Riassunto esame Linguistica inglese, prof. Camaiora, libro consigliato libro A handbook of present day English, Pulcini

Cap. 1 Language change and variation in English

Introduction: living languages

A language which can change and have variations is a living language (≠ dead languages: Latin, Greek), that means that it is still spoken and it still develops in the nations where it’s used. There are no static languages: all languages are dynamic and they adapt to the history and culture of the speech communities in which they are used. This change happens more or less quickly according to different factors, such as the linguistic, social, historical or political situation.

This characteristic of the language, the capacity to change and develop, is called variability and it happens thanks to the variant, which is a word that modifies structure and pronunciation of the language and which substitutes the old word.

This phenomenon of variability can affect different aspects of the language:

• The pronunciation;
• The morphology, that is the change of the little elements which make up words;
• The syntax, that is the structure of the sentence;
• The lexicon, that is the choice of the words.

These are two examples:

• In the past it was said “The man, whom I saw”; today we say “The man who I saw” (variation);
• In the past they used “may” to express capacity, ability and “can” to express permission; today we use “can” to express both capacity and permission (this fact reveals that language is economical).

The people who study languages are the linguists, who are today complemented by the sociolinguistics: they have realized that language is a big part of life and it isn’t an abstract aspect. They study language in relation with problems in communication, in order to make people aware when they talk, and they look to social changes, in order to understand which are the relations between language and society.

There are different factors which can influence language. For example, the social class a person belongs to: there are social classes (the ruling class) which use a more formal language, others instead who speak a lower English (lower class). Another factor is, for example, the sex of the person who speaks: the two different sexes in fact use different structures, or different words, according to their sex.

In the past, for example, people tended to choose masculine instead of feminine (“Everyone has to bring his own book”); today we can give the two alternatives (“Everyone has to bring his or her own book”) or use the plural, also if it’s incorrect (“Everybody has to bring their own book”).

Standard and non-standard language

The sociolinguistics have also determined that there are two different varieties of a language:

• Standard variety: this is considered the language par excellence in terms of social prestige. Today the standard variety is composed of all the variations of a language which are considered acceptable. This type of language is the one used by educated people and it is the official language;
• Non-standard language: this category is composed of all dialects, that means by the different languages which aren’t considered official languages, also if they are correct. Dialects are all equally interesting and correct and each nation chooses one dialect as the main one: Italy, for example, has its main dialect in Tuscany (Siena).

With the term “language attitude” we are referring to the attitude of people towards the language and the attitude with which we study them:

• Attitude of ignorance: they don’t know the language correctly, but they don’t worry about their mistakes;
• Hyper-correctness: people tend to speak in a too correct way.

There are different kinds of attitude:

• Diachronic attitude: this attitude concentrates on how language has changed over a period of time;
• Synchronic attitude: this attitude studies how language is today;
• Descriptive attitude: this attitude gives rules in order to use the language in correct way;
• Prescriptive attitude: this attitude compares different languages to see what is different and similar among them; it also compares the same language through time, between past and present.

Language changes

There are different types of language change:

• Regular change: A regular change is a change which affects a group of words and it leads to the reorganization of the phonology of the language.
• Sporadic change: Sporadic change refers to changes which affects a limited number of words. This kind of change is the exception, it’s not the rule and it doesn’t create a tendency.

There are also different levels of language change:

• Phonological change: This kind of change deals with any mutation within the sound system of a language and can be both sporadic and regular. Another distinction concerning phonological change is the one between:
  • Conditioned change: a change which is conditioned by the phonetic context;
  • Unconditioned change: a change which isn’t conditioned by the phonetic context.
  For example, in the past people pronounced the word “tea” as “tei”; today we pronounce it “ti”.
• Morpho-syntactic change: This kind of change refers to any change in both the morpho and syntactic system. The main mechanisms of morpho-syntactic change are:
  • Analogy: the process of modeling a language form in relation to an already existing form of that language (es. Stone:stones=road:roades);
  • Hypercorrection: this mechanism deals with the speaker’s awareness of the social value of the different language varieties within their speech community; that means that they try not to use non-standard forms;
  • Backformation: the creation of a language form which is not historically documented (es. “to laze” from the adjective “lazy”);
  • Leveling: it affects the ending system of nouns.

