Riassunto esame di Linguistica Inglese, prof. Maggioni, testo consigliato: Readings in English Lexicogrammar

TWENTIETH-CENTURY WORDS

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On 1 January 1900 there were approximately 140 million native speakers of English in the world. A

century later that figure has almost tripled to nearly 400 million. Add to them about 100 million who speak

English a second language. Given that huge increase in the number of English-speakers since 1900,

and the myriad new ideas, inventions, and discoveries that have proliferated in that period, it would be

astonishing if the vocabulary of English had not grown substantially. And so it has. We shall never know

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how many words were coined during the 20 century, some of them got lost before being taken into

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account, but officially in dictionaries about 90000 new words, and new meanings of old words, are

recorded into the English language; a 25 per cent increase in the total vocabulary of the language.

Words are a mirror of their times. By looking at the areas in which the vocabulary of a language is

expanding fastest in a given period, we can form an impression of the chief preoccupations of society at

that time and the points at which boundaries of human endeavour are being advanced.

Table 1 – Lexical growth-areas by decade

1900s - Cars, Aviation, Radio, Film, Psychology

1910s - War, Aviation, Film, Psychology

1920s - Clothes/dance/youth, Transport, Radio, Film

1930s - War/build-up to war, Transport, Film/entertainment

1940s - War, Post-war society/international affairs, Nuclear power, Computers, Space

1950s - Media, Nuclear power, Space, Computers, Youth culture

1960s - Computers, Space, Youth culture/music, Media, Drugs

1970s - Computers, Media, Business, Environment, Political correctness

1980s - Media, Computers, Finance/money, Environment, Political correctness, Youth

culture/music

1990s - Politics, Media, Internet

The new technology dominated lexical innovation on the 1900s (dashboard (cruscotto), aerodrome,

wireless, cinema), along with the vocabulary of psychology (psychoanalysis, libido). In the decade of

World War I they were overshadowed by the broad spectrum of military vocabulary (gas mask, tank),

and in the 1920s the lexicon of national post-war relief and the Jazz Age, dominated the scene

(Charleston, Oxford bags), followed in the 1930s by the approach of a new war (Blitzkrieg, black-out). In

the first half of the 1940s, World War II was providing the majority of new usages (gas chamber,

kamikaze), but the return of peace in the second half brought national and international reconstruction

(National Health, superpower) and the nuclear threat (nuclear bomb) to the fore. The 1950s saw the first

significantly burgeonings of youth culture (beatnik, teen), which has continued to be a prolific contributor

to the English language throughout the rest of the century. It was also the decade of a new vocabulary of

the media (hi-fi, transistor radio, videotape) that would dominate the next fifty years. Both had particular

offshoots in the sixties in language of music (the twist, Merseybeat) and the language of drugs (acid,

speed). In the 1970s, concerns about the destruction of the environment became a long-term source of

new vocabulary (global warming), and the language of political correctness began to get into its stride

(chairperson (presidente), herstory). The 1980s were the decade of money, typified both by financial

jargon (dawn raid, white knight) and by the lifestyle terminology of those who made and enjoyed it

(yuppie, dinky). The major new player on the 1990s lexical scene was the Internet (cyberspace, web

site).

It is not at all uncommon for a new term to potter along for decades in obscurity, before being suddenly

taken into account by linguists and lexicographers: greenhouse effect, for example, was coined in the

1920s, but few non-climatologists had heard of it until the 1980s.

Our changing modes of social interaction have a lexical fingerprint, too. Take, for example, the 20th

century's rehabilitation of the notorious 'four-letter words', formerly doubtlessly widely used in casual

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speech, but heavily tabooed in the print throughout the century. It appears to have been the great

melting pot of World War I, bringing together people of all classes and backgrounds, that encouraged the

spread of such words. But the most significant step was the publication in Penguin English Dictionary:

the first mainstream general English dictionary to include fuck and cunt. By the end of the century these

words are included as a matter of course in any unabridged English dictionary. This state of affairs would

have been unthinkable in the 1950s.

Up to the 1960s the notion of Standard English was based exclusively on written English; at the end of

the century that is no longer so, and colloquial usages are widely accepted in situations where they once

would have been considered inappropriate. Behind this may perceived a more general breaking of social

barriers, and a profound shift away from former (moral) role models.

