Історія англійської мови:

1.Historical periods and approaches to the chronological divisions in the history of English.

The historical development of any language is a continuous and uninterrupted process without sudden breaks or rapid transformation. Therefore any periodization imposed on language history by linguists with the precise dates might appear artificially, but we can’t do without it. So, it is with the history of the English language.

Old English (450-1100 AD)

The invading Germanic tribes spoke similar languages, which in Britain developed into what we now call Old English. Old English did not sound or look like English today. Native English speakers now would have great difficulty understanding Old English. Nevertheless, about half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots. The words be, strong and water, for example, derive from Old English.

Middle English (1100-1500)

In 1066 William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy (part of modern France), invaded and conquered England. The new conquerors (called the Normans) brought with them a kind of French, which became the language of the Royal Court, and the ruling and business classes. For a period there was a kind of linguistic class division, where the lower classes spoke English and the upper classes spoke French. In the 14th century English became dominant in Britain again, but with many French words added. This language is called Middle English.

Modern English

Early Modern English (1500-1800)

Hamlet's famous "To be, or not to be" lines, written in Early Modern English by Shakespeare. Towards the end of Middle English, a sudden and distinct change in pronunciation (the Great Vowel Shift) started, with vowels being pronounced shorter and shorter. From the 16th century the British had contact with many peoples from around the world. This meant that many new words and phrases entered the language. The invention of printing also meant that there was now a common language in print. Books became cheaper and more people learned to read. Spelling and grammar became fixed. In 1604 the first English dictionary was published.

Late Modern English (1800-Present)

The main difference between Early Modern English and Late Modern English is vocabulary. Late Modern English has many more words, arising from two principal factors: firstly, the Industrial Revolution and technology created a need for new words; secondly, the British Empire at its height covered one quarter of the earth's surface, and the English language adopted foreign words from many countries.

2.Old English dialects.

Old English Dialects A group of homogeneous west-germane dialects spoken in Britain from the 5th to the 11th century.

1) Northumbrian, spoken north of the river Humber; from the 7th century. During the Viking invasions of the 9th century, Northumbrian came under the influence of the languages of the Viking invaders. The earliest surviving Old English texts were written in Northumbrian. The Viking invasion forced the dialect to split in two: The southern Northumbrian dialect was heavily influenced by Norse. The northern Northumbrian dialect not only retained a lot of the Old English words, but was also a strong influence on the development of the English language in northern England, especially the dialects of modern North east England and Scotland.

2) Mercian, spoken in the midlands; had developed from Angles

The dialect was spoken from the border of East Anglia to the Offa's Dyke, bordering Wales.

3) Kentish, spoken in Kent (the southeastern part); developed from the speech of the Jutes and was from the 7th c. The dialect was spoken in what is now the modern-day county of Kent, southern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight by the Jutes.

4) West Saxon, spoken in the southwest. There were two stages of the West Saxon dialect: Early West Saxon was the language of King Alfred (849–899). By the 11th century, the language had evolved into Late West Saxon. Late West Saxon was the dialect that became the first "standardized" written English ("Winchester standard"). This dialect was spoken mostly in the south and west of England around the important monastery at Winchester, which was also the 'capital city' of the English kings. However, while other Old English dialects were still spoken in other parts of the country, it seems that all scribes wrote and copied manuscripts in this prestigious written form.

3.The Norman Conquest and its influence on the development of the English language.

The Norman conquest of England began on 28 September 1066 with the invasion of England by William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy over King Harold II of England.

The Norman Conquest was a great event in English history. It largely removed the native ruling class, replacing it with a foreign, French-speaking monarchy, aristocracy and clerical hierarchy. There was a transformation of the English language and the culture of England in a new area often referred to as Norman England.

Normans, who conquered England, were Vikings, men from the North. Some 150 before the conquest of England they came to a part of France, opposite England, a part which we now call Normandy.