Then, two different examples of syntactic change are:

• Word order: the order of the elements within the sentence;
• Grammaticalisation: that means that a grammatical function is given to a previously autonomous word.
• Semantic change: This level of change refers to any mutation in the meaning of words. These are the different kinds of semantic change:
  • Borrowing: when a language borrows a word from another language (es. “computer”);
  • Widening: the use of a particular word in more than one context;
  • Narrowing: this means the restriction of the meaning of a word (es. “to starve”: in the past it meant “to die”, today is “to die of hunger”);
  • Pejoration: this means that the speakers give a negative meaning to a word (es “silly”: in the past it meant “innocent”);
  • Amelioration / improvement: this means that the speakers give a positive meaning to a word (es. “queen”: in the past it meant only “woman”).

The history of English

Historically, English is a Germanic language, but it is difficult to locate or give a date to the origin of the Germanic languages and their speakers. The progenitor of Germanic is the Indo-European language, which is considered also as the ancestor of classical languages like Latin and Greek and as a consequence of many modern European languages such as Italian, French, Russian, English, and so on.

We can talk about three different levels of English:

• Old English (OE): the term “Old English” refers to the Germanic dialects and the event that mostly contributed to the shaping of the OE language was the Christianisation of the Island with the arrival of the Romans; the language of the Church was Latin and it was considered the language of the knowledge and of the education;
• Middle English (MD): the Norman conquest of England (1066) is considered to be the starting point of this level of English; during this period four main languages were spoken in England, that were French, Anglo-Norman, Latin, and English. French was the language of power, bureaucracy, and literature, while Latin continued as the language of learning, education, and the Church. English was still, on the other hand, the language of the majority of the population;
• Modern English: this level of English started during the XVII century and this was the period in which English grammar was made up and the language was standardized.

What has fixed English?

We know that every 300 years English changes a lot and it became very difficult to read texts of the previous period: this happened because the language wasn’t documented and we lost it. The factor which made English more fixed was the creation of grammar and the creation of dictionaries: the more we create dictionaries and grammar, the more language is stable. The fact of giving rules helps people to use the language in the proper way: the oral language is in fact more fragile because they’re not documented. This fact fixed the language and led to the stabilization of the language. This is the reason why contemporary English, the language we use today, isn’t so different from middle English.

Modern English has these characteristics:

• Few inflections: for example there is –ED for past tense and –S for the plural;
• Word order: the more you reduce inflections, the more the word order is important to understand the meaning of the sentence (SVO: English is more fixed than Italian);
• Rules of the language: the way in which we create sentences (es. Interrogative sentences: VSO).

The sociolinguistics status of present-day English

English is today spoken in different lands around the world and each area develops a new way of speaking English. The present-day English has an English paradigm:

• Geographical location: American English, African English, New York English, Canadian English;
• Linguistic and ethnic association: Chinese English, Indian English, Pakistan English, Japanese English;
• Cultural location / technological location: noun + “speak”: airspeak, seaspeak, policespeak used with activities such as culture, technology, commerce, and education;
• Combinations of locations and activity: medical English, legal English;
• Fusion of English with other languages: Frenglish, Chiglish.

The diaspora of English worldwide, that means the spreading of English worldwide, is characterized by three main stages:

• First stage: this stage refers to the expansion of English within the British Isles, so Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. These places had their own languages: Wales had Welsh, Scotland and Northern Ireland had Gaelic: English became more dominant than the other native languages. Today Gaelic and Welsh are still taught, but at higher levels, such as in the social and economical sector, English is the only spoken language. In these countries, English is an autonomist language;
• Second stage: this stage is associated with the discovery of new territories and the establishment of the British colonies in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In these places English is seen as a lingua franca for communication in trading exchanges and between African slaves and their British masters. In these countries, English is different from the English spoken in Britain, but it is also a standardized variety of English;
• Third stage: this stage deals with the diffusion of English as a second language in territories such as in Africa and Asia, also thanks to globalization.

The geographical spread of present-day English has been described in terms of three concentric circles:

• Inner circle: places where English has a multifunctional role and it’s used as a native language; this is the language spoken by the media and at school;
• Outer circle: places where English has the status of a second language; this is the language of government, media, religion, education;
• Expanding circle: places where English is used as a foreign language; this is the language of diplomacy, scientific research, business, and international organization.

