18. Origin of literary English.

19. The subject of theoretical grammar. Morphology and sintax

The subject of theoretical grammar and its difference from practical grammar.

The following course of theoretical grammar serves to describe the grammatical structure of the English language as a system where all parts are interconnected. The difference between theoretical and practical grammar lies in the fact that practical grammar prescribes certain rules of usage and teaches to speak (or write) correctly whereas theoretical grammar presents facts of language, while analyzing them, and gives no prescriptions.

Unlike school grammar, theoretical grammar does not always produce a ready-made decision. In language there are a number of phenomena interpreted differently by different linguists. To a great extent, these differences are due to the fact that there exist various directions in linguistics, each having its own method of analysis and, therefore, its own approach to the matter. But sometimes these differences arise because some facts of language are difficult to analyze, and in this case the only thing to offer is a possible way to solve the problem, instead of giving a final solution. It is due to this circumstance that there are different theories of the same language phenomenon, which is not the case with practical grammar.

Point 2. The main development stages of English theoretical grammar.

English theoretical grammar has naturally been developing in the mainstream of world linguistics. Observing the fact that some languages are very similar to one another in their forms, while others are quite dissimilar, scholars still long ago expressed the idea that languages revealing formal features of similarity have a common origin. Attempts to establish groups of kindred languages were repeatedly made from the 16th century on. Among the scholars who developed the idea of language relationship and attempted to give the first schemes of their genealogical groupings we find the name of J. J. Scaliger (1540-1609).

But a consistently scientific proof and study of the actual relationship between languages became possible only when the historical comparative method of language study was created – in the first quarter of the 19th century.

The historical comparative method developed in connection with the comparative observation of languages belonging to the Indo-European family, and its appearance was stimulated by the discovery of Sanskrit.

Sir William Jones (1746-1794), a prominent British orientalist and Sanskrit student, was the first to point out in the form of rigorously grounded scientific hypothesis that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, and some other languages of India and Europe had sprung from the same source which no longer existed. He put forward this hypothesis in his famous report to the Calcutta Linguistic Society (1786), basing his views on an observation of verbal roots and certain grammatical forms in the languages compared.

The relations between the languages of the Indo-European family were studied systematically and scientifically at the beginning of the 19th century by some European scholars, such as Franz Bopp (1791-1867), Rasmus Kristian Rask (1787-1832), Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), and A. Ch. Vostokov (1781-1864). These scholars not only made comparative and historical observations of the kindred languages, but they defined the fundamental conception of linguistic ‘kinship’ (‘relationship’), and created the historical comparative method in linguistics. The rise of this method marks the appearance of linguistics as a science in the strict sense of the word.

After that the historical and comparative study of the Indo-European languages became the principal line of European linguistics for many years to come.

The historical comparative linguistics was further developed in the works of such scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries as F. Dietz (1794-1876), A. F. Pott (1802-1887), A.Schleicher (1821-1868) , F.I.Buslayev (1848-1897), F. F. Fortunatov (1848-1914), F. de Saussure (1857-1913), A.Meillet(1866-1936) and other linguists.

At the beginning of the 20th century the science of linguistics went different ways and later formed into various trends or schools, each of them contributing greatly to English theoretical grammar. The process is still under way nowadays, and it is going to be considered in detail further on.

Thus, we may tentatively trace three main development stages of English theoretical grammar: first (the 16th century - the first quarter of the 19th century), second (the first quarter of the 19th century - the 1930s) and third (the 1930s - present day).

Morphology: What is morphology? Morphology is the study of word structure. When linguists study morphology, they are interested in the different categories of morphemes that make up words as well as morphological processes for forming new words. What are morphemes? Morphemes are the smallest meaningful pieces of language that make up words. Words may consist of one or more morphemes.

4. Different kinds of morphemes: Bound and Free Morphemes: Bound: A bound morpheme is a morpheme that cannot stand alone as an independent word, but must be attached to another morpheme/word. E.g: ship MENT : police intercepted a shipment of arms. A Symmetrical: my ruler is asymmetrical. Free: A free morpheme is a morpheme that can stand alone as an independent word (e.g. ‘Car, church, Person, House').

5. Syntax: What is syntax: In linguistics , syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages . Syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language. While morphology looks at how the smallest linguistic unit (called morphemes) are formed into complete words, syntax looks at how those words are formed into complete sentences.

