Morfologia inglese- teoria
Language change
Language is a system which changes in
• Pronunciation
• Vocabulary
• Grammar
This change occurs in
1. Time (for example from the invention of the social medias, the adjective friend has also become a
verb “to friend. Or new words such as white helmets or Brexit have been recently introduced)
Stages: old English middle English early modern English late modern English PDE (contemporary
English)
2. Place – diatopic variety (the language changes according to where it’s spoken. This change can be
national, regional, urban, new englishes- non native varieties of the English language – substandard
varieties born from code switching or mixing)
3. Register/context (according to who is speaking – social varieties and ethnic varieties or according to
what – professional setting or attitudes
4. Culture (cultural trends/values) socio-cultural backgrounds. Ex WOTY acronym for the word of the
year (new words related to news and culture of the moment – they are chosen by oxford dictionaries
Spin-off terms: terms which are used to reference to activities ex: threefie (3+selfie)
Knowing a word:
• Meaning(s)
•Spelling and pronunciation
• Figurative meaning in the cotext (to which words it’s associated)
• Function (the same word could be an adj/verb ex clean)
Any word has an internal structure that could be
• Simple
•Complex (derived from another word and can be divided)
Words take part into networks of meaning relations (paradigmatic relations) – synonyms – rephrasing means
knowing a word that can substitute the original one – syntactic relation= which words go in the company
with other words
Kachru’s model 1985 – core vocabulary => essential words that are used in a language – words are divided
into groups of frequency of use (frequency bands)
Word list lists of words that learners should possess
GSL = ordinary conversation
Articles are the most used words (in general grammatical words are the most frequent 300 words more or
less)
Wordhood what qualifies a word in English (analytic language)
