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Lecture 14

Varients and Dialects of the English Language

I.Regional Variants of the English National Language

There are two types of language territorial varieties: variants and dialects. Regional variants of standard language are used in large areas as means of orral and written communication: British, American, Australian and Canadian English. Dialects are varieties of non-standard language used in small localities for oral communication. The main variants of the English language are British and American. British, American, Australian and Canadian English cannot be regarded as different languages as they have essentially the same vocabulary, phonetic and grammar systems. They also cannot be referred to local dialects: they serve all spheres of verbal communicationand have dialectal differences of their own.

Each regional variant has its phonetic, grammatical and lexical peculiarities. Phonetic differencies include articulatory-acoustic characteristics and use of some phonemes, peculiar rhythm and intonation. Grammatical differences consist in the preference of this or that grammatical category or form: the preference of Past Indefinite to Present Perfect in American English, the formation of the Future Simple with the auxiliary “will“ for all persons in American English, lexical peculiarities are not very numerous. These are mainly divergencies in the semantic structure of words and their usage.

II.Origin of the Regional Variants

American English begins its history at the beginning of the 17th century when first English-speaking settlers began to settle on the Atlantic coast of the American continent. The language which they brought from England was the language spoken in England during the reign of Elizabeth I.

The first settlers took some of the names for local places, animals, plants, customs from languages spoken by the local population – Indians: chipmuck (an American sqiurrel), squaw (an Indian woman). Besides Englishmen, settlers from France, Spain and other countries came to America. Therefore, some words were borrowed from their languages: bureau, depot, pumpkin (French), bonanza, cockroach, lasso (Spanish). Such words as boss, dope, sleigh were borrowed from Dutch.

The second period of American English history begins in the 19th century. Immigrants continued to come from Europe to America. Italians brought with them a style of cooking which brought with them a style of cooking which became widely spread and such words as pizza, spaghetti came into English. There were words borrowed from German: hamburger, noodle, schnitzel.

During the second period of American English history there appeared quite a number of words and word-groups which were formed in the language due to the new political system, liberation of America from the British colonialism, its independence. the following lexical units appeared due to these events: The United States of America, assembly, Senate, senator, President, Vice-President.

III.Differences between British and American English

There are some differences between British and American English in their

usage:

1.Differences in the usage of prepositions: such as prepositions with dates, days of the week. British English (BE) requires on (I start my holiday on Friday). In American English (AE) there is no preposition (I start my vacation Friday). Compare also a quarter to five (BE) and a quarter of five b(AE), in the street (BE) and on the street (AE).

2.There are also differences in vocabulary.

a)There are units of vocabulary which are different while denoting the same notions: BE trousers – AE pants; in BE pants are трусы which in AE is shorts. While in BE shorts are outwear.

b)There are some differences in names of places: passage (BE) – hall (AE), pillar box (BE) – mail-box (AE), zebra crossing (BE) – Pxing (AE).

c)Some names of useful objects are also different: rubber (BE) – eraser (AE), parcel (BE) – package (AE), tap (BE) – faucet (AE).

d)Some words connected with food are different: tin (BE) - can (AE), sweet (BE) – dessert (AE). chips (BE) – french fries (AE).

e)Some words denoting personal items have different names: tights (BE) – pantyhose (AE), turn-ups (BE) – cuffs (AE), waistcoat (BE) – vest (AE).

f)Some words denoting people are also different: barrister (BE) – lawyer (AE), shop assistant (BE) – shopperson (AE), staff (university) (BE) – faculty (AE).

g)If we speak about cars there are also some differences: boot (BE) – trunk (AE), a car (BE) – an auto (AE), to hire a car (BE) – to rent a car (AE).

h)Differences in the organization of education lead to different terms: BE public school – a private school, AE public school – a free local

authority school; BE secondary school is AE high school.

3.Differences in spelling. There are some peculiarities typical of American English:

a)the deletion of the letter u in words ending in our: honor, favor;

b)the deletion of the second consonant in words with double consonants: traveler, wagon;

c)the replacement of re by er in words of French origin: theater, center;

d)the deletion of unpronounced endings in words of Romanic origin: catalog, program;

e)the replacement of ce by se in words of Romanic origin: defense, offense;

f)the deletion of unpronounced endings in native words: tho, thro.

4. Differences in pronunciation. In AE we have r-coloured fully articulated vowels in the combinations: ar, er, ir, or, ur, our etc. In BE the sound [o] corresponds to the AE [Λ], e.g. not. In BE before fricatives and combinations of consonants with fricatives a is pronounced as [a:] in AE, it is pronounced [ǽ]: class [kl ǽs], fast [fǽst]. There are some differences in the position of the stress: BE add`ress – AE `address, BE re`cess – AE `recess.

IV. Local Dialects on the British Isles

There are six groups of English local dialects: Lowland (Scottish), Northern, Western; Midland, Eastern, Southern. They are used in oral speech by local population. Only the Scottish dialect has its own literature (R. Burns).