Today English has acquired the status of global English: English has reached lots of places, also if it’s not the most spoken language numerically, because the most spoken language is Chinese. Global English is also considered in two different ways:

• Pollylectal: (spoken in many ways) that means how different populations speak the language, from the standard English spoken by the Upper Class to the one spoken by the lower class;
• Bilingualism: that means how well speakers can move from a language to another; such as in Switzerland, people can speak German and French very fluently and confidently.

The contacts among different populations and different varieties of the same language can change the language itself: the different types of influence are:

• Nativisation: the way in which people make English nearer to their native language;
• Acculturation: the way in which English is associated with culture;
• Borrowing: it happens when a different language starts to use words taken from the native language and to use them also in the variety of English spoken in that place;
• Adaptation: some words are adapted according to the situation;
• Change of the original meaning: in the new variety of the language, some words have changed their original meaning (es. “station”: where you take trains where you go to work).

Cap. 2 The pronunciation of English

Accents of English

English is spoken in different parts of the world and each area has its own pronunciation. The result is the variety of English accents which are used throughout the English-speaking world. The two main varieties of the English language are British English and American English.

Phonetics

Phonetics is the science that studies the physical characteristics of sounds. Articulatory phonetics deals instead with the physiology of speech production, that means that it searches the parts of the human mouth which produce sounds.

Graphemes and phonemes

The term grapheme refers to a letter of the alphabet, to the way in which sound are written. There are also silent graphemes, that means that they’re not pronounced. The term phoneme refers to the sounds of a language which are able to produce a distinction in meaning between words. For example, the two different sounds in the words “sheep” and “ship” create a minimal pair. Same pair of words can be:

• Homographs: they are written in the same way (es. tear –strappare– tear –lacrima);
• Homophones: they are pronounced in the same way (es. allowed – aloud).

In English, the relation between spelling (the way words are written) and pronunciation (the way words are pronounced) is misleading: the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is composed of the symbols used for representing the phonemes and sounds of all languages, also English.

English Phonology

Phonology, also called segmental phonology, describes the organization of the sound system of a language. We call suprasegmental phonology instead the one which studies units larger than the phoneme and their related phenomena, such as stress, intonation, and rhythm. We have also to speak about allophones, which are the different ways in which a word is pronounced: the allophonic variation doesn’t involve any change in the meaning of words but is responsible for some differences in accents.

The pronunciation of British English

In English, there are 43 phonemes:

• 11 vowels;
• 8 diphthongs: which are the result of the combination of two sounds;
• 24 consonants.

The characteristic of a sound are:

• Voicing: that means whether a sound is pronounced or not: the sound can be voiced sounds, which are pronounced (the vocal cords are closed and they cause a vibration), or voiceless sounds, which aren’t pronounced (the vocal cords are open and they don’t vibrate);
• Place of articulation: this is the different places of the mouth produce the different sounds;
• Manner (way) of articulation: the way we articulate sounds can be divided in three different types:
  • Plosive sounds: which involve a stricture in articulation and they are sounds like /p, t, k, b, d, g/),
  • Fricative sounds: which produce a hissing sound and the air escapes through a small place between the articulators and they are sounds like /f, v, s, z, θ/),
  • Affricate sounds: the combination, the mixture between plosive and fricative sounds es. /th/.

The pronunciation of American English

American English has become more and more important as a variety of the English language because of its massive impact on world business and commerce and on the mass media. Differences in pronunciation between British and American English are perhaps more marked than differences in vocabulary and grammar. Today, American English often influences British English itself.

Italian and English phonemes in contrast

English and Italian are two very different languages and we can realize that also when we hear an Italian student speaking English. The Italian speaker will tend not to differentiate, for example, between long /i:/ and short /I/, and pronounce them as if they sounded the same (es. leave – live). This happens also for the pronunciation of the past tense/past participle forms of regular verbs, the –ed inflection is pronounced differently according to the phoneme preceding it: the Italian speaker tends to pronounce all of them in the same way.

A syllable is a phonological unit made up of one or more phonemes. It can be:

• Open syllable: if it ends with a vowel (es. tea);
• Closed syllable: if it ends with a consonant (es. all).