Norman Conquest gave to England French kings and nobles. The Normans also brought with them the French language. After the Norman Conquest there were 3 languages in England.

1. Latin, the language of church and the language in which all learned men wrote and spoke; the kings wrote their laws in Latin for some time after the Norman Conquest.

2. French, the language which the kings and nobles spoke and which many people wrote. For almost three hundred years French was the official language of administration: it was the language of the king’s court, the church, the army and others. The intellectual life, literature and education were in the hands of French-speaking people.

3. English, language, which remained the language of the masses of the people. England never stopped being an English-speaking country. The bulk of the population spoke their own tongue and looked upon French as foreign and hostile.

Some men might know all these 3 languages; many knew 2; but most of the people knew only one. There were some people, who understood the French language though they couldn’t speak it. Rich people, the landowners, often knew French and Latin. But poor people understood only English.

After all that, came the general use of the English language. About 1350 English again became the language of law. But it was not quite the same as it was before the Conquest. The grammar remained, but many words came into it from the French language.

4. The effect of the Scandinavian Conquest.

English monastic culture was to be seriously disturbed because of developments in Scandinavia. In the 8th century the Scandinavians became expansionists and began raiding neighbouring coasts. Initially, this just consisted of marauding and plundering of places of wealth and they always returned back to home base. In time the Scandinavians became more adventurous and, with the efficient and sea-worth boats which they had, succeeded in making the crossing over the North Sea to Scotland. They, ‘Vikings’ plundered and killed indiscriminately there and elsewhere. They had occupied a vast territory north of the Thames in spite of resistance of the Anglo-Saxons.

In the 879 AD Wedmore peace was proclaimed and according to it, the whole territory occupied by the Scandinavians was to remain in their power. This was a change which was to have lasting consequences for the peoples of the British Isles because the invaders spoke the North Germanic languages. And the phonetic and grammatical structures of OE were close. Quite often mutual understanding and communication were possible without translation.

At that time OE was enriched by a great number of loan words borrowed from the Scandinavian languages. A number of geographical names in Modern English reflect Scandinavian components.

In grammar the pronoun of the 3d person ‘they’ was brought from the Scandinavian. In Scandinavian the infinitive could be preceded by preposition ‘at’.

During the OE period English was developing as a new language. OE left a great number of written records the majority of which are of a religious character.

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Лексикологія

1.The english word stock as a system.

Etymologically the vocabulary of the English language is far from being homogenous. It consists of two layers - the native stock of words and the borrowed stock of words. Numerically the borrowed stock of words is considerably larger than the native stock of words.

In fact native words comprise only 30% of the total number of words in the English vocabulary but the native words form the bulk of the most frequent words actually used in speech and writing. Besides, the native words have a wider range of lexical and grammatical valency, they are highly polysemantic and productive in forming word clusters and set expressions.

Borrowed words or loanwords are words taken from another language and modified according to the patterns of the receiving language.

In many cases a borrowed word especially one borrowed long ago is practically indistinguishable from a native word without a thorough etymological analysis. The number of the borrowings in the vocabulary of the language and the role played by them is determined by the historical development of the nation speaking the language.

The most effective way of borrowing is direct borrowing from another language as the result of the contacts with other nations. Though, a word may be also borrowed indirectly not from the source language but through another language.

When analyzing borrowed words one should distinguish between two terms - source of borrowing and origin of borrowing. The first term is applied to the language from which the word was immediately borrowed and the second - to the language to which the word may be ultimately traced. The closer the two interacting languages are in structure the easier it is for words of one language to penetrate into the other.

There are different approaches to classifying the borrowed stock of words

The borrowed stock of words may be classified according to the nature of the borrowing itself as borrowing proper, loans translation and semantic loans.

Loan translation or calque is a phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word translation.

Semantic loan is the borrowing of the meaning for a word already existing in the English language.

Latin loans are classified into the subgroups.

