Introduction to the Study of English

Cambridge dictionary:

What’s language?
1. a system of communication consisting of sounds, words, and grammar
2. a system of communication used by people living in a particular country

• Henry Sweet (an English phonetician and linguist): “Language is the

expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words.
Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to
that of ideas into thoughts.”

The Encyclopaedia Britannica : Language is a system

•
of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means
of which human beings, as members of a social groups and participants
in its culture, express themselves.

Language - is an institution
whereby humans communicate and interact with each other.

• animals also communicate together but their communication

systems lack the ability to communicate about anything beyond here
and now, also they do not produce or understand novel message.
• Language is confined to humans in the strict sense.

Language has:

• Informative function – language is a means of communicating

ideas, exchanging information, conveying messages ....

• Social function – language is a means of establishing

and maintaining relationships with other people

• - in spoken language - people use a set of symbols that consists of

noises resulting from movements of certain organs within the throat
and mouth - sounds

- in signed language - these symbols may be hand or body

•
movements, gestures, or facial expressions - by means of these
symbols, people are able to convey information, to express feelings
 and emotions etc ... with persons who make use of the same set of
symbols

• - in written language – we use a system of conventional symbols

that represent language
• - it is the representation of a language by means of a writing system

Writing systems: there are different kinds of writing systems – they

use different symbols that represent different things
• Writing systems:
• Logographic
• Syllabic
• Alphabetic

Logographic system – (also called logosyllabary)

• a writing system that uses symbols (signs, characters) that mean whole
words - symbols represent things or ideas
• - written or pictorial symbol represents a whole word
• - these symbols are called logograms or logographs ([Link])

Syllabic system (a syllabary): a writing system with symbols that

mean a syllable.
• e.g the hiragana and katakana used for the Japanese language
• (hiragana is primarily used to represent Japanese words, while
katakana represents foreign words)

Alphabetic system: Alphabets - writing systems that write individual sounds

(phonemes)

• true alphabets - symbols represent all sounds – vowels and

consonants -used in Roman (Latin) alphabet, Greek alphabet (Greece,
Cyprus) and Cyrillic alphabet ([Link])

• some alphabetic systems do not show vowels, only consonants -

• they are called abjads
• e.g. Arabic - doesn´t indicate short vowels in writing
• e.g. Hebrew alphabet - is also a consonantal alphabet – originally
there were no separate letters for vowels in written alphabet - vowels
were added to the reading
 • - later a system of vowel marks was developed - vowels
are represented by diacritics

• Abugida
• - the transition between a syllabic and alphabetic system is
called abugida ( used in India, South-east Asia, Ethiopia)
• It is a segmental writing system in which consonant-
vowel sequences are written as units.
• - each unit is based on a consonant letter and vowel notation
is secondary
• - syllables are built up of consonants, each of which has
an inherent vowel – i.e. a vowel is assumed to be pronounced in
a syllable even if it is not written down.
• [Link]
• [Link]
We have to distinguish between language as –

• an individual act of speaking or writing in a particular context at a given

moment or in a certain social context
• the abstract linguistic system underlying the linguistic behaviour of a
whole community of speakers.

Linguistics:
- is a scientific study of language
• - it analyzes language on different levels and from different points of
view
Linguistics deals with:
• 1. the study of particular languages
• 2. it searches for general properties common to all languages or large
groups of languages

Linguistics includes the following subareas :

• phonetics and phonology (the study of sounds )

• morphology (the structure of words)
• syntax (the structure of sentences)
• semantics (meaning)
• pragmatics (language in context)
Branches of linguistics

General (theoretical) linguistics :

• tries to determine universal principles of language

• describes the general features of language

• human language is seen as a universal part of human behaviour

Contrastive linguistics

• concentrates on the differences between languages

• its findings are often applied in the context of language teaching

Comparative linguistics

• studies different languages looking for similar characteristics.

• compares 2 or more different languages from 1 or more points of view -
this may include comparison of historical relationships among
languages or comparison based on resemblance of features between
languages without any historical consideration.

Historical linguistics

• studies the development in languages in the course of time - registering

the changes that have taken place in it
• languages change from period to period – historical
linguistics studies causes and results of the changes
• 2 basic principles can be applied to the study of language:
• SYNCHRONIC study of language
• DIACHRONIC study of language

Synchronic – diachronic linguistics

SYNCHRONIC STUDY OF LANGUAGE :

• describes a stage of a language at a certain time - during which
it´s assumed that no changes are taking place
• synchronic linguistics - studies languages at a single point of time
 • it may be the present-day situation or any given period in the history
of language development

• DIACHRONIC STUDY OF LANGUAGE

• relates to the changes that take place in language during the passage
of years (e.g. word order in English)

Applied linguistics
• is concerned with the application of linguistic theories and
their findings in solving various language problem, mostly in the
teaching of foreign languages (e.g., Studying language disorders, in
translation, lexicography...)
What are practical applications of linguistics?
• Native, second or foreign language learning
• Speech therapy
• Translating and interpreting
• Machine translation
• Forensic linguistics
• Mass media...

Language Features
Defining language is a difficult task:

many definitions of language have been proposed by linguists.

- however, there seems to be no definition that captures in

full its fundamental nature
- if linguists can´t define language properly- another solution is to
identify features that language as a system of communication
must have in order to function as a language.

• In1960 - American linguistic anthropologis Charles Francis Hocket

(1916 – 2000) listed 13 so-called design features of language
(later expanded to 16 features)

he considered themto be universal across the world’s languages

these features in
his view distinguished human language from animal communication
these features tell us much about what language is like and
what we can do with it.

• The list of design language features has been modified over years
• today mainly 5 or
6 main design features are regarded as key features of the
communication system called a language:

• Arbitrariness
• Discreteness
• Displacement
• Productivity
• Cultural transmission
• Duality of patterning

1. Arbitrariness:

• language is arbirtrary there is no“natural” inherent connection be

tween a linguistic form and its meaning
- the choice of
a word that is selected to mean a particular thing or idea is
purely arbitrary.

- the meaning is not in any way predictable from the form nor is the form

predictable from the meaning

• e.g., there is no reason why a female adult human is called a wom
an in English, in German, Zen in Persian, žena in Slovak ...
• the shape of a word does not determine its obvious meaning.

- although arbitrariness is a norm in language, there are some non-

arbitrary aspects in languages
- there are some words in languages that seem to “echo” the sounds
of objects or activities /e.g. cuckoo, crash, slurp, squeel, whirr... /
- perhaps every language displays some small degree of non-
arbitrariness
• it may involve:
1. Items whose forms are largely determined by their meaning
- onomatopoeic words (imitative or natural sounds), e.g. bow-
wow, cock-a-doodle-doo, meow....
• - words that mimic the sounds or noises that they refer to – sound
s of animals, human sounds or sounds that objects make

English Onomatopoeia
• uman sounds: achoo (sneezing), clap, burp,growl, gargle, slam, scr
eech.....
• Sounds made by objects: bang, boom, beep, ding-
dong, smash, splash...
• Animal sounds: baa(sheep), buzz (insect), meow(cat), hoot (owl),
moo (cow), oink (pig)
• - the form of these words is very much determined by the meaning
• but the form is not an exact copy of the natural sound
• e.g. the sound that a rooster makes in English is – cock-a-doodle-
doo – - English speakers conventionalized this noise in this form, Slovak s
peakers, however, conventionalized the same sound as kikirikí
• - onomatopoeic words are relatively rare in human languages
• [Link]
2. Sound symbolism /see for more details in Crystal´s Encyclopedia, pp.250-253/
- certain sounds occur in words not because they directly imitate the sounds in
nature but rather evoke certain meaning
• - the way these sounds sound suggests some physical characteristics, e.g.
in many languages, words for “small“
or words that have smallness as part of their meaning, contain the vowel /i/, e.g. te
eny,wee, teeny weeny.... , in Greek - micros,
in Spanish the ending for diminutive – ito
• Why is it so? - because /i/ is a high-pitched vowel and as such indicates
• smallness
• - other high-pitched sounds in nature are emitted by small objects
• - sound symbolism refers to the non-arbitrary relationship that
exist between phonetic properties of speech sounds and their meaning
 • [Link]

x
2. Discreteness

• the property of language to combine together discrete units to create larger

communication units
e.g. the sentence - She is slow.
- the sentence is composed of more discrete units which are independent (words)
- words are composed of even smaller units (individual sounds)
• sounds themselves do not have meanings
• the sounds used in language are meaningfully distinct - each sound is
treated as a discrete unit, and the occurrence of one sound instead of the
other leads to a misuse of language
- English
has around 50 sounds which can be combined in different ways to express different
meanings
- sounds combined together create words, words create sentences, sentences crea
te utterances - thoughts are expressed

Language is structured into levels - there are 5 levels

of language structure:
 1. Phonetics, Phonology:
• level of sounds
• Phonetics: studies physical properties of speech sounds in the process of
speech production and speech perception
• the main unit is a sound
• Phonology: classifies sounds of
a language, it studies how sounds pattern and function in a language
• phonology sees sounds as abstract units, as elements that are
in speakers´ minds, as units that are able to distinguish lexical meanings of w
ords
• these units - called phonemes
• phonemes are meaningless in isolation
 • but their clusters ( syllables, words...) can be meaningful if they are placed i
n correct order

2. Morphology:
• the level of words and endings
• it is what one normally understands by grammar (along with synta
x)
•
the expression comes from the Greek terms morphé and logos – a co
mpound term which stands for “study of forms“
• morphology studies word forms and the component parts that a
word consists of
• the main unit is a morpheme

Word
• What is a word?
• it is a unit, a part
of sentence, that is graphically separated by spaces
• it can (but doesn´t have to) be separated by pauses
• it is uninterruptable (no elements can be inserted in the
middle of word)
• it falls into certain classes which we call word classes
• a word can contain one or more morphemes
• e.g. success –
1 morpheme, vs. success/ful – 2morphemes)

Morpheme
• the smallest unit of grammar with which some meaning and/or
grammatical function is associated
there are 2 basic types of morphemes:
• free morphemes – morphemes that can stand alone as
a word (e.g. play, house, against, realize)
• bound morphemes – cannot stand alone as a word (e.g.
“assignment“ - “ assign=free morpheme, -
ment=bound morpheme, playful)
• Bound morphemes can be - A. derivational
 B. inflectional

Derivational morphem
es
• divided into prefixes and suffixes
• they have 2 important properties:

1. they can change the word class

• e.g. friend – friendship, friendly,friendliness, unfriendliness, friendl

ess, befriend
• these derived words belong to different word classes: nouns, adj
ectives, a verb

2. they affect the meaning

- each of these words has

a different meaning than the base friend

Inflectional morpheme
s
• indicate the relation of words to other words and to the extralin
guistic reality
• they do not affect the meaning and do not change the word cla
ss
• all inflectional morphemes are suffixes
• there are 8 inflectional morphemes in English

For verbs:
• Present participle (playing)
• Past participle (written)
• Past tense (played)
• 3rd person singular present (he works)
•
For nouns:
• Plural (things)
• Genitive (Peter´s)
For adjectives:
• Comparative (older)
• Superlative (oldest)
Morphemes can be:
• monofunctional or
• polyfunctional - morpheme can have one or
more functions

Morphological (inflection
al)classification of langua
ges
• we distinguish two basic types of languag
es:
• analytic languages
• synthetic languages
• no language is purely analytic or synthetic
• we only name them according to the feat
ures that prevail in it
• the inflectional possibilities of
most langauages can be defined in terms of
a continuum
 • analytic l. ------------------------------------------
--synthetic l.
• at one extreme of this continuum we hav
e analytic l. and
at the other extreme synthetic l.

