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much of a smile; Biber et al., 1999: 186). Two factors seem to be at work here: the proximity of a singular noun to the verb and the fact that the subject position in the clause is occupied by the ‘singular’-looking existential there. Again we are not dealing with present-day innovations but a feature that has a long history in the spoken medium from the Middle English period onwards (Jespersen, [1914] 1961: 181–3; Dekeyser, 1975: 164–8; Fischer, 1992: 364–7; Cheshire et al., 1993: 70).
Two conclusions may be drawn from these data on standard and non-standard grammar. It appears to be the case that, as J. K. Chambers (1995: 241–2) suggests, when a standard variety differs from other varieties, the difference lies both in the quantity and in the quality of variation. Non-standard varieties and the less focussed areas of the standard have variation where the focussed standard core allows none. Table 5.1 illustrates this by displaying two expressions in casual speech for cases of concord that are limited to only one in the written standard. The table also suggests that high-frequency standard variants are typically the historical ones. They attest to the relative conservatism and resistance to change of the focussed core of the standard language and often reflect the grammar of English at the time when it was codified. However, many casual features labelled as non-standard, too, have a long history and wide distribution in the Englishspeaking world. Which of them are going to be accepted as part of the standard written usage in the future depends on the stringency with which normative views are upheld. If the reception of the New Fowler is anything to go by (Morton, 1998: 323), new ‘legitimate modern practices’ may have brighter prospects in Britain than in the United States.
5.3.4 |
Vocabulary |
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As discussed in Section 5.2, standard English vocabulary was codified in dictionaries in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But as the vocabulary of a living language is open-ended, and may be freely augmented, its codification will always remain incomplete: no dictionary can be expected to include all the possible words of a language at a given time. Dictionary makers may even choose to omit parts of the vocabulary of what might be considered the standard language. In his preface to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) Samuel Johnson claimed that he had not included any quotations from his contemporaries, but illustrated his entries with ‘the writers before the restoration’. Although this is not quite true – Johnson does cite contemporaries, particularly Samuel Richardson and himself (Keast, 1957) – he regarded the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a golden age, ‘the wells of English undefiled’ (Preface, fol. Cr), from which the literary language had later degenerated under the influence of French.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) similarly prioritises the literary language. Although it aims at charting not only the origins but also the use of English vocabulary, it is based on written sources – a situation unavoidable in a dictionary
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working on historical principles, but one that necessarily leads to omission of a large portion of colloquial vocabulary. In fact, some Anglo-Saxonisms that do appear in writing were omitted from the first edition of the OED because they were deemed too delicate for its Victorian readership (Finegan, 1998: 562). Any restrictions in the usage of words are marked by a set of status and field indicators. These labels show if a word or a sense is restricted to a particular geographical area (e.g. Australia, North America, Scotland), to a register or style (e.g. colloquial, poetic, slang) or to a branch of knowledge or field of activity (e.g. heraldry, law, zoology). English dialect vocabulary was, however, largely omitted from the first edition of the OED, because there was a simultaneous project with the specific aim of producing The English Dialect Dictionary (Wright, 1898–1905).
As the second edition of the OED was published as recently as 1989, one might expect it to embrace a late twentieth-century view of what counts as standard English vocabulary worldwide. The historical bias of the OED was, however, carried through to the second edition, and to the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, in that usages restricted to English English were typically not singled out but were subsumed under the common core of the English language. Despite the current large-scale revision the OED is undergoing at the present time, much of this will still be apparent in the dictionary’s online edition, which still predominantly only shows RP pronunciations. That the English-speaking world is to a significant extent lexically divided by a common language is, however, evidenced by the fact that all the major national varieties of English today possess dictionaries of their own. Despite the impressive OED coverage of regional variation in Englishes around the world, there is to date no single, comprehensive lexical repository of world Englishes, not even first-language varieties, let alone the new Englishes discussed by Crystal in this volume.
While there are relatively few absolute grammatical and spelling differences between the British and American written standards, lexical variation is noticeable. It has to do with institutional differences in fields such as politics, banking, legal systems, the armed forces and sports, with local customs, folklore, flora and fauna, everyday slang and historical choices between variant forms. David Grote’s dictionary British English for American Readers, for example, contains nearly 6,500 entries. A large number of these words appear in both varieties but differ in their denotations or connotations, or both. So in British English joint ordinarily means ‘roast meat, especially for Sunday lunch’ (not marijuana), junction is ‘intersection’, junior school refers to ‘the older section of a primary school’ and public school means ‘private school’ (Crystal, 1995: 306).