1. Early Latin loans. Those are the words which came into English language through the languages of the Anglo-Saxon tribes. The tribes had been in contact with Roman civilization and had adopted many Latin words denoting objects belonging to that civilization long before the invasion of the Angles, Saxons and Judes into Britain (e.g., cup, kitchen, mill, wine, port).

2. Later Latin borrowings. To this group belong the words which penetrated into English language in the sixth and seventh centuries, when the English people were converted to Christianity (e.g., priest, bishop, nun, and candle).

3. The third period of the Latin borrowings includes words which came into English due to two historical events: the Norman Conquest and the Renaissance. Some came to English language through French but some were borrowed directly from Latin (e.g., major, minor, intelligent, permanent).

4. The latest layer of Latin words. The words of this period are mainly abstract and scientific words (e.g., nylon, molecular, vaccine, phenomenon, and vacuum).

The tendency of the English language to borrow extensively can be traced during the centuries. Thus, one can confidently claim that borrowing is one of the most productive sources of enrichment of the English vocabulary.

2.Morphological structure of the English word

Word is the principal and basic unit of the language system, the largest on the morphologic and the smallest on the syntactic plane of linguistic analysis.

English words fall into 4 main structural types:

1) simple words (root words) which have only root morpheme in their structure (man, sky, go, look, bright);

2) derived words (affixational derivatives) which consist of a root and one or more affixes (joyful, disagreement, reproductive, indifference);

3) compound words (compounds) in which two or more stems are combined into a lexical unit (classroom, whitewash, forget-me-not);

4) derivational compounds in which phrase components are joined together by means of compounding and affixation (long-legged, black-eyed, strong-willed).

A great many words can consist of smaller meaningful structural units which are called morphemes. From the semantic point of view all morphemes are divided into 2 classes:

• Root m.(roots)

• Affixational m(affixes)

The root is the lexical nucleus of a word. It’s common to a set of words that make up a lex word-cluster: e.g. act in act, actor, active, action, inactive. There exist many roots which coincide with root-words, e.g. man, son, desk, red.

The affixes fall into prefixes which precede the root (unhappy, rewrite, discover) and suffixes which follow the root (friendship, worker, realize).

The part of word which remains unchanged in all the forms of its paradigm is called a stem, e.g. girl- in girls, girl’s, girls’.

Stems that coincide with roots are known as simple stems ( boy’s, trees, reads). Stems that contain one or more affixes are derived stems (governments, teacher’s).

Binary stems comprising two simple or derived stems are called compound stems (machine-gunner’s, film-star)

From the structural point of view morphemes fall into 3 types:

• Free m (can stand free as a word (friendly, friendship)

• Bound m (occur only as constituent parts of words (freedom, greatly, poetic, receive)

• Semi-bound m (can function both as affixes and as free m-mes (words) – well-known, half-baked

Also we can meet combining forms or bound root m-s of Greek and Latin origin which have a definite lex meaning though are not used as autonomous words (tele- ‘far’, -scope ‘seeing’, -graph, -‘writing’

Positional variants of a morpheme are known as allomorphs. Thus the prefix in (intransitive) can be represented by allomorph il-( illegal), im-(immortal), ir- (irregular)

Several morphemes are polysemic, i.e. a certain form, being a component of words which belong to the same part of speech, can express diff meanings. Homonymic morphemes have the same form and diff meanings being components of words that belong to diff pans of speech.

3. Word formation in English

Word-formation is a process of creating new words from the material available in the word-stock according to certain structural and semantic patterns specific for the given language.

Various types of w-f in ME possess diff degrees of productivity. Some of them are highly- productive (affixation, conversion and similar phenomena substantivation, compounding, shortening, forming phrasal verbs) other are semi-productive (back-formation, blending, reduplication, lexicalization of the plural of nouns, sound-imitation) and non-productive (sound interchange, change of stress)

1. Affixation is a w-formative process in which words are created be adding word-building affixes to stems. Aff includes prefixation and suffixation.

