English Linguistics Notes PDF

2.10.2023 English Linguistics Dr. Erdem Akbas Erciyes University, 2023 www.erdemakbas.webs.com...

2.10.2023 English Linguistics Dr. Erdem Akbas Erciyes University, 2023 www.erdemakbas.webs.com https://york.academia.edu/ErdemAkbas http://www.researchgate.net/profile/erdem_akbas/ 2 Who is Erdem Akbas?  BA in ELT, Selcuk University, 2008  MEB YLSY Scholarship (MA+PhD), 2009  MA in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), University of York, 2010  PhD in Education, University of York, 2014  Musician (playing Bağlama, Guitar, Violin and Bendir)  Chess Player  Photographer  Researcher in the area of Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics  Published books and chapters internationally  2.10.2023 What do you need to pay attention?  I appeal to the principle of efficiency in learning. Therefore, my experience is that if we (I and you) do the following, you are likely to learn more.  I view class attendance as an individual student responsibility (even if it is ONLINE).  Students are expected to attend classes (online/face to face) and to complete all assignments as requested.  I will provide the notice of the dates on which major exams will be given and assignments will be due on the course syllabus.  You are expected to attend all examinations required by department or advisory committees as scheduled formally.  Always be polite and considerate to everybody and leave grudges outside the classroom door.  During the class, respect each other and respect other people's property.  Treat people the way you would like to be treated.  Turn off your mobile phones/iPods and keep them out of sight unless I tell you to use it.  Lastly, Smile  and Enjoy! Motto of the year for Linguistics Class! No matter how clearly I explain and present information in many different ways, some will prefer not to focus and endeavour enough.. Therefore, please pay attention because I can explain it to you; however, I can not understand it for you..Let’s do it together!  2.10.2023 Assessment of the course Type of Assessment Percentage Midterm Exam 30% Final Exam 50% Weekly (mainly socrative) Quizzes 20% Attendance 5% Socrative Quizzes  Download the application from Playstore or Itunes to your smart phones/tablets.  Bring your smart phones or tablets everyweek for the quizzes.  Each quiz is 100 points and your overall performance will be calculated based on the number of quizzes we have. For instance, if we have 6 quizzes in a term and you get 55-85-95-45-50-70, this simply averages 67 for your overall score.  2.10.2023 Ice-breaker Red Words Game: http://www.macmillandictionary.com/red-word-game/ A quick activity Do you know what a foreign accent is? It is a sign of bravery. (Amy Chua) Please do translate this first.. Now, discuss what is meant here!? Potential answere to this question??  2.10.2023 What is Linguistics about and why do we need it? Introduction  What is Linguistics?  Branches of Linguistics  Central Concepts of Linguistics A Brief History of English  The Linguistic History of English  Old English (c450-cll50)  Middle English (cl 150-cl500)  Early Modern English (cl500-cl700)  Modern English (cl700-present)  English Around the World  English in the 21st Century  2.10.2023 Phonetics and Phonology  Phonetics: The Study of Speech Sounds  Speech Sound Production  Description and Classification o f Consonants and Vowels  Phonetic Transcription  Phonology: The Function and Patterning o f Sounds  Segmental Phonology  Suprasegmental Phonology  Connected Speech Morphology  Morphology and Grammar  Morphemes and Allomorphs  Morphological Processes  Inflection  Word Formation  2.10.2023 Syntax  Syntax and Grammar  Syntactic Categories and Elements  Phrasal Categories  The X Bar Schema  The Merge Operation in Phrases  Building Sentences  The Merge Operation in Sentences  The Move Operation  Thematic Roles Semantics  The Study of Meaning  Lexical Semantics  Meaning Relations Among Words  Word Meaning  Conceptualisation and Categorisation  Sentence Meaning  Meaning Relations Among Sentences  Sentence Interpretations  2.10.2023 Pragmatics  What Does Pragmatics Do ?  Deixis  Person Deixis  Place Deixis  Time Deixis  The Cooperative Principle  Speech Acts  Conversation Analysis Discourse Analysis  What is DA?  Different views of DA  Differences between spoken and written discourse  Discourse and Society  Discourse and speech communities  Discourse and Language choice,Gender, Sexuality, Identity, Ideology  Discourse and Genre  What is Genre?  Written and Spoken Genres across cultures  Steps in Genre Analysis  Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis  What is Corpus?  Kinds of corpora, design and construction of corpora  Collocation and corpus studies  2.10.2023 JUST A FEW EXAMPLES to notions in our classes! Entailment (Semantics)  There are cases in which the truth of one sentence entails (or implies) the truth o f another sentence.  The relation between such sentences is accordingly referred to as entailment.  In each o f the following pairs o f sentences, the meaning o f sentence (a) entails the meaning o f sentence (b):  (3a) The cat killed the mouse entails  (3b) The mouse is dead  (4a) Anna likes every single kind of fruit entails  (4b) Anna likes oranges Homonymy and Polysemy (Semantics)  A word is polysemous if it can be used to express different meanings. The difference between the meanings can be obvious or subtle.  Two or more words are homonyms if they either sound the same (homophones), have the same spelling (homographs), or both, but do not have related meanings.  In other words, if you hear (or read) two words that sound (or are written) the same but are not identical in meaning, you need to decide if it's really two words (homonyms), or if it is one word used in two different ways (polysemy).  A clear case of homonymy 1: The word down in sentence (1-a) and the word down in sentence (1-b). These are two words that happen to share sound and spelling. There is no relation between them: (1) a. Sarah climbed down the ladder. b. Sarah bought a down blanket.  