Analytic languages
• an ideal analytic language has followi
ng features:
• each word is expressed by
just one morpheme
- there is one to one correspondence bet
ween words and morphemes
• words are not split into smaller units –
there is no segmentation of words
• morphemes in such a language do not
combine
• the relations between words are expr
essed by separate auxiliary words (e.g. p
repositions),
not by changes of the word form
• it has fixed word order
• word order is highly significant, morpholo

gy is not significant in these languages

 • an analytic language organizes words
and grammar by a strict word
order instead of inflections
• Chinese, Vietnamese.....
Synthetic languages
an ideal synthetic language has the following f
eatures:
• words are combined using a large
number of morphemes
• if the morphemes are monofunctiona
l (1 function)
- the language is an agglutinating type, e
.g. Hungarian, Turkish.....
• e.g doktor-ok-
nak – the dative plural of Hungarian wor
d “doctor“ -
• each morpheme expresses a separate
grammatical category (dative,
plural)
and the order of morphemes is given and can
not be changed
 • if the morphemes are polyfunctional -
the language is an inflecting (fusional) ty
pe
• e.g. Slovak: doktor- om- the ending -
om can indicate more cases and number
(dativ pl., instrumental sg.)
• other Slavic languages, Baltic languag
es, Latin....
Inflecting languages - declension and conjugation

• we can decline or conjugate the word

based on the given set of inflections
Synthetic languages, such as Slovak, Czech or
German, use a lot of inflections
Compare Slovak and English:
• there are many different forms of one
word in different situations: e.g in Slova
k the noun PES has different forms (due t
o declension - cases – pes, psa,
psovi, psa, psovi, psom), whereas English
has only DOG
• or with verbs - the Slovak verb ÍSŤ
has different forms:
 • (through conjugation) idem, ideš, ide,
ideme, idete, idú
- whereas English has only GO or GOES
Special type
of synthetic l. is a polysynthetic language:
• a polysynthetic language is a unique
type of language where words are
formed by combining several
morphemes into a single unit
• these combination units can express
complex ideas that are typically
conveyed through whole sentences in
other languages
• language in which a verb and
a subject or object of
a sentence are included within a
single word
• the main functional elements of
a clause structure are joined in one word
and have no independent existence (e.g.
North American
and Australian indigenous languages, Pap
uan languages....)
 • here's an example from Inuit:
•

• the word 'tawakiqutiqarpiit‘ - can be

broken down into the morphemes 'ta-
wak-ikut-iqar-piit', which mean 'you-
singular-plural-them-to give‘
• the single word 'tawakiqutiqarpiit' roughly
translates to 'You give them to us' in
English
In synthetic languages, word order is not very
important - because the different forms of
words (inflections) carry the meaning
- e.g. in Slovak
- these 2 different sentences have the same
word order but
different meaning:
• Pes naháňa mačku. Ja
no miluje Evu.
• Psa naháňa mačka. Ja
na miluje Eva.
- the different forms (endings) ensure that we
know who is chasing who
or who loves who
- but English needs to distinguish the meanin
g with word order
• A dog is chasing a cat. Jo
hn loves Eve.
• A cat is chasing a dog. Ev
e loves John.
English is an analytic language today:
• there is only very little inflection
• word order is very important for unde
rstanding the meaning

Looking back at the history of the English lang

uage - English
once was a synthetic (inflecting) language - th
e system of inflections (from Old
English) was lost
• English
has many “analytic“ words that can not b
e subdivided further
The change from a synthetic language to an
analytic one is the most
significant change that has occurred in the hi
story of English
[Link]

Language levels
II.
The Lexical Level
• lexical components of the language
- words and their combinations
• Vocabulary (lexicon)
•

• all words used in a language

• not just a list
of words - there are complex relations
between them
• English has a little more than 500
000 words
• the words we use = active vocabul
ary – roughly 5 000 words
 • the words we don´t use but underst
and = passive vocabulary
Every person
has his/her own special vocabulary and linguis
tic behaviour
which is unique – it´s called an idiolect
•

idiolect consists of word selection and w

ord combination
• it includes also speech habits, pronunc
iation....
• it depends on person´s education, prof
ession, environment, age,
gender, social status, creativity, interests....
Vocabulary is the least stable system in the la
nguage – it is constantly changing
Vocabulary is the focus of 2 disciplines:
A. lexicology (vocabulary structure, word
usage, origin and properties)
B. lexicography (procedures and principl
es of writing/compiling dictionaries)
• Appearance of words
How are new words created?
New words may appear:
• By means of word formation - from ot
her words already existing in the
language
• e.g. through derivation obedient – dis
obedient, compounding – greenhouse, co
nversion dry – to dry)
•

By means of borrowings from other lang

uages – i.e. loan words
e.g. opera(Italian), comedy (Greek), cafe (Fren
ch)......
• By means of coinage i.e. the inventio
n of a new word or a phrase
• they usually name newly emerged obj
ects or phenomena in reality
• they are created from scratch, not by r
eusing the already-existing
material in the language
What changes happen in the vocabulary of
a language?
 • Disappearance of words
Words disappear from the language when:
1. we do not need them any more due to the disappea
rance of the object in extra-
linguistic reality (e.g. loom – tkáčsky stav)
2. they get replaced (e.g by means of shortening – refri
gerator into fridge)
3. we get rid of identically pronounced words to avoid
misunderstanding
(e.g. write, right,
rite, wright (archaic, a maker or builder)
- the word wright disappeared, it has been preserved o
nly in the word “playwright“, it was replaced by
“maker“ or “builder“)
4. due to borrowings from other languages (e.g. the S
candinavian take replaced
the Old English / Germanic/ niman (“nehmen“
in modern German)

Lexicology
• Word formation
• Etymology
• Lexical semantics
 • Study of idioms
Lexical semantics
• studies the meanings of words and
word equivalents
• there are 2 types of meanings:
1. conceptual (denotational)
meaning
• the basic, dictionary
meaning - every word has it
• it is the definition of the
word and its direct meaning

2. associative
(connotational) meaning
• expresses attitudinal or emotion
al factors connected with the word
Connotational meaning - we
distinguish between -
 • stylistically coloured and emotionally
coloured words
• e.g. verbs ask, question,
interrogate - the first word is neutral,
the second is more formal and the third
is the most formal -
it is stylistic colouring
• e.g. adjectives thin (neutral), slender/s
lim/lean (positive), skinny (negative)
• it is emotional colouring
The connotational meaning is not present in
all words

Etymology
• studies the origin and the development of wo
rds – their meaning as well as their form (how th
e form has changed)
• although English is a Germanic language, it onl
y contains 20% of Germanic words, the rest came
from other languages (and ousted the original
words from use)
• in the past, there were 3 languages dominant
in the process of borrowing:
• Latin (wine, cup, street, pound, cross)
• French (crown, peace, justice, beef, state,
people)
 • Scandinavian (leg, skin, knife, happy, they,
wrong)
• other languages include: Italian (piano, opera,
umbrella), Spanish
(cigarette, potato, guitar), Dutch (yacht,
iceberg, ) Chinese
(tea), German (hamburger, kindergarten), Turkis
h (youghurt), Arabic (alcohol,
admiral, coffee,sofa)

Classification of words
I. according to the number of meanings
II. according to the similarities and
differences in meaning
III. according to the meaning included

The number of meanin

gs
• 1. monosemantic words
• words that have just one
meaning, few words are monosemantic
• 2. polysemantic words – more
meanings, frequent in English
 • e.g. head – can mean
• the thing on your neck
• a person in charge of sth
• the hair: ”wash your head”
• the foam on beer
Similarities and differen
ces in meaning
1. synonyms – e.g. noun, substantive…. ask,
question, interrogate ...buy, purchase
• very similar, almost identical and
almost freely interchangeable
• often they are stylistically coloured or
have various connotational meanings
3. antonyms – words of opposite
meaning, e.g. old – young, bad – good
3. homonyms – the meaning is
completely different but the words
have the spelling and/or pronunciation in
common:
HOMONYMS:
 • homonyms proper (e.g. bank –
financial institution or bank of a
river)
• homophones (e.g. steal – steel,
words have the
same pronunciation but different
meaning and different spelling)
• homograps (e.g. wind /wɪnd/ vs.
to wind /waɪnd/
- words that have same spelling bu
t can be used in different meanings
and/or have different pronunciati
ons
The meaning included
• more general terms include the
meanings of the more specific ones:
[Link]/hyperonym - a word whos
e meaning includes the meaning of
a more specific word
 • e.g. plant (more general) - is a hyperon
ym of flower)
• 2. hyponym - more specific words
• e.g. hypernym: cook
hyponyms: bake, boil, grill, fry, steam, ro
ast
Lexicography
• is the theory and practice of compiling
dictionaries
• Dictionary: is a reference book which
lists and explains the words
of one language or gives translations of
the words into another language
• a good dictionary tells you something
about the pronunciation,
word forms, grammatical information,
the usage in one of the language variants
(AmE, BrE), usage examples, derivations,
fixed phrases used with particular words,
phrasal verbs, synonyms, antonyms,
idioms, etymology….
Dictionary types:
A. linguistic dictionaries - contain
information already mentioned
• can be:
• explanatory dictionaries – the word and its
definition are written in the same language
• translation dictionaries – provide equivalents
in a particular language
Other division type:
1. general-purpose dictionaries – contain the
entire vocabulary
2. specialized dictionaries – contain only a
special part/aspect of the vocabulary
(legal, medical....)
B. encyclopaedic dictionaries – contain
comprehensive information about people, places,
events etc.

Language levels
III.
Syntax:
• the level of sentences
• syntax studies how words are combined
to form sentences
 • in languages words are put
together into sentences according to the rules of
syntax
• these rules
are acquired in early childhood - and result in
a small range of possible sentence patterns – but
from these few patterns an infinite number of
sentences can be generated
• each language has its own specific syntax
• syntax is the law of language that determines
word order and the basic sentence structure with
in the different languages

in Englishsyntax is very important - because h

ow we arrange words - it changes the meanin
g
• Ann is pretty – a statement
• Is Ann pretty? -
by switching two words - we get
a question
• if we want to
change the meaning, we have to rearran
ge words in sentences
 • English has fixed word order: SVOMPT
- subject, verb, object, (adverbial of )
manner, place, time

Sentence
• each text (written/spoken) consists
of various units of various ranks,
relations and types
• there are relations between these
units in a text and a sentence
• What is a sentence?
• a set of words that is complete in itself
• it generally contains a subject and
a verb
• a regular sentence (in a written text) s
tarts with a capital letter and ends with a
full stop and expresses a certain idea

Sentence types:
• according to the discourse function:
A, declarative sentences (statements)
- He knows the answer.
B, interrogative sentences (questions)
 1. yes-no questions Are you hungry?
2. wh-questions (plus
“how“) Why did you do it?
C, exclamatory sentences (exclamations)
– What a beautiful weather!
C. imperative sentences (commands)
– Complete this by tomorrow.