Etymology:

From the Greek, "shape, form"

Examples and Observations:

"The term 'morphology' has been taken over from biology where it is used to denote the study of the forms of plants and animals. . . . It was first used for linguistic purposes in 1859 by the German linguist August Schleicher (Salmon 2000), to refer to the study of the form of words. In present-day linguistics, the term 'morphology' refers to the study of the internal structure of words, and of the systematic form-meaning correspondences between words. . . .

"The notion 'systematic' in the definition of morphology given above is important. For instance, we might observe a form difference and a corresponding meaning difference between the English noun ear and the verb hear. However, this pattern is not systematic: there are no similar word pairs, and we cannot form new English verbs by adding h- to a noun."

(Geert E. Booij, The Grammar of Words: An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2007)

The Aims of Morphology

"Morphology is an essential subfield of linguistics. Generally, it aims to describe the structures of words and patterns of word formation in a language. Specifically, it aims to (i) pin down the principles for relating the form and meaning of morphological expressions, (ii) explain how the morphological units are integrated and the resulting formations interpreted, and (iii) show how morphological units are organized in the lexicon in terms of affinity and contrast. The study of morphology uncovers the lexical resources of language, helps speakers to acquire the skills of using them creatively, and consequently express their thoughts and emotions with eloquence."

(Zeki Hamawand, Morphology in English: Word Formation in Cognitive Grammar. Continuum, 2011)

Two Branches of Morphology

- "For English, [morphology] means devising ways of describing the properties of such disparate items as a, horse, took, indescribable, washing machine, and antidisestablishmentarianism. A widely recognized approach divides the field into two domains: lexical or derivational morphology studies the way in which new items of vocabulary can be built up out of combinations of elements (as in the case of in-describ-able); inflectional morphology studies the ways words vary in their form in order to express a grammatical contrast (as in the case of horses, where the ending marks plurality)."

(David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003)

- "The distinction between words and lexemes provides the basis for the division of morphology into two branches: inflectional morphology and lexical word-formation.

"Inflectional morphology deals with the inflectional forms of various lexemes. It has something of the character of an appendix to the syntax, the major component of the grammar. Syntax tells us when a lexeme may or must carry a certain inflectional property, while inflectional morphology tells us what form it takes when it carries that inflectional property.

"Lexical word-formation, by contrast, is related to the dictionary. It describes the processes by which new lexical bases are formed and the structure of complex lexical bases, those composed of more than one morphological element. The traditional term is simply 'word-formation.'"

(Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002)

"Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis."

(Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, 1971)

"And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning. . . .

"It is syntax that gives the words the power to relate to each other in a sequence . . . to carry meaning--of whatever kind--as well as glow individually in just the right place."

(Anthony Burgess, Enderby Outside, 1968)

21 Classification of English consonants and vowels. 1. Vowels and Consonants

Phonetically, it is easy to give definitions: a vowel is any sound with no audible noise produced by constriction in the vocal tract, and consonant is a sound with audible noise produced by a constriction.

However, this definition forces us to identify as vowels many sounds which function as consonants in speech. For example, in the English word "yes", the initial [j] is phonetically a vowel according to the definition above. In the phonological system of English, however, the [j] is in a typical consonant position (compare "yes" with "mess", "less", "Tess" etc.). Similarly, there are sounds which are phonetically consonants which under some circumstances do act as syllable nuclei; a typical example would be the use of "syllabic [l]" in English "little" [lItl] (cf. litter).

This leaves the terms "vowel" and "consonant" available to be used as phonological terms. Generally, vowels are syllabic vocoids. Thus, of the vocoids above, [i] and [a] could be vowels, but [j] and [w] would not, as they are never syllabic. Consonants are contoids which function as syllable margins, e.g. [p], [b], and sometimes [l] (in words like "lip", "lot", but not the final segment in "little", where the [l] is syllabic.

This definition of vowels and consonants leaves two other possible classifications:

nonsyllabic vocoids, such as [j], [w] and [IPA turned r];

syllabic contoids, such as English syllabic [l] and syllabic [n], or the syllabic fricative [s] in "s'pose", or e.g. syllabic [z] in Chinese [sz] "four".

3. Classification by place and manner

Consonants and vowels are traditionally classified in two dimensions: place and manner of articulation. Place of articulation refers to the location of the narrowest part of the vocal tract in producing a sound. For example, for the consonant [b] the vocal tract is narrowest at the lips (in fact, it could not possibly any narrower here!). In vowels, the narrowest part of the vocal tract is usually in the middle of the mouth, in the region of the palate. "Manner of articulation" refers to various other things, including whether the airflow is central or lateral, oral or nasal, retroflex or non-retroflex, the phonation type, and the degree of stricture.