Основы теории изучаемого языка

1. History of the English language. Periodization. Genealogical classification of languages. Prehistoric English

The Celtic language – Brythonic language – was spoken on the territory of modern Britain before Germanic tribes came there. It still remains in some parts of Britain nowadays. With the invasion of Germanic tribes the English language appeared made of several Germanic dialects. Indo-European language family is subdivided into Baltic, Celtic, Roman, Slavic and Germanic. Germanic group is subdivided into East, North and West subgroups. West: English, German, Dutch (Holland), Flanish (Belgium), Frisian (dead language). In 1786 sir William Jones discovered that Sunscrit has a lot in common with modern European languages, and he came to comclusion that they had the same protolanguage. Periodization: Old English – 450-110 AD, Middle English – XI-XIV centuries, Early Modern English – XIV-XVII centuries, Late Modern English – 1800-up to present.

2. Peculiarities of the Old English period

The most important historical event of the Old English period was Scandinavian invasion. In 8^th century they brought peculiarities of their own language, Old Norse, to English. The main aspect of the language influenced by Scandinavians was grammar. Vikings simplified the English grammar and made it lose grammatical gender and case (the system of declination). The influence on vocabulary was not so considerable, but there were some words borrowed from Old Norse and used nowadays (leg, law, anger, all nouns beginning with “sk”, and personal pronoun “they”). In the Old English period there was the 1^st wave of Latin and Greek borrowings to English owing to introduction of Christianity. They were mostly of religious content (e.g. mission). One of the main records is “Beowulf” epic poem written by an unknown author in IX-X century. The end of the Old English period is connected with Norman Conquest in 1066.

3. Peculiarities of the Middle English period

After the Norman Conquest in 1066, French became official language in Britain for 2 centuries and was spoken by government, court and noble people. Lower social classes continued speaking English considerably changed under the French influence. There were the following changes:

1) Changes in vocabulary, a lot of French borrowings (beef-cow, mutton-sheep, etc).

2) Changes in spelling and pronunciation (ð, Þ –> th). Consonants in the end of the words were not pronounced (comb, autumn).

3) Changes in grammar. Developing from synthetical language to analytical one continued during this period. The system of declination of English pronouns was almost formed, but in general changes in grammar were not so considerable.

The most famous writer is Geoffrey Chausser (XIV century) and his most famous work “The Canterbury tales”. 1258 – the 1^st official document in English was published (“Provisions of Oxford”). 1362 – Edward III addressed to the Parliament in English, and since then English returned its position as the official language. The Middle English period finished with the Great Vowel Shift.

4. Peculiarities of the Early Modern English period

The GVS is the major change in pronunciation of English vowels in the Medieval period (1350-1500). There are 2 hypothesis about the reasons of GVS:

1) influence of French (higher society);

2) Black Death (plague) that made people moving from North to the South-East trying to save themselves (lower society).

The 1^st person who investigated GVS and named this event was a Danish linguist Otto Jesperson (1860-1941). The main tendency of GVS was change of long vowels into other long vowels or diphthongs ([e:]-[ei] break, [i:]-[ai] nice, [o:]-[u:] look, [a:]-[ei] late, [e:]-[i:] feel, [u:]-[au] house, [o:]-[ou] hope; exceptions – dead, bread).

In the Early Modern English period (XIV-XVII centuries) there were big changes in English vocabulary connected with: 1) development of industry, inventing new devices, printing, travelling, and 2) changes in cultural life. The most important invention of that time was printing – J. Guttenberg (1454). William Caxton brought printing in England in 1470-s. Another factor that influenced English vocabulary was introduction of the Renaissance. It was revival of Ancient Greek and Roman culture. The main idea was placing a human being as a centre of the universe and admiration of a beauty of a human body. Owing to the Renaissance there was the 2^nd wave of Latin and Greek borrowings. There were the 1^st attempts to standardize English, e.g. in 1604 the 1^st English dictionary “The Table Alphabetical” was published. The most famous poets were William Shakespeare and John Millton.

5. Late Modern English and formation of the National Literary English language

The main difference between EME and LME is vocabulary. It was connected with 2 main factors:

1) Industrial Revolution. There was a big need for new terms to name new inventions. New words appeared in different ways: 1) borrowed or made of Latin and Greek roots (vaccine, nuclear); 2) made of native English words by adding suffixes (steamer); 3) made by combining several roots (airplane).

2) The growth of English Empire. By the beginning of XX century the British Empire covered a quarter of the Earth’s surface. Native languages of the colonies brought a lot of new words to the English language (shampoo, pajama – Hindi, sauna – Finland, tycoon - Japan).

During the LME period lots of variants of the English language appeared. There are 2 varieties of the English language – American and British, and other variants are based on them. 1758 – Samuel Johnson published “The Dictionary of English” which contained some grammatical forms of words. 1762 – Robert Lawth published “The Introduction to the English Grammar”. According to him, English should be logical, and we should avoid using double negatives, split infinitives, prepositions in the end of the sentences.

6. Theoretical phonetics of the English language: aims, tasks and connections with other branches of linguistics. The main branches of theoretical phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics studying sound system of the languages.

Aim is to analyze the functioning of phonetic units in the language. Tasks: to study structural organization of phonetic system of the English language, to describe main principles of vowels and consonants classification, to describe features of intonation and accentual structure, to consider variants of the English language, regional and social peculiarities of pronunciation. Phonetics can be subdivided into:

1) Segmental – studies separate sounds;

2) Suprasegmental – studies groups of sounds (syllables, phrases, syntagms).

Also it can be subdivided into 3 branches:

1) Articulatory – studies production of sounds by human speech organs;

2) Acoustic – studies vibration of sounds between the speaker’s mouth and the listener’s ears;

3) Auditory – studies reception of sounds by listener’s ears.

Phonetics is connected with other branches of linguistics and science: biology, physiology, physics, psychology, grammar, lexicology, stylistics. Phonetics represents expression level of the language.

7. Phoneme. Classification of phonemes. Phoneme theories

Phoneme is the smallest language unit possessing no meaning. Allophone is a variant o phoneme which depends on dialectal, stylistic variations or phonetic situation.

Phoneme theories:

1) Mentalistic (I. Baudauin de Courtenay and E. Sapin) – phoneme is an ideal image in our mind everyone is aiming at;

2) Functional (L. Bloomfield, R. Jacobson and N. Trubetskoy) – phoneme is a language unit that has its own function. They fulfill the particular function in the language (differentiating between the words). They have no variants and if pronunciation of the sound can change the meaning of the word, then they are different sounds;

3) Abstract (L. Hjelmsler and Uldall) – phonemes are considered irrespective of their functional aspect and physical characteristics;

Physical (B. Bloch and K. Trager) – phonemes are grouped into familiesaccording to their physical characteristics.

Phonemes