• according to the structural complexity:

1. simple sentence
– consist of one independent clause
2. multiple sentence – consist of
more than one clause
3. compound s. - He plays the guitar and
she plays the piano – two parts with equal
status (priraďovacie súvetie in Slovak)
4. complex s.– When he arrived, she had
already left – two parts with unequal statu
s - one is the main clause (hlavná
veta) and one or
more is a subordinate clause (vedľajšia
veta)
 • Sentence and clause are both translat
ed as “veta“ in Slovak
Clause:
• A clause is the smallest grammatical unit t
hat contains minimally a subject and a
predicate and can or cannot express a complete t
hought or an idea
•

• There are 2 kinds of clauses:

1. main clause (independent clause) is a clau
se that can stand alone as a sentence, can m
ake sense by itself, it is also known as
a simple sentence
2. subordinate clause (dependent clause)
– adds additional information to the main clause b
ut cannot stand alone as a sentence
Clause elements

• each clause consists of clause element

s
• each sentence/clause must contain at
least a subject and a predicate
• these two are obligatory elements bet
ween which we have a concord – agreem
 ent in grammatical categories, e.g. The m
an works
• other elements are
- object, complement and adverbial
• Subject - a part of a sentence that
contains the person or thing performing
the action (verb) in a sentence,
e.g. John reads a book.
• subject complement
• completes the meaning of the subject
• there is an intensive relationship
between the subject and
subject complement because they have
the same reference, e.g. Peter is
an architect
• tells something about the state of
subject or the change of the state of the
subject, e.g John seems happy, The
leaves are turning yellow,
It smells delicious, He has
become President
• Predicate – verb - is the central syntactic
element in a sentence
• its function is to predicate or state
something about the subject
• it typically expresses actions (kill, kiss),
mental states and processes
(know, think, consider), acts of
communication (speak, say, tell),
existence (remain, live, be) or
occurrence (happen, change, occur)
• Object – has 2 types
• direct object – is the receiver of the
action mentioned in the sentence, e.g. He wrote
a letter, She shook her head
• it has no preposition and comes immediately after
the verb or indirect object
• indirect object - identifies the person/thing for
whom/for what the action of the verb is
performed, e.g. John told Peter a
story. (indirect object – Peter; direct object –
story)
• it can only exist in a sentence in the presence of
the direct object
• it comes immediately after the verb without
a preposition followed by the direct object or at
the end of a sentence as a prepositional
phrase (with “to“ or “for“, e.g. He bought a gift to
him )
 • we have to to distinguish between a direct
object and an object complement
• They named the boy Christopher - ‘boy’ is
the direct object and ‘Christopher’ is the
object complement
• the object complement is a word that
describes the object
• They elected him their mayor - object –
him; object complement – mayor
• Adverbial
- is usually optional, provides additional information
- it is the most moveable element within the sentence
• adverbials are words that give more
information about a verb
• they can be one word (angrily, here) or
phrases (at home, in a few hours) and
often say how, where, when or how
often something happens or is done
• adverbs are a word class, adverbial is
a grammatical label - it´s about describing their
function in a sentence
• As a rule, standard English sentences follow
a SVOMPT word order – subject, verb, object,
adverbials of manner, place and time
- it may be changed, e.g. in questions, inversion with
negatives (e.g. Never have I been so happy)
Semantics:
• studies the meanings of linguistic e
xpressions in language
• it has
a special position in linguistic study b
ecause it is autonomous
from all other language levels - semantics
can accompany any of them
• it touches practically every level
of language (except phonetics) - there
exist lexical, grammatical and uttera
nce meaning - the meaning is present
in units from morphemes up to word
s, sentences and text (morphemes ar
e the most elementary units of langua
ge with lexical potential)
Semantics studies the meaning:
• on the word level
- when dealing with meanings, we have to take into acc
ount also the context
e.g. a big ant, small bear - big ant is not larger than a s
mall bear, even though „big“
means „larger than small“
• on the syntactic level - deals with clauses and
sentences
- even an ungrammatical sentence can have a meanin
g
• The car fast I love, my friend no
• a perfectly grammatical sentence might not ha
ve any meaning at all
• Colouress green ideas sleep bravely
- we primarily focus on grammatically correct sentence
s

• on the discourse level – it studies the meanin

g of individual sentences

Semantics is interested in:

• how meaning works in language

• how the way in which words are put t
ogether creates the meaning -
meaning of speech is not necessarily der
ived from the meaning of individual wo
rds put all together,
e.g. in idioms – to have butterflies in
stomach
 •the relationship between words -
how words can be semantically related t
o each other
(synonyms, antonyms, polysemy...)
The meaning in speech needn´t be always
derived from the meaning of individual words put all t
ogether
e.g. in idioms –
• I can´t hold a candle to somebody
(meaning not to
be as good as something or someone else)
• Scrape the barrel
• Cut corners
• Burn the candle from both sides .....
• the meaning of the sentence is not the result
of all words in it -
the meaning is different
-
the meaning in language is in general a product of the
meaning of words
there are however other aspects of meaning which ar
e not derived
solely from the meanings of words used in phrases an
d sentences

Pragmatics
 • studies language in use, language in co
ntext
• Pragmatics takes semantics one step f
urther
• it is the study
of the meaning of sentences within a cer
tain context
• it studies the meaning of words in use
• it looks beyond the literal meaning of
an utterance
• it studies the use of language in specifi
c situations
Relationship between syntax, semantics and
pragmatics
Syntax - is the study
of sentence structure and the rules of grammar
- syntax helps common users of a language
understand how to organize words
so that they make the most sense
•

The through pasture the chased a dog rabbit.

- if you apply normal rules of English
syntax, the sentence means nothing
 • but when we rearrange the same words in a
new order, the sentence makes perfect sense:
•

The dog chased a rabbit through the pasture.

Semantics - is the study of the meaning of sentences
- if we rearrange the previous sentence into:
• A rabbit chased the dog through the pasture -
it might make sense as far syntax is concerned
but it
seems a little odd when considering semantics -
because rabbits don't usually chase dogs
Pragmatics - is the study
of the meaning of sentences within a certain context
• A rabbit chased the dog through the pasture

- however odd the sentence may sound, it will make se

nse
if we learn about the dog's long history of being scared
of everything, even a rabbit - i.e. the sentence can
make sense when we take context into cosideration
History of
English I. OLD ENGLISH
Opening Lines of Beowulf In Old English
[Link]
A short history of English
[Link]
[Link]

English belongs to the Indo-

European family of languages
- it is related to
most other languages spoken in Europe and
western Asia
• the parent tongue, called Proto-
IndoEuropean, was spoken about
5,000 years ago by nomads who roamed th
e southeast
European plains
 • Germanic – is one of the language gro
ups descended from this ancestral
speech
• it is usually divided by scholars into thr
ee regional groups:
• East (Burgundian, Vandal,
and Gothic, all extinct),
• North (Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish
and Danish)
• West (German, Dutch (and Flemish), F
risian and English)

English is a West Germanic language first spo

ken in early medieval England
• English
has developed over the course of
more than 1 400 years

- there is a conventional division of the histor

y of English into
3 main periods:
 1. Old English (450-1.100)
2. Middle English (1.100 – 1.500)
3. Modern English (1.500 -

Old English (450-1100)

• he history of the English language reall
y
• started with the arrival of 3 Germanic
tribes -
the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes - w
ho invaded Britain in 5th cent.
• they crossed the North Sea from what
today
is Denmark and northern Germany
 • at that time the inhabitants of Britain s
poke a Celtic language
• after the invasion most
of the Celtic speakers were pushed west
and
north by the invaders – mainly into Wales, Sc
otland and Ireland
- the Angles came from “Englaland”and their l
anguage was called “Englisc” – from which th
e words “England” and “English” are derived
• it is hard to understand Old English
 • but that language provided a solid fou
ndation for the English language
people speak today

7 kingdoms
Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex,
SussexWessex , Kent
• early Old
English was not so much a language as a
group of related dialects brought to sout
hern Britain by the Germanic invaders fro
m their continental homelands
•

differences already existed between the

dialects of these tribes
• further divisions may have evolved wi
thin the separate kingdoms formed
under tribal leaders
•

political and dialectal boundaries shifted

frequently with the balance of power du
e to recurrent wars
 • by the beginning of the 7th cent. ther
e were 7 major kingdoms
- Northumbria, Mercia,
East Anglia, Essex, Sussex, Wessex and Kent
• towards the end of the 9th cent.-
in response to a common threat from Vik
ing invaders
- England was united under King Alfred the G
reat and a national language
also began to emerge
• the major dialects of Old
English were:
Northumbrian (north), Mercian (midlands),
West Saxon (south and south-west),
and Kentish (south-east)
• Northumbrian and Mercian are descri
bed together as ‘Anglian’
• Alfred was king of Wessex before he b
ecame king of England
he established West Saxon as the standard l
iterary form
 • the first great period of literary activity
occurred during the reign of King Alfred
the Great in the 9th century.
• most surviving manuscripts of Old
English are written in this variety
• textbooks and grammars of Old
English are usually based on West Saxon
• the Latin alphabet - was introduced by
Roman missionaries towards the end
of 6th century - it ultimately replaced
Anglo-Saxon runes
• but for some time, the alphabet
included the letters of the Latin alphabet
and some letters of Old English
• Latin alphabet is used in all manuscript
s of Old English
•

although some of the letters in OE were

written differently,
the alphabet is similar to that of Present-
Day English
• as Modern English evolved, the Old
English letters were dropped or replaced
The letters of the Old English alphabet are:
ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTU
XYǷÞÐÆ
• there are four letters which are not
present in modern English - wynn
(Ƿ), thorn (Þ), eth (Ð), and ash (Æ)
• some letters - j, k, q,
v and z - are rarely used

Writing:
• when the Germanic invaders arrived in
Britain, they had writing system known
as runes
- English was first written in the Anglo-
Saxon futhorc runic alphabet
• runes were straight-sided characters
primarily suitable for carving on hard
surfaces such as wood, bone or stone

Old English had 2 separate letters for the "th"

sound: þ (thorn) and Ð (eth):
Thorn (þ)
- represented the th sound in Modern English
 • it was replaced by the Y symbol in the
Latin alphabet
• the Y was the symbol that most
closely resembled
the sound represented by thorn - thorn
was dropped and Y took its place
• that is why the word ye - as in “Ye
Olde Booke Shoppe,” is an archaic
spelling of the
•

Eth (Ð, ð)
- a letter that originates from the Irish
language
- like the letter Thorn, it was also created to
represent a "th" sound (but more so for
words like "thought" instead of "the„)
• because of similarities and how Eth
and Thorn could sound - Eth was phased
out in favor or thorn
Wynn (ƿ)
• the Old English letter wynn (ƿ) was
replaced by UU - which eventually
developed into the modern W (it really
is a double U.)
Ash (Æ, æ)
- the letter Ash, or, "æ" is named after the
Futhark rune ash – now used as
a transcription symbol
•