2.10.2023 Homonymy and Polysemy (Semantics)  A clear case of homonymy 2: The word bark in sentence (2-a) and the word Bark in sentence (2-b). (2) a. My dog would always bark at mailmen. b. The tree's bark was a rusty brown.  A clear case of polysemy 1: The word Newpaper in the following sentences. The object that got wet cannot fire people, and the company didn't get wet. Still, it's obvious that the same word is used to refer to them both. (3) a. The newspaper got wet in the rain. b. The newspaper fired some of its editing staff  A clear case of polysemy 2: The word Good in the following two examples. In one case it's a moral judgement, in the other case it's a judgement of skill. (4) a. John was a good man. He donated a lot of money to charity. b. Bill was a good painter. His drawings always were exciting to look at The Cooperative Principle: Unrelated Utterances? (Pragmatics)  Human face-to-face communication is full o f exchanges that may appear, at first sight, rather unrelated, such as the following three examples: (6) A Can you tell me the time? B Well, the milkman has come. (7) A I do think Mrs. Jenkins is an old windbag, don’t you? B Huh, lovely weather for March, isn’t it? (8) A Where’s Bill? B There’s a yellow VW outside Sue's house. (Levinson 1994)  How can we interpret these exchanges? In his ground-breaking lecture “Logic and Conversation” (1975), Herbert P. Grice presents a basic principle that governs human interaction: the so-called Cooperative Principle (CP).  2.10.2023 An example to Discourse Analysis  How would you ask someone to come and see you around 9 am?  Be here around 9? Not polite?  Could you please be here at nine? A bit more?  If you could be here at nine, that would be great.. Is this a better way? Could this be a command?  Let’s see (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFRa7Ovym8s)  What do you think now?  Although the structure changes, it is functioning as a command, right? This is what a discourse analyst can come up with the data and the context.  Considering "Discourse: a continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit such as a sermon, argument, joke, or narrative" (Crystal 1992:25), discourse refers to too wide area of human life, An example to Discourse Analysis  How would you ask someone to come and see you around 9 am?  Be here around 9? Not polite?  Could you please be here at nine? A bit more?  If you could be here at nine, that would be great.. Is this a better way? Could this be a command?  Let’s see (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFRa7Ovym8s)  What do you think now?  Although the structure changes, it is functioning as a command, right? This is what a discourse analyst can come up with the data and the context.  Considering "Discourse: a continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit such as a sermon, argument, joke, or narrative" (Crystal 1992:25), discourse refers to too wide area of human life,  2.10.2023 What is Linguistics?  Linguistics is all about human language.  This means it is primarily concerned with the uniquely human capacity to express ideas and feelings by voluntarily produced speech sounds or their equivalents, such as gestures in sign languages used by deaf people.  Linguistics can be broadly defined as the scientific study of language or of particular languages.  Scholars who systematically study language usually refer to themselves as linguists.  Compare the following definitions from the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English:  1. a person who knows several foreign languages well: She’s an excellent linguist. I’m afraid I’m no linguist (= I find foreign languages difficult).  2. a person who studies languages or linguistics  In this course, we will use the term linguist as defined by the second of the above dictionary entries. From the point o f view of linguistics, a linguist does thus not necessarily have to speak many different languages fluently, just as a professional geographer does not have to know the location o f all the rivers, towns and cities in the world by heart. Branches of Linguistics  The field o f linguistics encompasses a wide range of “ways” to Branches study language, which are reflected in the subdivision of linguistics into branches (or subfields).  Traditionally, linguists identify five core branches of linguistics,  phonetics (namely the study of speech sounds in general),  phonology (the study of the sound systems of individual languages),  morphology (the study of the creation, structure and form of words),  syntax (the study o f structural units larger than one word, i.e. phrases and sentences),  and semantics (the study of word and sentence meaning).  2.10.2023 Expanding the Core Branches of Linguistics  These core areas of linguistic study, however, are not the only Expanding the Core branches that are subsumed under the umbrella term linguistics.  A number of branches of linguistics have appeared in recent years and decades, of which pragmatics (the study o f meaning in context) and sociolinguistics (the study of the relationship between language and society) are among the most dynamic and widely studied subfields o f linguistics today.  Many linguists now include both pragmatics and sociolinguistics when they speak about the core branches of linguistics.  Similarly to sociolinguistics, which has developed as a result of overlapping interests o f linguistics and sociology, many other branches of linguistics have been set up to describe interdisciplinary approaches: for example, anthropological linguistics (anthropology and linguistics), biolinguistics (biology and linguistics), clinical linguistics (medicine and linguistics), computational linguistics (computer science and linguistics), ethnolinguistics (ethnology and linguistics), philosophical linguistics (philosophy and linguistics) and psycholinguistics (psychology and linguistics), to name only a few. Applied Linguistics vs. Corpus Linguistics  The branches o f linguistics we have mentioned so far belong for the most part to the traditional core or have developed from the collaboration of linguistics and a neighbouring field o f study. We will now briefly turn to two examples o f branches that are distinguished for other reasons, namely applied linguistics and corpus linguistics.  