Riassunti The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Sintesi del corso di Lingua Inglese

Scarica Riassunti The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! 1 Summaries of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English language Chapter 8: The nature of the lexicon One of the most challenging tasks in English studies is the lexical study for its sheer quantity and range and also because of the important balance between the stock of native words and the incredible amount of foreign borrowings into English over the centuries. • Lexemes are grouped into semantic fields, and the relationships between them are strictly plotted. There are ways in which language is most alive, such as the cases of: 1. catch phrases (=“frasi ad effetto”) 2. vogue words (=“frasi alla moda”) 3. slangs 4. slogans 5. graffiti ...and other cases in which language is dead or dying, such as: 1. clichés 2. archaisms 3. quotations • Abbreviations are one of the most noticeable features in present-day English linguistic life; the fashion for them can be traced back over 150 years. They were used with a humoristic and satirical intent mostly by society people; nowadays, there is urgence of linguistic economy in many specific fields such as: 1. science 2. technology 3. media 4. drug trafficking 5. armed forces …This is because succinctness and precision are highly valued, in the contemporary world. They became so much important and in use that now it would be very weird to hear someone expanding words such a NATO, USA ecc. ecc. There are many different kinds of abbreviations: 1. Initialisms: they are spoken as individual letters (the vastest category of abbr.) 2. Acronyms: pronounced as single words, they would never have periods separating the letters (UNESCO=United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) 3. Clipping: a part of a word which serves for the whole; sometimes it is kept the first part of a word, sometimes the last and sometimes a middle part 4. Blends: made out of shortened forms of two other words, such as brunch (breakfast+lunch) or smog (smoke+fog) 5. Facetious forms: TGIF=Thanks God It’s Friday • Proper names are on the boundary of the English lexicon, but some of them form part of the idiomatic history of an English-speaking community (such as Billy the Kid, The Mayflower…) and there are names which have taken on an additional sense (such as The White House=“the US government”) 2 The vastity of anyone’s lexicon depends much on his/her hobbies and educational background, moreover there must be an additional reflection about the difference between active and passive vocabulary (i.e. lexemes actively used in speech or writing and those known but not used) Chapter 9: The sources of the lexicon In English language there are a million or more lexemes to deal with. There is a common approach looking at the origins, given that English language is the first in the world speaking of foreign borrowings and loan words (over 120 languages are on record as sources of its present- day vocabulary). • Many lexemes have always been there because they arrived with the Germanic invaders, and although Anglo-Saxon lexemes are very few in the modern lexicon they provide almost all the most frequently used words in the language. • Writers like George Orwell, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy criticized many other writers that habitually used words of Latin, Greek or French origins because they were considered grander than Anglo-Saxon words • William Barnes, who studied Classics and philology, wanted to promote a kind of English purified by alien (i.e. non-Germanic) borrowings. He thought that the removal of French, Latin and Greek words would make the language more accessible and intelligible (some of his coinages: speech-craft=grammar, starlore=astronomy, folkdom=democracy, booklore=literature, hearsomeness=obedience, outgate=exit) • The borrowings started with the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, and with the arrival of Christianity the Latin’s influence became very strong (as shown by words like bishop, church, priest, giant, lobster etc. etc.). The Vikings’ invasion brought into English about 2000 new Scandinavian words and then the influx of French doubled the size of the English lexicon. Since the 1950s English became a world language and it came into contact with many new languages and cultures. All the incredible innovations in many different subjects like science, politics, industry and landscape generated (and still do) thousands of new lexemes Lexical structure: most English vocabulary arises by making new lexemes out of old ones because almost any lexeme, whether Anglo-Saxon or foreign, can be given an affix, change its word class or help make a compound. There are many tools with which language is modified and enriched: 1. Affixation: there are three types of affix: prefixes, which occur before the root (or stem) of a word; suffixes, which are attached at the end of the word; infixes, which occur within the stem of the word [some suffixes and their meanings: -ess, meaning “female of”(ex. lioness), -ery, meaning the quality or state of having a particular trait’ (ex. snobbery), -ify which turns a noun to a verb (beauty=beautify) and -ing which turns the concrete noun to the abstract one (farm=farming)]; there are 57 varieties of prefix 2. Conversion: the creation of new lexemes (principally nouns, adjectives and verbs) made through changing the word classes and without the addition of an affix; not all the senses of a lexemes are carried through into the derived form: • Verb to noun (to swim= a swim) and noun to verb (bottle= to bottle) • Adjective to noun (natural= nature) and noun to adjective (brick/mattone= brick/di mattoni) • Adjective to verb (calm= to calm down) • Affix to noun (ologies and isms) • Phrase to noun (a has-been, a free-for-all…) 5 The thesaurus: thesauri are based on the 16th-century notion of grouping lexemes together; the first thesaurus, published in 1852 by its pioneer Peter Mark Roget, divides the lexicon into six main areas, that are then further subclassified giving a total of 1.000 semantic categories: 1. abstract relations 2. space 3. the material world 4. the intellect 5. volition 6. sentient/moral powers • A thesaurus acts as a complement to the traditional dictionary: in the latter we have a lexeme in mind and we are searching for its meaning or use, in the first we have a meaning in mind and we are looking for the lexemes available to express it. Lexical structure: as already said, one way of imposing order on the thousands of lexemes which compose the English vocabulary is to group them into semantic fields; we can think of lexemes being related along two intersecting dimensions: • on the horizontal dimension, which is called syntagmatic, we sense the relationships between lexemes in a sequence (this means that there is a certain mutual expectancy between the main lexemes in a specific sentence); horizontal expectancies of this kind are known as collocations or selectional restrictions • on the vertical dimension, which is called paradigmatic, we sense the way in which one lexeme can substitute for another (substitution), and relate to it in meaning So, the predictable links between lexemes are called sense relations, which are at the core of any account of lexical structure. • A sequence of lexemes is often governed by chance, or better by factors controlled by an individual speaker. These sequences are called “free combinations” of lexemes, and they are not collocations because there is no mutual expectancy between the items; on the other hand, a collocation is a sequence of lexemes mutually predictable, which occurs regardless of the interests or personality of the individual user. Collocations cannot be predicted from a knowledge of the world; each one of its items someway “calls up” another in the mind of a native speaker. Idioms: the meaning of an idiomatic expression cannot be understood by examining the meanings of the constituent lexemes, and the expression is fixed both grammatically and lexically (exs. “at first hand”, “bite the hand that feeds him”, “know it like the back of my hand”, “wash my hands of”…) • Lexical phrases are used frequently in both speech and writing but they are especially important in conversation, where they are used in many different ways (expressing agreement, summing up an argument, introducing an example, changing a topic…). There are four main kinds of lexical phrases: 1. Polywords: short phrases whose parts cannot be separated: “in a nutshell”, “by the way”, “once and for all”… 2. Institutionalized expressions: invariable and unseparable like polywords, they include proverbs and aphorisms too (exs. “how do you do”, “have a nice day”, “you can fool some of the people some of the time”…) 3. Phrasal constraints: quite short phrases allowing some degree of variation (exs. “as I was...saying/mentioning”, “good...morning/night”, “as far as I...can see/know”…) 4. Sentence builders: they provide the framework for whole sentences and allow considerable variations (exs. “not only... but also...”, “that reminds me of...”, “let me begin by...”) 6 We have a sense relation when we feel that lexemes relate to each other, for example we just feel that two words like “echo” and “mayonnaise” do not relate at all to each other. The chief types of lexical sense relation are: 1. Synonyms: lexemes which have the same meaning, but it is possible to find some nuance which separates them or a context in which one of the lexemes can appear but the other(s) can not. Between them there might be a dialect difference, a stylistic difference, a collocational difference or a difference of emotional feeling or connotation; it is important to remember that there may be no such things as a pair of “perfect synonyms”, i.e. lexemes which could substitute for each other in all possible locations. 2. Antonyms: lexemes which are opposite in meaning; unlike synonymy, antonymy very definitely exists and moreover it exists in several forms: - Items (adjectives like small/big, happy/sad) which are capable of comparison; they are called gradable antonyms - Opposites (like single/married, dead/alive) which are not gradable opposites, because there is no scale of “firstness”; if one of the pair of lexemes applies, the other does not. These items complement each other, that is why they are known as complementary antonyms - Antonyms (such as over/under, buy/sell) which are mutually dependent on each other. This kind of oppositeness, where one item presupposes the other, is called converseness and the lexemes are converse terms N.W.: the vast majority of lexemes in the language have no opposites at all (ex., there is no opposite of “rainbow”, “sandwich” or “chemistry”) 3. Hyponims: these refer to a much more important sense relation, because it describes what happens when we say for example “a daffodil is a (kind of) flower”; the relationship between such lexemes can be best shown in the form of a tree diagram, where the more general term (hypernym) is placed at the top and the more specific terms (hyponyms) are placed underneath. 