Курс лекций по предмету «история английского языка и введение в специальную филологию»

ЛЕКЦИЯ 1

The Subject of the History of the English Language

The subject of the History of the English language is a systematic description of the language development, of the changes of its phonetic structure, spelling, word stock, grammatical system and the historical conditions causing these changes. This course will help you to understand the peculiarities of the English language and its ties with other Germanic languages and languages of other groups of the Indo-European family.

There are two approaches to the language analysis. When we compare the use of the same word or grammar form in different periods of time or try to understand how the expression of the same meaning changed in the course of time, we use the diachronic method. Diachronic study is the study of the historic development of separate linguistic phenomena and of the whole system of a language. But when we analyse language phenomena at some definite time, we use the synchronic method. Synchronic study is the study of a language at a definite stage of its development as a system of lexical, grammatical and phonetic elements. In the study of a language these methods are combined. Traditionally the English language is divided into three cross-sections or it is regarded through three stops: Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and New English (NE). This division is not as strict as it seems because every change takes time.

Language development means changes of the language. These changes occur under the influence of different factors. They are divided into two groups – internal and external.

Internal or structural factors exist within the language itself. They are the necessity to improve the language technique, for example – to express different meanings by distinct means and identical meanings by identical means. Thus the plural forms of the borrowed nouns acquire the forms typical of native nouns.

The language evolution is also influenced by the external or extra-linguistic factors – those which exist beyond the language. Among these factors we can mention geographical and social spread of the language, its contacts with other languages, changes in the life of the language speakers. So the language development is closely connected with the history of a speech community. That’s why we have to know the people’s history, geographical expansion of the community, contacts with other peoples and nations, development of literature, science and culture.

A language is a system of different elements. A system is an organization of elements which are connected and form a unity. The characteristics of a system are not those of the elements; it means that an element of a system possesses qualities which it doesn’t possess out of this system. As an example we can take borrowed words (café, formulas,) – they acquire qualities typical of the English language. A system develops according to its laws and it imposes these laws on its elements.

Changes, from the point of view of their result, can be characterized as merging and splitting which means loss or appearing of opposition. The opposition is a general correlation of two or more units of the same class by means of which a certain meaning is expressed. The members of the opposition possess common and differential features (nouns – singular and plural).

Splitting (a new opposition develops): in OE [k] split into [k] and a palatalized variant [k’].

Merging (loss of opposition): unification of plural forms of nouns.

The evolution of the English language is studied at different linguistic levels:

-the phonetic and phonological level;

- the morphological level;

- the syntactic level;

- the lexical level.

Changes are not equally intensive at different levels. The vocabulary is subjected to linguistic changes more than other levels. The phonetic system can’t change rapidly as phonemes distinguish morphemes and that’s why phonemic opposition is meaningful. The slowest to change is the grammatical system. But in the English language the grammatical system underwent very significant changes and as a result the English language became analytical though it used to be a synthetic language. Sometimes changes at one level can cause changes at some other level too. Thus the shift of the stress to the beginning of a word and weakening of unstressed vowels caused homonymy of grammatical endings.

Morphologically we classify the English language as an analytical language. Genealogically it is an Indo-European language belonging to the Germanic group.

The changes are not always evident because the oral language existed before the written records appeared. Sometimes it is necessary to compare how other relative languages developed in order to have an idea about the OE situation, to restore the OE phenomena. That’s why it is important to know what the Old Germanic languages were like.

The development of a language has both static and dynamic character. Historically the process of the language development can be regarded as permanent. But there are some constant features which do not or almost do not alter (the most commonly used part of the vocabulary, ways of word-formation, grammatical categories). Linguistic changes are temporal transformations of the same units, which can be registered as distinct steps. A new feature becomes a linguistic change when it is accepted in the most varieties of the language or in the literary standard.