3. The grammar system of American English.

The dissimilarities in grammar are scarce.

1. The first distinctive feature is the use of the auxiliary verb will in the first person singular and plural of the Future Indefinite Tense. In British English in this case normative is shall. However, shall is becoming less common than will in British English too. The American I will go there does not imply modality, as in the similar British utterance where it means I am willing to go there, but pure futurity.

2. The second distinctive feature is a tendency to substitute the Past Indefinite Tense for the Present Perfect Tense, especially in oral communication. So, in American English, when people talk about something that happened in the past and now is finished, but still has the influence on the present situation they often use simple Past instead of the Present Perfect.

This feature is also rather typical of some English dialects.

3. The third prominent distinctive feature is usage of the old forms of the Past Participle of the verb to get: to get-got-gotten, the verb to prove: to prove – proved – proven.

Some other verbs also have different forms of irregular verbs.

They are:

American	British
dive – dove - dived fit - fit - fit kneel – kneeled - kneeled quit – qui t- quit	dive – dived - dived fit – fitted - fitted kneel - knelt - knelt quit – quitted - quitted
sneak – snuck - snuck spit-spit-spit spring – sprung - sprung wake – waked - waked wet – wet - wet	sneak – sneaked - sneaked spit - spat - spat spring – sprang - sprung wake – woke - woken wet – wetted - wetted

There are some other minor divergencies in grammar of American English and British English.

The grammatical system of both variants is actually the same with very few exceptions.

All said above brings us to the conclusion that the language spoken in the USA is in all essential features identical with that spoken in Great Britain.

So, the language spoken in the USA can be regarded as a regional variety of English.

Canadian, Australian and Indian (the English spoken in India) can also be considered regional varieties of English with their own peculiarities.

Lecture 9 Lexicography

1. Some main problems in Lexicography.

2. Types of dictionaries.

1. Some main problems in Lexicography.

Lexicography, that is the theory and practice of compiling dictionaries, is an important branch of applied linguistics. It has a common object of study with lexicology, as both describe the vocabulary of the language. The province of lexicography is semantic, formal and functional description of all individual words. Lexicographers have to arrange their material according to a purely external characteristic, namely alphabetically.

The most burning issues of lexicography are the following:

1) The selection of head-words. This problem can also be subdivided into several questions:

1. How far a dictionary should admit the historical element (for instance, should it include all words and senses used by W. Shakespeare, or only those that are kept in some expressions, e.g. “shuffled off his mortal coil” (“Hamlet”) where coil means ‘turmoil (of life)’.

2. Selection between scientific and technical terms (as you know, terms are as a rule used by a comparatively small groups of professionals and certainly not by the language community as a whole)

3. Whether a dictionary should cover all the words of the language, including neologisms, nonce-words, slang, non-assimilated borrowings, foreign words, etc.

4. Should a dictionary be perceptive and prohibitive (should dictionary-makers attempt to improve and stabilize the vocabulary according to the best classical samples and advise the readers on preferable usage)

5. Should the frequency of the usage of words be taken into consideration (this is a modern criterion)

2) The arrangement and contents of the vocabulary entry:

a) Which of the selected units have the right to a separate entry and which are to be included under one common head-word.

For instance, whether each other is a group of two separate words to be treated separately under the head–words each and other, or whether each other is a unit deserving a special entry.

Need such combinations as phone box, department store, boiling point be subentered under their constituents? If so, under which of them?

How many entries are justified for a word hound? One dictionary has two - one for the noun, and the other for the verb ‘to chase as with hounds’ – thus the noun and the verb are treated as homonyms. Another dictionary combines these words under one head–word, treating them as meanings of a polysemantic word.

b) Should the derivatives with suffixes –er, -ing, -ness, -ly be included in a dictionary (the meaning of these derivatives is so easily deduced, that they are considered not worthy of a separate entry).

c) Differentiation and the sequence of various meanings of a polysemantic word.

A historical dictionary (the Oxford English Dictionary) is primarily, concerned with the development of the English vocabulary and that is why it arranges various senses chronologically; a dictionary dealing with current usage has to give precedence to the most important meanings. But how to determine their importance? So far each compiler is guided by his own personal preference.

d) A synchronic dictionary should also show the distribution of every word.

Words are labelled as belonging to a certain part of speech, some cases of grammatically or lexically bound meanings are shown, for instance, the word spin is labelled in Concise Oxford Dictionary as v.t. and i., which gives a general idea of its distribution; various senses of this word are shown in connection with words that may serve as subject or object e.g. (of spider, etc.) ‘to make a web by extrusion of fine viscous thread’, then, spun glass, spun gold silver.

Some dictionaries even give information on the syntactical distribution of each word, for example: to tell somebody, to explain to somebody, information – singular, etc.)

e) Many dictionaries indicate the different stylistical levels to which the words belong: colloquial, technical, poetic, rhetorical, archaic, familiar, vulgar, slang and the words’ expressive colouring: emphatic, ironical, diminutive, facetious.

3) The principles of sense definitions in a unilingual dictionary

a) there are two main types of definitions

1. linguistic – they are only concerned with words as speech material.

For example, British dictionaries are fundamentally occupied with purely lexical data, with the grammatical properties of words, their components, their stylistic features.

2. Encyclopedic – they are concerned with things for which the words are names.

For example, American dictionaries are for the most part traditionally encyclopaedic which accounts for so much attention paid to graphic illustration. They furnish their readers with information about facts and things connected with the defined word.

b) The meaning can also be explained through synonyms, but one synonym is never sufficient because no absolute synonyms exist. Besides, if synonyms are the only type of explanation, the reader is placed in a circle of synonymic references, with not a single word actually explained.

c) The meaning can also be explained by examples, i.e. contextually.

1. There is also a problem of whether all entries should be defined or whether it is possible to have the so-called run–ons for derivative words in which the root–form is readily recognized.

Such as, for example, the words absolutely or resolutely. In fact, the word resolutely may be given as a -ly run-on after the word resolute, but the word absolutely in colloquial speech means ‘quite so, yes’ which is nor easily deduced from the meaning of the adjective.