Riassunti delle lezioni e del libro The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Sintesi del corso di Lingua Inglese

Scarica Riassunti delle lezioni e del libro The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! • CHAPTER 8: THE NATURE OF THE LEXICON WHAT IS A LEXEME? • Lexeme is the fundamental unit of the lexicon of a language. It comes from the Greek, "word, speech”. A lexeme is often (but not always) an individual word (e.g. Love) and it may have a number of inflectional forms or grammatical variants(e.g. loved; loving; lover). • A lexeme can be made up of more than one orthographic word. (Ex: phrasal verbs) • Come, coming, and come in are all lexemes. The head words in a dictionary are alle lexemes. Abbreviations Abbreviations are used for linguistic economy and also to convey a sense of social identity. In fact to use an abbreviated form is to be “in the know”, to be part of the social group to which the abbreviation belongs. There are many types of abbreviations. Acronyms: a word formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts (e.g. RADAR – RAdio Detection And Ranging) or major parts of a compound term (e.g. MOTEL – MOTor HoTEL) . 1. Initialisms, also called alphabetisms, are items which are spoken as individual letters such as BBC, DJ, USA and are generally formed from initial letters. PhD (Doctor of Philosophy), for example, uses the first two letters of the word philosophy, and TV take a letter from the middle of the word. 2. Acronyms instead are pronounced as single words such as NATO, UNESCO. They are formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts (e.g. RADAR – RAdio Detection And Ranging) or major parts of a compound term (e.g. MOTEL – MOTor HoTEL) 3. Clipping (clipped word, shortening, and truncation) is the shortening of a longer word, often reducing it to one syllable (e.g. AD instead of Advertisement). There are two chief types: the commoner type in which the first part is kept as in demo, exam, pub) and the other one in which the last part is kept as in bus, plane. Several clipped forms also show adaptation, such as fries (from French fried potatoes), Betty (from Elizabeth), Billy (from William). 4. Blends: a word which is made up of parts of two or more other words (e.g. BRUNCH breakfast + lunch) 5. Latin abbreviations : etc. ; et al. ; etc…. CHAPTER 9: THE SOURCES OF THE LEXICON English have more words than any other language for historical reasons. English was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and German. However, after the Norman Conquest in 1066 it was hugely influenced by Norman French (the language of the ruling class) and by Latin (the language of scholarship and of the Church). FOREIGN BORROWINGS When one language takes lexemes from another, the new items are usually called loan words or borrowings. Whereas the speakers of some language take pains to exclude foreign words from their lexicons, English seems always to have welcomed them. The borrowing began in the fifth and sixth centuries when Germanic invaders settled in Britain, displaced the Celts, and introduced a new language that is the Anglo-Saxon language. It constituted the core of the English vocabulary. Parts of the body (arm, bone, chest, ear, eye, foot, hand, heart), the natural environment (field, hedge, hill, land, meadow, wood), the domestic life (door, floor, home, house), the calendar (day, month, moon, sun, year), animals (cow, dog, fish, goat, hen, sheep, swine), common adjectives(black, dark, good, long, white, wide) and common verbs (become, do, eat, fly, go, help, kiss, live, love, say, see, sell, send, think) have Anglo-Saxon origin. Although the Celts were already resident in Britain when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, there are few obvious traces of their language in English today. Words that survive in modern English include brock (badger), alongside many place names. The Norse invaders settled in Britain (9th century), and they had a great influence on English (e.g. take, they). A good number of sc- or sk- words today are of Scandinavian origin (scathe, scorch, score, scowl, scrape, scrub, skill, skin, skirt, sky). After the Norman Conquest in 1066 the influx of words from the continent of Europe, especially French, doubled the size of the lexicon. By the end of Renaissance, the growth in classically derived vocabulary, especially from Latin, had doubled the source of the lexicon again. A good number of words of business and profession are of French and Latin origin. • Government: parliament, chancellor, government, country, crown • Finance: treasure, wage, poverty • Law: attorney, plaintiff, larceny, fraud, jury, verdict • War: battle, army, castle, tower, siege, banner • Religion: miracle, charity, saint, pardon Exploration, colonization, and overseas trade led to significant change in English and many words were absorbed from all over the world. Examples: Japan: samurai, kimono… Australia: kangaroo, boomerang… (and later) Italy: paparazzo, dolce vita… WORD FORMATION • In linguistics, word formation refers to the ways in which new words are made on the basis of other words. Word-formation can be viewed either diachronically (through different periods in history) or synchronically (at one particular period in time) It is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word's meaning. The major types of word formation are: 1. Abbreviations occurs when a word or phrase is shortened 2. Calque or loan translation occurs when a word or phrase is borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation (e.g. It goes without saying>ça va sans dire ). 