• spelling, however, was never fully stan

dardized - scribal monks used Latin alpha
bet to spell words "phonetically"
•

each dialect (with its different sounds),

was written differently
and inconsistently
• due to dialectal evolution and/or scri
bal differences

king Alfred made an attempt to regularize spe

lling in the 9th century
but by the 11th century continuing changes in
pronunciation once
again had disruptive effects on spelling

OE vowels
• OE had 7 or
8 vowels - depending on dialect
• each could appear as either a long or sho
rt monophthong
• all dialects of OE had diphthongs
• diphthongs had short and long versions

• mostOE consonants are pronounced t

he same way as their Modern English eq
uivalents
• the exceptions are:
• - c - pronounced in 2 ways - /k/ or as
/ch/ (e.g. if c preceded a front vowel, it w
as pronounced like "ch": ceosan , if c prec
eded a back vowel, it was pronounced lik
e "k": cyning
• -
g - can also be pronounced in two ways -
pronounced either like the Modern Englis
h „j" or „g“
• -
h - was never silent, it was pronounced lik
e the "ch" at the end of Scottish "loch"
• - r - was rolled or trilled, like the "r" in
British English
• - sc - is pronounced like Modern Engli
sh "sh": scip ("ship")

The grammatical
structure of OE
the grammar of
 OE was quite different from that of Modern E
nglish
• Modern English is an analytic language(fo
r the most part)
- it uses the word order in a sentence to indic
ate grammatical and logical relationships
• Old
English was a synthetic language - the gram
matical functions of sentence components -
are signalled through their form -
by inflectional endings
• due to the inflections,
OE word order was much freer than Modern
English
• over time, however, most
of the inflectional apparatus was lost and En
glish became
the analytic language we recognize today
• e.g. in present-
day English, a noun “stone“ has only 2 ma
in forms:
• the singular stone
• plural stones and the apostrophe „
s“ - signals the possessive
The plural -s and the apostrophe -s -
are relics of a highly developed
inflectional system in OE
Nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiner
s were fully inflected:
• declined according to case (nominativ
e, genitive, dative, accusative, or someti
mes instrumental), number (singular, plu
ral,
or [for pronouns] dual meaning 'two'), an
d gender (masculine, feminine,
or neuter)
• First- and second-
person pronouns also had dual forms for
referring to groups of two people - in ad
dition to the usual singular and plural for
ms
• e.g. - a pattern of inflections
for the noun stān (stone)
• OE stān - a masculine noun
Singular Old
English
Nominative stān
Accusative stān
Genitive stānes
Dative stāne

Plural Old
English
Nominative stānas
Accusative stānas
Genitive stāna
Dative stānum

Verbs were conjugated according to person (

1st, 2nd, or 3rd),
number (singular or plural), tense (present or
past/preterite), mood (indicative, imperative,
subjunctive)

OE verbs had only two tenses: present and pa

st
• the present tense was also used for th
e future, the Modern English past perfect
was signalled by the past tense with the
adverb ǣr (meaning: formerly)
– e.g. Ic lufode ‘I loved’, Ic lufode ǣr ‘I ha
d loved’
 • Old English verbs also had
3 moods: the indicative, used for
statements of fact (I love him), the imperative
, used for commands (Love me!), and the subj
unctive, used for hypothetical statements (If I
loved you) and reported speech (He said he lo
ved me)
• Most verbs were either “strong“
or “weak“
in conjugation (7 classes of strong v
erbs and 3 classes of weak verbs)

• “strong“ verbs changed their vo

wel in different tenses (as in Moder
n English sing/sang)
• “weak“ verbs used inflectional e
ndings for the same purpose (as
in love/loved)
Vocabulary of OE
 • Old English texts may look strange to
a modern English
speaker - many OE words are
no longer used in modern English
• however, with small spelling differenc
es and sometimes minor meaning chang
es, many of the most common words in
Old and Modern English are the same
•

• More than 80 percent

of the thousand most common words in
modern English come from Old English
• Nouns: cynn (king), hand, god,
man(n), word
• Pronouns: hē, ic (I), mē, self, wē
• Verbs: beran (bear), cuman (come), dy
de (did), sittan (sit), wæs (was)
• Adjectives: fæst (fast), gōd (good), hāli
g (holy), rīce (rich), wīd (wide)
• Adverbs: ær (ere), alle (all), nū (now), t
ō (too), ðǣr (there)
• Prepositions: æfter (after), for, in,
on, under
• Articles: ðæt (that), ðis (this)
 • Conjunctions: and, gif (if)

The Vikings
• from the end of 8th
to the 11th cent. Vikings (also called Nor
semen)
- warriors from southern Scandinavia) ra
ided and colonized wide areas of Europe
• around the end
of the 8th cent. there were many Viking
raids to Britain
• Vikings settled in England, lived alongs
ide speakers of OE
• Vikings spoke Old Norse
• there was a long struggle between the
Anglo-
Saxons and the Vikings for control of Brit
ain
• in the 9th cent., the English king Alfre
d the Great stopped the Vikings to take o
ver all England
• he agreed to make peace with them
 • some Vikings settled down to live in th
eir own area of eastern England
- called the Danelaw
• York was the capital of this new Danis
h kingdom (it covered half of England) - it
remained independent of England until
AD 954
• The Anglo-
Saxons and Vikings became neighbours i
n Britain but they didn’t always get along
peacefully
• towards the end of the Old
English period, Old English got mixed up
with Old Norse

•Old Norse had had a profound impact

on Middle and Modern English develop
ment
•

Old Norse as another Germanic language

was quite similar to OE
 - the inflectional systems became easily co
nfused - it resulted in a movement towards a
more analytic language with greater
reliance on word order
• the influence of Old Norse helped the
development of English from a synthetic l
anguage to a more analytic language
• both Old
English and Old Norse were synthetic lan
guages with complicated
inflections, they resembled each other and us
ers of these languages roughly
understood each other
• in many words the OE
and old Norse differed mainly in inflectio
nal endings -
the bases of the words were nearly the s
ame
• only the endings would put obstacles i
n mutual understanding
• the Norsemen and Aglo-
Saxons were able to comprehend one an
other
 • in speaking, however, the Norsemen were
unable to pronounce the endings of vario
us Old English words - this finally resulted
in the the loss of inflectional endings
• the

blending of peoples and languages in Engl

and finally resulted in simplifying English
grammar
English today has many words from old Norse
• many really common words are from
Old Norse
• pronouns they, their, them
• words like give, take, get, both, sale, c
ake, egg, husband, fellow, sister, root, ra
g, loose, raise, rugged, odd, plough, freck
le, call, flat, hale, ugly, lake
•Old
Norse words are most common in the Yo
rkshire dialect (Danelaw)
What happened to Old English?
Why aren’t the UK people speaking it today?
 •

in some respects people still use it, much

of the everyday vocabulary derives
from Old English
• e.g. words such as bear, father, foot, fi
sh, God, good, hare, he, him, his,
I, king, lady, lord, love,
man, me, night, oyster, queen, raven, shi
p, sing, stone,
tongue, us, we, where, white, widow and w
olf - are still in use today
• many words have changed their spelli
ngs
• some words have developed different
meanings
- e.g. OE wīf (OE woman)
has narrowed the meaning - now it refers onl
y to a married woman (‘wife’)
The modern spelling system and some of its ir
regularities (e.g. the
silent letters in words as knight, write) - can b
e traced back to Old English
 • these silent letters represented sound
s that were pronounced in OE
• they have now become fossilized and
preserve evidence for the history of the l
anguage
•

some grammatical inflections have been

retained from OE
• mainly in the system of pronouns
• the verb system too reflects many asp
ects of its OE
- the division between strong and weak v
erbs, the use of irregular forms of the ver
b “to be“

Middle English
[Link]
The Canterbury Tales in Middle English with translation,
lines 1 to 18
[Link]
The Lord's Prayer in Old English (and Middle English, and
Early Modern English)
[Link]
From Old English to Middle English: The effects of
language contact
[Link]
VOtsot_0YTug&index=3
Middle English (1.100 – 1.500)
- the Viking invasions towards the end
of the Old English period - Old
English got mixed up with Old Norse - transiti
on from the synthetic language to the
analytic language

The Invasion of French

• in
1066 William the Conqueror, the Duke of N
ormandy (part of modern France), invaded a
nd conquered England - in 1066 William
became the king of England
• the new conquerors (called the Normans)
brought with them Norman French
• William replaced the Anglo-
Saxon nobility with French-
speaking Normans
• Norman French became the language of t
he Royal Court, the ruling
and business classes
•

for a certain period there was a linguistic cla

 ss division - the lower classes spoke English
and the upper classes spoke French
• Anglo-
Saxons continued to speak their language w
hile French became the language of the upp
er class
• over time, the two cultures merged into A
nglo-
Norman and eventually into modern English
• despite its low status, English continu
ed to develop and grow - it adopted ma
ny Latin and French words
(including everyday words such as “beer”,”cit
y”, “fruit”,
“people”, also half of the months of the year)
• by adopting and adapting French wor
ds, the English language also
became more sophisticated - many new conc
epts and words were created (e.g. “liberty”,
“justice”)
In the 14th century English became dominan
t in Britain again, but with many French wor
ds added - this language is called Middle Engli
sh
 • Middle English (ME)- covers the perio
d of roughly 300 years from around 1150
to around 1450
•

it is, though, difficult to identify ME preci

sely because it is a time of transition bet
ween two eras - Old
English and Modern English
•

• before this period – English was a lan

guage which was mainly
Old Germanic in its character - in sounds, spel
lings, grammar and
vocabulary
• after this period -
English became a language with a very d
ifferent
kind of structure - with major changes, many
of them derived from the influence of French
after the Norman Conquest
• continuity between OE
and Middle English is mainly seen in texts
of
a religious, political or administrative characte
r - thousands of them have survived
• Middle English texts feel very much cl
oser to Modern English in grammar and
vocabulary
• ME was the language of the great poe
t Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400)
• in Chaucer´s work The Canterbury Tal
es - we can find many phrases
and sentences - if we modernise the spelling
– they look just like an archaic version of Mod
ern English
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roo
te,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour…

[When that April with his showers sweet

The drought of March hath pierced to the roo
t
And bathed every vein in such liquor
Of which virtue engendered is the flower...]
[Link]
Lord´s Prayer
[Link]

[Link]
Otsot_0YTug&index=2
(0.48)

Writing
Middle English saw significant changes to its
vocabulary, grammar,
pronunciation, and orthography
•

writing conventions during the Middle E

nglish period varied a lot
• examples of writing from this period s
how extensive regional variation
• Middle English spelling was usually ph
onetic rather than conventional
•

words were generally spelled according

to how they sounded to the
person writing a
text, rather than according to
a formalised system
(as Modern English today)
• because there was no fixed spelling sy
stem in ME, the same words
were often spelled more than one way
• by the end of the period (about 1470)
and supported by the invention of the pr
inting press by Johannes Gutenberg in
1439
- a standard based on the London dialec
t was established
• the Middle English speech of the city
of London (the speech of G. Chaucer) is u
sed as the standard Middle English diale
ct -
when linguists analyze the grammar or p
honology of Middle English
• this largely formed the basis for Mode
rn English spelling - although pronunciati
on has changed considerably since that ti
me
Pronunciation
• significant changes in Middle English
pronunciation took place
•

several consonants and vowels changed

their values
• new contrastive units of sound (i.e. ph
onemes) emerged

• [Link] distinction between the /f/ an

d /v/ consonants began to
differentiate words (e.g. grief vs grieve), also
between /s/ and /z/ (e.g. seal vs zeal)
• /ŋ/ (-ng) sound at the end of
a word also became contrastive (in
Old English “g“
had always been pronounced), pairs as si
n vs sing emerged