One of the best known dialects of British English is the dialect of London - Cockney. There are some peculiarities of it: interchange of [v] and [w] – wery vell; interchange of [h] and [´] - ´eart for heart.

As compared with the national literary vocabulary dialectal vocabularies include a limited number of words. They are mainly names for local customs, social life, natural conditions and farming: laird “landed proprietor, kirk “church“. Many dialectisms are emotionally coloured: Scot. bonny, daffy. National words may have a different meaning in dialects: Scot. call (to drive), short (rude). Some affixes are dialectal. The Irish diminutive suffix –een can be added even to English stems: girleen, squireen. Besides, dialectal vocabularies do not include scientific or technical terms.

V.Local Dialects in the USA

There exist a number of local dialects which are divided into three major groups: Northern, Southern and Midland (North Midland and South Midland).

It should be mentioned that the American English is practically uniform all over the country, because of the conctant transfer of people from one part of the country to the other. However, some peculiarities in New York dialect can be pointed out, e.g. there is no distinction between [ǽ] and [a:] in such words as ask, dance, sand, bad, both phonemes are possible. The combinations ir and ear in the words bird, girl, learn is pronounced as [oi]. In the words duty, tune [j] is not pronounced [´du:ti], [tu:n].

Lecture 15

Lexicography

I.The History of Compiling Dictionaries for English

The theory and practice of compiling dictionaries is called lexicography. The history of compiling dictionaries for English comes as far back as the Old English period, where we can find glosses of religious books (interlinear translations from Latin into English). Regular bilingual dictionaries began to appear in the 15th century (Anglo-Latin, Anglo-French, Anglo-German).

The first unilingual dictionary explaining difficult words appeared in 1604, the author was Robert Cawdry, a schoolmaster.

In 1775 an English scientist Samuel Johnson compiled a famous explanatory dictionary. Every word in his dictionary was illustrated by examples from English literature, the meanings of words were clear from the contexts in which they were used.

In 1884 the first volume of a dictionary including all the words existing in the language was published. It contained words beginning with A and B. The last volume was published in 1928. The dictionary was called NED (New English Dictionary) and contained 12 volumes.

In 1933 the dictionary was republished under the title The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), because the work on the dictionary was conducted at Oxford. The dictionary contained 13 volumes.

The American lexicography began to develop much later, at the end of the 18th century. The most famous American English dictionary was compiled by Noah Webster. He was an active statesman and public man and he published his first dictionary in 1806.

II.Classification of Dictionaries

All dictionaries are divided into linguistic and encyclopaedic dictionaries. Encyclopaedic dictionaries describe different objects, phenomena, people and give some information about them. Linguistic dictionaries describe vocabulary units, their semantic structure , their origin, their usage. Words are usually given in the alphabetical order.

Linguistic dictionaries are divided into general and specialized dictionaries. General dictionaries include explanatory and translation dictionaries. Specialized dictionaries include dictionaries of synonyms, antonyms, collocations, wordfrequency, neologisms, slang, pronouncing, etymological, phraseological and others.

All types of dictionaries can be unilingual if the explanation is given in the same language, bilingual if the explanation is given in another language and also they can be polylingual. There are a lot of explanatory dictionaries: NED (New English Dictionary), SOD (Shorter Oxford Dictionary), COD (Concise Oxford Dictionary). In explanatory dictionaries the entry consists of the spelling, transcription, grammatical forms, meanings, examples, phraseology.

Translation dictionaries give words and their equivalents in the other language. There are English-Russian dictionaries by I.R. Galperin (БАРС - Большой Англо-русский Словарь) consisting of two volumes, by Y. Apresyan (three volumes) and others.

Specialized dictionaries of synonyms are also widely used. There are unilingual dictionaries: A Dictionary of English Synonyms and Synonymous Expressions by R. Soule, Webster‘s Dictionary of Synonyms. The best known bilingual dictionary is English Synonyms compiled by Y. Apresyan.

Phraseological dictionaries describe idioms and colloquial phrases, proverbs. Some of them have examples from literature. The most famous bilingual dictionary of phraseology was compiled by A.V. Koonin. It consists of one volume and contains a lot of data.

Etymological dictionaries trace present-day words to the oldest forms of these words and forms of these words in other languages. One of the best etymological dictionaries was compiled by W. Skeat.

Pronouncing dictionaries record only pronunciation. The most famous is D. Jones‘s Pronouncing Dictionary.

Dictionaries of neologisms are : a four-volume Supplement to NED by Burchfield, Beyond the Dictionary by Brian Locket, Bloomsary Dictionary of New Words and others.

Lecture 16

Methods and Procedures of Lexicological Analysis

I.Stages of Scientific Research

The process of scientific research consists of the following stages: observation, classification, generalization and verification. Observation is the collection of data. Classification is the orderly arrangement of these data. Generalization is the formulation of a hypothesis, rule or law. Verification seeks the proof for the generalization.