3. Morphological derivation: the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix (e.g. unhappy) 4. Compounding: a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. On the surface, there appear to 2. Phonetics 3. Semantics 4. Pragmatics 5. Morphology 6. Syntax Phonology is the study of sound system of languages. While phonology belongs to theoretical linguistics, studies different patterns of sounds in different languages and can study one specific language, phonetics belongs to descriptive linguistics, studies the production, transmission, reception of sound and does not study one particular language. EX: • pèsca /ɛ/ means peach, the fruit • pésca /e/ means finishing, the activity The two symbols have to do with phonetic The abstract entity created by a sound is phonology. It focusses on the mental idea. Semantics is the study of meaning of individual words or sentences. It associated with pragmatics, a branch of Linguistics that studies the phrases and sentences in the actual context of discourse. For example “It's cold here” means “Please, close the window!” or “Lend me your ears” means “Listen to me”. Morphology is the study of the words of Language or deals with the internal structure of words. They’re the smallest independent units of language. Independent means that they do not depend on other words, can be separated from other units, and can change position. Words have internal structure, built of even smaller pieces. SIMPLE WORDS don’t have internal structure (only consist of one morpheme), for example work, build, run, horse. They can’t be split into smaller parts which carry meaning or function. Instead COMPLEX WORDS have internal structure (consist of two or more morphemes) for example worker: affix -er is added to the root work to form a noun; horses (plural marker -s is added). English permits the addition of meaningful dependent elements both before and after the base form: these are called affixes. Affixes which precede the base are prefixes, those which follow it are suffixes. Prefixes have a purely lexical role. Suffixes are of two kinds. Most are pure lexical, their primary function being to change the meaning of the base form. They are called derivational suffixes (-ness, - ship, -able). A few are purely grammatical. For example plural -s, past tense -ed and comparative -er. Elements of this second type, which have no lexical meaning are inflectional suffixes or inflections. CHAPTER 15: WORD CLASSES All words in the English language can be classified as one of the eight different word classes. The eight-word classes are: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and interjections. • A noun is a word whose job is naming, or labelling (people, places, objects, concepts, ideas. . .). The most important division is into proper nouns and common nouns. Common nouns can then be divided into count and noncount types. And both of these can be further divided into concrete and abstract types. • Pronouns are words which stand for a noun, in fact pro in Latin means for. There are many types of pronouns. Personal pronouns express ownership (mine, yours, his) Reflexive pronouns always ending in -self or – selves (myself, yourself, himself) Reciprocal pronouns are used to express a “two ways” relationship (each other, one another) Relative pronouns (who, whom, whose, which, that) Demonstrative pronouns (this/these, that/those) express a contrast between near and distant. Interrogative pronouns are used to ask questions (who, what, why?) Indefinite pronouns express a notion of quantity (anything, anybody) When the gender is unknown/unspecified the right pronoun is their but only in colloquial/informal situation. “Somebody forgets their coat” < singular In formal situation we can use his, the plural form or we can eliminate the pronoun. • The verb is the element which makes everything hold together. “Have you seen my keys?” This example show a main verb (a form of see) accompanied by an auxiliary verb (have). There are stative and action verbs. Stative verbs express states or conditions which are relatively static. They include verbs of perception, cognition, the senses, emotion, and state of being. Action verbs express activities, processes, momentary actions or physical conditions. • Adjectives are words which express some feature or quality of a noun or pronoun. To decide if a word is an adjective, several criteria are available. An adjective can occur immediately before a noun, can occur alone after forms of the verb be, can be immediately preceded by very and other intensifying words and can be compared. Adjectives are the parts of speech that contain the most explicit sentiment that is a subjective information. A sentiment analysis is an analysis of the emotional content of a text. For example nice is a positive