- •Lecture 1. Periodisation of English.
- •Subject and aims of the course «a History of the English Language».
- •Internal and external factors of language evolution
- •Indo-European and Germanic Influence on the English Language
- •The early writings of the English Language
- •The Northumbrian, Mercian, West-Saxon, Kentish dialects
- •King Alfred’s translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People
- •9Th c. Translation of the Psalter, hymns
- •Nominal morphology
- •Oe Adjectives
- •Strong and weak adjectives
- •Oe Pronouns
- •Personal pronouns
- •Demonstrative pronouns
- •Interrogative pronouns
- •Indefinite pronouns
- •Relative pronouns
- •Reflexive pronouns
- •Numerals
- •Strong and weak verbs
- •Classes of strong and weak verbs
- •Preterit-present verbs
- •Irregular verbs
- •The Communicative Types of Sentences
- •Sentence Simple
- •The Object
- •Phrases and ways of expressing syntactical relations
- •The Word-Order
- •Vowel system: quantitative changes in unstressed vowels
- •Interpretations of gvs
- •The System of Vowels in Late me Short monophthongs I, e, a, o, u
- •The System of Consonants in Late me
- •Changes in me vocabulary
- •Adoption of affixes
- •Assimilation of French words
- •Classical and Romance element in English
- •Borrowings from Latin and Greek
- •Interrogative, Indefinite, Relative Pronouns
- •Verb patterns
- •Voicing of consonants (16th.)
- •Intralinguistic factors:
Intralinguistic factors:
the phonetic reduction of final unaccented syllables caused by heavy Germanic stress, made the grammatical endings less distinct – later they were weakened
the new reliable formal markers – e.g. of number – were to be worked out. This was achieved by means of analogical levelling
prepositions accompanied the forms of cases and different types of word order to make the forms more precise and differentiated
Analytical forms:
the development of the analytical forms began early: OE already made wide use of verb phrases and verb-prefixes
enrichment of the verb system in ME
shift of some abstract meanings from the lexical to the grammatical level
the strive for a balanced regular arrangement of grammatical oppositions in ME and ENE
Syntactic changes:
the predominance of syntactic ways of word connection
the strict word order
the wide use of the prepositional phrases
the growth of predicative constructions
the development of the complex and compound sentences
were connected with simplifying changes in morphology
Extralinguistic factors:
the linguistic situation in Early ME speeded up the grammatical changes. The increased dialectal divergence of the feudal age, the two foreign influences – Scandinavian and French, the break in the written tradition caused greater grammatical instability and more intensive realisation of internal tendencies
the growth of culture and the written form of the language (the development of the verb system)
the formation of the national literary language – with its functional and stylistic differentiation