From the etymological point of view affixes are classified according to their origin into native (-er, -nese, - ing, un-, mis-) and borrowed (-tion, - ment, -ance, -re-, sub-). Affixes can also be productive (-able, -y, - ize, -ness) and non-productive (-th, -hood, -en, -ous)

2. Compounding (composition). Compounds are words produced by combining two or more stems which occur in the lang as free forms. They may be classified according diff criteria:

• According to the part of speech to which they belong

• Acc to the means of composition used to link their ICs together

• Acc to the structure of their Ics

• Acc to their semantic characteristics

Most compounds in ME belong to nouns and adj. Compound verbs are less frequent, they are often made through conversion.

3. Substantivation – is the process in which adj-s (or participles) acquire the paradigm and syntactic function of nouns. S can be: partial and complete.

Completely sub-d adj have the full paradigm of a noun (i.e. sing and plural case forms) e.g an official, the official, officials, the officials

In the case of partial sub-ion adj-s do not acquire the full paradigm of a noun.

4. Adjectevization – premodification of nouns by nouns is highly frequent in ME. Noun-adjuncts shouldn’t be considered as adjectives produced by means of conversion. Nevertheless, some nouns may undergo the process of adje-ion and function as attributes with idiomatic meanings (coffe-table(n.)-coffe-table(adj)

5. Phrasal nouns – are built from phrasal verbs as a result of combination effect of compounding, conversion, and change of stress. They consist of Ics identical to those of the corresponding phrasal verbs, but obtain, as a rule, the single-stress pattern and either solid or hyphenated spelling (to break down- a breakdown(a break-down)

6. Shortening- exist 2 main ways of shor-g: contraction(clipping) and abbreviation (initial shortening)

Contraction. One should distinguish between 4 types of contraction:

• Final clipping (apocope)-omission of the final part of the word (doc-doctor, mag-magazine)

• Initial cl (apheresis)- omission of the fore part of the word (phone-telephone, story-history)

• Medial cl (syncope)- omission of the middle part(maths-mathematics, fancy-fantasy)

• Mixed cl – where the four and the final part of the word are clipped (tec-detective, fridge-refrigerator)

7. Abbreviation (initial shortening) are words produced by shortening the Ics of phrasal terms up to their initial letters. Abb subdivided into 5 gh:

1. Acronyms (nato= north atlantic treaty organiz)

2. Alphabetic abbreviations (USA= united…, BBC= the british broadcasting corporation)

3. Compound abb (A-bomb=atomic bomb)

4. Craphic abb( Mr= Mister, Co=company)

5. Latin abb (a.m.= before midday)

8. Back-formation (reversion) – is the derivation of new words (mostly verbs) by means of subtracting a suffix or other element resembling it ( butle-butler, greed-greedy)

9. Blending is the formation of new lex units be means of merging fragments of words into one new word, or combining the elements of one word with notional w( smog= smoke+fog)

10. Conversion – the formation of new words by converting words of one class to another class. The most productive are taking place between noun and verb.

11. Sound interchange – the way of word building when some sounds are changed to form a new words. The result of Ancient Ablaut and Umlaut (life – to live).

4.Lexical meaning and semantic structure of the English word.

Lexical meaning reflects the concept expressed by the given word. The interrelation between the structural pattern of the word and its lex meaning is called motivation. There are 3 types of motivation: morphological, phonetical and semantic.

One should distinguish 3 main types of the lex meaning of the w:

1. Nominative m-direct meaning of the w, immediately referring to objects in extralinguistic reality. The Nom m includes denotational and connotational components. Denotation is the expression of the direct meaning proper of the w without any emotive evaluation or stylistic colouring (father, friend, girl, dog). Connotation is the supplementary expressive meaning presented either by emotive charge(doggy, worship)

2. Syntactically conditioned meaning which manifests itself in diff colligations- ask smb-ask smb about-ask for smb

3. Phraseologigally bound meaning which is idiomatic and manifests itself only in certain phraseological units (catch a cold, tall story)

There are main semantic structures of words: monosemy, polysemy and semantic diffusion.

