Вопросы к экзамену по дисциплине «история английского языка»
Two approaches to language study. The role of the language history course, its links with other disciplines.
Linguistic change.
Ancient Germanic tribes and their classification. Classification of Germanic languages.
Vowel and consonant peculiarities of Germanic languages. Germanic alphabet.
Basic grammatical features of Germanic languages. The substantive. Types of stem. Strong and weak declensions.
Basic grammatical features of Germanic languages. The adjective. Strong and weak declensions.
Germanic verbs. Strong and weak verbs.
Periods in the history of the English language.
Old English vowels. The phonetic and phonological aspect of the vowel system. Fracture. Palatalization. I-mutation. Back mutation. Mutation before “h”.
Old English vowels. Contraction. Lengthening. Changes of unstressed vowels.
Old English consonants. System of voicing and devoicing of fricatives. Palatalization. Other changes and loss of consonants. Metathesis.
Middle English stressed vowels. Shortening of vowels. Lengthening of vowels.
Middle English stressed vowels Monophthongization of diphthongs. Rise of new diphthongs. Leveling of unstressed vowels.
Modern English phonetic changes. The Great Vowel Shift. Rise of new long vowels and diphthongs under the influence of the vowel “r”.
Modern English phonetic changes. Changes in vowels. The loss of vowels. The rise of long vowels.
17th century changes in vowels.
Modern English phonetic changes. Changes in consonants.
Latin loan words in the English language word stock.
Scandinavian influence on the English word stock.
French influence on the English word stock.
Enrichment of vocabulary in the Renaissance period. Spanish, Italian, Greek words. Mixed vocabulary of English. Borrowings of colonial and French words in the 17th century. Borrowings in the 18-20th centuries.
Writings in Middle English. Changes in spelling system.
Grammar. The noun in OE, ME, MnE.
Grammar. The pronoun in OE, ME, MnE.
Grammar. The adjective in OE, ME, MnE.
Grammar. The article in OE, ME, MnE.
Grammar. The development of OE and ME strong verbs.
Grammar. The development of OE and ME weak verbs.
Grammar. The development of OE preterite-present and anomalous verbs.
The category of tenses in the history of English.
Word order in a simple sentence in the history of English.
Negation in a simple sentence in the history of English.
LECTURE 1:The Subject-Matter of the History of the English Language.
Plan:
The role of the language history course.
Two approaches to language study.
The aims of the language history.
The link with other disciplines.
Linguistic change.
Language is a historical phenomenon. It doesn’t stay unchanged for any considerable period of time or for any time at all, but it is constantly changing through its history.
The history of the English language has been reconstructed on the basis of written records of different periods. The earliest written records in English are dated to the 7th c. The earliest records in Germanic languages goes to the 3-4th c. AD. The development of English, however, began a long time before, it was first recorded in order to say where the English language came from, to what languages it is related, when and how it applied its specific features. One must get acquainted with some facts of pre-written history of the Germanic groups, as generally English belongs to the Germanic group of languages, which is one of the 12 groups of Indo-European (IE) linguistic family. Most of the area of Europe and large parts of other continents are occupied by IE languages, Germanic being one of the major groups.
Any language can be studied from different points of view: from the point of view of its phonetics, grammar, word stock, style. While studying Modern English we consider all these aspects synchronically and regard the language as a fixed, unchanged system. The synchronic approach may be contrasted to the diachronic one in which no element of the language is treated as fixed or stable. When considered diachronically every linguistic fact can be interpreted as a stage or a step in the neverending evolution of the language. In practice the contrast between synchronic and diachronic approaches is not so marked as in theory. We usually turn to the history of English to explain some phenomena in Modern English.
Different schools of linguistics took quite different views of the essence of the language development. According to the view, which is prevalent in linguistics, since the early 19th c. and down to 1920ies, the development was seen as s series of disconnected changes which gradually as if by chance resulted in a new stage of things. Thus such process as the reduction of the number of cases of substances, the rise of prepositional phrases, gradually replacing cases, were seen as a mechanical result of phonetic development, firstly reduction and loss of unstressed vowels. That was the point of view of the so-called “Youngo – grammarian school” represented by Karl Brugmann, Dellbruk and Paul. In their view phonetic development tended to disarrange the grammatical system of the language and only the analogy helped to cure parts of the destruction produced by phonetic changes. Even the great Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussur, who first introduced the concept of synchronic linguistics as opposed to diachronic, didn’t bring any change into the viewpoint of the language of the YGS. It was the merit of the Prague Linguistic Circle (created in 1926) to have introduced the notion of system into diachronic linguistics, so that the development came to be seen not as a chance, not as the development of disconnected changes.
