Riassunto Esame Lingua e Traduzione Inglese 1, Prof. Sturiale, libro consigliato The Frameworks of English

BACK FORMATION

Back formation is the change of word class. It involves the modification of a word

through the removal of a suffix and sometimes of a prefix. Suffixes are removed from

nouns to create new verbs.

- Acronym: expressing a phrase since the first letters (of each word in the phrase) is

placed in sequence to form a new word.

- Initialism: an acronym where the initial letters don't form a new word but they are

named individually.

- Cliping: shortening a word by removing some of the latter part. Clippings always

refer to everyday objects and most of them are monosyllabic.

- Blend: kind of compound in which part of one word is merged with part of another

they are typically nouns.

- Eponymy: use of a proper name to refer to an object or action. That word is called

eponym.

- Onomatopeia: a noun or adverb which refers to a sound and imitates it.

Onomatopeic words are the only words where there is a strong correlation between

the sound of a word and its meaning.

- Reduplication: process that involves the doubling of the first element of the word.

This repetition is identical but there is a consonant or vowel variation in the secondo

element.

- Borrowings (loanwords): words of another language adapted into English. Most of

these words are anglicised.

- English lexicon is much larger than many other languages. It's an historical reason.

English is made of Germanic words from Old English and Old Norse + French, Latin,

Greek.

- Synonymous: words which have the same meaning but different writing.

- Polysemous: words which have more than one meaning.

- Homonyms: words which have the same form but they are separate lexemes.

- Homophones: words with the same sound (pronunciation) but different meaning and

form.

- Register (context): register can be informal, formal or slang and it has field

(subject), mode (object) and tenor.

- Denotation: a word's denotative meaning is the person, object, quality, idea, action

or state to which a word refers → referent.

- Connotation: a word with connotative meaning refers to the emotions or attitudes

which it evokes. Depending on the context in which a word is used, positive or

negative connotations may come to play.

- Hypernym: a name for an overarching category.

- Hyponym: each name of the hypernym's category.

- Antonyms: pairs of words which express opposites.

- Complementary (to each other): words mutually exclusive.

- Collocation: combination of lexemes. It's different from compounds because

collocation doesn't result in new lexemes.

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Chapter 4: Inflections

- Grammar is the set of rules of whatever language that enables people to construct

well-formed sentences. Grammar contains syntax and inflections. Syntax is formed

by the principles of joining words together to form phrases, clauses and sentences →

syntactic rules; inflections are a branch of morphology; they are endings such the

plural ones and the past tense ones → inflectional morphology.

- The grammar of each language is different even though languages have grammatical

similarities. All speakers are subconsciously in possession of all the grammatical

rules.

INFLECTIONS: they are endings added to a word to indicate aspects such as past

tense or plural. By adding inflections we don't create a new word but we give

grammaticl information about words. Inflections are present in nouns, verbs,

adjectives, adverbs and pronouns.

- Stem: the word without inflections.

- Lexeme: abstract form/existence of a word.

NON INFLECTIONS: they are used to show plurality and to indicate possession.

- Nouns are divided into count nouns and uncount nouns. Count nouns have the plural

form; uncount nouns don't have the plural form.

There are nouns with only the singular form or only the plural one.

- Collective nouns: it is a semantic term for nouns which refer to groups. The plural

form of the verb is used with a singular collective noun as reference to several units.

-s/-es plural → inflection added to nouns to make the plural form.

- Assimilation: the process to decide if pronounce /s/ or /z/ like inflectional ending.

/s/ is a bound morpheme; /z/ is an allomorph

- 's possessive form & of-construction: these are the two possessive forms of nouns.

- Case: it indicates aspects: nominative (the subject of the sentences); accusative (the

object of the sentence); genitive (the possessor of something).

VERB INFLECTIONS

- Base form (stem): verb without endings; it coincides with the infinitive form.

- Infinitive: to-infinitive; bare infinitive (without to).

- Paradigm: inflectional set

- 4 irregular inflctions: -s; -ing; -ed; -ed participle.

-s → it's added at the third singular person in regular or irregular verbs.

- Concord (agreement): relationship between the verb form and the subject.

-ing → it's progressive; it's the -ing participle and it's added in the present continuous

and in the past continuous with the -ing form.

-ed → it's used to construct the past tense and it's pronounced /d/ ot /t/, it depends.

-ed participle → it's perfect; it's used to construct the past participle. But some verbs

change “-ed” with “-en” or change a vowel (vowel mutation).