4. Incompatibles: we talk about incompatibility when we want to exclude one meaning from another, while hyponimy was related to the inclusion of one meaning into another; ex. “I am thinking of an object which is painted in a single colour, and it is red and yellow”: there is a problem with the first sentence, because “red” and “yellow” are both hyponyms under the same hypernym (colour) and so they are incompatible, while “red” and “dirty” would not be. Other sense relations: notions such as synonymy and hyponymy are fundamental to semantic analysis because they express basic logical relationships which are represented widely throughout the lexicon. There are certain other kinds of meaning relationship which are much less widespread: • Parts and wholes: a door is a part of a house and a house is a part of a village, but it would be unusual to say that a door is a part of a village; it is unclear why some chains of items permit this and others do not. There is a distinction between those parts which are an essential feature of an entity and those which are optional (for ex., an arm is an essential part of a (normal) male bosy, but a beard is not) • Hierarchies: graded series of lexemes in which each item holds a particular rank being “higher” or “lower” than adjacent items (ex. Corporal-sergent-lieutenant); it represents a special kind of incompatibility. Several lexical domains are organized as hierarchies, reflecting for example relationships between people; notions of quantity are also important especially in relation to units of measurement (ex. Second-minute-hour) Making sense: a definition is the linguistic mechanism which brings everything together; it is a special type of sentence which relates all the relevant aspects of a lexeme’s meaning, enabling us to understand it. Definitions are listed in dictionaries. The basic structure of a definitional sentence has been known since Aristotle, who distinguished two factors: a general category to 7 which a word belongs and the specific features or attributes which distinguish that word from related words. Semantic fuzziness: definitions are not always as precise as we would like them to be, because the entities and events which we want to talk about in the real world are not always clear and determinate; the more abstract is a word, the more difficult is to arrive at a precise lexical definition for it Chapter 12: Lexical dimensions We know that the English lexicon is so vast a varied that it is impossible to classify it into neat categories; the lex. is a particularly sensitive index of historical, social and technological change. Denotation: the dictionary meaning of lexemes, and the objective relationship between a lexeme and the reality to which it refers. It identifies the central aspect of lexical meaning, which everyone should agree about, that is why we say “dictionary definition”. Connotation: it refers to the personal aspect of lexical meaning and the emotional associations which a lexeme incidentally brings to mind (N.W. because people do have some common experiences, many lexemes in the language have connotations which would be shared by large groups of speakers). Many synonyms can not be distinguished in denotation but they can in connotation (conn. is important in conveying personal attitude and point of view). The problem of studying connotations is that they readily change with the passage of time. • When a lexeme is highly charged with connotations, we commonly refer to it as “loaded”. We find such loaded expressions among political and religious language, for example, while the language of science and law attempts to avoid a highly connotative vocabulary. The more a domain or topic is controversial, the more it will contain loaded vocabulary. 1. Taboo words: lexemes which people avoid using in polite society because they believe them harmful or feel them embarassing or offensive; embarassment tends to be associated with sex and its consequences, offensiveness relates to the various substances exuded by the human body and to the different forms of physical, mental and social abnormality. The prohibition on use may be explicit (as in the law courts, the House of Parliament and the broadcasting media), but more commonly it is a tacit understanding between people. Taboo items are avoided through the usage of more technical terms (ex. “genitalia”) or euphemisms. 2. Swearing words: there is a distinction between the language of taboo, that of abuse and that of swearing, even though they may coincide sometimes. The term swearing is often used as a general label for all kinds of “foul-mouthed” language, whatever its purpose. It is an outburst, an explosion, which gives relief to surges of emotional energy; it is a substitute for an aggresively bodily response, and can be aimed either at people or at objects. Many swearing expressions are literally nonsense, but they have an important social function because it marks social distance, for ex. It is universal and contagious, and according to some psychologists’ opinion, the act of swearing helps reducing stress. The commonest notions about swearing are that of obscenity (related to sexuality), blasphemy (lack of reverence towards God) and profanity (irriverent reference to holy things and people) 3. Jargon words: it is itself a loaded word, and it is defined as an “obscure and pretentious language marked by a roundabout way of expression and use of long words”; it is said to be a bad use of language and something to be avoided at all costs. The reality is that everyone uses jargon, because all hobbies require mastery of a jargon; it is the element 10 • English permits the addition of meaningful, dependent elements both before and after the base form: these are called affixes (divided into prefixes and suffixes) • Prefixes in English have a purely lexical role, allowing the construction of a large number of new words (exs. un-, de-, anti-, super-…) • Most of suffixes are purely lexical and they change the meaning of the base form (exs. - ness, -ship, -able…), while a few suffixes are purely grammatical and they show how the word must be used in the sentence (exs. plural -s, past tense -ed and comparative -er); these last ones are called inflectional suffixes or inflections of the language Adjectives: they express quality and it is possible thanks to inflections, which permit the comparison; this last can be to the same degree, to a higher or to a lower • The base form of an adj. is called the absolute form (exs. big or happy) • Adding -er produces the comparative form: bigger, happier • Adding -est produces the superlative form: biggest, happiest • There are no inflectional ways of expressing the same or lower degrees in English, but these notions are expressed syntactically (as...as, less than…, the least of…) • Adjectives of one syllable usually take the inflectional form, even though there are a few exceptions • Adj. of three syllables or more use only the periphrastic form (exs. more, less, most, least) • Many of two-syllables adjectives permit both forms of comparison Nouns -number: most of nouns have bith a singular and a plural form, that is why they are known as variable nouns; a small group of cases do not have a number contrast (the invariable nouns). Variable nouns form their plural by adding an -s, but there are a few hundred nouns which have irregular plural form; for ex., seven nouns change their vowel in a process called mutation (man>men, woman>women, foot>feet). Nouns which have been borrowed from foreign languages pose a particular problem: some have kept the original foreign plural and some permit both (chorus>choruses, not chori; cactus>cactus/cacti) • Singular-only nouns: proper names, names of subjects, diseases and games (physics, mumps, billiards), nouns in a noncount use (music, homework) • Plural-only nouns: names of two-parts items (scissors), a few dozen nouns ending in -s (amends, annals, congratulations…), a few nouns which look singular but actually they are plural (people, police) Nouns -case: there are only two cases left in Modern English: a common case, where the noun has no ending at all, and the genitive; this last is formed by adding an -s to the singular form of the noun(in writing this appears with a preceding apostrophe). With most plural forms an -s ending is already present, so the written form just adds a following sign (the apostrophe: the cats’ food=il cibo dei gatti). The chief meaning of the genitive is possession, but the case expresses several other meanings too (notion of origin, description, period…). There is a close similarity between a noun in the gen. case and the same noun preceded by of ; the choice is largely based on factors of gender and style. • The apostrophe was introduced into English from French in the 16th century and became widespread during the 17th; not only did it mark the omission of letters, but it was often used before a plural ending . Printers and grammarians tried to lay down rules saying when the ap. should be used, but those rules were arbitrary and incomplete. Today in the UK it is almost always omitted and many modern sign-writers exclude it because they think it looks old-fashioned, while in the USA there is strong pedagogical pressure to mantain its use 11 Verbs: the forms of a regular lexical verb can be predicted by rules; an irregular lexical verb is one where some of the forms are unpredictable (there are thousands of regular verbs in Modern English, but less than 300 irregular ones). Regular verbs appear in 4 forms, each playing a different role in the clause: • The base form, with no endings (the infinitive form) • The -s form, made by adding an -(e)s ending to the base (sometimes with a spelling change), used for the third person singular • The -ing form, or -ing participle, made by adding -ing to the base • The -ed form, made by adding -ed to the base; this ending is found in the past form and in the -ed participle form. The past form has just one use: to express the past tense, while the -ed participle form has 4 uses: 1)To help express a past aspect; 2)To help express the passive voice; 3)In certain types of subordinate clause and to begin a clause; 4)As an adjective • Irregular verbs have the same -s and -ing forms as the regular ones, but they have either an unpredictable past tense or an unpredictable -ed participle form (or both); there are two main features of irregular lexical verbs: 1)Most irr. verbs changethe vowel of the base to make their past or -ed participle forms; 2)The -ed ending is never used in a regular way, and is often not used at all. Using these features, it is possible to group irregular verbs into 7 broad classes; moreover, there are many irr. verbs which have alternative past forms (-ed and the other one irregular): burned- burnt, learned-learnt, smelled-smelt, spelled-spelt, spilled-spilt, spoiled-spoilt. The -ed form may be more likely when the duration of an action is being emphasized, while the -t ending focuses on the result of a process rather than on the process itself • N’t: the contracted form of the negative word “not” is used as an inflection with some verbs. The ones which allow this are the auxiliary verbs, which mostly appear in two forms (does not- does’nt, is