4. Comment upon the functions of be:

a) The linguistic effects of Anglo-Saxon wars were just as clear-cut. Many Celtic communities were destroy­ed, assimilated, or gradually pushed back westwards and northwards, into the areas we now know as Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria, and perhaps also Scotland. Here the Celtic dialects were to develop in separate ways, resulting in such modern languages as Welsh and Gaelic.

b) Complaints about the state of the English lan­guage and the uses made of it are by no means new. They first appeared five centuries ago, after English had dis­placed French as a respectable vernacular and as the ins­trument for law and administaration, when English was beginning to compete with Latin as the medium for se­rious and scholarly writing. In the fifteenth century a

national standard language was emerging that was based on the dialect of London, the political and judicial capital of the country, but also its commercial, social and intellectual centre. ...Then, as now, the country needed a standard dialect that was not only generally intelligible but also, because of its naturality, did not distract through its regional peculiarities from efficient communication bet­ween people of different parts of the country. But at the end of the fifteenth century the standard language was not yet stable or uniform, though the invention of printing was to hasten its development.

c) By the end of the seventeenth century, conside­rable progress had been made towards the standardization of the printed language in spelling, syntax and vocabulary. It was agreed among the learned that English had reached in the recent past a near-perfect stage, having been purged of its impurities and inconsistencies. A major concern of the eighteenth-century writers was to prevent further change, to preserve English largely as it then was, remo­ving imperfections that they believed were creeping into the language in their own time. Any further changes, they feared, must be for the worse: that language must be pro­tected from corruption.

d) For generations of American children Mother Goose rhymes have been the first contact with the lite­rature of their native language and culture. At home and in their early years at school, the rhythmic lilt of these rhymes delights and instructs them. So well-known are these rhymes and their subjects that allusions to them permeate our adult conversation and writing; without a knowledge of them no English-speaking American has a truly complete literary education. It has been said that

there is something for everyone in Mother Goose. Even scholarly adults are intrigued by her possible origin, by the hidden meaning in the simple verses, and even which historical characters are being lampooned in them.

5. Comment upon the functions of have in the following extracts:

a) Scott, though he had some antecedents, including Maria Edgeworth's picture of Irish life in Castle Rackrent (1800), may be said to have invented the histotical novel.

b) As well as the ceaseless process of change, several factors have combined recently to blunt the angularities of Received Pronunciation. Some of them turn out to have affected more than the way we speak, in the revolution in the English language that is going through one of its rapid and violent phases, as after 1066 and in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

c) Just as everyone has an accent, so everyone speaks a dialect. This point sometimes comes as surprise to people who have been brought up to think of dialects as belonging to country yokels. But rural dialects make up only some of the regionally distinctive varieties of English.

d) Now all of this happened in educated speech only. Since the fourteenth century, the pronunciation associated with the south-east of England, and especially that heard in the area around London, had acquired a special social status. This was where the Court was located. Anybody who was anybody in politics, the law, the church or commerce would have had an eye — and an ear — on London.

e) Conversation is usually spontaneous; speakers have to 'think standing up'. They therefore do not have the time to plan out what they want to say, and their grammar is inevitably loosely constructed, often con­taining rephrasing and repetition.

f) However, as we have already indicated, language is very much a social phenomenon. A study of language totally without reference to its social context inevitably leads to the omission of some of the more complex and interesting aspects of language and to the loss of oppor­tunities for further theoretical progress. One of the main factors that has led to the growth of sociolinguistic re­search has been the recognition of the importance of the fact that language is a very variable phenomenon, and that this variability may have as much to do with society as with language.