The Subject, aim and objectives of studying the History of the English Language

HISTORY OF LANGUAGE AS A LINGUISTIC DISCIPLINE

LECTURE 1

Every language has a history; and as in the rest of human culture, changes are constantly taking place in the course of the transmission of a language from one generation to another. Languages change in all their aspects, in their pronunciation, word forms, syntax, and word meanings. These changes, mostly gradual in their operation, become noticeable only cumulatively over the course of several generations. In studying a foreign language, English in our case, the student inevitably compares it to his native tongue and is often astonished to find great differences not only in the structure of the target language but also in the way ideas are expressed in it. There is no denying that English spelling is somewhat difficult for a Belarusian learner of English. This is because the written form of the English word is conventional rather than phonetic. Therefore, some phonetic phenomena cannot be explained from the modern point of view without going into the history of the language. When the Latin alphabet was first used in Britain, writing was phonetic. After the introduction of printing in the 15^th century, the written form of the word became fixed, whereas the sounds continued to change. This resulted in a growing discrepancy between letter and sound. Hence, such ‘difficult’ words as light, daughter, speak, great, book and many others where their pronunciation and spelling differ. Moreover, if you ask a little English boy or girl to write the word light (in the meaning of daylight) he or she would rather spell it as lite because they have not learned its spelling yet.On the other hand, modern spellings show how such words were pronounced in the past. For example, the word light sounded as [lix’t] which is easy to prove if you compare it with the Belarusian word лiхтар (something which produces light). As far as English vocabulary is concerned, it contains words which are similar to words found in other languages. For example, English – German (mother – Mutter, father – Vater, winter – Winter, hand – Hand, etc.); English - French (revolution – revolution, autumn – autumne, river – rivière, etc,); English –Russian (float – плот; флот); English –Belarusian (glebe – глеба, must – мусiць, etc.). Without going into the history of English, it is difficult to say whether these words are native or borrowings from the above mentioned languages. English grammar also presents some phenomena which a Belarusian learner of English will find misleading. For example, the irregular plural of nouns (man- men, foot –feet, mouse – mic e, etc), or the same form for both singular and plural of such words as sheep, deer, fish, or the fact that English modal verbs, unlike the other verbs, take no ending –s in the 3d person singular, and many other similar facts. All these things are traced back to a distant past and can be accounted for only by studying the history of the language. Another important aim of this course is of a more theoretical nature. Study of the history of any language is based on applying general principles of linguistics to the language in question. While tracing its evolution through time, students will be confronted with a number of theoretical questions connected with the language development in general and its aspects in particular. To find answers to these questions, students will have to rely on the theory previously studied in the course called Introduction to Linguistics. In this way ties will be established between general principles of linguistics and concrete linguistic facts, in other words, theoretical knowledge will find its application in practice. While studying the history of the English language we will inevitably have to deal with the history of the English nation considering the ‘traces’ it left in the language development. It goes without saying that a systematic study of the language’s development from the earliest times to the present day will enable the student to acquire a more profound understanding of modern English, its role in our world and perspectives of its future development

cumulatively- increasing gradually as more of smth is added or used target languag e the language that you are learning or translating into   conventional- snth that has been used for a long time and is considered the usual type   discrepancy – a difference between two things that should be the same   borrowing – a word or phrase, that has been copied from another language   account for – explain   in question – the things, people etc in question are the ones that are being discussed   inevitable – certain to happen and impossible to avoid

.

