Appunti esame di Lingua e traduzione inglese 1

ENGLISH LINGUISTICS LANGUAGE: EXTERNALISED AND INTERNALISED

Language can be regarded as existing in two modes: as a body of objective facts (strings of

sounds or letters); as the language users’ knowledge.

These two modes of language are called Externalised Language (E-language) and Internalised

Language (I-language).

The dominant kind of language study in the first half of the 20th century, Structuralist

Linguistics, concentrated on E-language. It aimed to collect samples of E-language, that is

samples of the products of linguistic communication, as objects independent of the mind,

and then describing the regularities (patterns, structures) found in those samples.

Since then, the interest of language study has shifted to Ilanguage, to the knowledge that

native speakers of a language possess and use when they communicate linguistically.

Generative Linguistics aims at modelling the I-language of the native speaker, that is his/her

linguistic knowledge or internal grammar.

COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE

A natural language is composed of many components.

 Phonology

Phonology includes the phonemes (basic sounds) and the discrete suprasegmental elements

(stress patterns, tones, intonation) in the language.

The phonological component also contains rules that regulate how phonemes can be

combined in morphemes and words.

 Morphology

Morphology includes the morphemes and the rules for combining them to derive and inflect

words in a particular language.

We define morphemes as the smallest meaningful units of a language.

For example, the morpheme ion can be added to the verb elect (which is a vocabulary item)

and the result is the noun election (which is a new vocabulary item derived from the former

one).

The plural morpheme s can be added to the noun election to obtain the plural form of the

same noun: elections, (which is not a new vocabulary item but the inflected variant of an

already existing one).

 Syntax

Syntax is the component of language that contains the rules for putting together words in

phrases and phrases in sentences.

For example, the sentence he went to London is syntactically well-formed, whereas To he

London went is syntactically ill-formed. 29

 Semantics

Languages contain a system of meanings: this component is semantics. The semantic rules

specify which sentences are semantically normal and which are semantically anomalous.

For example, the sentence this woman is the mother of three girls is semantically normal, but

this woman is the father of three oil-wells is anomalous.

These are the central components of language.

We can also separate a special component in which all the central components may play a

role: a lexicon. A Lexicon is a list of the vocabulary items of a language and it contains

idiosyncratic information about those vocabulary items (such as the unpredictable aspects of

their phonology, morphology, syntactic behaviour, and meaning). Words, once formed and

established as vocabulary items, are stored in the lexicon.

Native speakers of a language have linguistic knowledge: they know their language. They

possess I-language, they have an internal grammar. They know the elements and the rules in

the various components of their language and, based on this knowledge, they can tell

whether a string of words in their language is grammatical or not. But most speakers are

unable to explain why one string of words is grammatical in their language and another is not.

This is because their linguistic knowledge (internal grammar) is intuitive (subconscious), and

they cannot express it explicitly (clear).

LINGUISTICS AND IT’S BRANCHES

If we want to obtain explicit knowledge about language, we must study language

systematically and objectively, that is we must deal with linguistics.

A linguist is a person who is professionally engaged in the scientific study of some aspects of

language.

Phonology is the study of the phonemes and their combinations in words and morphemes,

and also of the discrete suprasegmental elements in words and sentences.

Morphology is the study of word derivation and word inflection in terms of constituent

morphemes.

Syntax is the study of sentence formation.

Semantics is the study of the meaning of words and sentences.

Lexicology is the study of the lexicon.

All these can be studied from a synchronic point of view (how they constitute a particular

state of language at a particular point of time), or from a diachronic (historical) point of view

(how they change through time).

Phonetics is the study of the production of the actual sounds realising the phonemes and of

the suprasegmental elements of speech.

Pragmatics studies the ways in which words and sentences obtain different interpretations

when uttered in different situations. 30

The scope of linguistics can be extended further. It can include sociolinguistics. This is an

interdisciplinary branch of study (relevant to both linguistics and sociology), studying the

different varieties of a language used by different geographical and socio-cultural

subsections of a community, or varieties used by the same group of speakers in different

social situations.

Psycholinguistics deals with areas such as the mental processes that take place when we

produce and receive linguistic messages, or the processes of native language acquisition.

And finally, linguistics can be put in the service of a large number of other fields, some more

practical, some more theoretical, such as foreign-language teaching, speech therapy,

literary criticism, stylistics.