not-isn’t) and in some cases the form of the verb is altered (will not-won’t, were not-weren’t, shall not-shan’t) Chapter 15: Word classes Traditional grammars of English, following an approach which can be traced back to Latin, agreed that there were 8 parts of speech in English: 1)noun, 2)pronoun, 3)adjective, 4)verb, 5)preposition, 6)adverb, 7)interjection, 8)conjunction; the definition of the parts of speech was an essential first step in learning about English grammar, and to talk about them is necessary to make general and economical statements about the way the language’s words behave. Latin and English seemed to behave in a similar way, but when linguists began to look closely at English grammatical structure in the 1940s and 1950s, they encountered so many problems of identification that the term “parts of speech” fell in disuse in favour of “word classes” (word classes are equivalent to parts of speech, but defined according to strictly linguistic criteria) Class consciousness: to tell which word class a word belongs to, we need to look carefully at how it behaves in a sentence. The word brown, for ex., has 3 grammatical uses: as an adjective, a noun and a verb (some words have even more uses). A word class is a group of words which, from a grammatical point of view, behave in the same way: the words are the same morphologically and syntactically. Traditional grammar did not have the same interest in studying the actual linguistic behaviour of word classes; it assumed that the criteria which worked well for Latin would also work for English, but as we saw it is not this way The class of nouns: in the way nouns behave there are some factors involved: 12 • syntactic structure • syntactic function • grammatical morphology • lexical morphology In analyzing nouns, traditional grammar insisted on noting gender as well as number and case; modern grammars disregard this criterion, recognizing that gender has no grammatical role in English. Nouns can be grouped into 6 main classes: proper and common nouns, common nouns are divided into count and noncount types and both of these can be divided into concrete and abstract types. Proper nouns are names of specific people, places, times… and they differ from common nouns in many ways (for ex., proper nouns do not usually allow a plural while most common nouns do). Pr. nouns are written with an initial capital letter, but not all words with initial capital letter are pr. nouns and so there is sometimes uncertainty as to whether a word should be considered proper or common; moreover, pr. nouns are single words but many proper names are formed by more than one word (but still considered a single unit). Count nouns refer to individual, countable entities, while noncount nouns (also known as mass nouns) refer to an undifferentiated mass or notion; for ex., count nouns allow a plural while noncount nouns do not. Both count and noncount nouns can be divided further into abstract and concrete types: first ones refer to unobservable notions, while the second ones refer to entities which can be measured and observed. In many languages such as Latin and French nouns can be grouped into types, based on the kind of endings they have, or on the way they pattern with other words in the noun phrase; such types are known as gender classes. English has no grammatical gender, but it does have ways of identifying natural gender and it is chiefly done by using pronouns The class of pronouns: words which stand for a noun, a whole noun phrase or several noun phrases; in each case, the meaning expressed is much less specific than that found in phrases containing nouns. Pronouns carry out a similar range of functions to nouns and noun phrases (for ex., they can appear as subject, object or complement of the clause); some pronouns have separate cases for subject and object functions, some show a contrast between personal and nonpersonal genderand between male and female and finally some distinguish singular and plural number, but not by adding an -s. Different subclasses of pronoun have to be recognized: 3 subclasses are sometimes grouped together as the central pronouns, because they all express contrasts of person, gender and number. Personal pronoun occur more often than any other type: the first person involved refers to the speaker(s) or writer(s) of the message, the second person refers to the addressee(s), excluding speaker(s) or writer(s) while the third person refers to “third parties”, excluding the speaker(s), writer(s), and addressee(s); by the way, there are also some special uses The class of adjectives: words which express some feature or quality of a noun or pronoun; it can occur immediately before a noun (this is called the adjective’s attributive function) or it can occur alone after forms of the verb be (this is the adj,’s predicative function). An adjective can be compared (bigger, most beautiful) and many adjectives permit the addition of -ly to form an adverb. To count as an adjective, a word must be able to function in both attributive and predicative positions; moreover, the adj. is a good example of a word class with fuzzy edges (taking as examples the numerals and the words ending in -ed or -ing, which could be either an adjective or a form of a verb) 15 Sentence functions: traditional grammars recognized four types of sentence function: statement, question, command, exclamation. Even if we restrict ourselves to the four “classical” types, though, there are certain refinements which need to be introduced. 1. A statement is a sentence whose primary purpose is to “state”, i.e. to convey information; its clause contains a subject, though in informal conversation this is sometimes omitted, and the subject precedes the verb. Such sentences are said to have a declarative structure (a structure which “declares” or “makes something known”). 2. Questions are sentences which seek information, that is why they are said to have an interrogative structure (a structure which interrogates); yes/no questions allow an affirmative or negative reply, wh- questions allow a reply from a wide range of possibilities while alternative questions require a reply which relates to the options given in the interrogative sentence. Exclamatory questions express the speaker’s strong feelings and ask the hearer to agree (they are strongly positive in meaning). Rhetorical questions are used as if they were emphatic statements, infact the speaker does not expect an answer (public speakers, politicians, poets and all who give monologues quite often use rhetorical questions as a means of making a dramatic point; poets tend to self-question more than others). Finally, tag questions expects a yes/no kind of reply, and its interrogative structure is left to the end of the sentence. 3. Directives (or more inappropriately commands) are sentences which instruct someone to do something, just like: inviting, advising, warning, suggesting, meditating, expressing an imprecation… in each of these cases, the verb is found in its basic form, with no endings. To remmeber: many verbs which express a state rather than an activity cannot be used as directives. 4. Exclamations are sentences which show that a person has been impressed or roused by something; they often take the form of a single word or short phrase. Exclamations can have a major sentence status too, with a structure which differentiates them from statements, questions and directives; tehir first element begins with what or how, and they can frequently occur in a reduced form. Echoes are used only in dialogues and its purpose is to confirm, question or clarify what the previous speaker has just said. Their essential feature is that they reflect the structure of the preceding sentence, which it repeats in whole or in part (echoes often sound quite impolite, unless accompanied by an apologetic “softening” phrase like “I’m sorry” or “I beg your pardon”). Clause elements: all clauses are made up out of elements, each expressing a particular kind of meaning. Traditional grammars recognized two main elements, which they called the subject and the predicate. The grammatical analysis of the present recognizes five types of clause element: 1. the 1st element is the subject, which usually identifies the theme or topic of the clause; it usually appears after the first verb in questions, it controls whether the verb is singular or plural in the third person of the present tense, it controls the form of certain objects and complements; some pronouns have a distinctive for when used as a subject, and finally there is only one subject recognized per clause 2. the 2nd is the verb, which expresses a wide range of meanings such as actions, sensations, or states of being. The verb plays a central role in clause structure, it is the most obligatory of all the clause elements; we can omit the adverbial, the object and even the subject, but we cannot omit the verb (there is only one type of exception: verbless clauses such as “if possible...”) 3. the 3rd is the object, which identifies who or what has been directly affected by the action of the verb. Object elements often follow the subject and verb in a clause; they are of two types: direct and indirect. The direct object is the common one, referring to some person 16 or thing directly affected by the action expressed by the verb; the indirect object typically refers to an animate being which is the recipient of the action. Objs. Can be noun phrases (including single nouns), pronouns, or certain kinds of subordinate clause. As with subjs., a set of connected noun phrases in analysed as a single element 4. the 4th is the complement, which gives further information about another clause element. Complements express a meaning which adds to that of another clause element; a subj. complement usually follows the subj. and verb, and the verb is most often a form of be, but it may also be one of a few other verbs that are able to link complements to their subjects in meaning (these are called copular =linking verbs) 5. the 5th element is the adverbial, which usually adds extra information about the situation, such as the time of an action, its location or its manner of being performed. Adverbials differ from other clause elements chiefly in that there can be an indefinite number of them in a single clause; they can be used in several possible positions in the clause, though they are most common at the end, and they express a wide range of meanings such as manner, place and time. To remember: some verbs need an adverbial to complete their meaning In Modern English, in about 90 per cent of the clauses which contain a subject, verb, and object, the subject precedes the verb and the verb precedes the object. • A vocative is a name used for the person or the people to whom a sentence is addressed. It may be there to attract attention or to express a particular social relationship or personal attitude; the voc. can be added or removed from a sentence without affecting the rest of the construction and it may occur in various positions in a sentence Phrases: syntactic constructions which typically contain more than one word but which lack the subject-predicate structure usually found in a