Verb patterns

During the ME size and complexity of Verb patterns grew: Vs came to be extended by Noun patterns of complicated structure.

Verb phrases with an Adv formed composite Verbs; or verb-adverb combinations:

maken melody (sing)

have mind

have ware; business.

Simple Sentence

Simple Sentence became more uniform, although more complicated as the sentence included extended parts: longer attributive groups, diverse subjects, predicates, numerous syntactic complexes like predicative constructions.

1. The relationship between the parts of a sentence are shown by position, prepositions, rigid syntactic structure, environment.

2. Every syntactic function is connected with a certain part of a sentence. It reflected in the following:

• Obligatory use of the subject (in ME the formal and hit occurred in all types of impersonal sentences).

• The position of the predicate could not be vacant: Helpeth me now, as I dyde you (the use of auxiliary Vs).

Word order

1. In ME and MnE WO became fixed and direct: S+P+O

S+ notional part of the predicate. (in ?)

Stabilisation of the WO took many years: from the 15^th to the 17^th century.

2. The placing of the P at the end of a S was abandoned (synthetic WO). The place before the P belonged to the Subject.

3. In the 17-18^th centuries the WO became the same as in English today.

Principal Parts of a Sentence

1. The Subject became more varied in meaning and in the forms of expression. The Subject could now denote not only the agent but the recipient of an action (in Passive Constructions).

2. Some types of compound Predicate turned into simple – as the V phrases developed into analytical forms.

3. The structure of the Predicative became more complex: Of twenty yeer of age he was.

4. The Compound Verbal pred. is characterized by a wider use of modal phrases and Vs of aspective meaning.

Negation

Double negation went out of use. In the age of Correctness (18^th century), when the scholars tried to perfect the language, multiple negation was banned. It’s a strict rule of English grammar.

Compound and Complex Sentences

1. Differentiation between the 2 types became more evident, the use of connectives – more precise:

   • new conjunctions and connective words appear: both …and, because; connectives developed from adverbs, pronouns – who, what, which, where, whose, how, why.

2. The conjunction that became polyfunctional. It introduces Subject, object, attributive, adverbial (of result so … that), of time (after that) clauses. That is included into adverbial clauses of condition (if, if that), concession (wher- so “whether”, though that), of clause (by way of reason, by cause that).

3. The structure of a sentence became complicated and perfected in the 18-19^th centuries.

4. From the 15 to the 18^th century the number of coordinating connectives was doubled: and, in consequence, in fact, to conclude, neither … nor.

rþan + 2^nd participle

original meaning: the subject had a feature or acquired a feature as a result of an action performed on it. Hē wearþ ofslægen meant he became a killed one > ME a passive action

3. sceal + infinitive, wille + infinitive

original meaning: modal > a future tense

In all instances the original, lexical meaning of the verbs became weakened and the former syntactical phrases were grammaticalized. The verbs ben, have, shall, will became auxiliaries.

Lecture 18. The New English (NE) Period.

Contents:

1. Formation and development of the National Literary English language (16^th – 19^th c.).

2. Literary Renaissance.

3. W.Shakespeare.

4. Expansion of English over the British Isles.

5. Normalising tendencies. Grammars and dictionaries in the late 17^th –18^th c.

6. The English Language outside Europe.

The New English Period started in 1475 (or 1485). The period of the 16^th-17^th c. is called the Early NE (ENE). The most significant events of the ENE are the end of the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) and the introduction of printing. The Wars of the Roses marked the decay of feudalism and the birth of a new social order.

New economic relations began to take shape as early as the 13^th c. New social groups came into being: poor town artisans, the town middle class, rich merchants, owners of workshops and money-lenders. Britain began to export woolen cloth produced by the manufactures. The new nobility who traded in wool, fused with the rich townspeople to form a new class, the bourgeoisie.

The changes in the economic and social conditions led to the strengthening of social ties between the various parts of the country. In the end of the 15^th c. England became a centralised state.

At the end of the Hundred Years’ War, when the warlike nobles were disappointed with their defeat in France, a civil war known as the Wars of the Roses broke out. The thirty-year contest for the possession of the crown ended in the establishment of a strong royal power under Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty.

Henry VIII (1509-1536) declared himself head of the English Church and dissolved the monasteries (the English Reformation). Both an absolute monarchy and an English nation were created.

The economic and political unification played a decisive role in the development of the English language. The victory of capitalism, consolidation of people into a nation made the formation of the national literary language possible.

