Appunti di Morfosintassi inglese

What kind of language is PDE?

English: language typology and genetic classification

• English in genetic classification: IE and Germanic languages
• PDE: a Germanic language?

German – Germanic > adjective, we are talking about a family of languages which originally shared some common features (phonology, grammar, syntax) = language family; for example, both English and German are Germanic languages. Analytic > analytic languages > they express grammatical and syntactical categories through word order or function words (prepositions, conjunctions). Synthetic > synthetic languages (present day Italian, German) > they share the mainly grammatical notions by inflection/ they express grammatical categories by form. Derivational > for example compounding. Inflectional > inflection > forms that a word can take in forms of number, case (genitive, etc.).

Introduction

Language classification:

1. Typologically
2. Genealogically

Language typology features that languages share > describing languages according to the features. No reference to language history > we are not going to describe the language across its historical development. Morphology, syntax, lexis > language typology affects its morphology and its syntax (not so much its vocabulary). It is a continuum which has two opposed points. The division is based on how languages represent grammatical notions. Latin is an example of a synthetic language. If you compare present day English and present day German, the last one is more synthetic. Word order = position of words within a sentence. If you compare PDE and Italian, English is more analytic than Italian.

Language typology of PDE

In terms of language typology, PDE is more analytic than synthetic; which does not mean that PDE doesn’t possess inflection, but there are very few cases. In fact, we can identify a noun as a subject or object by its position in the phrase. But, adverbs and adjectives can be inflected according to degree (positive, superlative, comparative) > Clear > clearer/clearest: clear testifies to English being a synthetic language.

There are still examples of words which can be created by means of inflection. But, effective > more effective/the most effective > the word is inflected by using a function word: effective testifies to English being an analytic language. English used to be a highly synthetic language > Old English was a highly inflected language.

OE nouns, pronouns, adjectives, definite article

Case:

• Nominative, genitive, accusative, dative > in English all these categories were inflected for case: subject, possession, direct object, indirect object.
• Number: sing vs pl (dual - = we too; you too- only for 1st and 2nd pers. pl. pron. > it is still used in PDE > you both; both of us; either you or me: these are forms of dual).
• Gender (grammatical) feminine, masculine, neuter. Grammatical = the gender had nothing to do with the sex of the represented entity > even though it was an object it had a grammatical gender > the gender that a word received had nothing to do with the gender that the denoted entity had in the real world.

Gender assignment in PDE isn’t grammatical but natural: it follows the gender that the entity has in the real world > Boy: masculine; girl: feminine; singer: common gender = it could be masculine or feminine; life: neuter; chair, desk: neuter. Stan = stone (neuter). Giefu = gift (neuter). Hunta = hunter (common gender). Some of these forms actually continue in PE. Weak is lost in PE but continues in modern German. English used to be very close to Germanic languages.

What is left of this in PDE?

Case

Nouns:

• Genitive (synthetic/analytic-periphrasis > it can be expressed in two ways: Saxon genitive (which continues the old English inflection) or the use of the preposition “of” (> it is a representation of how English has moved from being a predominantly synthetic language to being an analytic one).
• Accusative: WO > a noun in the accusative generally follows the verb.
• Dative + other ind. cases: analytic-periphrasis > the dative case is only expressed by means of periphrasis (ex: by somebody).

Pronouns:

• Genitive (relative + poss prons; synth. /analytic-periphrasis > they are still inflective for the genitive case > ex: whose VS of whom).
• Accusative (only relative prons; synthetic > ex: whom).
• Dative + other ind. cases (analytic-periphrasis > they are introduced by a preposition followed by the inflected form of the relative pronoun > analytic with a bit of inflection).

Adjs/Def. article: lost.

Number

• Pronouns/Nouns: sing vs pl > most of them are inflected only for singular or plural.
• Pronouns (pl. pers.): Dual! > we two, the two of us, the both of you (expressed by means of periphrasis).

Gender

• Pers prons: only 3rd pers. sing.
• Nouns: natural!

In PE gender is natural (and this trait distinguishes it from other Germanic languages and European languages). There is no way for us to understand the gender of the word by looking at the article or the adjectives (unless we refer to the entity they represent). Also “he/she/it” don’t follow grammatical gender but the gender that the entity has in the real world.

OE verbs

Also verbs were highly inflected in OE. A well-developed system of strong and weak verbs.

• Strong verbs: root vowel alternation for tense > their paradigm is irregular and their form changes.
• Weak verbs (deverbal, denominal/deadjectival = derived from nouns, adjectives or adverbs): dental suffix for past tense > they have a paradigm which is predictable (they take -ed).