clause based on the most important word they contain (if this is a noun, they would be called noun phrases and so on). The indentifying elements of phrasal constructions are six word classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, adverbs and prepositions (there are considerable differences between the syntactic patterns which can occur within each type of phrase) ➔ pronoun phrases are restricted to a small number of constructions and tend not to be recognized as a productive type in English ➔ adverb phrases are typically found as short intensifying expressions ➔ adjective phrases are usually combinations of an adjective and a preceding intensifier ➔ verb phrases display very limited syntactic possibilities ➔ finally, noun phrases allow an extremely wide range of syntactic possibilities; teh noun phrase is the main construction which can appear as the subject, object or complement of a clause. It consist of a noun or a noun-like word which is the most important constituent of the phrase; sometimes the noun appears alone in its phrase but more often it is accompanied by one or more other constituents. Noun phrases are more varied in their construction than any other kind of phrase in English, infact no other syntactic unit in English presents such possibilities for structural variation. Moreover, several of the meanings expressed by the noun phrase are extremely subtle, requiring a careful consideration of many examples before their function can be consciously appreciated. ➔ The article system is a good example of the subtle meanings which the noun phrase can express; three concepts are involved, two of which are familiar from traditional grammmar: the definite article (the), the indefinite article (a or an) and the absence of an article (the zero article). In the zero article, the article is often omitted in idiomatic usage when talking about human institutions and routines, means of transport, periods of time, meals and illnesses. 17 ➔ Adjective zones: words which are usually nouns or closely related to nouns, are placed next to the head. They include nationality adjectives, noun-like adjectives which mean “involving” or “relating to” and straightforward nouns (zone IV); Participles and colour adjectives are placed immediately in front of any in zone IV (zone III). Adjectives with an absolute or intensifying meaning come first in the sequence, immediately after the determiner and its satellites (zone I); all other adjectives (the vast majority in the language) occur in this zone: big, slow, angry, helpful, ecc. (zone II) Verb phrase meanings: the meanings which each pattern can convey are extremely difficult to state, being influenced by what else is happening in the sentence, and even by the meaning of particular types of verb. For ex., an accompanying adverbial can dramatically alter the period of time to which a verb form refers; a verb which expresses a specific action works differently from one which expresses a state of awareness. One of the important function of the verbs is to indicate the time at which an action takes place, and the term tense is traditionally used to refer to the way verbs change their forms to express this meaning. English has only two tenses, present and past: • the state present is used for timeless statements or “eternal truths”; the habitual present is used for repeated events and there is usually an accompanying adverbial of frequency; the instantaneous present is used when the action begins and ends approximately at the moment of speech; the historic present describes the past describes the past as if it were happening now • most uses of the past tense refer to an action or state which has taken place in the past at a definite time, and it can be used to express specific events, states and habitual actions; the attitudinal past reflects a tentative state of mind giving a more polite effect than would be obtained by using the present tense, while the hypothetical past expresses what is contrary to the speaker’s beliefs and it is especially used in if- clauses English has no future tense ending; rather, future time is expressed by a variety of other means (one of these, the use of will and shall, is often loosely referred to as the future tense, but this usage changes the meaning of the word “tense” so that it no longer refers only to the use of verb endings. There are six main ways of referring to future time: 1. Will, shall or ‘ll followed by the infinitive without to or the progressive form 2. Be going to followed by the infinitive; this common informal use usually suggests that the event will take place very soon 3. The present progressive which stresses the way a future event follows on from an arranged plan (the happening is usually imminent) 4. The simple present tense, often implying definiteness 5. The use of be to, be about to, have to and a few others all expressing a future action at various removes from the present 6. The modal verbs, which alsomconvey a future implication: I may/might/could/should travel by bus Multiple sentences: many sentences can be immediately analysed into more than one clause: they are multiple sentences, and they for the majority of the sentences in formal writing and are common in everyday conversation too (indeed, much of the spontaneous character of conversational speech is due to the way it uses multiple sentence constructions). Such constructions are classified into two broad types: compound sentences and complex sentences • In compound sentences the clauses are linked by coordination -usually, by the coordinating conjunction and, but or or. Each clause can stand as a sentence on its own as an independent clause or main clause 20 All consonants have certain properties in common, which identify them in contrast to vowels: from a phonetic point of view, they are articulated in one of two ways: either there is a closing movement of one of the vocal organs, forming such a narrow constriction that it is possible to hear the sound of the air passing through; or the closing movement is complete, giving a total blockage. From a phonological point of view, they are units of the sound system which typically occupy the edges of a syllable; they may also appear in sequences, up to three consonants may be used together at the beginning of a spoken word in English. Some consonants involve the vibration of the vocal cords, and an alternative way of capturing the difference between such consonant pairs as / p/ and / b/ is to compare the force with which they are articulated. The distinction between consonants and vowels is fundamental, but some sounds sit uneasily between the two: certain consonants are somewhat vowel-like, in that they can be sounded continuously without any udible friction. All English consonants are madin the vocal trae with an air-stream from the lungs moving outwards; to differentiate the 24 consonants from each other, phoneticians use a classification based on the place and manner of articulation: • Place of articulation: we need to know where in the vocal tract the sound is made, and which vocal organs are involved. • Manner of articulation: we need to know how the sound is made, at the various locations in the vocal tract. Syllables: vowels and consonants typically do not act alone; the vast majority of English words contain a combination of vowels and consonants, and the combined units are called syllables. The words which contain only one unit are called monosyllables, while the words which contain more than one syllable are known as polysyllabic words (they represent the majority of the words in the language). People are able to count the number of syllables in a word by beating out its rhythm; each syllable contains one vowel or vowel-like nucleus. Connected speech: vowel and consonant segments combine into syllables, syllables combine into words and words combine into phrases and sentences; the process of producing connected speech affects the pronunciation of several of these segments in a number of interesting ways. Certain segments have a tendency to run together; extra segments may be added to ensure smoothness of speech: 1. Assimilation: adjacent sounds often influence each other so that they become more alike or assimilate; for ex., in the phrase “ten balloons”, / ten/ is likely to be pronunced / tem/, anticipating the following bilabial consonant 2. Strong and weak forms: nearly 50 words in English can be pronunced in two distinct ways, depending on the degree of force with which they are uttered (in many cases, we need to take note of the context) 3. Elision: as speech speeds up, sounds are likely to be left out or elided; indeed, some sequences are impossible to articulate naturally without elision. Some exs. are gonna (=going to) and wanna (=want to) 4. Liaison: a sound may be introduced between words or syllables to help them run together more smoothly (an ex. is the letter /r /) Prosody: the sound system enables us to express meaning in speech in both verbal and non- verbal ways. Verbal meaning (“what we say”) relies on vowels and consonants to construct words, phrases and sentences; non-verbal meaning (“the way that we say it”) makes use of such factors as intonation, rhythm and tone of voice to provide speech with much of its structure and expressiveness (it is the non-verbal meaning which is the critical element in a communication). 21 The main auditory properties of sound are: pitch, loudness and speed. Such properties, used singly or in combination (in the form of rhythm) and accompanied by the distinctive use of silence (in the form of pause), make up the prosody or prosodic features of the language. The most important prosodic effects are those conveyed by the intonation system; loudness is used in a variety of ways: gross differences of meaning (such as anger, menace, excitement) can be conveyed by using an overall loudness level. Varying the speed (or tempo) of speech is an important but less systematic communicative feature; we can convey several kinds of meaning, such as (speeding up) excitement and impatience, or (slowing down) emphasis and thoughtfulness. Prosody, and especially intonation, is an important feature of sociolinguistic identity; the functions of intonation are: 1)emotional, which expresses attitudinal meaning; 2)grammatical, which helps identifying grammatical structure in speech, performing a role similar to punctuation; 3)textual, which helps larger units of meaning than the sentence to contrast and cohere; 4)informational, that helps draw attention to what meaning is given and what is new in an utterance; 5)psychological, that helps us to organize speech into units that are easier to perceive and memorize. Features of pitch, loudness, speed and silence combine to produce the effect known as speech rhythm; our sense of rhythm is a perception that there are prominent units occurring at regular intervals as we speak. All forms of spoken English have their rhythm, though in spontaneous speech it is often difficult to hear, because hesitations interfere with the smooth flow of the words. Sound symbolism: it is a fundamental principle of linguistic enquiry that individual sounds do not have meanings; however, there are