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Sara Bresciani - Lingua inglese II

Lingua, morfosintassi e lessico: Germanic languages

Languages can be classified according to:

• Typological principle: Language features that languages synchronically have in common (there’s no reference to the history of these languages):
  • Inflectional languages express grammatical categories, relations, and verbs inflections through case markers (inflections or endings).
  • Analytic languages express grammatical and syntactic relations through word order and function or grammatical words (Present Day English).
• Genealogical principle: Languages are classified according to their historical parentage. In the Indo-European family, an extended group of families from Asia to Europe, English belongs to the Germanic subfamily. All Germanic languages are genetically related through their common origin, Proto-Germanic, a pre-historical language which has no written evidence: it was in fact reconstructed in the 19^th century by comparing the written evidence of its descendant languages. These Germanic languages started to develop, aside from the common characteristics of their family, their own features and developed into modern languages.

Verbs

In Germanic languages:

• System of strong and weak verbs.
• Verbs were inflected for person (1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd), number (singular or plural), and tense (present or past).

In Present Day English:

• Distinction between irregular and regular verbs, rather than strong and weak.
• The only inflected verb is 'to be'.

Nouns and pronouns

In Germanic languages, nouns were inflected for:

• Cases: nominative (subject), genitive (possessive), dative (indirect object), accusative (direct object).
• Gender: feminine, masculine, and neuter.
• Number: singular or plural.

In Present Day English:

• Cases can be found in personal pronouns (I-me-my/mine) and relative pronouns (who, whom, whose).
• Gender is only maintained in the 3^rd singular person of pronouns.

Adjectives

In Germanic languages, adjectives had weak and strong inflection.

In Present Day English, the inflection is lost (is maintained instead in German).

Syntax

In Germanic languages:

• Word order was flexible.
• Morphological elements used to show how words function in a sentence.
• The verb was in 2^nd position after time adverbs.
• The verb was in final position if an auxiliary was in 2^nd position and in subordinate clauses.

In Present Day English:

• Flexibility is not maintained (only in German).
• Word order is rather fixed.

The common features of Germanic languages are:

• Sound correspondence
• Grammatical evidence
• Basic vocabulary the least reliable source because of the influence of words from non-Germanic languages
• Synthetic

New words in English via borrowing

In Present Day English, even if the basic vocabulary is Germanic, many words were borrowed from a variety of foreign languages ('city' is borrowed from the French 'cité'). The interplay between Anglo-Saxon, French and Latin/Greek is evident in kinship terms:

• Anglo-Saxon origin: basic kinship terms (mother, father, husband, wife, son, daughter, sister, brother)
• Old English + foreign language hybrid words: (grandmother, grandfather)
• French or Latin origin: other kinship terms (family from Latin, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew from French, therefore from Latin)

Borrowing, which is the result of two languages coming in contact, is the primary source of genuinely new worlds in English. Linguists label borrowing as an external source of lexical innovation, as foreign influence affects several faces of a language:

• Graphemes and spelling conventions (-gh- and -ie- are graphemes which were introduced by Anglo-Norman tribes)
• Morphology (suffixes and prefixes)
• Vocabulary
• Syntax

When borrowing a word there are two steps:

• 1^st step: Adoption from the source language
• 2^nd step: Phonological, orthographic and morphological adaptation to the target language (can also not occur)

Even though all English manuals use the word 'borrowing' to reference foreign contact, this word is not the best notion to use because the borrowing process is more like copying from the original source, rather than taking for a period of time and then giving it back.

In vocabulary, foreign influence shows in:

Loan words

• Words adopted from a foreign language (the donor or source language) and incorporated into another language without translation: city (from Norman French), beef, data, alcohol, Arabic, pizza, maquiladora, vuvuzela (very recent borrowing).

Loan translations, shifts, calques

• Words or phrases whose meaning are adopted from another language by word-for-word translation: flea market (marché aux puces), forgive (perdonare), Holy Ghost (Spiritus Sanctus), it goes without saying (ça va sans dire).

The bulk of modern English vocabulary comes from romance languages, such as French (30.2%), and from Latin (28.3%): these languages have always played a major role in English vocabulary.