Applied linguistics can be broadly defined as the branch of linguistics that seeks to solve language-related problems in the real world.  Originally, applied linguistics essentially focussed on the relevance of linguistic study for language teaching, particularly foreign language teaching, but has since much expanded its scope.  Corpus linguistics, on the other hand, is not defined by the possible application of the results of linguistic study, but by the methodology used.  A corpus is a collection o f authentic language material, now frequently in the form o f machine-readable databases.  Corpus linguists are interested in actual language use. For example, linguists can search these corpora for all occurrences of a certain linguistic feature and interpret both the number of occurrences as well as the context in which such a feature occurs.  2.10.2023 A quick examination of a conversation with Applied Linguistics focus  Let’s watch it without any background knowledge. Tell us what happens in the video.  Now, a bit of background:  The conversation takes place in a home context.  The child is around 18 months old and the father initiates a conversation.  The child has not eaten ice-cream in his life.  He just learned the word ‘dondurma’ in Turkish and he does not know the word ice- cream in English.  Let’s watch again and share our views.  Shall we have a micro-look at it? A quick examination of a conversation with Applied Linguistics focus  Let’s watch it without any background knowledge. Tell us what happens in the video.  Now, a bit of background:  The conversation takes place in a home context.  The child is around 18 months old and the father initiates a conversation.  The child has not eaten ice-cream in his life.  He just learned the word ‘dondurma’ in Turkish and he does not know the word ice- cream in English.  Let’s watch again and share our views.  Shall we have a micro-look at it?  2.10.2023 Central Concepts of Linguistics  Linguistics at the beginning of the 21st century is still to a large extent based on the ideas of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), which were responsible for a fundamental change of direction of linguistic study in the early 20th century.  Synchrony versus Diachrony: One of the major changes brought about by Saussure’s ideas is the distinction between the study of languages at a certain point in time called synchrony (or synchronic linguistics), and the study of language change over time termed diachrony (or diachronic linguistics, or historical linguistics).  Spoken versus Written: Another major change was caused by Saussure’s call for the primacy of the spoken word. Most linguistic study in the 19th century had been concerned with the written form o f language, but Saussure (1983:24) insisted that “ [t]he sole reason for the existence of the latter [i.e. the written form] is to represent the former [i.e. the spoken form]”. This notion is o f fundamental importance to Saussure’s model o f the linguistic sign. Central Concepts of Linguistics: Prescriptivism versus Descriptivism  A further fundamental change o f direction in linguistic study that is connected with Saussure’s ideas, and the last we would like to mention here, is the transition from a prescriptive (or normative) period of linguistics to a descriptive approach.  Descriptive linguistics aims to describe the facts of linguistic usage as they are in practice, whereas prescriptive linguistics attempts to prescribe rules of “correctness”, i.e. to lay down normative rules as to how language should be used.  Since the beginning o f the 20th century, linguistics has been increasingly critical o f prescriptivism and has been favouring the approach of descriptivism.  2.10.2023 Central Concepts of Linguistics: Structuralism  At the heart of Saussure’s ideas is the focus of linguistics on the structure of the language system shared by members of a certain speech community.  This is why the Saussurean type o f linguistics is also referred to as structural linguistics (or structuralist linguistics).  The centre of study is the language system (or langue) and not the concrete language use by the individual (or parole)..  Structural linguistics aims at the description and analysis of all elements of the language system and the relationships that exist between them.  These elements and their interrelationships are investigated at all structural levels o f linguistics, such as sounds, words and sentences. Central Concepts of Linguistics: Arbitrariness  Saussure emphasises that there is no internal natural link between the sound shape and the meaning o f the linguistic sign  Neither does the form o f a word dictate its meaning, nor is the meaning predictable from the form. This is illustrated by the fact that the same concept can be referred to by completely different sound patterns in different languages.  For example, the same animal that can be represented by [dog] in English, is usually referred to as hund [hunt] in German and chien [Jjê] in French. The relationship between the sound pattern and the concept is thus said to be arbitrary.  The term arbitrary here refers to the fact that the symbol that people use is made or chosen without any principle, logic or reason. For example, people, in Java, do not have a principle or logic to call an animal with long tail, two hands, and two legs and like scratching and playing on trees as kethek. There is no logic either for people in Jakarta to call that animal monyet. This is what arbitrary means.  The principle of arbitrariness o f the linguistic sign states that the connection between the sound pattern and the concept o f a sign is by convention only.  2.10.2023 Central Concepts of Linguistics: Generative Linguistics  Since the 1950s, a linguistic school o f thought called generative linguistics (or: formalism) has become increasingly influential, particularly in American linguistics.  