Vowels
• the ME short vowels are quite similar
to those in Modern English
 • at the end
of the ME times, all of the long vowels c
hanged in pronunciation in
a regular manner
• this phenomenon is called The Great
Vowel Shift
• the Great Vowel Shift was a massive s
ound change that affected the
pronunciation of long vowels during the 15
th to 16th centuries
• the long vowels shifted upwards -
a vowel that used to be pronounced in o
ne place in the mouth would be
pronounced in
a different place - higher up in the mouth
• the main difference between the pron
unciation of ME and Modern English is i
n the value of the long vowels
The Great Vowel Shift had long term implicat
ions for the orthography,
reading,
and the understanding of any English-
language text written
before or during the Shift
•

today the differing pronunciations ofEngl

ish vowel letters do not stem from
the Great Shift as such but because English sp
elling did not adapt to the
changes (German, e.g.,
had undergone vowel changes quite similar
to the Great Shift, but the spelling was chang
ed accordingly)
The Great Vowel Shift (GVS)
- was happening in several steps, and the cha
nges occurred over several centuries
• at any given time, people of different a
ges and from different regions would hav
e different pronunciations of the same w
ord
 • older,
more conservative speakers would retain
one pronunciation,
• younger,
more advanced speakers were moving to
a new pronunciation
of vowels
• some people would be able to pronou
nce the same word two or more different
ways
• These changes can be divided into 2 phase

s:
•

• 1st phase - affected the close vowels /iː

uː/ and the close-mid vowels /eː oː/ - /eː
oː/ → raised to /iː uː/
• /iː
uː/ → became the diphthongs /ei, ou/ or
/əi, əu/
•

• 2nd phase - affected the open vowel /aː/

and the open-mid vowels /ɛː ɔː/ -
• /aː ɛː ɔː/ → were raised, in
most cases changing to /eː iː oː/
words had very different pronunciations in Middle English be
fore and after the Great Vowel Shift

• another change
in the vocalic system of ME was the redu
ction of vowels to /ə/
and eventual loss of short vowels in unstress
ed syllables (in lexical words, e.g. nama – na
me)
Consonants
• most
English consonants haven't changed muc
h in the past 500 years
•

a few interesting facts about the spellin

g and pronunciation of ME
consonants:
• because many medieval scribes were
used to writing French, in which /h/ is sil
ent, the letter h occasionally occurs at th
e beginning of
words that in
English begin with a vowel sound
• /k/ was always pronounced before n,
as in knife, knight
• /l/ was always pronounced in words li
ke folk and talk
• /w/ was always pronounced before r,
as in write

Grammar
• the difference between OE and
ME is - mainly in grammar
• Old English
had many word endings; Modern English
has hardly any
•

• during the ME
– there was the eventual disappearance
of most of the earlier inflections
• instead alternative means of expressio
ns are used -
word order and prepositional constructi
ons - to express meaning and relationshi
ps

• all areas of grammar were affected

 • among the new kinds of construction
were the progressive forms of the verb
(I am going)
and auxiliary verbs (I have seen, I didn’t go, et
c.)
• the infinitive form of
a verb starts to be marked by the use of
a particle TO (to go, to jump)
• a
new form of expressing relationships (e.g
. possession) appeared – using OF
(e.g. the pages of a book)
• several new pronouns appeared throu
gh the influence of Old Norse
Noun, adjective and verb inflections were sim
plified by the reduction and
eventual elimination of most grammatical ca
se distinctions
•

Vocabulary
• the French influence on English
in the Middle Ages is a consequence of
 the dominance of French power in Englan
d
• the French lexical content - is a major
linguistic feature of ME
•

each of the major literary works of the M

iddle English period provides evidence of
the impact of French
• e.g.
in the opening lines from The Canterbur
y Tales - 8 of the 13 content words are fr
om French – April, March, pierced, vain, l
iquor, virtue, engendered, flower
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to th
e roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour…

[When that April with his showers sweet

The drought of March hath pierced to th
e root
And bathed every vein in such liquor
 Of which virtue engendered is the flower
...]
• according to the Oxford English Dictionary - by
the end of the ME period around 30%
of English vocabulary was French in origin
• French (or ‘Anglo-
Norman’) was the language of politics, legislatio
n and literature
• ME -
a huge increase in the use of affixes (prefixes and
suffixes)
– that produced a big number of new words
• during ME
- a great flood of such affixed words:
• French introduced such (Latin-
derived) prefixes as con-, de-, dis-, en-, ex-, pre-
, pro- and trans-, and suffixes as -able, -ance/-
ence, -ant/-ent, -ity, -ment and -tion
• the suffixes were especially productive, e.g. in
words such as tournament, defendant, solemnity
and avoidance
• the ending -
tion alone produced hundreds of words, e.g. da
mnation,
contemplation, suggestion.....
• the flow of French loanwords into Engl
ish reduced during the 15th cent.
 • but the overall rate
of foreign borrowing did not decline - du
e to
the growing influence of Latin
• thanks to its role
as the language of religion, scholarship a
nd science,
Latin words eventually have a much greate
r impact on English than French
Today, over 30
000 words (excluding derived forms) are
of French origin, over 50 000 words are
of Latin origin

What was the scale of language change

in the Middle English period?

• at the end
of the OE period the size of the lexicon w
as something over
50,000 different words

• many words then fell out of use due to

new French words - by the
end of the ME period the lexicon was doubled

• by
1450, around half of the available word-
stock was non-Germanic
• thanks to the nature of
English grammar (which frequently uses
words
like the, of, have), the fundamental Anglo-
Saxon character
of the language was maintained

• when we look
at ME words in terms of their frequency
of use,
we can see that around half of the most com
monly used words were from
Old English
David Crystal – the real importance of the ME
period:
 • additional vocabulary became the pri
mary means of introducing new concept
s into the language
• ME period gave novel ways of express
ion to familiar concepts

This period was offering people a much great

er linguistic choice:
in the year 1200, people could only ask;
by 1500 they could also question (from Frenc
h) and
interrogate (from Latin)
• during Middle English - we see the ev
olution of a language
which is increasingly showing regional, social
and stylistic variation

• at one extreme - there was a learned,

formal, literary style, characterised by
a lexicon of French and Latin origin, and
used by the aristocratic and well-
educated people
 • at the other - there was an everyday, p
opular style, typically informal
and casual, full of words with Germanic roots,
and used by ordinary
folk.

Modern
English
[Link]
Early Mod.E
[Link]
&list=PL6JxJJFiLLSnOtHIq-VNMfeewWjrU75v7
A major factor separating Middle English
from Modern English – is the Great Vowel
Shift
• radical change in pronunciation, esp.
in 15th and 16th cent. – particularly in
the pronunciation of long vowels
• - in Middle English – long vowels were
pronounced much more like the
Romance languages stemming from
Latin
 • ModE „house“ – Middle English
pronunciation „hu:s“
• „out“ as „u:t“
• after the GVS – pronunciation was
much closer to today´s pronunciation
• It is common to divide the time since the
end of the Middle English period into:
•

• 1. the Early Modern English period (1500-

1700)
• 2. the Late Modern English period (1700-
1900)
Early Modern English
•the death of [Link] at the end
of the century (1400) marked
the beginning of the period of transition fr
om Middle English to the Early Modern Engli
sh
•

the changes in the English language durin

g this period involved changes in
pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar
There were 3 outstanding developments of th
e 15th century
that affected the society and the language:

1. the rise of London English

2. the invention of printing
3. the spread of the new learning associated
with the Renaissance

London English
• although the population of London in 1400
was only about 40,000,
it was by far the largest city in England
• London got much bigger during the reign
of Queen Elizabeth – the rise of population
• York came second, followed by Bristol, Co
ventry, Plymouth and Norwich
• the Midlands and east Anglia, the most de
nsely populated parts
of England supplied London with
many young immigrants
• as a result, the speech of the capital
was mixed, and always changing

Pronunciation
• 7 long vowels of Chaucer’s speech had
already begun to shift - the diphthongiz
 ation of high front /i:/
and high back /u:/
led to instability in the other five long vow
els
•

The Great Vowel Shift changed the who

le vowel system of London English
• as /i:/ and
/u:/ became diphthongized to /ai/ (as
in bide) and /au/
(as in house), so the next highest vowels
, /e:/ and /o:/ moved higher to
take their places
The Invention of Printing
• printing was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in
1450
• printing press was introduced into England
by William Caxton in 1476
• William Caxton - was an English merchant, print
er, translator and publisher
• as a printer
he was the first English retailer of printed books
• it was William Caxton´s innovation of an early pr
inting press
that allowed Early Modern English
to become mainstream
 • the printing press was key in standardizing the En
glish language mainly through distribution of the En
glish Bible
• [Link]
•
•

• up to 20 000 books were printed in the

next 150 years
• Among Caxton´s bestsellers were The
Canterbury Tales and Tales of King
Arthur
• mass produced books were cheaper and
more commonly available
• as a reusult - literacy in England grew
• English books became more commonly
available than Latin books
• when William Caxton started printing at West
minster in
1476, he was very much aware of the uncertain s
tate
of the English language - in his prologues and epi
logues to his translations, he made some observa
tions on the problems that he
had encountered as translator and editor
• at that time, sentence structures were being g
radually modified but there were many inconsist
encies in grammar
 • Caxton’s publishing of Thomas Malory’s Le
Morte d´Arthur (the Death of
Arthur) - is regarded as print material’s first
bestseller
• Malory’s various tales surrounding the
legendary King Arthur and the Knights of
the Round Table and its
popularity indirectly ensured that Early Modern
English was to stay in Britain
•