an interesting number of apparent exceptions to this general rule, cases where native speakers feel that there is some kind of meaningful connection between a sound (or cluster of sounds) and properties of the outside world. Such phenomenon is known as sound symbolism, also called phonaesthesia or onomatopoeia. For example, given the nature of the act of swearing and of invective in general, we would expect the words involved to be short, sharp and to the point. Children’s literature is full of sound symbolic words and onomatopoeic nonsense names also abound, while in general literature, especially in poetry and poetic prose, the phonaesthetic values of sound segments have characterized the genre throughout the history Pronunciation in practice: the study of the sound system of English is in principle no more difficult that that of its writing system, but most people are unfamiliar with the phonetic terminology required to describe vocal effects. We do have little conscious recollection of how we learnt to talk, so that the process of speaking and listening seems totally natural and unproblematic Chapter 18: The writing system Many children, before they are 3, have been given some informal tuition in letter shapes and sounds, and in societies where levels of literacy are high, almost all will have had some systematic teaching (whether from parents, through the media or in school) by the time they are 5. Letters attract most of the attention in these early years, infact they are the main units available for conveying meaning while writing. Punctuation and features of graphic design are important elements of the meaning and identity of a written text too, and the rules governing letter combinations (“spelling”) promote a standard of intelligible and acceptable communication. 22 The study of the linguistic properties of the written language has lagged somewhat behind the study of the sounds of speech, because of some ambiguities: 1)writing can refer to either a process or a result (when we are actively engaged in the process, we are said to be “writing”, when we have finished, the product is also called “a piece of writing”); 2)writing can refer to either an everyday or a professional activity. Writing is a way of communicating which uses a system of visual marks made on some kind of surface; it is one kind of graphic expression (other kinds include drawing, musical notation and mathematical formulae). In the alphabetic system, the graphic marks represent individual speech sounds. The standardized writing system of a language is called orthography, and the linguistic properties of the orthographic system can be studied from 2 points of view: 1. graphetics: the study of the way human beings make, transmit and receive written symbols; 2. graphology: the study of the linguistic contrasts that writing systems express; it recognizes the notion of the grapheme (because “sat” and “rat” have different meanings, /s / and /r / emerge as different graphemes). • Graphemes are abstract units, and appear in a variety of forms; each of these possible forms is known as a graph • When two letters represent a single sound, the combination is called digraph; some digraphs may be physically joined as in ae, oe, ff. Digraphs are an important part of the English writing system, because there are far more phonemes in speech than letters in the alphabet The alphabet: the letter-shapes of the modern alphabet in most cases are the result of an alphabetic tradition which is over 3000 y. o. The earliest known alph. was the 22-letter North Semitic, which developed c. 1700 BC in the Middle East. Several alphabets were based on this model, including the Phoenician, which c. 1000 BC was used as a model by the Greeks, who added letters for vowels. Greek in c. 800 BC itself became the model for the alphabet used by the Etruscans, and it is from the Etruscan that the capital letters of the 23-letter Roman alphabet derived. The Christian era saw the birth of new styles of writing throughout the Roman Empire, whith scribes developing smaller scripts which could be written rapidly and smoothly (there was the need for an efficient handwriting). Old English was first written in the runic alphabet, but the arrival of Christian missionaries brought the rapid introduction of the Roman alphabet. Some early forms of handwriting are: • Majuscule: large letters generally contained within a single pair of imaginary orizontal lines (the Greek and Latin alphs. were originally written in this way); • Minuscule: small letters whose parts often extend above and below a pair of imaginary orizontal lines (noe usually called small letters o lower-case letters); • Uncial: form of professional writing consisting of simple, rounded letters; • Cursive: handwriting in which the characters are joined in a series of rounded, flowing strokes, which promotes ease and speed; • Dual alphabet: the use of capital and small letters in a single system, this was later called Carolingian minuscule Properties of letters: the letters of the alphabet are the basic elements of the writing system. Like phonemes they have no meaning in themselves: their primary role is to combine into linguistic units each of the 26 letters or graphemes playing a contrastive role. The need to mantain a distinctive graphic form has motivated many of the changes in letter shapes throughout the history of the alphabet, such as the use of the cross-bar in G (to preserve a constrast with C) or the lenghtening of the second leg of R (to contrast with P); it becomes more difficult to see the linguistic of letters when we see them combine. It is much easier to interfere with the written language that the spoken one. English now often looks like a Romance 25 Unexpected features of dialogue: we are used to seeing dialogue in contexts where the language has been carefully crafted, such as the script of a play or the conversations in a language teaching textbook; dialogues are usually a long way from what can happen in everyday conversation. The stereotype is that people speak in complete sentences, taking well- defined turns, carefully listening to each other and producing balanced amounts of speech. The reality is that people ofetn share in the sentences they produce, interrupt each other, do not pay attention to everything that is said and produce a discourse where the contributions of the participants are wildly asymmetrical Chapter 20: Regional variation Of all the sociolinguistic and stylistic factors which promote variety in language use, the one which people most commonly enquire about is geographical origin; we readily notice regional differences in the way people talk, and although we may be unable to describe these differences other than in the most vague and impressionistic terms, we have no difficulty in responding to them intuitively, laughing at dialect jokes, enjoying dialect literature and folklore and appreciating the point of dialect parodies. Differences of opinions between people of different dialcet backgrounds can quickly lead to mutual mockery of each other’s speech, disparagement of regional speech readily transmutes into disparagement of the speakers; the more we know about regional variation and change in the use of English, the more we will come to appreciate the striking individuality of each of the varieties which we call dialects, and the less we are likely to adopt demeaning stereotypes about people from other parts of the country, or of the world. • There is a systematic distinction between regional accent and regional dialect: a regional accent refers to features of pronunciation which convey information about a person’s geographical origin, while a regional dialect refers to features of grammar and vocabulary which convey information about a person’s geographical origin. Speakers who have a distinctive regional dialect will have a distinctive regional accent, but the reverse does not necessarily follow; it is possible to have a regional accent yet speak a dialect which conveys nothing about geographical origin • Within a country, there may be a prestige or neutral accent which conveys no information about geographical background. The most famous example occurs in Britain, with the accent that has long been called Received Pronunciation or RP, which is distinctively regional and perceived as the archetypal British accent • When people with different regional or social backgrounds meet, there is a tendency for their speech patterns to become more alike, or converge, and this process is known as accommodation; there have been several experimental studies which clearly show both convergence and divergence in action, and which demonstrate the way we unconsciously associate regional variation with psychological and social traits It is inevitable that people traditionally think of dialects as a purely intranational matter, local to the country to which they belong; even when English began to move around the world, only a relatively small proportion of the population of each country would travel widely enough for global differences in regional speech to be apparent. Radio, television and cinema links, coupled with a vast increase in travelling mobility, have brought a universal awareness that English dialects operate on a world scale (“dialectology” is the name of the study of “world Englishes”). The two models: when comparing samples of written English from around the world, one must decide if the language is British or American English or some mixture of the two; infact, as we move away from the formal written English of the press in the direction of the informal spoken 26 language, the differences between regional varieties dramatically increase. In the case of American and British English the variation is considerable, but there are no accurate estimates for the number of points of contrast for two chief reasons: 1. Recent decades have seen a major increase in the amount of influence the two models have had on each other (especially American on British); 2. the regional dialect surveys of both countries are bringing to light huge amounts of lexical distinctiveness. Few of these forms have literary background or enough breadth of use to warrant their inclusion in general dictionaries. The stock of regional differences is likely to be extremely large; for ex., nicknames for counties is a phenomenon which plays a much larger role in the USA than in Britain (very few British counties have nicknames, and if they do they do not create a sense of identity). There are spelling differences between Am. English and Br. Eng., differences of pronunciation between the RP (Received Pronunciation) and General American and also stress differences, because there are many words whose stress varies between the two accents Classifying lexical differences: in describing the lexicon of the two regions, there are three distinctions which have to be made: some words, or lexemes, are found only in American English (AmE), some only in British English (BrE) and some from either surce have become estabilished throughout the world as part of Standard English (World Standard English); there are many items where the word is part of WST, though the entity being referred