Methods and sources of studying language and its history

As is known, the science of scientific study of language as a system is called linguistics. This term was first used in the middle of the 19^th century to emphasize the difference between a new approach to the study of language that was then developing and the more traditional approach of philology. The philologist is concerned primarily with the historical development of languages as it is manifested in written texts and in the context of the associated literature and culture. The linguist, though he may be interested in written texts and in the development of languages through time, tends to give priority to spoken languages and to the problem of analyzing them as they operate at a given point of time. The field of linguistics may be divided in terms of three dichotomies: synchronic versus diachronic, theoretical versus applied, and microlinguistics versus macrolinguistics. A synchronic description of a language describes the language as it is at a given time; a diachronic description is concerned with the historical development of the language and the structural changes that have taken place in it. The goal of theoretical linguistics is the construction of a general theory of the structure of language or of a general theoretical framework for the description of languages; the aim of applied linguistics is the application of the findings and techniques of the scientific study of language to practical tasks, especially to the elaboration of improved methods of language teaching. The terms microlinguistics and macrolinguistics are not yet well established, and are used purely for convenience. The former refers to a narrower and the latter to a much broader view of the scope of linguistics. According to the microlinguistics view, languages should be analyzed for their own sake and without reference to their social function, to the manner in which they are acquired by children, to the psychological mechanism that underlie the production and reception of speech, to the literary and the aesthetic or communicative function of language, and so on. In contrast, macrolinguistics embraces all of these aspects of language. Various areas within macrolinguistics have been given terminological recognition: psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, dialectology, mathematical and computational linguistics, and stylistics. The study of language has a long history which began in pre-historic times in different cultures but linguistics as a science was established only in the 19^th century in Europe when accumulation of facts about the early stages of living languages called for theoretical interpretation of linguistic evolution.   The Comparative Method It is generally agreed that the most outstanding achievement of linguistic scholarship in the 19^th century was the development of comparative method which comprised a set of principles whereby languages could be systematically compared with respect to their sound systems, grammatical structure and vocabulary and shown to be ‘ genealogically’ related. As French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and the other Romance languages had evolved from Latin, so Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit as well as the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic languages and many other languages of Europe and Asia, had evolved from some earlier language, to which the name Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European, or the common parent language or the original language is now customarily applied. It had been known for centuries that all the Romance languages were descended from Latin and thus constituted one family. But the existence of the Indo-European family of languages and the nature of their genealogical relationship was first demonstrated by the 19^th -century comparative philologists. The main impetus for the development of comparative philology came toward the end of the 18^th century, when it was discovered that Sanskrit (Note 1), the classical Indian language, bore a number of striking resemblances to Greek and Latin. The English orientalist, Sir William Jones, though he was not the first to observe these resemblances, is generally given the credit for bringing them to the attention of the scholars and putting forward the hypothesis, in 1786, that all three languages must have ‘sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists’. The next important step came in 1822, when the German scholar Jacob Grimm, following the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask (whose work (1818), being written in Danish, was less accessible to most European scholars)) pointed out in the second edition of his comparative grammar of Germanic that there were a number of systematic correspondences between the sounds of Germanic and the sounds of Greek, Latin and Sanskrit in related words. Grimm noted, for example, that where Gothic (the oldest surviving Germanic language) had an f, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit frequently had a p. The table below illustrates this correspondence.

dichotomy -[daɪˈkɒtəmi] дихотомия the difference between several things or ideas that are completely opposite     synchronic- синхронический   diachronic- диахронический   applied- прикладной   microlinguistics микролингвистика   macrolinguistics макролингвистика   techniques- methods, means   elaboration- разработка     accumulate- gather and build up   call for- require   scholarship- study   genealogy- the study of the history of families genealogical evolve- develop   Proto-Indo-European – протоиндоевропей-ский, индоевропей- ский праязык descend- to have developed from something that existed in the past   comparative philologists- филологи-компаративисты orientalist- someone who studies the languages and culture of oriental countries   accessible- easy to obtain or use

Germanic	Non-Germanic	Germanic
Gothic	Sanskrit	Greek	Latin	Modern English
fotus	padas	podos	pedis	foot