At the time of the Norman conquest, French wasn’t a homogeneous language, it divided into Norman French and Central/Parisian French (which continues today), and it was Norman French which represented the language of prestige in France and in the British Isles.

In Present Day English lots of words are of French origin, but some of these words, the ones derived from Norman French, are older than others: candle (chandelle), castle (château), escape (échapper), garden (jardin).

At the beginning of the XIII century, in 1204 England lost the region of Normandy: Norman French started to lose the status of language of prestige, while Central French took over. This caused the phenomenon of 'lexical doublets': pairs of words which have different phonological form and morphology, but the same root, and came into English vocabulary through different routes and at different stages (Central French words had already entered English through Norman French words).

Whenever a Latin word has /k/ or /g/ in it, it remains the same in Norman French, but it changes to /ts/ and /dg/ in central French:

• 'Captiare' ('to seize') turned to 'catch' from Norman French (it maintains the sound /k/) and 'chase' from Central French
• 'Captale' ('property') turned to 'cattle' from Norman French, and 'chattel' from Central French
• 'Lanceare' turned to 'launch' from Norman French, and 'lance' from Central French

Germanic words come into English via both Norman and Central French:

• 'Warranty' entered English from the Norman French 'warantie', while 'guarantee' came through Central French 'g(u)arantie'

In general, words derived from French or Latin are more formal and prestigious than Germanic or Anglo-Saxon derived words (phrasal verbs, which are used in informal contexts, are all of Germanic origin).

• Cow, calf, sheep = derived from Anglo-Saxon
• Beef, veal, mutton = borrowed from French: these words were used to reference animals but specialized to refer to the edible flesh of these animals (more noble notion than the animal itself because it refers to the cuisine)

French suffixes and prefixes combined with words of Germanic or Anglo-Saxon origin, giving birth to hybrid words:

• [-ess] shepherd-ess, god-ess
• [-ment] enlighten-ment

New words via meaning change

Meaning change shows in a variety of processes, but we can observe a few recognizable paths of change, which include:

• Widening: A word which referred to a specific notion is changed to refer to a more inclusive and wider concept
  • Bird: 'young foul' → 'all fowl both young and old'
  • Manage: handle a horse → handle anything difficult successfully
• Narrowing: A word’s original meaning is restricted to refer to a more specific concept. Sometimes narrowing happens because a word with a similar meaning takes over the meaning of the original.
  • Deer: 'animal' → 'large four-legged wild animal which eats grass and leaves' (in Middle English and Present Day English)
• Amelioration: A word’s register is affected and changes over time, from casual and slang to high and polite (lower to higher register)
  • Nice: 'stupid, simple' → positive connotation
  • Fond: 'foolish, crazy' → 'dazed with love' → 'in love with' → 'affectionate towards'
• Pejoration: A word’s register changes, socially or emotionally, from high and polite to low and rude (higher to lower register)
  • Bully: 'lover, sweetheart' → 'abusive person'
  • Terms for female roles have undergone pejoration: 'mistress' vs 'master', 'princess' vs 'prince'

Morphology

Morphology is the branch of linguistics devoted to the study of the internal structure of words. It deals with the correlation of form and meaning within the word: likeness in structure should be meaningful.

• Friend → friendly → friendliness
• Man → manly → manliness
• Woman → womanly → womanliness
• Mother → motherly → motherliness

Relationship in meaning: 'friend', 'man', 'woman', and 'mother' share meaning (they all mean 'person' of some kind), but not a morphological structure.

Relationship in form: 'friendly', 'manly', 'womanly', and 'motherly' share a phonological relationship (they all end in 'ly'), but not a morphological one.

• Partygoer = person who goes to parties
• Shopkeeper = person who keeps a shop

Morphology can be distinguished into two sub-branches:

• Inflectional morphology: Deals with the correlation of form and meaning within the inflective words of the same lexeme. It refers to the inflection of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, and determiners.
• Derivational morphology: Deals with the correlation of form and meaning within new lexemes by means of word-formation processes (derivation, compounding, shortening, etc.).