PDE: irregular > irregular verbs in PE represent what is left of OE strong verbs vs regular verbs. PDE: all new verbs are regular. Small group of “anomalous” verbs > ex: could. It is a past form, but it is also used in the future, for example. It includes also auxiliary verbs (have: it is an auxiliary verb, not a lexical verb). Today the strong inflection of words is lost: whenever a verb is coined or introduced in the language > whenever a new verb enters the language it receives the regular inflection. The same goes with nouns (child-children; foot-feet): whenever a new noun enters the language it is inflected according to the regular plural inflection (it only receives -s or -es).

Anomalous > ex: could. It is a past form, but it is also used in the future, for example.

OE verbs inflected for

• Person: 1st, 2nd, 3rd > this distinction was only in the singular. Today verbs aren’t still inflected for person, only for the third.
• Number: singular/plural (same inflection for pl. pers.).
• Tense: present, past > present tense also covered the simple aspect (opposed to the continuous). Past tense also covered the function of the perfective aspect. OE didn’t present the perfective aspect: it has received it as influence whether from Latin or from Celtic languages.
• Mood: ind., opt. (subj), imp.

Future tense, passive voice, other aspects: periphrasis! (In the past tense verbs had forms for the singular and the plural, while today it is lost?) Nime > taka > take. Secgan > say. Sit > paradigm: sit-sat-sat = it is what remains in PDE of strong verbs vs seat > paradigm: seat-seated-seated = it is what remains in PDE of weak verbs.

What remains in PDE?

PDE Verbs: It is maintained only in the verb “to be”.

• To be:
  • Past tense: singular vs. plural maintained (< OE: waes-waeron).
  • Present tense: 1st, 2nd and 3rd pers. sing. maintained.
• Other verbs:
  • Present tense: 3rd per sing only.
  • Past tense: lost.

All the persons are inflected in the same way regardless the number or the tense.

OE syntax

• Word order: flexible > because it was a highly inflected language. Nouns, verbs could be placed everywhere in a sentence. Nowadays, in PDE word order is fixed: we understand the function that a word has in the sentence by its position.
• Morphological elements used to show how words function in a sentence > This is a result of the loss of nominal and verbal inflection which English experienced in its history.
• Syntactic structure and morphological structure intertwined. See also Latin and German.
• Flexibility is lost in PDE but maintained in German.

Grammar, syntax, morphology

From purely synthetic to predominantly analytic.

Vocabulary

• Genetic relatedness/relationship
• Classification on historical principles
• Through descent from a common linguistic ancestor > English shares many features with other languages because they descend from a common linguistic ancestor = parent language.
• Language family, parent language, daughter languages, sister language.
• Common linguistic ancestor > similarities.

English belongs to the Germanic family, which is a big family and includes languages such as Danish, Norwegian, Modern German, Swedish, etc. Even the Germanic family can be subdivided into other three families > this distinction is based on the similarities that the languages share. English is a Germanic language. What makes PDE like the other languages in its subfamily? How much of its Germanic origins does PDE still retain?

Common features of PDE and other Germanic languages

• Regular sound correspondences & other phonetic evidence.
• Grammatical (& morphological) evidence.
• Basic vocabulary (least reliable!) > because many English words have entered the language via a well-known process called borrowing.

Regular sound correspondences

Whenever in Latin we have the sound “x” in Germanic languages we have a velar sound (which is now silent but used to be pronounced) followed by a sound of stop. “C” in Latin becomes a velar sound in German as well as in English.

Other phonetic evidence

• i-Umlaut (a.k.a. i-mutation) (internal vowel modification caused by –i/-j in following syllable).
  • Foot/feet
  • Blood/bleed
  • Mouse/mice > "c” is the result of French influence on English.
• Word stress fixed on root/first syllable > Syllables following the root always unstressed and weak > Loss of inflectional endings (all the vocalic endings).

That’s why in PDE words do no longer exhibit any inflectional endings (except the “s” in the plural). Inflectional endings lose their function, and this is the reason why grammatical gender becomes useless and natural gender is adopted.

What kind of language is PDE?

Grammatical & morphological evidence

• Strong verbs vs weak verbs
• Strong vbs: 7 classes
• Past tense of weak verbs: dental suffix
• Comp & sup degree of adjs/advs > formed by adding -er or -est at the end. But when English lost inflectional endings, this function was taken up by the adverbs “more” and “most”.
• Flexibility & resourcefulness of vocabulary
  • Derivation (prefixes & suffixes; cfr. German)
  • Compounding (cfr. German)

In OE much more than in PDE, new words were created by means of:

• Adding prefixes and suffixes to a word that already exists
• Combining together words that already exist

English coined new words starting from words that were originally part of its vocabulary. It was also very likely to get a lot of synonyms > another feature of Germanic languages is that there are a lot of different words for the same concept.