to differs in certain respects from country to country: • some words reflect cultural differences but are not part of WST, infact there are no synonyms in the other variety • some words are straighforward: they have a single sense and a synonym in the other variety • some words have one meaning in WSE and a synonym in one or other of the two varieties • we also have to remember the effect of the frequency: some words are used in both varieties, but are much more common on one of them Grammatical differences: there are relatively few grammatical differences between educated BrE and AmE: • in the verb phrase, AmE prefers have to have got for possession (Do you have the time? VS Have you got the time?); AmE prefers such forms as burned to burnt and there are some special past tense forms (for ex., AmE also sometimes uses a simple past tense where BrE has a present perfect: I just ate VS I’ve just eaten) will/won’t is generally found for shall/shan’t • in the noun phrase there are some differences of word order and the use of article; AmE prefers collective nouns in the singular whereas BrE allows plural also • AmE also makes more use of the subjunctive and prefers were to was in such sentences as I wish she were here • there are several differences in prepositions and adverbs, such as AmE real good VS the BrE very good • gotten is probably the most distinctive of all the Ame/BrE grammatical differences; it is not simply an alternative for have got, because gotten is used in such contexts as They’ve gotten a new boat (=”obtain”) Regional variation in American English: the scientific study of US regional dialects is over a century old, having begun with the formation of the American Dialect Society in 1889. such studies have estabilished the existence of three broad dialect areas: 27 1. Northern: an area not to be confused with the political “north” of the Civil War period, historically it is the area of New England; dialect studies show that there is an important boundary separating western and eastern New England 2. Southern: the coastal and piedmont areas of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, the Gulf States and extending into the eastern part of Texas; in this area there is a frequent loss of final -r 3. Midland: a very large area extending across almost the whole country, from southern New Jersey and Pennsylvania and northern Delaware, down through the mountainous areas of Virginia , the Carolinas and Georgia, westward across Tennessee and western Arkansas, then spreading into the whole of the western United States The three dialect subdivisions are recognized, providing evidence for the nationwide regions shown above Variation in British English: awareness of regional variation in English is evident from the 14th century, as seen in observations of such writers as Chauser, but the scientific study of dialects in English began in the late 19th century. In 1946 a questionnaire of over 1300 items was developed and a field survey undertaken between 1898 and 1961 in many localities throughout England; it was addressed especially towards rural communities, and the informants were all locally born working class, almost all over 60 and mainly men. A great deal of other work has since taken place in British dialectology, especially focusing on the speech of urban populations, and the picture which emerges from the surveys relates historically to the dialect divisions recognized in Old and Middle English: 13 traditional dialect areas, excluding the western tip of Cornwall and most of Wales which were not English-speaking until the 18th century or later, and the urban area of London. A major division is drawn between the North and everywhere else, broadly following the boundary between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia, and a secondary division is found between much of the Midlands and areas further south. For xample, the vowel pronunciation in such words as up is considered to be the chief distinguishing feature in the division between North and South; moreover, the traditional North-South boundary turns out to be no longer in England, but on the border between England and Scotland, and it is this division which gives rise to the most noticeable dialect distinction in modern British English. • An important regional speech is that of London, which is called “Estuary English” referring to the Thames River. The factors governing the spread of this variety are only partly explained by social mobility and new patterns of settlement; for example, there is the influence of radio and tv and of English media personalities who use a modified form of Cockney English, which refers to the accent and dialect of English traditionally spoken by working-class Londoners. After World War the 2nd, the move of Londoners to other cities will have caused many to modify their accents in order to accommodate in their direction. Variation in Scotland: of all the varieties of English which have developed within the British Isles, there are none more distinctive or more divergent from Standard English than some of those associated with Scotland. It is argued that Scots differs from the regional dialects of England in two crucial ways: it is unique because it was once the variety used, in the late Middle Age, when Scotland was an independent nation, and it is unique because it has a clearly defined history of its own, with a strong literary tradition beginning in Middle English, its own dialect variants and a contemporary sociolinguistic stature which other dialects of British English do not share. Scots has received far more lexicographic description than other regional British varieties (the Association for Scottish Literary Studies has an active Language Committee), but anyway Scots as a language has not so far been able to make inroads into the use of Standard 30 influential public institutions, such as the monarchy, the estabilished Church, the civil service, broadcasting and the press, has inevitably given rise to a popular notion of language authority which can even become explicit through an official language policy; moreover, attitudes to social variations vary widely. Received Pronunciation: in England, one accent has traditionally stood out above all others in its ability to convey associations of respectable social standing and good education; this “prestige” accent is known as Received Pronunciation, or RP. It is associated with the south-east, where most RP-speakers live or work, but it can be found anywhere in the country. Accents usually tell us where a person is from, while RP tells us only about a person’s social or educational background (it was born as the accent of the court and the upper classes)in due course, RP came to symbolize a person’s high position in society and was soon the main sign that a speaker had received a good education; because it was a regionally “neutral” accent, and was thought to be more widely understood that any regional accent, it came to be adopted by the BBC when radio broadcasting became in 1920s. Today, with the breakdown of rigid divisions between social classes and the development of the mass media, RP is no longer the preserve of a social élite; the most widely used is that generally heard on the BBC, and early BBC recordings show how much RP has altered over just a few decades, and they make the point that no accent is immune to change, not even “the best”. RP is no longer as widely used today as it was 50 years ago, but it is still the standard accent of the Royal Family, Parliament, the Church of England, the High Courts and other national institutions; but less that 3 per cent of the British population speak it in a pure form now; nonetheless RP retains considerable status, because it has long been the chief accent taught to foreigners who wish to learn a British model (most learners would find a Scots accent, for ex., much easier to pick up) Prescriptive attitudes: prescriptivism is the view that one variety of a language has an inherently higher value than others, and that this ought to be imposed on the whole of the speech community; the alternative to a prescriptive approach is the descriptive approach associated mainly with modern linguistics, and its main aim is to describe and explain the patterns of usage which are found in all varieties of the language, whether they are socially prestigious or not. The approach also recognizes the fact that language is always changing, and that there will accordingly always be variation in usage; linguists feel that a notion of absolute correctness is inadequate to explain what is happening in such cases, and work instead with a notion of relative appropriateness (the suitability of a usage to a situation). The concept of “appropriateness” has itself been attacked, usually on the grounds that it is correct “in disguise”; appropriateness tries to capture a notion of naturalness in language use, and an appropriate use of language is one which does not draw attention to itself and does not motivate crtiticism. Prescriptive attitudes play an important part in defining the educateness of a society, and should not be gribly dismissed Gender issues: some of the most important linguistic changes affecting English since 1960s have arisen from the way society has come to look differently at the practices and consequences of sexis; there is now a widespread awareness, which was lacking a generation ago, of the way in which language covertly displays social attitudes towards men and women. In vocabulary, attention has been focused on the replacement of “male” words with a generic meaning by neutral items (chairman, for ex., becoming chair or chairperson); in certain cases such as job descriptions, the use of sexually neutral language has become a legal requirement, and there is continuing debate between extremists and moderates as to how far such revisions should go. In grammar, the focus has been on the lack of a sex-neutral third-person singular pronoun in English; a radical solution would be to invent a completely new pronoun to act as a neutral third person. 