Development of the English Literary Language

Until the early 17^th c. English was spoken only in the British Isles. In the 17^th c. it crossed the borders. With the first English settlers in America the language entered the New World. A first attempt to colonise America was made in 1584, but this brought about no result. In the 17^th c. colonising began again.

It was caused now by acute political struggle in England. The official Anglican church was persecuting the Puritans. Political and religious persecution made them seek a way out in emigration. In 1620 the famous ship The Mayflower reached North America (now the state of Massachusetts). This was the start of English colonies in America.

In England the political struggle led to civil war, which ended with a puritan victory and proclamation of a Commonwealth in 1649.

The language of the Commonwealth belongs to the Early Modern English period, which lasted till about 1660. The literary language of the time bears a strong imprint of puritan ideology. It is present in a famous Bible translation (1611), the King James’ Bible. The translators set the task of achieving a clear, simple and easily intelligible language. Poets and writers: Milton, John Bunyan.

The Restoration of the Stuarts under Charles II in 1660 reinstated the influence of nobility and the aristocratic language culture which were overthrown by the Revolution. Charles II and his court, returning from France, favoured French influence in all spheres of social life and language. Speech of Restoration comedies was full of French words and phrases.

At this very time a purist movement arose. In History of the Royal Society Thomas Sprat protested against the wide use of artificial phrases and metaphors. This expressed the view of a bourgeois democratic opposition to the nobility’s speech culture. Most new loan words were connected with the life of the nobility.

Since the mid-17^th c. a trend made itself felt against the entangled syntactic structures in favour of shorter and simpler syntactic formations: John Evelyn, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele.

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele (the publishers of the magazine The Spectator, a paper The Humble petition of Who and Which, jocular style) protested

1. against the growing use of the relative pronoun that: “W are descended of ancient families, and kept up our dignity and honour many years, till the jacksprat that supplanted us”.

2. against the wide use of colloquial abbreviations mob (< Lat. mobile), incog (incognito).

According to this new trend the language of the 16-17^th c. was wild and clumsy. Poet – Alexander Pope – edited Shakespeare’s works – failed to understand the forms in his texts.

Normalising tendencies. Grammars and dictionaries in the late 17^th –18^th c.

In the 17018^th c. a great number of grammarians and orthoepists appeared who set as their task the establishment of correct language forms.

1. Alexander Gill The English Word- law (1621)

2. Charles Butler English Grammar (1634)

3. John Wallis Grammar of the English Language (1653)

4. Christopher Cooper English Grammar (1685)

5. Jones Practical Phonographer (1701)

6. Willam Baker Rules for True Spelling and Writing (1724)

1. Gill - stuck to conservative views in the pronunciation, condemn new tendencies

2. Butler proposed a modernised spelling system

3. Wallis made objective observations of pronunciation

4. Cooper was aware of the difference between sounds and letters

5. Jones – available information about the pron-n

6. Baker – noted divergencies between pron-n and spelling

In the middle of the 18^th c. there appears a tendency to limit the freedom of phonetic and grammatical variants within the national languge. The influential statesman Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773) thought that the right to set the law in language should go to a narrow circle of educated people.

The idea of a strict norm in language was expressed by Samuel Johnson in his famous Dictionary (1755): he preferred the “regular and solemn” pronunciation to the “cursory and colloquial”. This view is most characteristic of the mid-18^th c.

The English Language outside Europe

18^th c.

1. India

2. Canada

3. Australia

19^th c.

1. New Zealand

20^th c.

1. South Africa

Lecture 19. New English Phonology and Lexicology.

Contents:

1. Development of the NE Phonology.

2. History of word-formation (15^th – 17^th c.).

3. Borrowings from classical and contemporary languages in NE.

Development of the NE Phonology

Sibilants and Affricates

the clusters sj, zj, tj, dj in unstressed position in French borrowings > ſ, g, tſ, dg. The stress shifted to the beginning of the words, the final syllables became unstressed, sequences of sounds fused into single consonants.

condicioun [condi’sju:n] > condition

plesure [ple’zju:r] > pleasure

soildier [soul’djer] > soldier

Stressed position: suit, mature, duty

A new phoneme appeared: g. The four sounds formed a well-balanced system of correlated pairs: ſ, g: tſ, dg.

Fricatives

In OE fricatives f / v, θ / đ, s / z were treated as positional variants or allophones: sonority depended on phonetic conditions: intervocal position – voiced. In ME and ENE these allophones became independent

The first pair of consonants to become phonemes - f/v: ME veyne / feine.