Professional Documents
Culture Documents
INTRODUCTION
-In the study of linguistics, we can appreciate 2 main approaches:
Situations:
1. Phonetics: and Phonology are affected by diachrony
Ex: In Old English the word house was /hus/, whereas in
Middle English it was added [au].
Ex: I know not thee (Middle or Early Modern English) = I don
t know you
2. Syntax is also affected:
-External history: it gives us the knowledge about the different factors
that had influenced English: political issues, cultural facts, scientific
events
Both, internal and external, have the role of making English and both,
complement each other.
But. Why does a language change?- due to dynamism and How do
languages change?- there are two main reasons:
Innovation: the introduction f a new variant from which at
the beginning might have been a considered error. It can
made catching on or dying off.
Diffusion: spreading a variant form from the point when it
was used. The greater the place is, the bigger diffusion
takes
Also, there are variations in different fields:
-Variations in pronunciation: Ex: tomato (U.K VS U.S)
-Variations in vocabulary: Ex: Autumn (U.K)/Fall (U.S) or Toilet
(U.K)/Restroom (U.S)
-Variations in syntax:
WHY DOES A LANGUAGE CHANGE?: there are 3 main types of engines
which diffuse changes :
1. Structural
2. Social
3. Functional
1.Structural pressure may develop in any part of a language.
Bread-uncountable-----------------more bread-----------------------less bread
Loaf/Loaves-countable------------more
loaves
2
bread-----------------------fewer
Extremely
Absolutely
Really
vocabulary to impress
Dead easy
Dirt cheap
3 main areas:
1.Grammar:
Can I borrow
Could I borrow
Newer
options
Maynt I
2.Phonology:
H.R.T= High Rising Tone (use of an intonation for a statement, not for
a question)
Ex: Are you okay?
-A.Q.I= Australian Question Intonation (originated in Sydney working
women classes)
-Valley Girls (1980s, California)
-All scholars agree on the same thing: pragmatics are involved and it
s genre patterned
3.Sociolinguistics
UNIT 1:
English: An Important Language
Any language lives if there are people who speak it. There are six thousand languages
in the world but half of the world's population speaks only ten. English is the single
most dominant of all western languages and this, had a lot to do with British history and
colonialism which initiated its spread across the world. Today English has been spoken
nearly everywhere and it has become even more important since the Second World
War. Politics are also involved in a language. The importance of a language is not
connected to its linguistic issues, it is related to social issues. There are 3 main
reasons why English is important: first language, second language and pidgin and
creole varieties.
- English may function all around the world as a mother tongue, official Dom or a s a
second language.
- British colonies usually achieved independence after the Second World War. India
became independent in 1947 but others in the decade of the 50s, 60s... When they
became independent, the new governments had to come to terms with a territory
which was multilingual and they had to give some orders to the new situation. The
reality was that the new nations had the need of a national language for representing
them. That choice was extremely difficult due to internal revolts and the influence of
super power nations. In some cases, they chose local languages thinking that it
could be partially representative but the problem is that many local languages are not
5
- English in Africa: South Africa, English is the main language but is only one of the
eleven languages. In Cameroon, English and French are the main ones. In Nigeria,
English and the main local language are officials.
Easy and Difficult things in English:
There are things which are difficult as well as other which are easier to learn. English
has become easier because declinations disappeared many years ago. English is an
infective language.
For nouns: Ex: paper (sing) // paperS (plural)= regular or analogical plural //
man (sing) // men (plural) = irregular plural.
For adjectives: is even easier. Ex: a nice child// nice children. It remains
invariable independently its of function, genre or number.
Grammatical gender: implies that you have to learn and memorize the gender which is
not grammatically or semantically connected. This happened many years ago and after
the 14th century, people started to use natural gender. It means that all nouns which
refer to living brewing a are masculine or feminine according to the sex of the individual
and the other nouns are neutral. There are cases in which a man is referring as a
woman for example sheep but this is a question of rhetoric.
Besides, is there a link between pronunciation and how a word is written? We can
safely say that we can't pronounce a word just by looking how it is written.
Ex: honour//heritage. It is a question if time. Heritage came before and honour after
and we need more time to adapt its pronunciation. This is the case of foreign words in
English.
There have been different attempts to making easier the pronunciation of English.
Roosevelt tried to get a degree of simplification in the pronunciation of English. But it
seemed that this advantage was not enough for formal conservatism. Ex: island
(inserting an s in the 16th century). Spelling is very difficult to get rid of graphemes due
to its conservatism. Ex: subtle
Pidgins and Creoles languages: Loreto Todd, 1990, Routledge
Pidgins and Creoles are found in every continent and they have received academic
attention but there is a way a different way to looking to the same linguistic fact. They
have been thought to have been a broken version of other standardized versions of
English. In academic circles for the last 25 years there have been serious attempts to
remove these varieties. Pidgin and Creoles have been regarded as broken forms of
English, primitive and inferior languages. Now, we try to detach this idea.
Pidgin: it is defined as a marginal language which arises to fulfill certain restricted
communication needs among people who have known common language. The birth of
a variety appears when there is contact between people who speak different
languages. In the first stages mainly for businesses, they used small vocabulary and
few words which are usually provided by one of the main languages. The syntactic
structure is less complex and less flexible than the syntactic structure of English.
All languages have a certain range of redundancy.
Ex:
les deux grands journaux 4/4 spelling but 3/4 pronouncing (plurality is marked)
The two big newspaper: English is less redundant than French
Tupela bik pepa: no redundancy
Ex:
Verb aller in French - no repetitions in its forms
Verb go in English - invariable except for the third person singular
Verb go in Tok Pisin- totally invariable
Nouns are also invariable in Tok Pisin and there are no markers of plurality
Ex: ten men// one man ( mutation of the vowel ) in Tok Pisin is tenpela man ( numeral
marks number )
Ex:Lots of men have no wife (English)- plenty man i no get meri (Tok Pisin) so there is
not gender distinction