31 The linguistic effect of these changes in social attitudes has been far more noticeable in writing than in speech, and publishing companies now usually issue guidelines recommending that author should avoid sexist language: avoiding so-called masculine generics such as the pronoun he with sex.indefinite antecedents or man and its compounds (except in unambiguous reference to males), and avoiding using genuine generics as if they referred only to males (e.g. “Americans use lots of obscenities but not around women”). Occupational varieties: the term “occupational dialects” has long been used for the distinctive language associated with a particular way of earning a living, but such varieties are not like regional or class dialects; features of language which identify our geographical or social origins, once estabilished, tend not to vary, unless affected by major currents of language change. Occupational varieties’ linguistic features may be just as distinctive as regional or class features, but they are only in temporary use; they are “part of the job”, taken up as we begin work and put down as we end it (such notion has to allow for people who are “always on the job”, meaning that work is so much a part of their personalities that it permanently imfluences their behaviour, linguistically as well as socially). Occ. Var. develop slang and jargon which set them apart from outsiders; the more specialized the occupation and the more senior or professional the post, the more technical the language is likely to be. All occupations are linguistically distinctive to some degree, even if all that is involved is a few items of specialized vocabulary Religious English: religious belief fosters a variety in which all aspects of stucture are implicated; there is a unique phonological identity in such genres as spoken prayers, sermons, chants and litanies. There is a strong grammatical identity in invocations, prayers, blessings and other ritual forms, both public and private, and there is a highly distinctive discourse identity in such domains as liturgical services Scientific English: its main characteristics are long sentences with many clauses, adjectives, passive structures and a specialied use of vocabulary/phrases, in addition to the subject-neutral vocabulary which cuts across different specialized domains. Its lexicon is characterized by a sheer quantity of technical terms, that make difficult to understand such language together with the way in which the sentences and discourse are structured Legal English: legal language shares with science a concern for coherence and precision, and it shares with religion a respect for ritual and historical tradition; it also shares in the criticisms which these other varieties attract. Its statements have to be so phrased that we can see their general applicability, yet be specific enough to apply to individual circumstances; above all, they have to be expressed in such a way that people can be certain about the intention of the law respecting their right and duties. That is why legal language has developed such a complex grammatical structure It has lenghty sentences because it tries to integrate several relevant issues in a single statement and it is repetitive so that each point is totally clear; finally, it can be said that legal language depends greatly on a fairly small set of grammatical and lexical features (for ex., modal verbs distinguish between obligation and discretion). In practical terms, legal language seems to be anything but precise, indeed it is said to be “a profession of words”; the use of legal varieties of Latin and French after the Norman conquest introduced a major barrier between the professional lawyer and the ordinary person. Considerable progress has now been made in raising public awareness of these issues, thanks largely to the work of the Plain English Campaign; many complex legal documents have been rendered into a more accessible English 32 Plain English: a growing concern about plain English in several countries has drawn attention to the unnecessary complexity of the official language used by government departments, businesses and other organizations which are in linguistic contact with the public; the plain English movements are a modern phenomenon, in the UK the Plain English campaign was launched in 1979 by a ritual shredding of government forms in Parliament Square, while in the USA, President Carterissued an order in 1978 requiring that regulations be written in plain English. The order promoted a great deal of local legislation throughout the country, and an increase in plain language awareness among corporations and consumers; the campaigners point to enormous savings in time and money which can result from the use of clearer language Political English: the language of politicians displays much of the ritual phraseology and consciousness which we associate with religion or law, and it makes use of many of the rhethorical and dramatic techniques belonging to advertising or to the media. When two people of different political persuasions confront each other, there is more at stake than grasping the immediate meaning of the words they use: there are questions of identity, personal consistency and credibility; political questions and answers can rarely be clearly valutated when confrontations happen in public. Most politicians seem to work on the assumption that what their opponent says is a tissue of lies, side-issues and irrelevance but at the same time they are aware that this is a stereotype and that they are playing a language game; in fact, politics is said to be the world of the half-truth. In political speaking, the need for applause is paramount and much of the distinctive rhetoric of a political speech is structured in such a way as to give the audience the maximum chance to applaud on cue (=”a comando”); moreover, skilled politicians can resort to several techniques in order to evade an awkward question (they can for ex. ignore the question, decline to answer it or acknowledge it without answering it), that is why politics can be considered as a true “form of art” News media English: when we apply the notion of a language variety to the media, we have to look within each product (a newspaper, a radio or TV channel) for uses of language which have been shaped by the nature of the medium; for ex. the reporting of news, whether in the spoken or written media, reflects one of the most difficult and constraining situations to be found in the area of language use (the chief constraint is the perpetual battle against the pressures of time and space, but there is also the constraint imposed by an awareness of what “the readership”, “the listener” or “the viewer” wants). Moreover, anyone who has produced material for the media knows how the finished product can differ greatly from what is first submitted, and the average news report is the product of many hands New varieties: the electronic age has changed our lives as communicating human beings: we have to learn new conventions of communication, new techniques of accessing or asking and of reading and assimilating. Chapter 22: Personal variation • The study of English can proceed from the general to the particular, investigating the domain of personal identity; when we begin to describe the linguistic features which identify an individual we leave behind the safety-net of predictability, which has guided our study of varieties. The distinctive features of political speeches are, to some extent, predictable but there is no way of predicting someone’s personal linguistic identity from our knowledge of the way other people use language • Individuality in language is a complex matter, arising from variations in sex, physique, personality, background, interests and experience; personality plays a part in voice 35 Variety humour: the existence of language variety is a major source of humour, in speech and writing and in everyday language and literature, all over the English-speaking world; the regional accents and dialects within a community readily lend themselves to comic exaggeration. If a variety is used as a prestige dialect, its forms provide an effective means of satirizing the élite group who speak it, and moreover occupational varieties is a gift to the vocal satirist; variations of this kind are present in the everyday speech too • It is not possible to use the written medium to capture the dynamics of joke-telling, especially the crucial role played by prosody and by the interaction of face and tone of voice; writing jokes down does something lethal to their humour. Jokes are not for the individual, in fact there is something very strange about people who tell jokes to themselves or who read jokes alone (some jokes tell jokes about jokes, and this is called metalinguistic humour, which can be found in catch questions and parodies) Literary freedom: the peak of personal variation in the English language is found in the corpus of English literature; the notion of “an” English literature is now much less easy to work with, because of the increasing range of linguistically divergent literatures qualified by ethnic, regional and other labels. Literature has a much freer language than occupational varieties and regional dialects, in fact authors are free to circle above the the language and to take from it whatever they want; the language of literature has no situational restrictions, because all structures and all varieties are available to it as a resource. Authorial voice may be born out of ordinary language, but they eventually have a connection with it, providing a dimension through which we are led to see new meaning in the mundane; literature offers writers the opportunity to explore the language in individual and unprecedented ways, and although literature cannot be identified by language it is wholly identified with it, for it has no other medium of expression Phonetic freedom: the phonetic properties of English sounds are an important source of special effects, especially in poetry and drama; it is obiouvsly the case that speech sounds have acoustic properties which remind people of noises they encounter in the world. The term phonaesthetics is often used for the study of sounds from this point of view; all aspects of pronunciation are affected, including vowels, consonants, syllables and prosodic patterns Phonological freedom: the ossibility that sounds may have some instrinsic meaning is discounted, and all the attention is focused on how sounds are used contrastively in sequences, pointing to meanings which lie elsewhere; a distinctive phonological pattern always carries a semantic implication. The similarity of sound, in short, prompts a similarity of sense Graphological freedom: the conventions of the written language are more stable, limited and perceptible than those of speech, and operating with a world standard alphabet, a limited range of punctuation marks and a physical medium (the page) there would seem to be little real freedom for the writer in the area of graphetics and graphology. It is the genre of poetry which has tried most urgently and successfully to free itself from the severity of the constraints imposed by its linear medium, but on the other hand there is nothing in prose to match the graphic variations which have been used to give visual structure to poetry or to suggest particular modes of oral reading. Lines, verse structure, the use of white space and textual shape define the semantic structure of a poem, and identify the weight to be attached to its various elements; they also control the tempo of a reader’s interpretation, and the pace of an oral performance Grammatical freedom: there are severe limits on the freedom of writers to deviate from the norms of English grammar, if they want their text to mantain coherence and intelligibility; 36 grammatical deviance in literature is not ususally gross, thought from time to time (especially in poetry) we can encounter constructions which strain for intelligibility. In poetry a deviant grammatical pattern is typically to satisfy the phonological demands of the line or verse, and sometimes grammatical deviation is there to add to the archaic tone of a text, using elements of older morphology; comic verde also relies greatly on drastic grammatical