adjective, but bad is a negative adjective. • Adverbs give you further details about the action of a word. The usual way to make an adverb is to take an adjective and add -ly to it (quick>quickly), but not always. In fact the adverb of good is well and not goodly. There are adverbs of manner, of place and of time. • Conjunctions are items which join clauses or parts of clauses together. There are two types of conjunctions: coordinating conjunctions that simply join together words, phrases (for, and, nor, but, or, yet so) and subordinating conjunctions that join units which do not have the same grammatical status in the sentence. The typical case is when one clause is subordinated to another as in, We went out when the rain stopped. The main clause We went out is joined to the subordinate clause (the rain stopped) by the conjunction when. • A preposition expresses a relationship of meaning between two parts of a sentence, most often showing how two parts are related in space or time. If you get the preposition wrong, you can completely change the meaning of a given sentence. • Interjections are noises used to express our emotions (surprise, pain, disgust.) and they don't form part of sentence. CHAPTER 16: THE STRUCTURE OF SENTENCES The study of sentence structure is called syntax. Sentences are constructions which can be used on their own, usually have sense and are constructed according to a system of rules and summarized in a grammar. A sentence formed in this way is said to be grammatical. In fact only certain combination of words can be sentences. Regular sentences are often referred to as major sentences, irregular ones as minor sentences. Major sentences are formed using the basic grammatical rules of the language. They are sentences which can be broken down into a specific and predictable pattern of elements, called clauses. Sentences which consist of just one clause are said to be simple sentences. Sentences which consist of more than one clause are multiple sentences. There are two main types of multiple sentences: compound sentences and complex sentences. Compound sentences consist of two or more independent clauses linked by coordination, usually by the coordinating conjunctions, and, or or but. For example: Joe waited for the train, but the train was late. In complex sentences, the clauses are linked by subordination, using such subordinating conjunctions as because, when and since. Here one clause (called subordinate clause) is made dependent upon another ( called main clause). For example: Joe was reading a book because he was waiting for the train. The present grammatical analysis recognizes five types of clause element. • The subject (S) that usually identifies the theme or topic of the clause • The verb (V) • The object (O) that identifies who or what has been directly affected by the action of the verb. • The complement(C) gives further information about another clause element. • The adverbial (A) usually gives further information about the situation, such as the time of an action, its location, or its manner. There are two main types of sentences: • Declarative sentence tells something and ends with a period • Interrogative sentence asks a question and ends with a question mark • Exclamatory sentence shows strong feeling and ends with an exclamation mark • Imperative sentence gives a command and ends with a period or an exclamation mark CHAPTER 17: THE SOUND SYSTEM Phonetics is the study of the way humans make, transmit, and receive speech sounds. It is speak without being interrupted as for example the priest in the church. You can sometimes find stretches of monologue within a dialogue as for example when a friend is telling a joke. Dialogue is an exchange of language between two people. It could be spoken or written dialogue. Conversation is a social interaction where everybody taking part must have a chance to say something. It follows rules of etiquette which depend on social convention. These rules of conversation were first formulated by Paul Grice in 1975 as “Cooperative Principle”. This states that we interpret language on the assumption that a speaker is obeying the four maxims of quality(being true), quantity (being brief), relation (being relevant), manner (being clear). Sociolinguistics studies the correlation between language and social factors. These social factors may be social stratification (status), role, age, sex, ethnicity etc... There are language- based stereotypes. Accents used to express the nature of the characters. Standard American English is the desirable accent of characters who play a positive role in Disney’s animated films. In fact in Aladdin, Jafar, the “Grand Vizier» who play a negative role, has an English accent. Style is a set of linguistic variants with specific social meanings. Linguistic variants are choices made from the repertoire of a language. Social meanings can include group membership, personal attributes, or beliefs. A style is not a fixed attribute of a speaker but belongs to a particular written or spoken situation. Thousands of varieties depend on region, attitude, social group, field of discourse. CHAPTER 20: REGIONAL VARIATION Of all the sociolinguistic and stylistic