A set of English words that have equivalents in other Germanic languages. Ex: portare; bring; bringen. These are the least reliable of all the evidence of relativeness between Germanic languages, because present day vocabulary is a result of a process of borrowing > Take is an example of a word that English borrowed from a North language. Imports also due to all England’s many colonies. Even though English is a Germanic language, PDE classifies as a hybrid language in terms of its vocabulary, because it is a melting-pot of a variety of languages > in fact we can distinguish different layers:

• Native layer = Anglo-Saxon layer (or core). Words which have always been in the language. They date back to English’s origins as a Germanic language, or they have been coined within English using Anglo-Saxon words. They are not the result of language contact or borrowing. The basic vocabulary of PDE, used in everyday conversations, is represented by words which belong to the Native layer. They are words which have been in the language all through its recorded history and which are very unlikely to be replaced by other words. They refer to common notions: household, parts of the human body, etc.
• Foreign layer (borrowing) = words that have been borrowed by a variety of foreign languages throughout all English history. The first forms of borrowing date back to the period when the Germanic populations settled in England, which was inhabited by Celtic and Roman populations > Celtic: the first form of borrowing was from the Celtic language ex: “down” is a word of Celtic origin + Celtic survives in many place names in English. Latin: Latin words entered English mainly during the Roman military conquest and the Christianisation of the English isles. So, the words especially refer to Christianity, to the military area or to place names Ex: church, street (via strata), Latin “castrum” continues today as “cester” or “caster” A second wave of Latin words entered the language via French. A third wave entered the language during the Renaissance. Other languages that influenced English, are for example, Scandinavian languages Ex: window, take (we are used to think about these words as English words, but from a chronological perspective these are not proper English words, but they were borrowed from other languages, even though it happened a long time ago).
• WF > word formation (can combine the first two) = words which have been coined in English by means of: (Using words that are already part of the lexis inventory of the language and then adding them together or adding prefixes and suffixes to the word). Compounding or derivation > words that belong to the native layer and words that belong to the foreign layer can be used. Ex: skyline: compound noun made by sky > borrowed from a Nordic language + line > borrowed from Latin. Homework: compound noun formed by two words that belong to the Native layer. Greenhouse. Grandmother, grandfather: mother and father are Anglo-Saxon words; grand- has been borrowed by Latin via French. Undertake: take had been borrowed but it then had been part of the language for a long time > so the speakers perceived it as an English word, and it underwent the same processes as the words that belonged to the language.
• Phonosymbolism = creating words from the phonetic material of the language. Typical of children’s language. It’s not a very productive source of new words in English. They are the result of a sort of a wordplay on the sounds of the language. New words enter the language either by means of borrowing or word formation. But a big part of the lexis is composed by words that have always been in the language and get back to English’s origins as a Germanic language.

Vocabulary

From purely Germanic to hybrid. Borrowing < Foreign influence = Language contact. Even though English was originally a Germanic language, in terms of vocabulary it has become a hybrid language which combines a native layer and a foreign layer.

New words in English. An introduction

• Anglo-Saxon layer – Basic vocabulary
• Foreign layer
• Word-formation
  • From Anglo-Saxon layer
  • From foreign layer
• Phonosymbolism

OED lexicographers: around 7,000 new English words (= NEOLOGISMS) surface annually. Basic vocabulary:

• Resistance to borrowability
• Semantic stability (i.e. least likely to be replaced by other words as a language evolves)
• Leipzig-Jakarta list of Basic Vocabulary
  • Haspelmath & Tadmor (2009)
  • Loanword Typology Project
  • Top 100 ranking items (i.e. words grouped around semantic domains/concepts)
  • 41 languages + semantic fields, ranked by loanword percentage

The percentage of loanwords is higher in semantic fields that concern cultural items, while it is lower in relatively culture-free meanings (the physical world, motion, the body).

New words: lexical borrowing

‘Charlie’, she says, ‘they look like fish fingers to me, and I would never eat a fish finger.’ ‘I know that, but these are not fish fingers. These are ocean nibbles from the supermarket under the sea—mermaids eat them all the time.’ (Lauren Child, I will not ever never eat a tomato, 2000) Borrowed words + Catch > borrowed from Latin “captiare” and entered in English via French (Norman French).

This research has tried to quantify the number of words that English has borrowed from other languages against the number of words that belong to the Anglo-Saxon layer. The words borrowed from Romance languages amount to more than 50%. We are talking about a linguistic process which is a result of an external and historical event > External cause of language change/innovation. Language contact = foreign influence. We must distinguish from donor/source language (more than 120 languages are recorded among the donor languages in PDE vocabulary) > borrowing/receiving language. Lexis (it is the area where foreign influence can be more easily observed) > lexical borrowing > the process of borrowing entire words from a donor language. We also have to take into account > spelling conventions/graph.