Early Modern English –

The Bible
• William Tyndale published the translation of
the Catholic Bible in 1526
• he was persecuted and finally executed for
publishing the Bible in English
• The Bible played an important role in the
continued development of the English language
• Tyndale´s Bible included many new
words and phrases which are standard „Bible
language“ today
• e.g. let there be light, salt of the earth....
• this was the time of Reformation – the
division of Church across Europe
• in England Reformation resulted in
the creation of the Church of England
 • the official Bible of this church is the King
James Bible (in 1611) – 80 per cent Tyndale´s
– considered the definitive English version
• during Henry the VIII’s reign - English common
people were finally able to read the Bible in
a language they understood, the Bible spread the
language of the common folk
Early Modern English:
Standardization
• a process of standardization began
• around 1500 there were 5 major
dialects of English – Northern,
West Midlands, East Midlands, Southern
and Kentish –
5 different ways of speaking English
• there was a huge variety in the way
words were spelled
• e.g. the word “church“ – could be
spelled in 30 different was, “people“ in
20 ways
• it was difficult in printing to find the
form that could be understood
throughout the country
 • over time – the printed spelling
became fixed – and spread as a standard
• the process of standardization was
helped by dictionaries (1st in 1604)
and later by newspapers (1st in 1622) –
but the process of standartization was
slow
The English Renaissance
• the English Renaissance began during the
end of the 15th century
• Renaissance (spiritual rebirth) arose in
Italy, spread to France and England
• In England it celebrated the heights of
glory during the Elizabethan Age
• The Elizabethan Age is called the Golden
Age of England
• named after the queen Elizabeth I. – the
queen between 1558-1603
• it was the age of prosperity and progress
during which England became
the dominant maritime power
• literature and language flourished during
this era
 • the time of English Reneissance – the art
and philosophy of ancient
Greeks and Romans was brought back to
western Europe
• it brought the revival of classical learning
• it evoked a new interest in Greek and
Latin
• Renaissance scholars adopted a liberal
attitude to language
• they borrowed Latin words (through
French or Latin
words direct), Greek words (through Latin
or Greek words direct)
• Latin was no longer limited to Church
Latin - it embraced all Classical Latin
•

Queen Elizabeth I.
• for a time - the whole Latin lexicon
became potentially English
• some words, such
as consolation and infidel, came into
English from either French or Latin
• such terms as e.g. abacus, arbitrator,
explicit, gratis, memento, memorandum,
 neuter, simile...were taken straight from
Latin
• words that had already entered the
language through French were
now borrowed again, so that doublets
arose: blame and blaspheme; count and c
ompute; frail and fragile;
sure and secure
William Shakespeare
• Early Modern English era – is the
Golden Age of English literature (16th
– 18th cent.) – creativity
• the end of the 16th and start of the 17th
century - marked with the writings
of William Shakespeare
• Early modern English – also called
Shakesperean English
• William Shakespeare – huge impact
on the English language
• he almost single-
handedly changed the English language f
orever
•

William Shakespeare
 • had a huge vocabulary – around 34
000 words in his plays and poems
• around 2 000 of those words had
never appeared in print before
• he introduced thousands of new
words and phrases in the
English language throughout his career
• he coined many words himself -he
contributed approximately 1.700
to 3.000 words to the English language
• he also had unique way how he put
words together - he created a lot of new
phrases
• [Link]
G1ijEcSo
Words coined by Shakespeare:
accommodation, aerial, amazement, apostrophe,assass
ination
auspicious, baseless,bloody, bump, castigate, changefu
l, countless, courtship,dishearten, dislocate, dwindle
eventful, exposure, fitful, frugal, generous, gloomy, gna
rled
hurry, majestic, misplaced, monumental, multitudinous
obscene, palmy, perusal, pious, premeditated,radiance
reliance......
Famous phrases by William Shakespeare:
• many sayings, idioms and phrases that
Shakespeare invented - are still in common usage
today
• All that glitters isn´t gold
• Break the ice
• fair play
• Naked truth
• Wear one´s heart on one´s sleeve
• this is a poster used in many English literature
classrooms - devised by a famous English journalist Bernard
Levin:
•
If you cannot understand my argument and declare it’s Greek to
me, you are quoting Shakespeare. If you claim to be more sinned
against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare. If you
act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the
thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are
quoting Shakespeare. If you have ever refused to budge an inch or
suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and
loose, if you have been tongue-tied – a tower of
strength – hoodwinked or been in a pickle, if you have knitted your
brows – made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play – slept not
one wink – stood on ceremony – danced attendance on your lord
and master – laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift – cold
comfort, or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days,
or lived in a fool’s paradise, why, be that as it may, the more fool
you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are as good luck would
have it, quoting Shakespeare. If you think it is high time, and
that that is the long and the short of it, if you believe that the game
is up, and that the truth will out, even if involves your own flesh
and blood, if you lie low – till the crack of doom because you
suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge at one fell
swoop – without rhyme or reason, then to give the devil his
due if the truth were known for surely you have a tongue in your
head, you are quoting Shakespeare. Even if you bid me good
riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a
doornail, if you think I am an eyesore – a laughing stock – the devil
incarnate – a stony-hearted villain – bloody-minded, or a blinking
idiot, then by jove – o lord– tut, tut! – For goodness sake – what the
dickens! – but me no buts – it is all one to me, for you are
quoting Shakespeare.
Why was Shakespeare’s influence important
during those times?
• Shakespeare started writing during a
time when the English language was
undergoing serious changes due to
contact with other nations through war,
colonisation etc.
• these changes were further cemented
through Shakespeare and other emerging
playwrights - who found their ideas could
not be expressed through the English
language currently in circulation
• new words and phrases were added to
the language – (modified from other
languages) - creating a richer experience
• How to read
Shakespeare: [Link]
t2ST0OA
•
• Crystal
• [Link]
• [Link]

• it was the time when English people

first tried to settle in these new explored
lands
• first attempt at English settlement was
in Roanoke Island in today´s North
Carolina, USA in 1587 - ended in
disaster, the whole settlement was
wiped out
• the English superiority – travelling the
seas was growing and led to more
international trade and to contacts with
other trading nations (the Dutch, the
Portugese, the Spanish, the Chinese)
– new words entered the English
language in this way

• during the early 17th cent. - the first

successful English colony was established
in America - called The New World
• in Jamestown, Virginia – the rise
of American English started
• English colonizers adopted indigenous
words and added them to the English
language
• due to voluntary and involuntary (i.e.
slaves) migration during the 17th, 18th
 and 19th cent. - a variety of English
dialects had emerged (this included
West African, Native American, Spanish
and European influences)

Early Modern English - summary:

• The Great Vowel Shift
• Printing Press
• Standardization of spelling
• The Bible
• Golden Age
• Shakespeare
• Exploration and trading
Late Modern
English (1700- )
• the Industrial Revolution and the Rise
of the British Empire during the 18th, 19
th and early 20th-
century saw the expansion of the Englis
h language
• the advances and discoveries in scienc
e and technology during the Industrial Re
 volution brought
a need for new words, phrases,
and concepts
to describe these ideas and inventions
• scientists and scholars created new w
ords using Greek and Latin roots
• e.g. bacteria, histology, nuclear, biolog
y......
• since 1900 – a large amount of
vocabulary has been added to English in
a relatively short period of time
• colonialism had an important linguisti
c impact
• under the British Empire’s rule -
we could see the introduction of the
English language as
a way for colonized people to learn,
engage, and
“benefit“ from British influence
• colonial Britain saw this as
a way to not only teach their language b
ut
 import their culture and traditions upon so
cieties especially in Africa
and Asia
• as
a result, the English language has adopte
d a large number of
foreign words that have now become part
of the English language
Summary
• if we compare English
at different stages of its development,
we would find almost no immediate similariti
es between ModE and Old English
• there have been many changes on all
language levels – from phonology throu
gh grammar to lexis
• Modern English is an analytic (i.e. rela
tively uninflected) language, whereas Ol
d English was synthetic, or inflected
language
• during the course of thousands of year
s, English words have been slowly simplif
 ied from the inflected variable forms to i
nvariable forms
• for example, when we compare the M
odE word ride with the
corresponding word in Old English – ModE
now has only 5 forms
(ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden), whereas Old
English ridan had 13 forms
•

• in addition to the simplicity of inflectio

ns, English
has 2 other basic characteristics:

1. flexibility of function
2. openness of vocabulary
Flexibility of function
• has grown over the last five centuries
as
a consequence of the loss of inflections
• words formerly distinguished as nouns
or verbs by differences in their forms ar
e now often used as BOTH
nouns and verbs
• Examples: you may be
 • planning a table or tabling a plan
• booking a place or placing a book
• lifting a thumb or thumbing a lift
• in the other Indo-
European languages (apart from rare exc
eptions in Scandinavian languages),
nouns and verbs are never identical
• pronouns, adjectives, adverbs - can al
so function as nouns
• adjectives and adverbs - as verbs –
e.g. dry – to dry,
• nouns, pronouns, and adverbs -
as adjectives
• any word class may alter its function i
n this way
• e.g. the ins and outs (prepositions bec
oming nouns)
• no buts (conjunction becoming noun)
Openness of Vocabulary
• it means both
[Link] admission of words from other langu
ages
 [Link] ready creation of compounds and der
ivatives
English adopts (without change)
1.

or adapts (with slight change) any word

really needed to name some new object or
to denote some new process
•

words from more than 350 languages have e

ntered English in this way

2. Compounds – e.g. first-hand, greenouse,old-

fashioned.....
• Derivations – e.g. analyse, analyst,
analytical, analysis....
•

Varieties of
English I.
• English was spreading outside of Britai
n with the rise of the British Empire – Bri
tish people brought English
to different parts of the world
• we can speak about two dispersals - or
diasporas of English (diaspora = “the mo
 vement, migration,
or scattering of a people away from an est
ablished or ancestral homeland,
e.g. members of an ethnic or religous gro
up that originated from the same place di
spersed to different locations“)
• 1st diaspora – involved migration of arou

nd 25 000 people mainly from the south a

nd east of England primarily to America
and Australia
– this resulted in the new mother- tongue var
ieties of English
• 2nd diaspora – involved the colonization

of Asia and Africa and led to the develop

ment of many second-
language varieties (called New Englishes
)
First diaspora
• the first migration of mother-
tongue English speakers (from England, Scotland
and Ireland)
was to North America, Australia and also New Zealan
d
 • dialects that travellers brought with them grad
ually developed into American, Australian and
New Zealand English
• the varieties which are spoken here today -
are, of course, not identical with the language
of the first settlers
• they have altered in response to the changed s
ociolinguistic context (e.g. vocabulary rapidly
expanded through contacts with indigenous people -
Indian, Aboriginal or Maori people)
The USA
• the first permanent colonists arrived in 1607 and
settled in Jamestown, Virginia (named after the Qu
een
Elizabeth I – “ Virgin Queen“)
• they were followed in 1620 by a group of Purita
ns who landed further north and settled in what is no
w Plymouth, Massachusetts (New England)
•

• both settlements spread rapidly and attr

acted many migrants in the following yea
rs – these people were from different ling
uistic backgrounds
• there were immediately differences in
the accents of two groups:
• those in Virginia came mainly from the
west of England - they spoke rhotic acce
nt (pronunciation of R in all positions)
 • the Plymouth group were people from
east of England - they spoke non-
rhotic accent