The term generative was introduced by Noam Chomsky in his influential book Syntactic Structures in 1957.  Extremely simplified, we can say that the generative approach reflects the fact that all speakers of a language can produce, or generate, a theoretically unlimited number o f grammatical sentences from a limited number o f means, i.e. words and the rules for their combination.  Chomsky distinguishes between competence, the knowledge we have of the language we grow up with, and performance, the speech we actually produce.  Our complete knowledge of our native language is often also referred to as our grammar. Generative linguistics is traditionally most influential in the subfleld of syntax A Brief History of English “Time changes all things: there is no reason why language should escape this universal law’’ (Ferdinand de Saussure)  Why include the history of the English language in an introductory work on English linguistics? Why should we bother to deal with the state of the English language many centuries ago, as if modern English was not complicated enough already?  The answer is that the history of the English language can provide explanations for many features,  e.g. the origins o f the common plural marker -s or many of the irregular verbs in contemporary English.  Taking a look at the history of English also reminds us that English has only been around for a comparatively short time and is historically related to a number of other languages. Which languages?  Following Saussure, linguistics is now commonly divided into synchronic linguistics and diachronic linguistics.  Synchronic linguistics is the study of a language at a given point in time. The time studied may be either the present or a particular point in the past; synchronic analyses can also be made of dead languages, such as Latin.  Diachronic linguistics, or historical linguistics, is the study of language change. It is concerned with both the description and explanation of such change. Linguists generally agree that all living languages are constantly changing as the needs of the people who use them change as well.  2.10.2023 A Brief History of English  What makes languages change? How does that happen? Any idea?  Economy?  Speakers tend to make their utterances as efficient and effective as possible to reach communicative goals. Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs and benefits. For instance: going to [ˈɡoʊ.ɪŋ.tʊ] → gonna [ˈɡɔnə] or [ˈɡʌnə]  Language Contact?  Borrowing of words and constructions from other languages  Cultural environment?  Groups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and objects in their language, whether they encounter different people there or not.  Migration/Movement?  Speakers will change and create languages, such as pidgins and creoles.  A pidgin is a reduced language used by groups with no language in common who need to communicate for trade or other purposes. A creole, by contrast, is a natural language developed from a mixture of different languages, like Haitian Creole, which is based on 18th-century French but absorbed elements of Portuguese, Spanish and West African languages  Traditionally, historical linguistics distinguishes between two types of change:  Change due to internal factors, which refers to language change that occurs in isolation,  Change that results from external factors, which is largely caused by contact with other languages.  Language change affects all linguistic levels of a language.  You have difficulty in English pronunciation?  What If English Were Phonetically Consistent?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zWWp0akUU Periods of English  Reflecting the changes the English language has undergone during its roughly 1500 years of existence, the history of English is commonly divided into four main periods.  They are namely Old English (OE), also referred to as Anglo-Saxon, Middle English (ME), Early Modern English (EModE) and Modern English (ModE), which includes so-called Present Day English (PDE).  The periods are distinguished on the basis of historical events as well as characteristic linguistic developments. The dividing lines, however, are somewhat fuzzy as languages change rather gradually than abruptly.  Pre-English Period (before c450 AD): Archaeological evidence shows that humans had lived in what we now refer to as the British Isles long before the Germanic tribes that later became the English people arrived.  Unfortunately, we do not know much about the languages spoken in England before English. This is mainly due to the lack of written records. The only groups about whose languages we have some definite knowledge are the Celts and the Romans.  2.10.2023 An Overview of Periods The Celts and the Romans before English  The spread of the Celts (kelt) across the British Isles and thus the spread of Celtic customs and the languages they spoke took place several centuries BC.  The Celtic influence on the English language, however, is very small, as the Celts were defeated and/or pushed back into the northern and western parts of Great Britain when the Germanic tribes invaded England in the fifth century AD.  Traces of Celtic influence due to language contact with English survive almost exclusively in place names. Such place names are more common in the North and the West than in the East and Southeast. Some names of settlements such as York, London, Kent, Dover, Thames, Avon, Trent, Severn, Cornwall and Leeds most likely go back to Celtic designations, but the majority of place names that can be traced back to Celtic origins are names connected with hills and rivers. So British people still use Celtic   There is some speculation that Celtic had some influence over the grammatical development of English, though, such as the use of the continuous tense (e.g. “is walking” rather than “walks”), which is not used in other Germanic languages. The Celtic language survives today only in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland, the Welsh of Wales,  2.10.2023 The Celts and the Romans before English  The Romans first arrived in Britain in 55 BC under Julius Caesar, but permanent settlement did not take place until nearly a hundred years later. The full-scale Roman invasion o f the island started in 43 AD and resulted in Roman occupation.  