The aims of studying the English language history:
The first aim is to provide a student with the knowledge of linguistic history sufficient to account for the principal features of the present-day English. We are faced with the number of peculiarities, which appear unintelligible from the modern viewpoint. These peculiarities can be found in grammar, wordstock and phonetics:
any student is aware of difficulties on reading and spelling words where sounds are represented by a number of letters (e.g.: light, daughter, know) and asks why the combination of “ea” indicates different sounds (e.g.: speak, great, hear, heart, head) or why the sound [] is spelt by “u” in “sun” and “cut” and by “o” in “love”;
in the sphere of vocabulary there is considerable likeness between English and German (e.g.: winter – der Winter, summer – der Sommer). Such similarities are observed in many languages but we can’t explain them if we remain within the limits of contemporary English, we can only guess that they are not matters of chance and that there must be some cause behind them. These causes belong to more or less remote past and they can only be discovered by going into the history of the English language;
the history of the English language can explain why some substances form their plural by the change of the root vowel (e.g.: man-men) or why the substances “sheep, deer” have unchanged plural or why the verbs “must, can” don’t take –s in the 3rd person singular present indicative.
The second aim is of the theoretical nature. The study of the history of the concrete language is based on applying general principles of linguistics to the language-in -question. Foundations of this science are studied in introduction to linguistics and in general linguistics. In describing the development of the English language they will be discussed in respect of concrete linguistic facts, which will ensure a better understanding of these facts and will demonstrate the appreciation of general principles to the language material.
The third aim is to provide a student with a wider philological outlook. The history of the English language shows the place of English in the linguistic world. It reveals its ties and contacts with some other related and unrelated languages. The purpose of this subject is a systematic study of the development of the language from early times to the present days. Such studies enable the student to acquire a more profound understanding of the language of today. Besides the history of the language is an important subsidiary discipline to the history of England and English literature.
The history of English language is connected with other disciplines:
it is based on the history of England and studies the development of the language in connection with concrete conditions in which the English people lived in several periods of their history;
it is also connected with disciplines which study present-day English: theoretical phonetics, lexicology and theoretical grammar as it shows phonetic, lexical and grammatical phenomena as they developed and states the origin of the present-day system.
Linguistic changes.
A living language can never be absolutely static; it develops together with the speech community, i.e. with people who speak it. In studying the history of the language there arises a question about the trend of its development. The evolution or historical development of language is made of diverse facts and processes. Firstly it includes the internal or structural development of the language system, its various subsystems and component parts. The description of internal linguistic history is presented in accordance with division of language into linguistic levels. The main accepted levels are: the phonetic and phonological levels, the morphological level, the syntactic level and the lexical level. Accordingly, the history of the language can be subdivided into historical phonetics (phonology), historical morphology, historical syntax and historical lexicology.
The evolution of language includes also many facts, which pertain to the functioning of language in the speech community. These functioning aspects constitute the external history of the language and embrace a large number of diverse matters: the spread of the language in geographical and social space, the differentiation of language into functional varieties, contacts with other languages. In discussing these aspects one deals with two concepts: the concept of linguistic space, i.e. the geographical and social space occupied by the language, and the concept of linguistic situation, which embraces the functional differentiation of language and the relationships between the functional varieties.
We are faced with a number of problems concerning the causes of changes in the language. These causes may be of different kinds: external and internal:
in the first case the language is influenced by the factors lying outside it (= extralinguistic factors). Such historic events as social changes, conquests, wars, cultural contacts can hardly fail to influence the language and especially its vocabulary;
on the other hand many changes occur in the history of the language which cannot be traced to any extralinguistic causes. The driving power in such cases is within the language itself. Internal factors, which operate in all languages, are inherent properties of any language system. Specific factors operate in one language or in a group of languages in the certain period of time.
One can distinguish three main types of difference in language: geographical, social and temporal. Linguistic changes imply temporal differences, which become apparent if the same elements or parts of the language are compared as successive historical ages; they are transformations of the same units in time, which can be registered as distinct steps in their evolution.