variations, both morphological and syntactic Lexical freedom: in poetry, where there is a well-estabilished tradition of literary vocabulary (which is called poetic diction), the 20th century has seen a remarkable broadening, so that now we are likely to encounter there the whole range of the domestic lexicon including slang and taboo words as well as the special vocabulary of regional and social varieties;as a result, it is no longer so easy to describe the lexical choices in a literary work Discourse freedom: evidence of deviance and personal identity is fairly easy to see when the stretch of language being investigated is fairly small, but as soon as we enter into such domains as the paragraph, section, scene, act and chapter, it becomes much more difficult to see distinctive linguistic structure in action; is an analysis succeeds is it usually because it has restricted the scope of its enquiry. According to contemporary thinking in pragmatics, conversation succeeds because we adopt a “cooperative principle”, which is a set of rules governing linguistic interaction whihc everyone recognizes; we assume, for example, that when people ask us a question they wish us to respond and they intend to pay attention to our answer Variety freedom: it is not only the levels of language structure which, singly or in combination, can be used in deviantways as part of literary self-expression: the complexes of features which define regional and social varieties can also be put to use; a text may begin in one variety and then switch to another, or build up effects by incorporating features of several varieties. This is most evident in the novel, and some novelists have a considerable reputation for their ability to capture variety usage in this way (such as Charles Dickens); by contrast, it is much more difficult to introduce variety distinctiveness into poetry, in fact it is unusual to find in a poem lines which tap the whole range of variety features Demonstrating identity: in all cases, the identification of potential stylistic features, whether shared or idiosynctratic, has been carried out significantly. The more we know about the structural possibilities of language, the more we shall spot points of stylistic interest when they arise, and the more we shall be able to explain the nature of the effects; the present century has seen considerable progress in providing alternative methods for arriving at stylistic decisions, aided by developments in statistics and computing. The basic approach is to calculate the frequency and distribution of a small number of linguistic variables in a text, comparing texts from unknown or uncertain authorship with comparable texts whose authorship is known; literature is not the only beneficiar of these methods. In the legal field there is now a large body of published material showing how linguistic techniques can be used to support a claim of identity or difference between samples of speech and writing as part of a case for the defence of prosecution; this application has generated yet another name for the subject: forensic linguistics Chapter 23: Learning English as a mother tongue People do not need to be proficient (as producers or receivers) in all of the enormous range of regional and occupational varieties of English which exist, but everyone needs to acquire a 37 certain minimum ability in the three domains of language structure, interaction and use; to be adult linguistically means to have acquired the following skills: • the 20 or so vowels and 24 or so consonants of a spoken dialect of the language, and over 300 ways of combining these sounds into sequences • a vocabulary which can evidently reach 50.000 or more active words, and a passive ability to understand about half as many again • at least a thousand aspects of grammatical construction, dealing with all the rules governing sentence and word formation • ways of using the prosodic features of pitch, loudness, speed and rhythm along with other tones of voice, to convey meaning • a number of rules governing the way in which sentences can be combined into spoken discourse, both in monologue and dialogue • a number of conventions governing the way in which varieties of the language differ, so that the linguistic consequences of region, gender, class, occupation and other such factors can be assimilated • an uncertain number of strategies governing the ways in which all the above rules can be broken or bent in order to achieve special effects such as in jokes and poems The task of learning to read and write demands an additional set of skills involving letter recognition, spelling rules, reading strategies and writing techniques; the acquisition of a first language is the most complex skill anyone ever learns, and children need a great help if it is to be accomplished successfully. From birth, emerging linguistic awareness needs careful fostering by parents and other caretakers; in school, the nurturing and expansion of linguistic skills needs systematic promotion across the whole curriculum as well as in the basic area of reading and writing, and for those children who prove to have special needs there has to be extra help. It is traditional to think of illiteracy as a problem facing the underdeveloped nations of the world, but in fact significant numbers of people have major difficulties with reading and writing also in the “inner circle” of English-speaking countries; literacy is not an all-or-none skill, but a continuum of gradually increasing levels and domains of ability The development of grammar: the learning of grammar is an almost imperceptible process and it happens so quickly; it is a matter of only three or four years, and in that time children master the grammar of the language to an extent which would be the envy of any foreign learner Grammar learning is a continuous process, but it is possible to spot certain types of development taking place at certain stages, as children grow up in English: • the earliest stage is hardly like grammar at all, as it consists of utterances which are just one word long (such as gone, dada, teddy and hi) • the next stage begins to look more like “real” grammar because two words are put together to make primitive sentence structures; by the end of this stage children have learnt several basic lessons about English word order • the next step is “filling out” of these simple sentence patterns adding extra elements of clause structure and making the elements themselves more complex; to get to this point takes up much of the thrid year • at around three years sentences become much longer, as children start stringing their clauses together to express more complex thoughs and to tell simple stories • this takes us towards the age of 4, when children typically do a great deal of “sorting out” in their grammar; they learn the adult forms of the irregular noun and verb and of the pronoun. As there are several dozen irregular nouns and several hundreds irregular verbs, and all kinds of other grammatical irregularities to be sorted out, it is not surprising that it takes children the best part of a year to produce a level of English where these “cute” errors are absent; the process will continue until the early teens, especially in acquiring confident control over the grammar of the written language 40 The new technology supports sociolinguistic studies of dialect variation, providing computer- generated maps and sophisticated statistical processing, and as always, faced with technological progress, the role of the human being becomes more critical than ever; it is not difficult for researchers to be swamped with unmanageable data The corpus revolution: compilating a corpus is very different from the traditional practices of citation-gathering or “word-watching” which have guided work on dictionaries since the time of Dr Johnson; corpora are large and systematic enterprises: whole texts or whole sectionsof text are included such as conversations, magazine articles, newspapers, lectures, sermons eccetera. Considerable thought is given to the selection of material so that in the most general case the corpus can stand as a reasonably representative sample of the language as a whole, as well as comparative statements about usage in different varieties; to arrive at a total account of the linguistic features in any of the texts contained in the corpus • A general corpus must in principle be large enough to answer the questions likely to be asked of it • A general corpus must represent the language as faithfully as possible, within the period of time chosen for study; this means mantaining a balance between speech and writing, monologue and dialogue, male and female and as many other aspects of variation as it is practicable to obtain • A general corpus must be well structured so that it proves easy for researchers to access it efficiently A large and well-constructed corpus will give excellent information about the frequency, distribution ad typicality of linguistic features such as words and collocations, spellings, pronunciations and grammatical constructions • In grammatical and lexical research, for ex., it is usually necessary to know the grammatical status of a word and this means tagging each word in the database with a grammatical label • A major problem is the copyright law, which can restrict the public availability of the texts that the designer wants to include • Perhaps the biggest problem is the need to encode the language database Dictionaries: more than any other domain of English language study, the compilation of dictionaries has been aided and stimulated by the availability of computer techniques and electronically stored collections of text. It will never be possible to eliminate the subjective element from dictionaries; unconscious bias can affect the very process of definition writing, as has been pointed out by feminist critics of male-orientated entries. And subjectivity is inherent in the choice of sources for citations Dictionary giants: the history of lexicography is dominated by the names of three figures: Johnson, Webster and Murray; their influence continues today, directly in the case of Webster through the series of dictionaries which bear his name, and indirectly in the case of Johnson, through the tradition which led the Philological Society to sponsor a “new” English dictionary The Oxford English Dictionary: in 1857 the Philological Society of Great Britain, noting the inadequacies of the English dictionaries then available, resolved to promote a “New English Dictionary” which would record the history of the language from the Anglo-Saxon times; in 1879, the Society reached an agreement with Oxford University Press and appointed James A. H. Murray as editor. The aim was to produce a four-volumework in a period of ten years, but after five years Murray and his colleagues had managed to complete only the section A-ANT; it was evident that the dictionary was a much greater work than had been envisaged. Additional 41 editors were appointed, and the Oxford English Dictionary, as it came to be called, was produced in fascicles over the next 44 years, the final section appearing in 1928 ad it was published in 12 volumes.