Latin became the official language during the time of Roman rule but was not used extensively by the native population and did not replace the Celtic language in Britain.  Latin influence on English from this period is thus very slight as it had to be transmitted through Celtic and was limited by the same factors as Celtic influence itself.  One of the few Latin elements that have come into English in this way is OE ceaster, which represents Latin castra ‘camp’ and is a common designation in Old English for a settlement. The English town of Chester thus owes its name to Roman influence.  There were, however, two periods of more extensive influence of Latin on Old English: firstly, the transmission of elements from Latin into the Germanic dialects before the Germanic tribes left the Continent for Britain, and secondly, an enormous influence due to the systematic Christianisation of Britain by Roman missionaries starting in the year 597. Origins and Dialects of English  The history of English started in the area now called England in the middle of the fifth century, when a number of Germanic tribes, namely the Jutes, Saxons, Angles and at least a part of the Frisians, invaded Britain, settled in the South and the East and brought their Germanic dialects with them.  They gradually expanded their settlement, and by doing so the English-speaking territory, until by about 800 they occupied all but the Scottish highlands in the North.  Resulting from the dialect divisions of the invading tribes and the different languages they came in contact with, there was linguistic variation in English right from the very beginning. Three main dialect areas can thus be distinguished for Old English:  West Saxon (southern and southwestern England),  Kentish (southeastern England)  Anglian, which is commonly subdivided into Mercian (central England south of the river Humber) and Northumbrian (England north of the river Humber and southeastern Scotland).  The Old English texts which have survived come from all of the above dialect areas. However, most of the preserved Old English material is written in the West Saxon dialect, reflecting the rise of the West Saxon kingdom and the resulting position of the dialect as a kind of literary standard after 900.  2.10.2023 Where did the Germanic Tribes come from and where did they settle?  Yorkshire Airlines: https://www.y outube.com/ watch?v=6VLY pKGVBUg  Yorkshire Style: https://www.y outube.com/ watch?v=gO W5h4eMcBY  British Accents by region: https://www.y outube.com/ watch?v=FyyT 2jmVPAk Origins of English  Genetically, English is thus a Germanic language that is a member of the Indo-European family of languages and related to other Language Germanic languages on the Continent.  Close relatives are other members of the West Germanic branch of the Germanic languages, e.g. Frisian, Dutch and German, as we can see in the traditional branch diagram (or tree diagram):  2.10.2023 Some Linguistic Characteristics of Old English  Despite the dialect distinctions o f Old English mentioned above, there are a number o f characteristic linguistic features shared by all major varieties of Old English.  Vocabulary  From a modern perspective, one of the most striking features of Old English is the very limited number of words derived from Latin and the absence of borrowings from French, the latter of which make up a large part of the vocabulary of Modern English.  The vocabulary of Old English is almost exclusively of West Germanic origin - with the exception of a few borrowings from Celtic and Latin, and some Scandinavian influence on vocabulary and place names from 787 AD onwards - but more than 80 per cent of those words have since disappeared from the language.  The surviving West Germanic words, however, form the core of the Modern English vocabulary and occur frequently in everyday speech.  They express basic concepts, such as child (OE did) or to drink (OE drincan), and constitute a large part of Modern English function words, i.e. auxiliaries, conjunctions, determiners, prepositions, pronouns Some Linguistic Characteristics of Old English  Morphology and Syntax  Old English was an inflected language like Latin or Modern Morphology and Syntax German, which means that the grammatical function of words in a sentence was indicated largely by means o f inflection, most commonly in the form of endings. As a result, the word order in Old English is rather free.  Nouns in Old English not only employed inflection to indicate number (singular/plural) but also case and gender. As in Modern German, four cases are distinguished: nominative, genitive, dative and accusative  Old English distinguishes masculine, feminine and neuter and has so-called grammatical gender, which means that the gender of Old English nouns does not correspond to biological sex.  For example, inanimate objects can thus be feminine (e.g. OE giefii ‘gift’) and masculine (e.g. OE stän ‘stone’, the so-called macron above the a indicating a long vowel), whereas the designations for female persons can be neuter (e.g. OE w i f ‘wife’ and mxgden ‘girl’)  2.10.2023 Some Linguistic Characteristics of Old English  The Old English verbal system formally distinguished only two simple tenses, the present and the preterite (or past). The system was divided into strong and weak verbs.  Many Modern English “irregular” verbs still show an alternation of their root vowel, e.g. drive, drove, driven. e.g. drifan ‘to drive’, draf drifon, (ge)drifen (strong verbs class I)  Weak verbs are subdivided into three different classes but all have in common that they form their preterite and past participle by adding an ending called a dental suffix. e.g. hieran ‘to hear’ has a preterite hierde and a past participle (gejhfered (weak verbs class 1)  The dental suffix is the origin o f the Modern English “regular” past tense marker –ed.  