Similar correspondences were also found for some other consonants. Grimm formulated these phenomena as a cyclical soundshift of consonants which got the status of a sound law known as Grimm’s Law. (Grimm’s Law will be dealt with in subsequent lectures.)   Neogrammarians In the work of the next 50 years the idea of sound change was made more precise, and in the 1870s, a group of scholars known collectively as the Junggrammatiker, young grammarians or Neogrammarians, (Note 2) put forward the thesis that all changes in the sound system of a language as it developed through time were subject to the operation of regular sound laws. At first this thesis was regarded as most controversial, because there seemed to be several irregularities in language change not accounted for by the sound laws, such as Grimm’s Law. In 1875, however, the Danish linguist Karl Verner explained the apparent exceptions to Grimm’s Law (Verner’s Law). Subsequently, many other important sound laws were discovered and formulated to account for other apparent exception and by the end of the 19^th century the hypothesis or thesis of the regularity of sound change had been generally accepted and become the cornerstone of the comparative method. Using the principle of regular sound change, scholars were able to reconstruct ‘ancestral’ common forms from which the later forms found in particular languages could be derived. By convention, such reconstructed forms are marked in the literature with an asterisk (*).   The 20^th century Structuralism Structuralism in linguistics is a general term to describe any one of several schools of 20th-century linguistics committed to the structuralist principle that a language is a self-contained relational structure, the elements of which derive their existence and their value from their distribution and oppositions in texts or discourse. This principle was first stated clearly, for linguistics, by the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). His structuralism can be summed up in 2 dichotomies: (1) langue versus parole and (2) form versus substance. By langue, best translated in its technical Saussurean sense as language system, is meant the totality of regularities and patterns of formation that underlie the utterances of a language; by parole, which can be translated as language behaviors, is meant the actual utterances themselves. Just as two performances of a piece of music given by different orchestras on different occasions will differ in variety of details and yet be identifiable as performances of the same piece, so two utterances may differ in different ways and yet be recognized as instances, in some sense, of the same utterance. What the two musical performances and the two utterances have in common is an identity of form, and this form, or structure, or pattern, is in principle independent of the substance, or ‘raw material’, upon which it is imposed. Structuralism in the European sense then refers to the view that there is an abstract relational structure that underlies and is to be distinguished from actual utterances – a system underlying actual behavior – and that this is the primary object of study for the linguist. Saussurean structuralism was further developed in somewhat different directions by the Prague school, most notably represented by Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy and Roman Jakobson, both Russian émigrés, the Copenhagen (or glossematic) (Note 3) school, centered around Louis Hejlmslev, John Rupert Firth and his followers, sometimes referred to as the London school. In the United States the term structuralism, or structural linguistics, has had much the same sense as it has had in Europe in relation to the work of Franz Boas (1858–1942) and Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and their followers. Nowadays, however, it is commonly used, in a narrower sense, to refer to the so-called post-Bloomfieldian school of language analysis that follows the methods of Leonard Bloomfield, developed after 1930. Phonology (the study of sound systems) and morphology (the study of word structure) are their primary fields of interest. Little work on semantics has been done by structural linguists because of their belief that the field is too difficult or elusive to describe.   The Prague school The most characteristic feature of the Prague school approach is its combination of structuralism with functionalism. The latter term (like structuralism) has been used in a variety of senses in linguistics. It can be understood as an appreciation of the diversity of functions performed by language and a theoretical recognition that the structure of languages is in large part determined by their characteristic functions, such as cognitive, expressive and conative or instrumental. The cognitive function of language refers to its employment for the transmission of factual information; by the expressive function is meant the indication of the mood or attitude of the speaker (or writer); and by the conative function of language is meant its use for influencing the person one is addressing or for bringing about some practical effect. A number of scholars working in the Prague tradition have suggested that these three functions correlate in many languages, at least partly, with the grammatical categories of mood and person. The Prague school is best known for its work on phonology(Note 4). Unlike the American phonologists, Trubetskoy and his followers did not consider the phoneme to be the minimal unit of analysis. Instead, they defined phonemes as sets of distinctive features. For example, in English /b/ differs from /p/ in the same way that /d/ differs from /t/ and /g/ from /k/. Just how they differ in terms of their articulation is a complex question. For simplicity, it may be said that there is just one feature, the presence of which distinguishes /b/, /d/ and /g/ from /p/, /t/ and /k/, and that this feature is voicing (vibration of the vocal cords). Similarly, the feature of labiality can be extracted from /p/ and /b/ by comparing them with /t/ and /d/, /k/ and /g/; the feature of nasality from /n/ and /m/ by comparing them with /t/ and /d/, and so on. Each phoneme then is composed of a number of articulatory features and is distinguished by the presence or absence of at least one feature from every other phoneme in the language. The Prague school is also known for its theory of markedness which was first developed in phonology but subsequently extended to morphology and syntax. When two phonemes are distinguished by the presence of absence of a single distinctive feature, one of them is said to be marked and the other unmarked for the feature in question. For example, /b/ is marked and /p/ is unmarked with respect to voicing. Similarly, in morphology, the regular English verb can be said to be marked for past tense (by the suffixation of – ed) but to be unmarked in the present (cf. ‘jumped’ versus ‘jump’). There is also a more abstract sense of markedness, which is independent of the presence or absence of an overt feature of affix. On the level of vocabulary, for example, the words ‘dog’ and ‘bitch’ provide examples of markedness of this kind. Whereas the use of the word ‘bitch’ is restricted to females of the species, ‘dog’ is applicable to both males and females. ‘Bitch’ is the marked and ‘dog’ is the unmarked term. The principle of markedness, understood in this more general or more abstract sense, is quite widely accepted by linguists of many different schools, and is applied at all levels of linguistic analysis. The most valuable contribution made by the post-war Prague school is considered to be the distinction of theme and rheme. By the theme of a sentence is meant that part that refers to what is already known or given in the context (sometimes called, by other scholars, the topic or psychological subject); by the rheme, the part that conveys new information (the comment or psychological predicate). It has been pointed out that in languages with a free word order (such as Russian or Czech or Latin), the theme tends to precede the rheme, regardless whether the theme or the rheme is the grammatical subject, and that this principle may still operate, in a more limited way, in languages like English, with a relatively fixed word order (cf. ‘That book I haven’t seen before’). But other devices can also be used to distinguish theme and rheme. The rheme may be stressed (‘John saw Mary’) or made the complement of the verb ‘to be’ in the main clause. (“It’s John who saw Mary”).

soundshift- смещение, сдвиг звуков Grimm’s Law- Закон Гримма Neogrammarians Младограмма-тики   сontroversial- causing a lot of disagreement, because many people have strong opinions about the subject being discussed irregularity- smththat doesn’t follow the usual pattern   hypothesis / haɪˈpɒθəsis/ international word   cornerstone- краеугольный камень   convention – custom   committed to smth – dedicated, loyal to smth   self-contained – independent, autonomous   discourse- дискурc   langue- language parole- speech referred to as- call (formal)   elusive- difficult to describe or understand   cognitive- когнитивный expressive- экспрессивный, эмоциональный conative- волевой instrumental - инструментальный, действенный   phonology – the study of the system of speech sounds in a language, or the system of sounds itself   voicing - озвончение   labial – губной   nasal – носовой, назальный theory of markedness – теория маркированности   marked - маркированный   unmarked немаркированный   overt – obvious, evident   theme - тема rheme - рема   complement – a word or phrase that follows a verb and describes the subject of the verb.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11