work ed add ed Plural is realized by the morph -(e)s :
[z] [s] [əz]
bees laps lenses hippos wallets kisses blossoms sticks speeches oars laughs badges beds months bushes → the same morph -e(d) / -(e)s has different pronunciations depending on the phonetic environment (ending consonant) of the verb / noun to which are attached. → phonologically conditioned morph = pronounced in different ways predictable from the phonetic environment ≠ unpredictable phonologically Ox - oxen ➔plural: –en (suffix) Child - children ➔plural: -(r)en suffix + root allomorphy Woman - women ➔plural: -en suffix + root allomorphy Goose - geese, mouse - mice ➔plural: root allomorphy Shelf - shelves ➔plural: -es + root allomorphy (but: proofs) Sheep - sheep ➔plural: ø zero morph Buy - bought, sweep - swept ➔past simple/past participle = dental suffix -t + root allomorphy (vowel sound) Sing - sang - sung ➔past simple + past participle = root allomorphy (no overt suffix)