The consonants of Old English were similar to the consonants of Modern English as the consonant system has not undergone any major structural changes in the history of English. As far as vowels are concerned, the situation is completely different.  Particularly the long vowels have undergone considerable change from Old English to Modern English, e.g. OE mona > ModE moon and OE stan > ModE stone Middle English 1150-1500  The Norman Conquest  In the year 1066, the troops of William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, invaded Britain. This invasion is known. as the Norman Conquest.  His reign not only brought about fundamental changes in society, religion and politics, it also had the greatest effect on the English language of all events in the course of its history.  The Normans became the ruling class in England. Accordingly, French, strictly speaking the Norman French dialect, became the preferred language of the upper class and at the so- called Anglo-Norman Court.  More and more speakers of English descent gradually acquired at least some knowledge of French resulting in a very strong influence o f French on the English language, despite the fact that the everyday language of the masses remained English at all times.  These influences were clearly visible by about 1150, which is why this date is often given as the approximate dividing line between Old English and Middle English.  Written sources from the early Middle English period are scarce, as English had low prestige and most administrative and religious material was written in French or Latin.  2.10.2023 Some Linguistic Characteristics of Middle English  French influence and other developments towards the end of the Old English period led to some marked differences between Old English and Middle English.  Vocabulary  One of the most striking features of Middle English is the easily observable immense influence of French on the English vocabulary.  Several centuries of intimate language contact led to the transference of an enormous number of words of French origin to English until the end of the Middle English period.  Many thousands of words from all spheres of life were adopted, including government, religion, art, justice, fashion, army, navy, literature and poet.  Estimates claim that between 30 and 40 per cent of the Modern English vocabulary is of French origin. But whatever the exact figure, there can be no doubt that the majority of these words entered the English language during Middle English times, replacing many inherited Germanic words. Some Linguistic Characteristics of Middle English: Morphology and Syntax  The extensive changes of the Middle English period, however, show not only in the vocabulary but also the grammar of English. A widespread loss of inflections took place and changed English into a more analytic language.  This means that the English language increasingly depended on a relatively fixed word order to express the relation of words in a sentence. Middle English is thus traditionally called the period of levelled inflections.  The verb also exhibited the general tendency towards weakening of endings and levelling of inflections, but showed lesser degrees of structural change.  The main changes of the verbal system during the Middle English period were the loss of many strong verbs and the gradual process of conversion from the strong to the weak conjugation found in a number of formerly strong verbs.  The weak class of verbs was further strengthened by the adoption of many verbs from foreign languages, particularly from French at the time, which were for the most part included into the weak system. These processes contributed to the reduction of the number of so-called irregular verbs in Modern English  2.10.2023 Some Linguistic Characteristics of Middle English: Pronunciation  The consonants of English have not changed much since Old English times and thus only a few rather minor changes took place from Old English to Middle English, such as the loss of initial h- before l, n and r in words like OE hring > ME ring.  Some evidence of ‘h-dropping’ word-initially in words from French and Latin: e.g. oste (OE host), onour (OE honour), in native words: e.g. it (OE hit); earth, (OE herthe)  New phonemes have entered: voiced fricatives /ð/, /v/, /z/. The situation in OEo voiced fricatives were just allophones of voiceless fricative and fricatives were voiceless unless they were between voiced sounds  [ð]: oðer [v]: hlāford, hēafod, hæfde [z]: frēosan, ceōsan, hūsian.  “voiced consonants require less energy to pronounce”: previously unvoiced fricatives became voiced in words receiving little or no stress in a sentence, like function words:  e.g. [f] of -> /v/ e.g. [s] in wæs, his ->/z/ e.g. [θ] in þæt -> /ð/  The vowel system, on the other hand, underwent some fundamental changes, such as some instances of lengthening and shortening in certain environments and the reduction of /a/, /e/, /o/ and /u/ to /a/ in unstressed position, which is at least to a large extent responsible for the loss of inflections in English.  Reduction to /ə/ and eventual loss of short vowels in unstressed syllables (lexical words: nama -> name, mete -> meat, nosu > nose, sunu -> son)  Different vowels in otherwise similar words: e.g. noun plurals: child and children,, nose and nostril, wise and wisdom; in weak verbs: keep and kept, lead and led. Early Modern English 1500-1700  The beginning of the Early Modern English period is connected with the effects brought about by the introduction of printing into England in the second half of the fifteenth century. Printing from moveable type was invented in Germany in the middle of the fifteenth century and brought to England by William Caxton.  Books no longer had to be copied by hand and for the first time in the history of English a great number of identical books could be produced. Printing gave written works a much wider circulation, contributed to the standardisation of the English language and fostered norms of spelling and punctuation.  