Most linguistic changes involve some kind of substitution and can be called replacements. Replacements are subdivided into different types or patterns:
a simple one-to-one replacement occurs when a new unit takes the place of the old one (e.g.: but, feet [u], [e:] > [], [i:]);
two or more units may fall together and thus may be replaced by one unit, or, vice versa, two distinct units may take the place of one. The former type of replacement is defines as merging or merger; the latter is known as splitting or split (e.g.: the common case of nouns is the result of the merging of three OE cases; the consonant [k] has split into two phonemes [k] and [t]).
LECTURE 2. Linguistic Features of Germanic Languages.
Plan:
Phonetics.
word stress;
vowels;
consonants.
Grammar.
substantives;
adjectives;
verbs.
All the Germanic languages of the past and present have common linguistic features, some of which are shared by other Germanic groups in the IE family, others are specially Germanic. The Germanic group acquired the specific distinctive features after the separation of the ancient Germanic tribes from other IE tribes and prior to the future expansion and disintegration. These Proto-Germanic features inherited by the descendant languages represent the common features of the Germanic group. Other common features developed later, in the course of individual histories of separate Germanic languages.
Phonetics.
Word stress. It is known that in ancient IE, prior to the separation of Germanic, there existed 2 ways of word accentuation: musical pitch and force stress. The position of the stress was free and movable, it could fall on any syllable of the word irrespective of whether it was a root-morpheme, an affix or an ending and could be shifted both in form-building and word-building. Both these properties of the word accent were changed in Proto-Germanic and force stress (dynamic) became the only type of stress used in Early Proto- Germanic. Word stress was still as movable as in ancient IE but in Late Proto-Germanic its position in the word was stabilised. The stress was now fixed on the first syllable, which was usually the root of the word or the prefix; the other syllable suffixes and endings were unstressed and later they became phonemically weakened. These features of the word stress were inherited by the Germanic languages and despite later alternations are observable today.
Vowels. Throughout the history, vowels displayed a strong tendency to change. They underwent different kinds of alterations:
qualitative changes affect the quality of the sound (e.g.: [o]>[a:]);
quantitative changes make long sounds short or short ones long (e.g.: i>i:);
dependant changes are restricted to certain positions or phonetic conditions;
independent changes take place irrespective of phonetic conditions.
From the early date the treatment of vowels was determined by the nature of word stress. In accented syllables the oppositions between vowels were carefully maintained and new distinctive features were introduced, so that the number of stressed vowels grew. In unaccented positions the original contrasts between vowels were weakened and lost, the distinction of short and long vowels was neutralised.
Strict differentiation of long and short vowels is regarded as an important characteristic of the Germanic group. The contrast of short and long vowels is supported by different directions of their changes. While long vowels tended to become shorter and to diphthongise, short vowels often changed into more open. These changes can be seen in the earliest vowel changes:
IE short [o] changed in Germanic into the more open vowel [a]: (e.g.: Noctem (IE) - narhts (Goth.), Nacht (Ger.);
the merging of long vowels proceeded in the opposite direction: IE long [a:] was narrowed to [o:] (e.g.: Mater (IE) – modor (OE) ). As the result there was neither short [o] nor long [a:] in Germanic languages. Later on these sounds appeared from different sources.
a quality of a stressed sound is in some cases dependent on a following sound. The earliest manifestation of this principle is known as fracture (breaking) and concerns 2 pairs of vowels “e-i”, “u-o”. IE “e” in the root syllable finds its counterpart in Germanic “i”, if it is followed by “i” or “j” or by the nasal [n] (Umlaut) (e.g.: Ventus (L.) – winds (Goth.), wind (OE); Medius (L.) – midde (OE)).
in IE the sound [u] became Germanic [u] when followed by “u” or nasal consonant, it finds its counterpart in Germanic [o] (e.g.: Sunus (Lith.) –sunu (OE): Hurnan (Celt.) – horn (OE);
a special kind of vowel gradation (Ablaut) exists in all IE languages. Its origin has been a matter of discussion for about a century. 3 variants of root distinguished by gradation are due to the condition of stress. There are two types of Ablaut: quantitative (is the alteration of different vowels mainly [e]>[a], [e]>[o]) and qualitative (means the change in length of qualitatively one and the same vowel: normal, lengthened, reduced). The main type of gradation in IE languages is represented by alternation “e-o-zero (absence of a vowel)”. Full stress brings the highest degree (“o”), weakened stress - the medium degree (“e”) and the unstressed position – zero (e.g.: cтол- стелю- стлать).
Short vowels.