factors which promote variety in language use, the one which people most enquire about is geographical origin. When people talk about dialects, they mean regional dialects. A regional dialect refers to features of grammar and vocabulary that show a person’s geographical origins in a particular country or locality or city. Some cities has their own dialects. Cockney English refers to the accent and dialect of English traditionally spoken by working-class Londoners. Scouse English (or Liverpool English) is an accent and dialect closely associated with the city of Liverpool. Social dialects or class dialects tell you where the speakers are from socially. Occupational dialects are varieties of the language which tell you the sort of job a person does (speaking or writing like a politician, a priest, or a journalist). Accent is a matter of pronunciation, the part of your voice which tells your listeners which country you come from and how you were educated. Received pronunciation is accent which doesn’t give you any geographical information at all, associated with royalty, government, Oxford, and Cambridge, etc. It is called ‘received’ because it has been passed down by the ‘elite’ groups in Britain. Today “modified RP” is more frequent. Estuary English is spoken by a large and growing number of people in the South of England. They say it will dominate general British pronunciation within 50 years. Some scholars think it doesn’t exist because Estuary English shares many features with Cockney English. CHAPTER 21: SOCIAL VARIATION Age, sex, socio-economic class, and occupation have been shown to be of importance when it comes to explaining the way sounds, construction, and vocabulary vary. STANDARD VS NON-STANDARD ENGLISH NON-STANDARD ENGLISH When people don’t speak or write according to the rules of standard English , they use a non-standard English, even called substandard, a not polite way to talk. Sometimes you can call it even slang. We have different slang words. In American slang “The John «is an informal name for “the toilet”. Instead , British people use “Loo”. It is called Standard English because of language standardization, a process by which conventional forms of a language are established, maintained. Standardization is a natural development or even effort by members of a community. Re-standardization refers to ways in which a language may be reshaped by its speakers and writers, as for example the Estuary English. DOES “STANDARD” MEAN SUPERIOR? Prescriptivism (or purism) is the view that one variety of a language is superior to others. The favoured variety is usually a version of the standard written language. Those who speak and write in this variety are said to be using language “correctly”, those who do not are said to be using it “incorrectly”. The alternative to a prescriptive approach is the descriptive approach. Its aim is to describe and explain the pattern of usage which are found in all varieties of the language, whether they are social prestigious or not. They do not deny the social importance of the standard language, but they do not condemn as ugly, incorrect, or illogical other dialects which do not share the same rules. STYLE When you learn a language, you learn all kinds of styles of speaking and writing. • It’s a process that goes on all your life and it starts at a very early age. We judge styles to be appropriate or inappropriate. We write more carefully when we don’t know the person we’re writing to. We speak more politely when addressing strangers or superiors. GENDER NEUTRAL LANGUAGE In order to minimize assumption about the social gender or biological sex of people referred to in speech or writing, many “male” words have been replaced by neutral items. In certain cases, such as job descriptions, the use of gender-neutral language has become a legal requirement. For example bartender instead of barman or barmaid; firefighter instead of fireman. Although the word man originally referred to both males and females, some feel that it no longer does so unambiguously. Man and men may be replaced by human(s) or people, mankind may be replaced by humankind or humanity. The vocabulary of marital status has also been affected. There was the introduction of Mx, an honorific that does not indicate gender and of Ms as a neutral alternative to Miss or Mrs, which describe woman's marital status differently from Mr. which can be used regardless of marital status. In grammar, the language has been on the lack of a sex- neutral third-person singular pronoun in English, that in informal conversation can be replaced by they or anyone. LANGUAGE AND OCCUPATION Occupation could not exist without language. It has their own linguistic features that are not like regional or class features. They are only in temporary use, they are “part of job”, taken up as we begin work, and put down as we end it. There are different kinds of occupational language. RELIGIOUS ENGLISH is a sacred language, cultivated and used primarily in religious service or for other religious reasons. Early Modern English used in some parts of the Anglican Communion/the Continuing Anglican movement/English- speaking Protestants SCIENTIFIC ENGLISH has some features: long sentences with many clauses; adjectives; passive structures; specialized use of vocabulary/phrases. Scientific communication is not limited to the scientific field as such! LEGAL ENGLISH is used in legal writing and speaking (also known as a sublanguage). Its own linguistic features are consistency, validity, completeness, and soundness, while keeping the benefits of a human-like language (as clear as possible). PLAIN ENGLISH • easy to understand, clear, no overly complex vocabulary, no technical jargon. It could be appropriate to the audience’s educational level and familiarity with the topic. It is used government or business communication. POLITICAL ENGLISH criticised the written English of his time and examines the connection between politics and language. Political language "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind". Orwell encourages concreteness and clarity instead of vagueness, and individuality over political conformity. NEW ENGLISHES News style is the prose style used for news reporting in media such as newspapers, radio, and television. It includes not only vocabulary and sentence structure, but also ways of presenting information, tone and intended audience. The tense used for news style articles is past tense. News writing attempts to answer all the basic questions about any particular event (who, what, when where and why) at the opening of the article. This form of structure is called “inverted pyramid”, to refer to decreasing importance of information in subsequent paragraphs. News stories contain these features: • Timeliness: news like a baked good that is best served fresh. • Proximity: people are interested in homegrown news. • Impact/Consequence: Will the information change our lives? • Novelty/Rarity: Is it an unusual story? • Conflict: "good news is no news.” • Human interest: people are interested in other people. • Prominence: people are interested in famous people. PERSONAL VARIATION Ch. 22 Idiolect is your own personal dialect . You’d be very unlikely to find two people who had exactly the same way of using language even if we're dealing with people of the same country or family. DEVIANCE /ˈdiː.vi.əns/ When a sentence breaks the rules of the English language, we call it deviant. Deviance is quite common in speech (more than writing). The asterisk is conventionally used to symbolize this kind of deviant formation.* PLAYING WITH LANGUAGE mice’. This explains that they have learnt the forms of the irregular noun ‘mice’ (mouse/mice), the verb ‘gave’ (give, gave, given), and the pronoun ‘he’ (personal pronoun). This learning process will continue until early teens. ACTIVE vs PASSIVE structures : Crystal carried out an experiment testing whether children at certain ages used more active or more passive sentences. His study shows that at around 3 years old, none of the children produced a passive sentence. At 7 years, the ability to use passives dramatically increased. CLINICAL LINGUISTICS is the application of linguistic theory to describe, analyze, and treat language disabilities, but also to offer insights to formal linguistic theories. A LANGUAGE DISORDER is an impairment that makes it hard for someone to find the right words and form clear sentences when speaking (= producing), but also makes it difficult to understand what another person says (= receiving), or both. (producing + receiving). There are 3 KINDS of language disorders 1. Receptive language issues: involve difficulty understanding what others are saying. 2. Expressive language issues: involve difficulty expressing thoughts and ideas. 3. Mixed receptive-expressive language issues: both understanding and using spoken language. The disorder can be acquired or developmental 1. Acquired language disorder shows up only after the person has had a neurological illness or injury. 2. Developmental is much more common in children. Children often start speaking later than their peers. • This delay isn’t related to their intelligence level. (Typically average or even above-average intelligence). They usually have problems with receptive and expressive language skills before the age of 4. A language disorder is not the same as a hearing or speech issue. The challenge is mastering and applying the rules of language (like grammar). A treatment is needed (they are not simply “late talkers”). CHAPTER 24: NEW WAYS OF STUDYING ENGLISH According to Sinclair a corpus is «a collection of naturally-occurring language text, chosen to characterize a state or variety of a language”. According to Francis is «a collection of texts assumed to be representative of a given language, dialect, or other subset of a language, to be used for linguistic analysis”. Corpora are large and systematic enterprises: whole texts or whole sections of texts are included, such as conversations, magazines, articles, newspapers, broadcasts, advertisements, and chapters of novels. A general corpus must represent the language as faithfully as possible, within the period of time chosen to study. British National Corpus (BNC) is 100-million-word collection of samples of spoken and written British English, representative of British English “as a whole”. It is designed to be appropriate for a