Various methods of lexicological research are used for classification, generalization and verification.: contrastive analysis, statistical methods of analysis, Immediate Constituents analysis, distributional analysis, transformational analysis, componental analysis.

II.Contrastive Analysis

Contrastive analysis is a detailed comparison of the structure of a native and a target language. It is the basis of teaching foreign languages: it helps to forsee and prevent recurrent mistakes caused by the interference of the learner‘s mother tongue.

Contrastive analysis reveals sameness and difference in the lexical meaning and semantic structure of correlated words. Thus, English kinship terms do not always differentiate between male and female: cousin – двоюродный брат, двоюродная сестра. The semantic structures of correlated polysemantic words do not coincide, e.g. in English zhe word head is used to denote the head of a person, bed or match, whereas in Russian different words have to be used: голова человека, изголовье кровати, сторона монеты. The number and meaning in the correlated sets differ: pitiful – жалкий, жалостливый – pitiful. Correlated words also differ in their valency: new and новый are correlated only in some collocations: новое платье – a new dress; others have to be specially learnt by Russian students: new potatoes - молодая картошка, new bread - свежий хлеб.

III.Statistical Methods of Analysis

Statistical linguistics deals with the quantitative study of language phenomena. Its results can be used for verification.

Statistical methods are applied in the analysis of different structural types of words, affixes and the vocabularies of great writers. They also help to select the most frequent items for teaching purposes. Statistical regularities can be observed

only if the phenomena are numerous and their occurrence frequent, e.g. it was found that about 1,300 – 1,500 most frequent words make up 85% of the text.

Statistical methods of analysis have been also applied to various theoretical problems of meaning, e.g. G.K. Zipf discovered that the number of the word‘s meanings is equal to the square root of its relative frequency.

Statistical approach is quantitative, while most linguistic problems are qualitative. We should Know what to count. Even if we just want to count the number of lexical units, we have to define what a lexical unit is – whether we must count the following as one or more units: work n – work v; by chance; at large, etc.

IV. Immediate Constituent Analysis

Immediate Constituents analysis (IC) is used to study the structure and lexical syntagmas. Sentences or word-groups are segmented into hierarchally arranged sets of binary constructions (ICs): a black dress in severe style – a black dress/in severe style. Successive segmentation results in Ultimate Constituents (UCs) – two-facet units that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units: a/black/dress/in/severe/ style. Immediate Constituents analysis depends on the meaning of the whole complex: fat major‘s wife – fat major‘s/wife – fat/major‘s wife.

Ics also represent the word‘s derivational structure: denationalize v – de- + nationalize, snow-covered – snow + covered; blue-eyed – blue + eye + -ed. Ucs show the word‘s morphemic structure: de/nat/ion/al/ize; snow/cover/ed; blue/eye/ed.

V.Distributional Analysis

Distribution is the position which linguistic units may occupy in the flow of speech, or the co-occurrence of units of the same level.

Distributional anlysis helps to describe the word’s meaning. the word has different meanings in different patterns: to treat smb well (treat + N + Adv) – to behave towards; to treat smb to ice-cream (treat + N + to + N) – to supply with sth at one’s own expence.

The interdependence of distribution and meaning is also observed at the level of word-groups: water tap – tap water. A distributional pattern as such has its own meaning: to coax smb into accepting the suggestion – make smb do smth by means of smth. The pattern retains this meaning no matter what verb is used in the structure V + N + into + V-ing: to coax/talk/kiss/flatter/ beat smb into doing smth.

Productivity depends on the word’s distributional meaning. We can make up and understand any nonce-word whose pattern is familiar to the speaker and the hearer: smiler, kissable.

VI. Transformational Analysis

Transformational analysis consists in repatterning identical distributional patterns in order to discover difference or sameness of their meaning. It is used to investigate polysemantic patterns, e.g. compounds which have the same pattern (n + n) may have different lexical meanings. This is shown by transformational procedure: dogfight – a fight between dogs; dogcart – a cart drawn by dogs.

Transformational analysis is a kind of intraligual translation, a kind of paraphrasing: his work is excellent – his excellent work – the excellence of his work

– he works excellently.

VII. Componental Analysis

In Componental analysis linguists proceed from the assumption that the smallest units of meaning are sememes (or semes) and that sememes and lexemes (or lexical items) are usually not in one-to-one but in one-to-many correspondence.

For example, in the lexical item woman several components of meaning or sememes may be singled out and namely: human, female, adult.

The analysis of the word girl would also yield the sememes human and female, but instead of the sememe adult we shall find the sememe young distinguishing the meaning of the word woman from that of girl.

Literature

1.Antrushina G.B. English Lexicology. M., 2006.

2.Arnold I.V. The English Word. M., 1986.

3.Ginzburg R.S. et al. A Course in Modern English Lexicology. M., 1979.

4.Dubenets E.M. Modern English Lexicology. M. – S.-P., 2004.