These involve various kinds of applied linguistics. For example, when a doctor wants to cure

a patient who suffers from aphasia (that is who has lost – partly or completely – the ability

to use language), the doctor will have to know about the language system. In such cases

linguistics helps the doctor in his work.

ENGLISH AS A CHANGING LANGUAGE

Introduction - How English language has undergone changes through centuries.

Sounds, lexis, semantics, morphology, and syntax are concerned.

Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English.

Sound change

This is a process related to vowels or consonants, which concerns combinations of sounds.

Sound change can be interpreted as a kind of umbrella term for a wide variety of changes. Its

processes may be related to vowels or consonants, combinations of sounds.

Sound changes can be conditioned, when they occur only in specific phonetic environments,

or unconditioned, when they can affect all occurrences of a particular sound.

One occurring type of conditioned change is assimilation, when one sound becomes more like

another in its environment. Assimilation can be complete, in that the sounds involved in the

process become identical or can be partial, so that instead they come to share certain

features.

Dissimilation, the opposite of assimilation.

Another type of segmental sound change is epenthesis, according to which segments are

inserted into a phonetic sequence.

Segments can also be sporadically deleted in pronunciation: through aphaeresis, an initial

segment is lost; in apocope a final vowel is lost; in syncope medial vowels disappear; in

haplology a whole syllable is deleted.

Through metathesis, another sporadic change, adjacent segments are reordered. 31

Lexical change

English has constantly undergone lexical change throughout its history.

Some ways in which this type of change occurs are word loss (English has lost words),

compounding, derivation, clipping, blending and borrowing.

It is important to underline that a new word, after entering usage, is treated like other words

of its class. For example, the loan curry (from Tamil kari) is now treated like other English

nouns.

Conversion is a process in which words come to function in more than one lexical category.

Compounding is the combination of two or more independent words to create a new one.

The process can occur with various combinations, such as noun+noun (bathroom),

adjective+adjective (bittersweet), verb+noun (pickpocket), Adjective+noun (blackboard),

preposition+noun (overdose), preposition+adjective (ingrown), and preposition+verb

(overcome). Other examples are software, e-commerce, Bluetooth.

Derivation through affixation, using both native and ‘foreign’ elements from loanwords, is

another major source of new words in English. The suffix –y for example is used generating

nouns such as fitty and hotty.

Clipping is when a word is extracted from a longer one with the same meaning, as in phone

from telephone, photo from photograph.

Blending is another process which involves a sort of combination of clipping and

compounding, as can be seen in brunch (breakfast+lunch), smog (smoke+fog), motel

(motor+hotel).

New words can also result from acronyms and initialisms.

Acronysms are pronounced as a single word, for example yuppie (derived from young urban

professional plus affix).

Initialisms have to be pronounced individually, as in FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation).

Semantic changes

Changes in the material culture can also lead to semantic change in particular words. The

word car (from Latin carrus) has had a long history in English, initially being used to denote

wagons driven by animals and now, due to technological innovation, vehicles.

The fact that words are adopted into use by various social groups also facilitates meaning

change: the use of words such as mouse, cookie, windows has given these words additional

meanings.

Similarly, words once exclusively used in particular domains are now used with somewhat

different meanings by the wider community. Lure, for example, which now carries the

meaning ‘to attract’, originated in falconry, where it was used to describe the feathery object

a falconer would use to attract a hawk.

Changes in a language’s morphosyntax and lexicon can also be conducive to semantic change.

Similarly, the introduction of loanwords into a language may also catalyze semantic change.

Now turn to some of the more common patterns of semantic change. One such is restriction

(also known as narrowing or specialization), in which a meaning becomes more specific and

thus narrows the application of the word to which it is attached. 32

Another common change is extension, also known as generalization, in which a meaning

becomes less specific.

Another common process of semantic change is metaphorization, through which words take

on metaphorical dimensions of meaning in instances where speakers want to establish a link

between two concepts. Examples of this process can be seen in the metaphorical use of body

parts in English: the foot of a mountain, the eye of a needle, the mouth of a river, the head

of a company. We also use animal labels metaphorically when we apply them to humans.

Semantic change may also occur through the metonymic use of words. The most common

type of metonymy is that in which a term that labels part of an entity comes to represent the

whole.

Synecdoche is the opposite of metonymy, in which a term which describes an entity