On the other hand, there are a good many usages which once went unremarked, but which we now dare

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not allow to pass our lips. In the 19 century, for instance, it was socially acceptable to be fat and there

was nothing bad associated to the word itself. At the end of the century thinness has become

fashionable, and fat is an insult, and we have evolved a range of euphemisms to avoid the direct

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accusation. It sometimes seems as if the 20 century were the century of euphemism: there are many

areas which English-speakers have become embarrassed to talk about in the last hundred years. The

one with the highest-profile is probably racial (and sexual) discrimination. But if underlying tensions

remain, a change of name will not stick. th

Terms such as black and nigger fell under a taboo in the middle part of the 20 century. They tended to

be replaced by negro, but this went out of favour in the 1960s. Back stepped black, revived by blacks

themselves as a term of pride, and joined in the US by Afro-American and in the UK by Afro-Caribbean.

The politically correct lobby revived the 18th-century person of colour; then in the 1980s US blacks

subverted the whole process by reclaiming nigger, in the assertive new spelling of nigga.

The term racism dates from the 1930s, but the broader concept of -ism, in the sense of a censured

discrimination on unacceptable grounds, is a creature of the 1960s. Sexism led the way. The era of non-

discriminatory, 'politically correct' vocabulary was arriving.

There are fundamental five ways in which neologisms are created:

1. Putting existing words to new uses: the most effort-free way of expanding language. This generally

implies modifying the meaning of the word. The percentage of such modifications among the total

neologisms are between 10 and 15. Much rarer is the process known as conversion: this is when

the word-class of a word changes, so that, for instance, a noun is used as a verb (ex to garage the

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car). 20 century linguists purists see in it a threat to the coherence of the language.

2. Combining existing words or word-parts: by far the commonest in English: it accounts for ¾ of the

new vocabulary coming into the language. It can be divided into two main categories:

• two or more words can be combined in such a way together, they mean something different

from what they would mean separately (dirty dancing, dreadnought (corazzata))

• an existing word can have a prefix or a suffix added to it (unbundle, beatnik)

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But there is one particular compound that is highly characteristic of the 29 century: the blend. You

take two words and put them together, so that the end of the first word merges with the beginning of

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the second one (ex motor + hotel = motel). It is a pattern that seems to have had its beginnings in

Victorian word-play, its most celebrated early exponent was Lewis Carroll. The pattern was

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established itself at the end of the 19 century, and the 20 century has taken to it with great

enthusiasm. The 1980s and 1990s in particular have been addicted to the blend's cool snappiness

(vivacità) – hence all the cross-genre terms such as infotainment and docusoap).

3. Shortening existing words or word-parts: the most straightforward way is to knock off the end (porn

for pornography), but there is a particular subset of these shortened words (nearly all verbs) that are

created by deleting a suffix, thereby usually altering the word-class (destruct from destruction,

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elevate from elevator). They are known as back-formations, and they have proliferated in the 20 -

century English, particularly in US military and scientific jargon.

4. An extreme form of shortening a word is to leave only its first letter. This is called initialism (LP, PC).

When the resulting string of letters is pronounced as if it were an ordinary word, it is termed an

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acronym (Aids, NATO). Acronyms have been the 20 century's great new contribution to English

word-formation. The main reasons for this are non-linguistic: the proliferation of organizations and

other entities with multi-word names (especially during and after World War II) and an increasingly

rushed world which prefers not to waste time on saying or writing such long names.

5. Borrowing words from other languages: foreign borrowing has provided approximatively 5 per cent

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of new words in the 20 century. The Anglo-Saxon's attitude to foreign food, for instance, has

undergone a sea change in the past fifty years, introducing new culinary vocabulary: doner kebab,

pizza, quiche, tandoori, etc. Scientific and technological developments in a particular country ca lead

to a sudden inrush of foreign terminology (ex the prominence of France in early aircraft technology,

introducing in English terms like aerodrome and hangar). And an interaction at a political level often

contributes neologisms to English (führer, perestroika).

6. Coining words out of nothing: these account for less than one per cent of English neologisms. The

great majority of them are proprietary names or commercial names (Teflon, nylon, kleenex), but

some technical terms are devised in this way, either directly (googol) or by a piece of judicious

borrowing from a literary source (quark).

ENGLISH: A LIVING LANGUAGE

5.1 English: a living language

English is a constantly changing, living language, adapting to an ever-changing world which requires

new means of communication. Linguistic pessimists (prescriptive approach) see change as phenomenon

running parallel to the breakdown of society. They are concerned about the supposedly decreasing

standards of literacy marked by poor spelling and grammar, the use of informal spoken language in

written contexts, and the inaccurate pronunciation. Others (descriptive approach) see a flexibility and

vitality in the adaptability of the English language, watching at current linguistic developments as a

possibility to broaden our world view and understanding.

Language changes can be considered from a historical perspective, analysing the ways in which English

has evolved from its early, old form to its current, late modern one, as a continuum (diachronic

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