Thinking of the global coverage of standard English, the greatest lexical uniformity can be found in two different domains of language use. The first, the common core, literally constitutes the foundations of the standard. It largely goes back to the Anglo-Saxon heritage of English and consists of frequent everyday vocabulary used in all registers, in speech and writing alike (Gordon, 1966: 3). It includes names of everyday objects and actions, the commoner adjectives, verbs and adverbs, terms of family and social relationships, and central grammatical function words (pronouns, prepositions, articles and auxiliary verbs). The ten
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most frequent word occurrences in a million-word corpus of standard presentday British English are all grammatical: the, of, and, to, a, in, that, is, was and it (Hofland & Johansson, 1982). The top ten most frequent word forms in the early Modern English section (1500–1710) of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and of Caxton’s own prose (Mizobata, 1990: 601) contain I but not was (or it in the case of Caxton, whose list contains as and for instead); the rest are the same as in the present-day corpus. These words are all Proto-Germanic in origin.
In the course of time, the core vocabulary has absorbed a number of loanwords, but according to some estimates, roughly 50 per cent of the core vocabulary items of English remains Germanic (Scheler, 1977: 73). The dozen most frequent lexical verbs in the LGSWE corpus are, in order of frequency: say, get, go, know, think, see, make, come, take, want, give and mean (Biber et al., 1999: 373). They all go back to the native Old English stock except for take, which is a Scandinavian loanword in late Old English, and want, another word of Scandinavian origin, first attested in Middle English (the initial /g/ in give may similarly be attributed to Scandinavian influence in Middle English). The registers drawing heavily on the common core, enriched with their international register-specific lexis, include those of the news media. The written standard English that appears in newspapers all over the world can easily be read without immediately suggesting its country of origin.
Other areas to show a high degree of shared lexis and continued elaboration of function are found in the many professional specialisations where English is used for special purposes (ESP). At the focussed end of ESP come the nomenclatures of various branches of science and technology. Their special terminologies date from different historical periods. While the common core vocabulary goes back to times before any documented national or international standards, specialist terms were increasingly recorded in monolingual glossaries and dictionaries in the early Modern English period. Sch¨afer (1989) shows that well over a hundred such publications appeared in the period 1475–1640 alone. These early fields of lexical focussing include a large variety of specialisations, including architecture, classics, cosmography, fencing, geography, grammar, heraldry, herbals, law, mathematics, poetry, rhetoric, and weights and measures. The terms defined in these works are typically not regionally localisable. Specialist terms figure prominently in seventeenth-century hard-word dictionaries, as in Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1656) and Elisha Coles’ An English Dictionary (1676). By the end of the century, the basic terms in fields such as anatomy and mathematics had already been established. Most of them were borrowed from Latin, still the language of international scholarship at the time.
Most scientific terminologies, however, came into being only after this first wave of lexical codification in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What these early works had managed to do was to regulate to a large extent the morphological shape and spelling of the lexical items they covered. But they could not fix their meanings. Where a word continued in technical use, its meaning was bound to reflect advances in science, technology and scholarship (Nevalainen, 1999: 435– 54). This was, of course, also the case with more recent technical terminology.
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One of the many scientific terms to come into English in the seventeenth century was electricity. In his Dictionary (1755), Dr Johnson glosses it as ‘a property in some bodies, whereby, when rubbed so as to grow warm, they draw little bits of paper, or such like substances, to them’. His comment on the gloss is worth quoting because it reveals the ongoing changes in the extension of the term:
Such was the account given a few years ago of electricity; but the industry of the present age, first excited by the experiments of Gray, has discovered in electricity a multitude of philosophical wonders. Bodies electrified by a sphere of glass, turned nimbly round, not only emit flame, but may be fitted with such a quantity of the electrical vapour, as, if discharged at once upon a human body, would endanger life. The force of this vapour has hitherto appeared instantaneous, persons at both ends of a long chain seeming to be struck at once. The philosophers are now endeavouring to intercept the strokes of lightning. (A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755, s.v. electricity)
Johnson’s philosophers in this context refers to ‘men deep in knowledge, either moral or natural’. In his time philosophy was still the general term used of human knowledge of all kinds, including ‘the course of sciences read in the schools’. Science itself came to English from Old French in the fourteenth century in the broad sense of ‘(certain) knowledge’, which persisted into early Modern English. Science was also used for acquaintance with or mastery of any department of learning. In his dictionary of ‘hard words’, A Table Alphabeticall, Robert Cawdrey (1604) simply defines it as ‘knowledge, or skill’. In early Modern English the seven liberal sciences was used to refer to ‘the seven liberal arts’ of the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, Astronomy). The modern, narrower sense was introduced in the eighteenth century:
The word science, is usually applied to a whole body of regular or methodical observations or propositions [. . .] concerning any subject of speculation.
(OED, s.v. science; 1725, Watts, Logic II.ii.§9)
The more specialised sense of ‘natural and physical science’ did not appear until the latter half of the nineteenth century, thus reflecting the increasing separation of the physical from the mental in the field of human learning (Nevalainen, 1999: 435–6). An unprecedented number of specialist dictionaries appeared in the nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution, and new discoveries in natural sciences, medicine and philology, all gave rise to new terminologies to be recorded and standardised. More than two hundred specialist dictionaries and glossaries were published, as well as over thirty encyclopaedias. A similar upsurge in dictionaries and other reference works would next be seen in the 1980s (Crystal, 1995: 82).