The USA
• during the 17th century – English spread to so
uthern parts of America and the Caribbean as
a result of slave trade – slaves were transported fr
om west Africa and exchanged on the American c
oast and in the Carribean for sugar and rum
• among slaves and their captors developed a s
pecial language - and
so contact pidgin languages appeared - Pidgin E
nglishes (mixture of English and local languages)
Pidgin language
• simplified version of language that dev
elops as a means of communication betw
een people who do not have a language in
common – it is not a native language of
any speech community
• with the birth of the next generation, pi
dgin becomes a mother tongue - pidgin l
anguages developed into creoles
• creole is a stable natural language -
it has been nativised by children as their
primary language
 (more about pidgin and creole l.
in the next lecture)
•during the 18th cent. - there was a big
immigration to America from
Northern Ireland - initially on the coast ar
ound Philadephia but
quickly moving south and west
• between 1820 and 1860 - the
Irish made over one third of all
immigrants to the United States
• immigrants were pushed out of
Ireland – due to religious conflicts, lack
of political
autonomy and very bad economic
conditions (Irish Potato Famine, 1845 –
1852, period of mass starvation and disea
se)
• it is estimated that as many as 4.5
million Irish arrived in America
between 1820 and 1930
• after 1776
– The Declaration of Independence (separ
ation of 13 North
American British colonies from Britain)
 – many loyalists (British settlers supportin
g British government) left for Canada – th
ey have given rise to Canadian English
• today American and British
English differ slightly in spelling,
pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary
• AmE – rhotic accent, BrE – non-rhotic
• while there are certain differences
between BrE andAmE on all language
levels, the
two varieties have more similarities than differ
ences
• Americans and Brits can usually
communicate with each other without
too much difficulty
•

Spelling differences
British English American English

-oe-/-ae- (e.g. anaemia, diarrhoea, encyclopaedia) -e- (e.g. anemia, diarrhea, encyclopedia)

-ence (e.g. defence, offence, licence) -ense (defense, offense, license)

-ell- (e.g. cancelled, jeweller, marvellous) -el- (e.g. canceled, jeweler, marvelous)

-ise (e.g. appetiser, familiarise, organise) -ize (e.g. appetizer, familiarize, organize)

-l- (e.g. enrol, fulfil, skilful) -ll- (e.g. enroll, fulfill, skillfull)
-ogue (e.g. analogue, monologue, catalogue) -og (e.g. analog, monolog, catalog)

- American English also recognizes words

spelled with –ogue

-ou (e.g. colour, behaviour, mould) -o (e.g. color, behavior, mold)

-re (e.g. metre, fibre, centre) -er (e.g. meter, fiber, center)

-y- (e.g. tyre) -i- (e.g. tire)

Vocabulary differences
British English American English

trousers pants

flat apartment

bonnet (the front of the car) hood

pavement sidewalk
boot (the back of the car) trunk

lorry truck

university college

holiday vacation

jumper sweater

crisps chips

chips French fries

trainers sneakers

fizzy drink soda

postbox mailbox

biscuit cookie

chemist drugstore

shop store

football soccer

GRAMMAR
 • there are certain grammar
differences, however, they are rather scarce
• some verbs have different simple
past and/or past participle forms - e.g. the
past participle of get in AmEi s gotten; in
BrE it’s got (I haven’t gotten his reply yet. /
I haven’t got his reply yet.)
• verbs such
as dream, burn, and learn are regular in
AmE (dreamed, burned, and learned), in
BrE they are irregular (dreamt, burnt, and learnt)
• possessive constructions
with have – AmE prefers have, BrE have got (Do
you have Instagram? / Have you got Instagram?)
• needn’t - commonly used in
BrE, in AmE is used rarely, instead they use don’t
need to
• the present perfect tense is far less commonly
used in AmE than in BrE (I just wrote an email to
my boss. / I have just written an email to my boss.)
Canadian English
• The American Revolution - the first large grou
p of English-speakers moved to Canada
• after the American Revolution, approximately
45,000 Loyalists who had supported
Britain during the war, fled to Canada
 • their arrival in 1783–84 - provided
the first substantial English-speaking
population in what is now Ontario, Quebec,New
Brunswick and Nova Scotia
• most of the Loyalists who arrived
in Quebec - were resettled further west,
in Ontario, to avoid conflict with the French
Canadian population
• the Industrial Revolution in
Britain - encouraged an even larger group to join
them in the 19th century
• American immigration continued into
the early 19th century
•

• Canadian English - is a product of several waves

of immigration and settlement over more than two
centuries
• Canada’s history of English-speaking
settlement - resulted in a hybrid
variety of English - a distinctive blend of
American and British features
• it has been developing its own distinctive features
since around the 19th cent. – there are
a few features that are today uniquely Canadian
• the English spoken today by most
Canadians – is closer to American English
– it is most similar to English spoken in the western
United States and to General American English
• this is particularly true of
its pronunciation and grammar
 • in fact, most people will have a hard time
differentiating Canadian English from American
English
Australian English
• James Cook discovered Australia in 1770
• in 1788 the First Fleet landed in New
South Wales
• between 1788 – 1852 around 160 000 convicts
were transported to Australia from Britain and Ireland
• from 1820´s large numbers of free settlers beg
an to arrive
• the largest proportion came from London and t
he
south-east (not convicts)
• others were from different parts of Britain
(south-west England, Scotland, Ireland)
– there was huge dialect mixing which was further
influenced by indigenous aboriginal languages
•

• Australian English - emerged from a

process called levelling
down - the process of reducing dialect di
fferences
• all immigrant people spoke differently
and used different words – in order
to communicate with each
other – they had to to level down their
dialect variations
 • Australian English is a non-
rhotic accent
• the Australian accent is most similar
to New Zealand accent
• it is also similar to accents from the
South-East
of Britain (particularly Cockney and
Received Pronunciation)
• as with most dialects of English, it is
distinguished primarily
by its vowel phonology
• the beginning
of the Australian English - started after th
e arrival of European settlers in 1788
• they were from different regional dialects
across England
• Australian English - a new dialect
that developed as a result
of contact between people who spoke
different, mutually intelligible, varieties
of English
• Australian English - is
relatively homogeneous when
 compared with British or
American English
• the major varieties of Australian English
are sociocultural rather than regional
• there are
3 main varieties of Australian English
- broad, general, and cultivated
• they contain variations in pronunciation –
accent variations
• they reflect the social class, education and
urban or rural background of the speaker
• Broad Australian
English - common especially in rural areas
• General Australian English - is the most
common of Australian accents, it
is especially prominent in urban
Australia and is used as
a standard language for Australian
films, television programs and advertising
• Cultivated Australian English - in the past
been perceived as indicating high social
class or education
• it is similar to Received Pronunciation
• in recent generations, it has fallen sharply
in usage
• [Link]

New Zealand
• was first settled by European traders in 1790´s
• immigrants arrived in three stages:
• 1.1840´s – 1850´s – from Britain
• 2. 1860´s – from Australia and Ireland
• 3. 1870 to 1885 from the UK (big number of Scots)
• linguistic situation – there was a
mix of dialects plus strong influence of Maori language

• today: 2 official languages: Te Reo Māori (the Māor

i language) and New Zealand Sign Language
• English is the predominant language but does not
have a legal status
• it is said NZ accent is based on the accent of south-
east England, where a lot of the first European settlers
to New Zealand came from
•

• New Zealand English – mostly non-

rhotic
• a unique type of youthful, urban
speech has
emerged - these young people fully
pronounce the /r/ in post-
vocalic positions
• parallels are often drawn between Aus
E and NZE
– they are not identical but to foreigners c
an be undistinguishable
 • differences in vowel pronunciation
• NZE
has specific vocabulary (words from Poly
nesian languages, Maori)
• some phoneticians identify 3 varieties
of NZE: Cultivated NZE, General NZE
and Broad NZE
• Cultivated NZE –
a large proportion speak “near-RP“
• [Link]

South African English

•colonized by the Dutch from 1650´s
• British arrived much later – in 1795 they annex
ed the Cape of Good Hope
• they began to settle in large numbers from 182
0
• most of them were from the south of England
• later Irish and Scottish settlers arrived
• in
1822 English was declared the official language
• it was also learned as the second language by t
he
indigenous black community
•

• today South Africa’s Constitution reco

gnises 11 official languages, English is o
ne of them
 • South African English
is the 1st language of about 10% of the total p
opulation of the country
• to a small (important) African elite,
English is a “second first“
language
• it is used as
lingua franca by millions whose mother t
ongue is
not English
• South African English is mostly non-
rhotic,
but may be partially rhotic due to the influ
ence of the Afrikaans
• variations in accent depend usually on
education, social class, urban or rural regi
ons
• several South African English varieties
have emerged – they have varying levels
of perceived social prestige
• conservative middle class accents rema
in close to RP though esp. vowels may be
influenced by Afrikaans or other African
languages
 • vocabulary: SAfrE – borrows freely fr
om other languages
•

• a rough estimate of source languages f

or distinctively South African words: Dut
ch/Afrikaans 50%,
English 30%, African languages 10% oth
er languages 10%
[Link]
• [Link]
s

Varieties of
English II
English in Africa
• the history of colonial Africa has 2 dist
inct patterns :
• West Africa vs. East Africa
Second diaspora - spread of English
in Asia and Africa
• it took place at various points during th
e 18th and 19th centuries
 but in very different ways and with very dif
ferent results
(than the 1st diaspora)

West Africa
• West Africa
• linked to the slave trade and the devel
opment of pidgin and creole languages
(English-based pidgin and creole l.)
• from the late 15th cent. onwards -
British traders travelled to
and from various coastal areas of west
Africa - mainly
Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria,
Cameroon
• there was, however, no major British
settlement in this area
•

• English was used as lingua franca - b

oth
• among the indigenous population (wh
o spoke hundreds of local languages)
• between indigenous people and
British traders
•

Lingua franca –
 is a language that is adopted as
a common language among speakers
whose native languages are different
• it is a language that is used as
a means of communication between
populations speaking local languages that are
not mutually intelligible
•

English - has later gained official status in th

ese 5 states - Gambia, Sierra Leone,
Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon
• some of the pidgins and creoles that de
veloped from contact with English
are now spoken by large numbers of peop
le, especially as a second language (e.g. t
he language Krio in Sierra
Leone, Cameroon Pidgin)
• Krio [Link]
3woz0FI
• Krio [Link]
3BFVAHF0
• Pidgins and creoles v
Linguistic features of pidgins and creoles
Pidgin – contact or emergency language
 •

the need to communicate and understa

nd - has driven the development
of pidgins across the globe
(this need is often prompted by trade)
• the word “pidgin“ could be actually de
rived from a Chinese (mis)pronunciation
of the word „business“ in
English (originally this term was used to r
efer to Chinese Pidgin English, then it be
came to be used more generally to name a
ny pidgin language)
•

until recently pidgins (and creoles) were r

egarded by linguistis and non-
professionals as inferior, bad or broken la
nguage or even not languages at all
• since the end of
20th century – attitudes have changed
• Ethnologue
• an encyclopedic reference work catalo
ging all of the world´s 7.111 known livin
g languages - lists 16 pidgin languages -
but not all of them
 are still spoken
•

by comparison – there are around 100 cre

ole languages
•

Why are there so many more creoles than pid

gins?
• the main reason: pidgins are used as
a temporary means of communication
(temporary can mean a few decades)
• over time their status shifts – some ev
olve into creoles but others die out
What do pidgin languages have in common
?
• they are not learned as the first languag
e by any of their users
• their functions are restricted (trade, ad
ministration, communication with visitors
)
• vocabulary and grammar structure are
sharply reduced in
comparison to language from which they w
ere derived
Vocabulary:
• limited vocabulary
• generally pidgin lexis is drawn from the domin
ant language – usually it is some European langu
age (English, French, Dutch, Portuguese)
– lexifier language
• grammar is from indigenous African or Asian l
anguages
• pidgin lexis is systematic and
has rules like other languages
• the rules - especially:
• concepts tend to be encoded in lengthier ways
- e.g. in Tok Pisin (pidgin in Papua New
Guinea) the word “bilong“ means
the prepostion “of“
• papa bilong mi – means my father
• haus bilong yu – your house
• extensive use of reduplication – which
is used:
•