variety of uses lexicography, education, research, commercial applications (computational tools) and balanced with regard to genre, subject matter, and style. (To keep an eye on someone or something means to watch someone or something or stay informed about the person’s behaviour, especially to keep someone out of trouble.) • British National Corpus (BNC, British English) • COCA (American English) • The CORIS corpus (Italian) • Leeds Internet corpora: English, Chinese, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish: • Mannheim corpora (German) • Corpus del Español (Spanish) • CREA (Spanish) Systemic Functional Linguistics (dispensa on your webpage) Translation is a “representation” or “reproduction” of an original text produced in another language. We can analyse translation from two different perspectives: that of a ‘process’, which refers to the activity of turning a source text into a target text in another language, and that of a ‘product’, i.e. the translated text, that can be written or spoken. Translation is an interdiscipline, with a linguistic core. The disciplines with which it is correlated are multiple: philosophy, linguistics, literary studies, cultural studies, language engineering. «Just as a theory of translation without a link to practice is simply an abstraction, so the practice of translation without a theoretical background tends toward a purely subjective exercise» (Manfredi 2011, p.50) SFL as a useful tool in TS. 1. there is an essential interplay between theory and practice; SFL can offer a model for translating language and culture (= text and context). SFL was developed to address the needs of language teaching/learning. According to it language must be seen in (social) context. Language is not good or bad, it is appropriate or inappropriate to the context of use. It is called functional because it considers language to have evolved under the pressure of the particular functions that the language system has to serve. Functions in language are offering, suggesting, advising…/ in the present, future / possibility… Functionalism vs Structuralism (e.g., Chomsky) A “functional” approach to language is more concerned with what an utterance does, while a “structural” approach is concerned with how an utterance is composed (its internal structure). Why “Systemic”? Grammar consists of a set of choices, or “systems”, hence systematic. It focus on meaningful choices in language (e.g., active vs. passive) without needing to think of the particular structure that realises it. LANGUAGE AND ITS CONTEXT In SFL, the appropriateness of linguistic options is conditioned by the current “context of situation «that is the situation in which the event unfolds, at least those parts of the situation which condition that language use. Three strands which influence the way language is used: 1. Field: what is being talked about 2. Tenor: the people involved in the communication and the relationships between them 3. Mode: what part the language is playing in the interaction (e.g., what form does it take - spoken or written). Example: A RECIPE IN A COOKBOOK a) Field: cooking (ingredients and process of preparing food) b) Tenor: expert writer to a learner c) Mode: written, prepared. Text often read as part of process of cooking. Typical fields are science, education, war, medicine, sports. They can be more specific: Science: biology, microbiology… – Education: Language education, English Language… They can be specialised or non-specialised. Specialised vocabulary can be used in other fields but with different meaning in the current field (a “constituent” in politics means member of a political unit, in linguistics a syntactic unit) Tenor: relationship between participants. It includes relations of formality, power, and closeness. Power relations can be unequal: doctor/patient, teacher/student or Equal: friend/friend, student/student Formality: formal/informal Closeness: personal closeness lessens the effect of power roles. Distant/neutral/close (e.g., forms of address) Mode: what part the language is playing in the interaction. His role can be ancillary (as when we talk as we cook together) or central (as in a speech). It can be written vs. spoken, or some mix, ‘written to be spoken’ (e.g., a speech) as in projected channel, spontaneous or prepared. The channel can be uni-directional channel or bidirectional (which means there are both monologue and dialogue). Finally there may be use of multimedia (blackboard, PowerPoint, etc.). The concept of Context of Situation is strictly linked to the notion of ‘Register” that is the set of linguistic options typically associated with a given context. • The three variables of the Context of Situation affect our language choices because they are linked to the three main functions of language, which Halliday calls ‘semantic metafunctions’, i.e. the ‘Ideational’, ‘Interpersonal’ and ‘Textual’. • ‘Ideational Meanings’: how the individual perceives the word. • ‘Interpersonal’: language allows us to express the interactions and complex relations with other person in society. • ‘Textual’: language allows us to bring structure to our interaction and organize the system itself, making communication easier.