Morphs

Morphs are the smallest units in morphological structure; they’re each constituent element into which a word can be segmented.

In English, there are different types of morphs according to distribution:

• Free morph: An independent word on its own
  • Content words (dog, forest, laugh, etc.)
  • Function words (for, at, in, and, have/has/had, do/did, etc.)
• Bound morph: A word that can’t be independent on its own and is only attached to free morphs
  • Derivational affixes = prefixes and suffixes (-ish, -ive, -ly, in-, un-, etc.)
  • Inflectional suffixes = endings (-s, -ed, -ing, -er, etc.)
  • (En)clitics = contracted auxiliaries and negatives ('s, 'm, 're, 've, 'vn’t)
  • Bound roots = foreign borrowings (-vert, -mit, -ceive, -fer, -dent, etc.)

• Deforestation = de-forest-ation
• Inexpensive = in-expens(e)-ive
• Laughed = laugh-ed

In English, there can be an upper normal limit of six morphs: antidisestalishmeantarianism = anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism

Derivational affixes vs Inflectional affixes

Derivational affixes

• Can be either prefixes or suffixes (re-, un-, -ly, -ness).
• Can be more than one per word (unfriendly, dismissal).
• Can attach to a limited number of free morphs (-ment, -al, -ance/-ence).
• Have two functions:
  • Convert one part of speech to another (verb to noun, adjective to noun, noun to verb).
  • Change the meaning of the original word.
• Precede the inflectional suffix (consumables).

Inflectional affixes

• Can only be suffixes (-s, -er, -est, -ed, -ing, -'s).
• Can only be one per word (cars).
• Can attach to all members of a word class (-s for singular to plural nouns, -ed for past simple or past participle tenses of weak verbs).
• Have only one function:
  • Indicate grammatical meaning (number, tense, aspect, degree, case).
• Follow derivational suffix(es) (consumables).

Morphemes

A morpheme is the smallest unit of a word that has meaning (while a morph is the phonetic realization of that morpheme). Multimorphemic words can be segmented into several components, or morphs, with their own functions and meanings. By splitting the word into its components, English grammar deduces that:

• Explorationists = explore – ation – ist - s
• Explorationist-s = more than one explorationist
• Exploration-ist = one that performs the action of exploration
• Explor(e)-ation = the action or process of explor(e)-ing
• Explore(ing) = conducting a systematic search

Morphemes can convey two different types of meaning: lexical or grammatical. By this division, there can be both lexical morphemes and grammatical morphemes.

Grammatical morphemes

They represent a closed set in English and they correspond to the grammatical categories motivated by grammar or syntax:

• Number (countable or uncountable nouns; demonstratives; personal, possessive, and reflexive pronouns)
• Case (nominative, genitive, objective; personal, interrogative, and relative pronouns)
• Person (personal, possessive, and reflexive pronouns; possessive determiners; singular present indicative of verbs)
• Tense
• Aspect (distinguishes present tenses from perfect or continuous ones)
• Mood (the function of a sentence is expressed through inflections)
• Voice (active vs passive)
• Definiteness (the use of the definitive article first)
• Degree

Grammatical words can be realized by:

• Free morphs = function words (and, but, by, in, the, it, me, each, all, someone, etc.).
• Bound morphs = inflectional affixes (endings) and (en)clitics.

Lexical morphemes

They reference things, qualities, events, actions, etc. and form a large and open set of English words (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs).

Lexical morphemes can be realized by:

• Free morphs = content words, to which bound morphs can be added (child, laugh, boy, witness, love, etc.).
• Bound morphs = derivational affixes (-ish, -ly, -able, dis-, mis-).

Morphs and morphemes rules

Not always there’s a one-to-one correspondence between morphs and morphemes. Morphemes can transform following four different realization rules:

• Agglutinative rule: Every morpheme is realized by a distinct morph, and morphs are simply glued together.
  • 'These cows are eating grass' = 'cows' consists of two morphs, each one realizing one morpheme at the time:
    • cow (an animal)
    • -s (plural number = informs that there are more cows)
  • 'The new laptop is slower than the old one' = 'slower'