A, partly to intensify the meaning

• tok = talk tok tok = chatter
• look = look looklook = stare
B, partly to avoid confusion that may happen d
ue to phonological similarity
Sip = ship was = watch
Sipsip = sheep waswas = w
ash
Pronunciation
pidgins have fewer sounds than those
•

of the corresponding languages (e.g. Tok

Pisin has only 5 vowels)
• consonants clusters are simplified , e.g.
friend = fren, cold = col
• conflation – merging of 2 or
more consonants into 1
• e.g. /s, ʃ, ʧ/ or /t,θ/ or /d, ð/
- the result is a reduced phoneme invento
ry and large number of
homophones
Grammar
- simplified, elimination of many gramatical devices
1. Few inflections of nouns, pronouns,
verbs and adjectives
e.g. nouns are not marked for plurals, verbs ha
ve no tense markings,
pronouns are not distinguished for case, e.g. m
i = I + me
Some new distinctions can be made:
 • Tok Pisin
– distinguishes between inclusive „we“
= yumi ( speaker + adressee) and non-
inclusive mepela (speaker and others)
- suffix – pela,
- fela (meaning a fellow)– is added to adjectiv
es
describing people and things
• e.g. naispela haus – nice house
• gutpela meri = good woman
2. Negation is formed with simple negative particle „n
o“ (English-based pidgins)
• e.g. he no like coffee
Extinct pidgins – there are many extinct pidgin langua
ges
• when the need for communication is removed,
the pidgin usually doesn´t survive much longer
, e.g.
• Chinese Pidgin English – was used for nearly
3 centuries as a means of communication betwee
n English and Chinese traders and officials,
then Standard English was adopted as
a preferred means of communication
• Port Jackson Pidgin English – originated in
New South Wales, Australia -
 to facilitate communication between early colonia
l settlers and indigenous people
Pidgin English - today is a non-specific name used to
refer to any of the many pidgin languages derived
from English
When pidgin is used in multilingual areas as
lingua franca - it is likely to develop over time and be
used for more and more functions
•

the early pidgin goes through series of stages and

becomes more complex
over one or two generations
• final stage is when pidgin becomes creole
•

when children of pidgin speakers use this languag

e as their mother tongue – creole arises
• creole is acquired as the first language – its si
mple structure changes - vocabulary expands, gra
mmar becomes more complex so that it is able to
express the entire human experience of its native sp
eakers
English-based creoles:
• most English creoles were formed in British
colonies - in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries
• the main areas of English-based creoles
are Atlantic (the Americas
and Africa) and Pacific (Asia and Oceania)
• over 76.5 million people estimated globally
speak some form of English-based creole
 • Malaysia, Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica,
and Singapore have the largest concentrations of
creole speakers
•

Nigerian Pidgin English – is an English-

based creole language spoken as
a lingua franca across Nigeria
[Link]

East Africa
• relationship with English was different
• countries like Kenya,
Uganda, Zambia, Malawi,
Zimbabwe, Tanzania - were extensively settl
ed by British colonists from 1850 on
• they became British colonies between the
late 19th and 20 th cent
• in these countries, English played an
important role in
major institutions – government, education, la
w...
•

• colonization and exploitation from the

late19th century led to the development of
non-native, indigenized varieties of
English
• initially, only a small local elite gained
access to high proficiency in English in
mission schools
• after independence from the mid-
twentieth century, a massive expansion of
the national school education
granted access to English-language
education for a larger part of
the indigenous population (although with
less proficient teachers in English
- resulting in lower levels
of language competence than among the
local elites
• from 1960´s these countires one after anot
her achieved independence
• there are about a dozen African countries
where English is an official language - th
ey include Zimbabwe, Uganda,
Botswana, Zambia, Kenya, Namibia,
Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia...
• today there are approximately 6.5 million
native English speakers and 700 mil. non-
native English speakers in Africa
• English is widely used as a second
language lingua franca in
 Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Zambia and
Uganda
• English is widely used in education and for
governmental purposes in Tanzania and
Kenya
English in Asia
there are few native English speakers i
•

n Asia, but a large number of the populati

on use English as
a second or third language
• e.g. India, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines,
and Singapore - all recognize English as
an official language
• the exact number of people who can sp
eak English in Asia is hard to estimate
due to the large and diverse population
• but it is estimated that there are
125 million in India, 94 million in
Pakistan,
and 90 million in the Philippines
English Speaking Countries in Asia
RankCountryPopulation
1 India 1,247,540,000
2 Nepal 29,700,002
3 Pakistan 199,085,847
4 Philippines 102,885,100
5 Singapore 5,469,700

South Asia
• India, Bangladesh,
Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan
• English was introduced to South Asia in the
early 17th cent.
and reinforced by the long rule of the British Empire
• today it is spoken as a second language by about
33 million people, 3% of the total population
• although it is quite homogeneous across the region a
nd shares linguistic features and tendencies at almost al
l linguistic levels, there are also differences based on va
rious factors
• today, these varieties of
English (“New Englishes“) are usually divided accordi
ng to the modern states:
• Bangladeshi English, Indian English, Nepali
English, Pakistani English, Sri Lankan English
•

South-
East Asia and the Pacific
• Southeast Asia -
a subregion of Asia - includes 11 multiethnic, mul
ticultural and
multilingual countries
 • Singapore, Malaysia,
?Honk Kong?, Philippines, Papua New Guinea ....
• in this region,
English can be classified into 2 groups:
•
• 1. as
a second language in the countries that were once
colonies or
protectorates of an English-speaking power
(Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and Philippines)
• English
in this area has developed into new varieties (“N
ew Englishes”)
• Singapore English, Brunei English, Philippine
English, and Malaysian English
•
• 2. as a foreign language in the rest
of the region
•

New Englishes
have come from the second diaspora
•

• they are learned as

a second language or as one language w
ithin a wide multilingual repertoire
• there are many varieties of English
(many New Englishes)
which are not uniform
• they, however, share a few common f
eatures:
.they have developed through the education s
ystem
• English
has been taught as a subject at schools an
d often was a medium
of instruction in regions where other language
s than English were the main languages
[Link] have developed in
a region where the native variety of
English was not the
language spoken by most of the population
[Link]
English was used for a range of functions am
ong those who could speak it
and write it
4. these varieties have become localized or na
tivized - by adopting some language features
of its own – sounds, intonation patterns, senten
ce structures, words, expressions....
English as
a Global language
• Now we
are living in a globalization era
 • globalization has created a smaller
world for
people in which they can travel and meet
people from different places in the world
• when people of different backgrounds
meet,
they need to communicate together - they
need a common language for that - a ling
ua franca
•

• English is currently the main lingua

franca in the world
• there are also
other lingua francas used – e.g. Spanish, A
rabic, Chinese ... (these lingua francas are
typically used in regions where people
speak these languages as well as their
native language)
[Link]
Znks
•

• huge spread of English over the globe

which took place over the last
decades has created changes in
the sociolinguistic profile of the
 language and provided new varieties of
English
• English is the world´s leading langua
ge
• the number of non-native or second
language speakers
of English is now bigger than the numb
er of native or first language speakers
•

• more people speak Spanish than Englis

h as their first language and almost 3
times as many people speak Chinese at ho
me
• yet English is the leading world langua
ge –
or the global language - because Englis
h is the world´s lingua franca or commo
n second language
• people in every part of the world feel
its urgent role in their life:
for academic purposes, for business
goals, tourism, internet,
IT technology, etc,
English is the international language
of business, commerce, science, medicine,
and many other key areas
 • English is the most widely taught fore
ign language in over 100 countries
• English today is spoken throughout the
whole world – as a mother toungue, as
a second language and as
a foreign language
• it´s not a uniform linguistic code but th
ere are many different varieties of Englis
h
•in the mid-1980s – a pioneering model
of “World Englishes”
was proposed
by Braj Kachru (an Indian linguist) - Three
Concentric Circles Model
• the term World
English (or World Englishes) - refers
to the English language as it is variously
used throughout the world
• he divided the varieties of World Engli
sh into three concentric circles:
the Inner Circle, the Outer Circle, and
the Expanding Circle
• these circles – outline the type of
spread, the pattern of
 acquisition, and the
functional domains in which English
langauge is used across cultures and
languages

The Inner Circle- presents the countries

where English is used as
a native language, the primary language that is used in
daily life
and government institutions (the USA, the UK, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand)
- the inner circle is norm-providing
The Outer Circle - includes countries that have
old historical British colonial relations
and where English is commonly used in social
life or the government sectors
- most of the countries that belong to this circle are
former colonies of the British Empire, such as India,
Malaysia, Singapore, Ghana, Kenya....
• the usage of English in these countries
is similar to what is known as English as
a second language (New Englishes...)

The Expanding Circle - includes countries

that introduce English as a foreign language
in schools and universities, mostly for communicating
in English with the Inner and
Outer Circles, however, today more and
more for the communication
of people within the expanding circle
• in the past – the use of English
in the expanding circle was restricted – it
was used only in specific context (e.g. tou
rism, commerce, international transaction
s)
 • with the growth of English
- the range of English use has
become much wider
• Today it can be observed that there is
merging of the outer and expanding circl
e (can outer circle merge into inner circle
?)
• sometimes it is difficult to say who sp
eaks English as
a 1st language and who as a
2nd language
•

• The division between native and non

-native speakers is inconsistent
• The idea of native speaker is blurred
• since its first introduction in
1985 - Kachru's Three
Concentric Circles Model of English
has prompted a great debate
• many linguists considered it one of the
most influential models
for understanding the use of English in
different countries, some, on the other
hand, (including Kachru himself),
criticized the model
 for its oversimplification and the
unclear membership to the circles
• the main drawback of the model
– is the location of the native countries
in the Inner Circle – the model considers
the countries in the Inner Circle as
the perfect place for the correctness of the
language
• the ownership of the
language - is in the countries in the
Inner Circle
• this can be seen as
a linguistic imperialism (defined as
“the transfer
of a dominant language to other people“)
• as one linguits put it, the model '' re-
establishes the notion that the language is
the property of specific groups, and that
correct usage is determined by experts
who speak a prestige variety”
• another criticism – even though Kachr
u’s model offered a useful categorization
for English in the world, it failed to
present the rise of English as a Lingua
Franca among the speakers of the
Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle
• there is a growing number of
researchers who problematize the idea
of native user’s ownership of English
• a quotation from a linguist: “How
English develops in the world is no
business whatsoever of native speakers in
the United States, United Kingdom or
anywhere else. It is not a possession which
they lease out to others, while still
retaining the freehold.
Other people actually own it”
• if a language is not subject to
ownership but is rather to be learned
and used, the ownership of English
bears global features - it is not the
native speakers’ monopoly that they can
decide to keep or pass on to others
• currently, there is a significant
growing call for accepting variations
from native standards as norms in non-
native Englishes
• [Link]
q9b9YqGRY – world Englishes, David Cry
stal .