• Monosemy- is the existence within one word of onle 1 meaning. Monosem-c words are comparatively few in number, mostly scientific terms (radar, biochemistry)

• Polysemy – is the existence within 1 word of several connected meanings. One of them is the main(central) meaning the rest are associated(marginal) meanings. (Face(n.) 1. The front of the head/the main m-g/ 2. The main or front surface 3. Appearance / associated m-g/

• Sem diffusion is observed in ws with a very wide conceptual volume. Such word denote one concept but can name large number of objects(referents). E.g. Thing – denote “any object of our thoughts” but it can also denote- facts, affairs, problems.

Semantic changes in denotation my lead to:

1. The extension of meaning (generalization) of meaning ( barn- a place for storing barely→a covered building for storing grain

2. The narrowing of meaning (specialixation) (voyage –any trip or journey→a journey by sea or water)

Sem changes in connotation may result:

1. The pejorative of meaning (degradation) (knave-“a boy, a male servant”→a “tricky rascal”

2. The ameliorative development of m-g (elevation) (fame-“common talk, rumour”→”reputation, esp for good)

Synonyms- are words belonging to the same part of speech, differing in sound form, and possessing one or more identical or nearly identical (similar) denotational meaning. 2 types of syn:

1. Ideograohic syn which differs in shades of meaning (to shake0to tremble-to shiver-to quake)

2. Stylisctic syn which differs in stylistic characteristics (father-dad-parent-papa)

Euphemisms – more “decent” synonymic substitutes used instead of indecent, impolite or too direct words. They may have various causes: superstition( devil- deuce) social and moral taboos (to copulate – to make love, make it), the need to express smth in a more delicate, softened way ( to die- to decease, drunk- mellow)

Antonyms- words that have directly opposite meanings. They fall into 2 groups:

- Root ant (those which are of diff roots) – long-short, quickly-slowly

- Affixal ant (in which special affixes or their absence express semantic opposition) hopeful-hopeless, happy-unhappy.

5.English phraseology.

Phraseology is a branch of lexicology studying phraseological units (set expressions, praseologisms, or idioms). Phraseological units are stable word-groups with partially or fully transferred meanings.

Phraseological units differ from free word-groups semantically and structurally:

1) they convey a single concept and their meaning is idiomatic. 2) they are characterized by structural invariability. 3) they are not created in speech but used as ready-made units. Unlike a word, a phraseological unit can be divided into separately structured elements and transformed syntactically.

In the classification proposed by Vinogradov phraseological units are classified according to the semantic principle, i.e. the relationship between the meaning of the whole unit and the meaning of its components. Three groups are distinguished:

1. Phraseological fusions The meaning of the whole is not deduced from the meanings of the components: to kiss the hare’s foot (опаздывать).

2. Phraseological units are motivated through the image expressed in the whole construction, they are transparent: to dance on a tight rope.

3. Phraseological combinations are motivated; one of their components is used in its direct meaning while the other can be used figuratively: to get in touch with.

Prof. Smirnitsky classifies phraseological units according to the functional principle. Phraseological units are neutral, non-metaphorical when compared to idioms: get up, fall asleep. Idioms are metaphoric, stylistically coloured: to take the bull by the horns. Structurally Smirnitsky distinguishes one-member and many-member phraseological units, depending on the number of notional words: against the grain (не по душе)(1member).

According to their origin phraseological units are divided into native and borrowed.

Native phraseological units are connected with British realia, traditions, history. To native phraseological units also belong familiar quotations from works of English literature. A lot of them were borrowed from works by Shakespeare: a fool’s paradise (“Romeo and Juliet”).

Borrowed phraseological units come from several sources. A number of units were borrowed from the Bible and were fully assimilated: the root of all evil, a woolf in sheep’s clothing. A great amount of units were taken from ancient mythology and literature: the apple of discord.

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