Apart from of the extensive regularisation of spelling conventions by the middle of the seventeenth century - resulting from the arrival of printing and the first English-language dictionaries - Early Modern English is mainly characterised by fundamental changes in the vocabulary and the vowel system.  Among the most important influences on the development of the English language in the Early Modern English period were the works of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and the King James Bible.  2.10.2023 Early Modern English: Vocabulary  The Early Modern English period saw another major expansion of the English vocabulary and a huge influx of words from other languages.  The exploration of far-away places and the ensuing contact with foreign cultures and unfamiliar environments was one of the reasons for the need of new words.  The spread of new concepts and inventions from the Continent and renewed interest in the classical languages during the Renaissance (1500-1650) also led to numerous borrowings from Latin, Greek, French and other languages.  The following list contains just a small fraction of the words that were borrowed during the Early Modern English period:  From Latin and Greek: anonymous, appropriate, atmosphere, catastrophe, chaos, crisis, criterion, emphasis, encyclopedia, enthusiasm, exact, exaggerate, excursion, exist, expensive, explain, habitual, immaturity, impersonal, lexicon, lunar, monopoly, necessitate, obstruction, parasite, parenthesis, pathetic, pneumonia, relaxation, relevant, scheme, soda, species, system, tactics, temperature, thermometer, transcribe, utopian, vacuum, virus Early Modern English: Vocabulary  From or via French: alloy, anatomy, bayonet, bigot, bizarre, chocolate, colonel, comrade, detail, entrance, equip, explore, grotesque, invite, moustache, muscle, naturalise, passport, pioneer, progress, shock, ticket, tomato, vase, vogue, volunteer  From or via Italian: balcony, ballot, carnival, concerto, design, giraffe, grotto, lottery, macaroni, opera, piazza, rocket, solo, sonata, soprano, stanza, trill, violin, volcano  From or via Spanish and Portuguese: alligator, anchovy, apricot, armada, banana, barricade, cannibal, canoe, cockroach, corral, desperado, embargo, guitar, hurricane, maize, mosquito, negro, potato, port (wine), sombrero, tank, tobacco  From other languages: Arabian: harem; Dutch: keelhaul, knapsack, landscape, yacht; Hindi: guru; Irish Gaelic: trousers; Malay: bamboo, ketchup; Norwegian: troll; Russian: rouble; Persian: bazaar, caravan, turban; Tamil: curry; Turkish: coffee, kiosk, yogurt; Welsh: flannel  Some viewed the influx of new vocabulary as enrichment, others "Inkhorn’’ Terms objected strongly to the extensive borrowing of words from foreign languages. The latter claimed that the language should remain “pure” and “unmixed”, not obscured by so-called inkhorn terms that are not understood by a large part of the population.  The borrowing of so many foreign words led to the compilation of dictionaries containing hard words, such as the probably first-ever monolingual English dictionary published by Robert Cawdrey in 1604.  2.10.2023 Early Modern English: Morphology and Syntax  The major structural changes in English grammar were completed before the Early Modern English period started and thus the syntax and morphology at the time are already very similar to Modern English.  The inflectional system of the noun was essentially the same as in Present Day English, with only two cases (common and possessive) and the plural marker -s. Shakespeare still occasionally employs the plural ending -en in words like eyen ‘eyes’.  The verbal system is characterised by the continuation of the tendency of strong verbs to become weak and the rare occurrence of the progressive form.  The word order pattern subject-verb-object (SVO) had already established itself before the Early Modern English period, but deviations from this general rule were still more frequent than in Modern English.  One of these common deviations was the inversion of the subject and the verb after a sentence-initial adverbial as in “and then shalt thou see clearly” (King James Bible, Matthew 7.5) instead of “and then you will see clearly” (The Revised English Bible 1989) Early Modern English: Pronunciation and Great Vowel Shift  The consonant system of Early Modern English is for the most part identical with Modern English.  A few minor changes took place during the Early Modern English period, such as the loss of initial /k-/ and /g-/ before /n/, as in knee, know and gnome, or the loss of word-internal /l/ in certain environments, as in folk and palm.  The Great Vowel Shift  The vowel system, however, underwent a fundamental change commonly called the Great Vowel Shift (GVS).  The GVS started in the fourteenth century, took several centuries to complete and affected all long vowels of Middle English.  The long vowels of Middle English were either raised or diphthongised, i.e. they were changed into a combination of two vowel sounds pronounced together (ou, ae)  For example, the long /o:/ in ME fode (EME: food) was raised to long /u:/ and the long /i:/ in ME child and lyf (EME: life) was diphthongised to /ai/. The change seems to have happened as a kind of chain reaction.  2.10.2023 Early Modern English: Pronunciation and Great Vowel Shift  The Great Vowel Shift  It is, however, controversial whether the vowels at the bottom of the vowel chart were raised first and “pushed” the others up, called a push-chain, or whether the ones at the top were diphthongised first and “pulled” the lower ones up by leaving an open space, called a pull-chain. Some linguistics even suggest a mixture of both.  One of the most important changes affecting the short vowels of Middle English was the rounding and centralising of the high back rounded vowel /u/ in the southern part of England.As a result, /u/ became /a/, as in ModE but and cup. It is still /but/ and /kup/ in Yorkshire  Modern English 1700-Present time  There is no historical landmark such as the Norman Conquest or the introduction of printing to mark the beginning of the Modern English period.  