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AUXILIARY VERBS: to have, to be, to do. They are used to construct different

aspects in the verb phrase. All the three verbs are irregulat but “to be” is the most

irregular because it has 3 present tense forms and 2 different past tense forms.

- Verbs can be added into particular categories.

ADJECTIVE AND ADVERB INFLECTIONS

- They can be graded and thanks to them we can indicate to what extent a particular

quality exists. Gradability is typical of adjectives and adverbs.

-er → comparative form/more

-est → superlative form/most

- Absolute forms → adjectives or adverbs with inflectional endings.

PRONOUN INFLECTIONS

- Subjective: it appears in the subject position before the verb (I-you-he-she-it-we-

you-they).

- Objective: it occurs in the object position after the verb (me-you-him-her-it-us-you-

them).

Chapter 5: phrases

- Syntax: it's concerned with the rules by which words are combined into larger units.

- The units of construction are phrases, clauses and sentences.

- In order there are... 1. phrase level; 2. clause level; 3. sentence level.

- A phrase is a sequence of word groups.

- Head words/heads = key words: lexical items central to the phrase because they

give important information. They are to identify them.

- There are many types of phrase: noun phrase, verb phrase (active voice/passive

voice), adjective phrase, adverb phrase and prepositional phrase.

- Embedding: the occurrence of one linguistic unit within another.

- Coordination: it means joining together two linguistic units using the conjunction

“and”.

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Chapter 6: clauses

- Clause: it's a unit of syntactic construction. Clauses are formed from phrases. The

central element of the clause is the verb, usually active but it can be also passive.

Clauses are made up of a combination of elements: subject + verb + object +

complement + adverbial element. They can also be main clauses or subordinate

clauses.

- Verbs can be transitive, intransitive and ditransitive. Transitive verbs need a object;

intransitive verbs don't need a object; ditransitive verbs need two or more objects.

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Chapter 7: sentences

- Sentence: it's the largest unit of syntactic structure. It can be declarative,

interrogative, imperative and exclamative. Declarative sentences indicate a statement;

interrogative sentences indicate a question; imperative sentences indicate a directive;

exlcamative sentences indicate an exclamation.

- Variation of sentences: extraposition; cleft sentences; fronting. Extraposition move a

linguistic item out of its normal clause position. Cleft sentences focus on a particular

piece of information. Fronting move a element to the beginning of the sentence.

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Chapter 8: beyond sentences

- Discourse: it's any sequence of sentences wich makes up a text.

- Textuality: the phenomenon of sentences belonging together.

- Context: importance in which speech and writing occur.

- Genre: particular type of speaking or writing.

!: Speakers imply more than they say and for doing this they employ implications or

inferences → pragmatics: the branch of linguistics which deals with the

interpretation of meaning which is not explicit.

- Non-flency: something said spontaneously.

- False start: when a speaker says more than he knows.

- Repetition: it's the repetition of lexical words, word groups, clauses by no giving

cohesion to the text.

- Parallelism: repetition of the same prepositional phrase.

- Anaphor: when an element refers to the previous one.

- Cataphoric: read above ↑

- Deixis: the way words indicate time, location or person in the context.

- Ellipsis: the omission from a clause/sentence of an element.

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Chapter 9: phonetics and phonemes

PHONETICS: the study of the sounds of speech, so how we produce sounds.

PHONOLOGY: the study of sound systems and patterns.

- Receive Pronunciation (RP): it represents Standard British English.

- There are distinct sounds. Each sound can be substituted with another and a

different word is the result of this substitution.

PHONEMES: astract concepts in the way that lexemes are also abstract.

- Transcription: writing down speech sounds.

- IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet): it's a special alphabet in which one symbol

always represents the same sound.

- In phonetics, it's the sound of a word which is important and not its written form.

Phonetic symbols are written in slant brackets // in order to distinguish sounds from

letters. This type of transcription is known as broad transcription. Allophones are

indicated with special markings called diacritics.

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- The vocal tract were the sounds are produced begins at the voice box (or larynx) and

ends at the lips. The larynx is a casing of cartilage rings at the top of the trachea. The

front of the larynx protrudes slightly below the chin and jaw. In the larynx there are

two small important muscles, stretching from front to back, which can open and close

→ Vocal cords (or vocal folds). The space between the vocal cords is the glottis. The

section of the vocal tract between the larynx and the uvula is the pharynx. Above the

pharynx, the vocal t