The year 1700 is usually set as the beginning of the Modern English period, because the English language had by then reached its present state in most respects.  This was thanks to important works like Samuel Johnson’s influential Dictionary of the English Language published in two volumes in 1755 and several highly popular grammar books published in the eighteenth century.  For the geographical expansion of English that started late in the Early Modern English period and reached its peak in Modern English, it is called colonisation and led to the spread of English beyond the British Isles and its distribution in many territories overseas.  Spread of English : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10  Modern English is the result of over 1000 years of continuous changes.  2.10.2023 Modern English 1700-Present time: Vocabulary  The lexicon of Modern English combines words from different origins which can be assigned to three different groups.  Firstly, the continuations of inherited Germanic words that have survived since Old English.  Secondly, the vocabulary that has been adopted from Latin, Greek, French and other European languages throughout the course of the history of English.  And thirdly, words that have been borrowed or made up as a result of the geographical expansion of English as well as the social, cultural and scientific developments that have taken place since the early nineteenth century.  Borrowed words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES3qDORQjAA  Most recently the rapid progress in computer and communications technology has been responsible for a large number of new and frequently used words in the English language, such as software or download.  The English-language domination of these technologies and other fields has led to the “export” of a large number of lexical items to many languages around the world Modern English 1700-Present time: Morphology and Syntax  As far as morphology is concerned, Modern English can be called the period of lost inflections.  Only a very small number of regular inflectional endings (Thank God!)has been preserved in Modern English. What are they?  Due to the loss of inflections, English has become a highly analytic language, i.e. the relation of words in a sentence is now indicated by a relatively fixed word order that does not allow for many deviations from the basic pattern and, for example, the usage of prepositions.  Regarding Pronunciation: The early twentieth century saw the rise of the prestige accent RP (Received Pronunciation) in England  RP is still widely used as a reference in foreign language teaching around the world and until recently was the exclusive accent used in British broadcasting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8uW15pmF68  2.10.2023 English as a Global English  The emergence of an international or global language is always closely linked with political, cultural and economic power and so historically the status of English in the world today is due to two main reasons:  First, as we have seen before, English spread across the world with the expansion of British colonial power, which reached its peak at the end of the nineteenth century.  Second, the maintained international status and increasing spread of English in the twentieth century is the result of the establishment of the United States as the leading economic and military power.  The present global status of English is based in part on the impressive number of English speakers and users in the world, with an increasing importance being attributed to the nonnative speakers of the language.  The number of native speakers seems to pose the least difficulties and is widely accepted to be somewhere between 300 and 400 million.  Accurate numbers of speakers for whom English is not the mother tongue are much more difficult to establish and depend largely on the definition of the minimum level of proficiency that can be counted as “English-speaking, -using or -knowing”.  However, The vast majority of users of English today are thus non-native speakers of the language and their proportion is increasing constantly English as a Global English  From a linguistic standpoint, English language is now characterized as ‘the first truly global language’ (Crystal, 2012), and even ‘the zeitgeist’ in today’s globalizing world (Mauranen, 2009). (/ˈzaɪtɡaɪst/: quality of a particular period of history  Selvi (2019) points that the present-day ‘triumph’ of the English language across the globe has several important manifestations (p.185): 1. English, as a language of globalization, has a profound role, presence and impact in various spheres of life, and is conceived as an important asset in the participation in the interconnected/interdependent global economy; 2. In addition to de rigueur (custom) portrayal of English as an idealized linguistic key to a better future, it is criticized as ‘a language which creates barriers as much as it presents possibilities’ (Pennycook, 2016: 26) whose global spread ‘contribut[es] to significant social, political, and economic inequalities’ (Tollefson, 2000: 8), 3. In response to growing demands for English and English-medium education, governments and policy makers spearhead projects and educational reforms to equip individuals with stronger links to the English language (Ferguson, 2013); and 4. Transnational and transcultural uses, users, teachers, contexts and functions of English in an increasingly superdiverse world (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011) have pluralized the language (from the English language to World Englishes).  2.10.2023 Best English speaking countries (L2)  2.10.2023 Summary and a quick matching exercise  Periods-matching.htm  Three groups needed (4 people each)..  The History of English in 10 Minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfKhlJIAhew