English Language Grammar

GENERAL BOOKS ON LANGUAGE
SECTION 1
Introductory books dealing with the grammar of English and Linguistics in general are very numerous. However, they vary enormously in the quality of their introductory style, ranging from the over-simple to the quite technical. They also suffer from the vagaries of change in theoretical fashion. Perhaps the most useful (and certainly the most accessible) general introduction for both teacher and student among the following is Crystals The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Category A Aitchison, J, The Articulate Mammal, London: Hutchinson, 1983 Aitchison, J, Teach Yourself Linguistics, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992 Crystal, D, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 Crystal, D, The English Language, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988 Graddol, D J; Cheshire, J and Swann J, Describing Language, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994 Leech, G; Deuchar, M and Hoogenraas, R, English Grammar for Today, London: Macmillan, 1982 McArthur, T (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 McCrum, R; Cran, W and MacNeil, R, The Story of English, London: Faber & Faber, 1986 Quirk, R and Stein, G, English in Use, London: Longman, 1990 Trask, R L, Language: The Basics, London: Routledge, 1995 Traugott, E C and Pratt, M L, Linguistics for Students of Literature, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980 Wardhaugh, R, Investigating Language, Oxford: Blackwell, 1983 Yule, G, The Study of Language , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 Category B Akmajian, A; Demers, R A and Harnish, R A, Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979 Bolton, W F, A Living Language: the History and Structure of English , New York: Random House, 1982
ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION
GENERAL BOOKS ON LANGUAGE
Burchfield, R, The English Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985 Crystal, D, An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Languages, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 Lyons, J, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, London: Cambridge University Press, 1968 Lyons, J, Language, Meaning and Context, London: Fontana, 1981 Palmer, F, Grammar, London: Pelican, 1976 Pinker, Stephen, The Language Instinct, London: Penguin, 1994. This is a very readable introduction to the study of language and its relationship to the human mind and its workings. Robins, R H, General Linguistics: an Introductory Survey, London: Longman, 1989 Reference works offering alphabetical lists of linguistic terms and concepts with definitions Finch, G, Linguistic Terms and Concepts, London: Macmillan, 2000 Hurford, J R, Grammar: A Students Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 Todd, L and Hancock, I, International English Usage, London: Routledge, 1986
THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING
SECTION 2
The syntax of Modern English

Native speakers of English are aware that meaningful and well structured sentences are not formed merely by stringing together random sequences of words, even if these words themselves have a correct structure and are fully meaningful in their own right. For example, a string of words such as young the boy man hit old the is clearly ungrammatical despite the fact that all the individual words have a full meaning in the language. On the other hand, the speaker immediately recognises the grammaticality of the young boy hit the old man. Not only that, however, since the speaker also intuitively recognises that certain of the words go together and that separate sequences of words share a common structure. For example, both the young boy and the old man are identifiable units, not least because one can replace the other in the sentence: the old man hit the young boy. Again, although it is not quite so ungrammatical, a sentence like the young boy the old man hit goes against another intuition speakers have about English sentence structure. This intuition suggests that sentences involving an agent, or a do-er here the young boy and an activity in this case hitting should show the activator word placed immediately before the word denoting the activity. Indeed, the object affected by the activity here the old man is often felt best placed immediately following the activity-indicating word. In this way, we tend to get actor > activity > affected sequences. However, it is perhaps possible to go even further and suggest that the totality of the activity in which the boy is involved is not just the hitting part, but hitting the old man. Thus the structure of the sentence is perceived as being like [the young boy[hit the old man]] rather than [[the young boy][hit][the old man]], alternatives represented in a tree form thus:
The young boy
hit
the old man
The young boy
hit
the old man
In other words, under the latter interpretation, the sentence can be seen as containing two major components or constituents. Each of these components contains a head word (the word which it is essential for the component to have, and without which it is not that component). In the case of the young boy, that head word is boy the noun a type of word which can be modified or described and characterised by other components like young an adjective and the a definite article . In the same way, the constituent hit the old man has as its characterising head the word hit a verb although notice that this constituent also contains within it yet another structure the old man. These major constituents are named after their head components: thus the young boy is a noun phrase or noun constituent, while hit the old man is a verb phrase or verb constituent. Notice too how the noun phrases themselves have an internal structure such that the young boy can be characterised as:
the
young
boy
In this way, the entire sentence: the young boy hit the old man can be said to have a structure like:
sentence
VP NP NP Nominal VERB DA ADJ NOUN DA ADJ NOUN Nominal
the
young
boy
hit
the
old
man
Nominal represents the structure embracing the adjective + noun grouping.
Some definitions
Noun: a word which denotes individual objects or classes of objects; for example, individual names: John, Mary, Henry and Peter; individual objects: house, tree, car; or abstract concepts such as fear, grief , architecture, history, art. Nouns can co-occur in phrases with definite articles and adjectives and they can act as subjects and objects to verbs. Adjective: a word used to qualify, modify or describe nouns. For instance the characteristics of a noun like stick are modified, amplified, characterised by adjectival words such as big and new in phrases like: a big stick, a bigger stick, a new stick and such like. Most often such describer words are placed before the noun they affect, but very occasionally we find them in a noun-following position: The ghost of Christmas past. Adjectival words are also regularly to be found in noun+be constructions: John is happy, the road is wide.
Definite article: the word the used to refer to and specify particular objects as against a general set of objects: thus the cat as against all cats. The word used to refer to objects which are not closely specified or even known to the speaker is the indefinite article a, as in I would like a new car. Contrast this with a specifying word, or demonstrative, like this in I would like this new car where both speaker and hearer know precisely which car is being referred to. At the same time, demonstrative words like this and that can be used to signal the physical closeness to the speaker in space (or time) of the modified noun: this book the one near me, versus that book the one farther away from me over there. Preposition: a word, as its name suggests, positioned before (preposed to) a Noun Phrase, often indicating semantic functions like agency (John was kissed by Mary), instrumentality (John cut the loaf with a knife) or spatial/temporal location: John met Mary in the park at four oclock). The combination of a preposition with a Noun Phrase is called a prepositional phrase. Verb: a word which describes an activity, a process or a state; thus words like kick, buy, exist, believe. The verb is the central element in the sentence and is usually used as the part of the sentence where the time/ tense of the action is marked: I like/I liked Paris. Adverb : adverbs can have several functions in the sentence: they can modify all of the sentence, as in Yesterday John saw Bill; they can modify the verb itself: John happily gave Helen the present or they can modify other adverbs or adjectives: John ran very slowly This book is extremely rare. Case and Function: A word on subjects and objects. While it is traditional to see a Noun Phrase like the boy in the sentence the boy kissed the girl as that sentences subject, and the Noun Phrase the girl as the object, it is important to distinguish what are essentially structural definitions from those which are functionally or semantically based. For instance, although the boy can be viewed as the agent or instigator of the activity of kissing and the girl the object or recipient of the same, such a functional description does not apply to structurally defined subjects and objects in a sentence like the table moved. While the table occurs in a structural position which would perhaps suggest it is the sentences subject, it is clear that the sentence means something like somebody moved the table and that the table, despite its position before the verb, is in fact the object of the item affected by the activity of the verb move. Again, in a sentence like
Bill opened the box with a key, Bill is the agent (and structural subject), box the affected and structural object, while the with in the prepositional phrase with a key denotes the instrumental case . However, this sentence can also be expressed as A key opened the box where the instrumental function has a subject structural position. Again, The box was opened with a key by Bill, shows the agent (previously the structural subject) denoted by a prepositional phrase by Bill, while the instrumental on this occasion still shown by a prepositional phrase in this instance uses a with rather than a by prepositional form. The complexity of the issue of what constitutes the relationship between structural (pre-verb) subject and the semantic function of the noun in the sentence is clear from sentences such as the policeman slept or Henry left home, where agency is clearly not involved in the noun phrases the policeman and Henry and where home is clearly not an affected object in the same way as the table in a sentence like John kicked the table.
2.1 Complex sentences; sentences within sentences

So far we have been considering simple sentences, that is, sentences containing a single verb phrase. However it is possible for English to produce complex sentences involving multiple verb phrases. Obviously, simple sentences can be conjoined using words like and and but to make a complex sentence, such as in John loves Mary and/ but Bill loves Ann. However, complex sentences can be formed in a number of other ways, notably in those cases where a noun phrase has been replaced by a whole sentence. Consider: John said something replace the pronoun something with the sentence Bill lifted the table and we have the complex sentence: John said that Bill lifted the table, where the pronoun-replacing sentence is introduced by the word that, sometimes called the complementiser. We can represent such sentences by structures like the following (where the # on page 10 denotes a sentence, for simplicity of representation, which is unanalysed for structure) schematically as:
Direct Object
John said
something
Direct Object
John said
Bill lifted the table
Or, in the form of a branching tree:
Sentence Verb Phrase
Noun Phrase
Verb
NP/Pronoun
John
said
something
NP
VP
Verb
NP
John said
S S Comp NP Verb VP NP
that
Art
Bill
lifted
the
table
Notice how the object pronoun something has been substituted by a whole sentence (this is sometimes called sentence embedding). This embedding can occur too at subject position. Compare sentences such as: John liked Henry; Something pleased Mary; The fact that John liked Henry pleased Mary. Once more we can represent the structure of such sentences diagrammatically as:
NP
VP
Pronoun
Verb
Something
pleased
Mary
VP Art Art the fact #that John liked Henry VP Verb
VP
pleased
Mary
Here we see a number of things happening. In the slot for the pronoun subject something, there is replacement by a noun phrase the fact. This in its turn is filled out by a complete sentence (once more introduced by a complementiser) that John liked Henry. Complex sentences of this type involve the embedding of a higher order unit (here S) under a lower order syntactic unit like a noun phrase. Such constructions are clearly not unrelated to those involving what are traditionally called relative clauses. A sentence such as The man who lent Bill a car shot Henry is manifestly composed of two structures: The man shot Henry and The man lent Bill a car where, importantly, the man in each structure refers to the same individual. The structure of the complex sentence might be represented as:
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NP Verb Art N shot the man
VP
NP
Henry
#the man lent Bill a car
In cases like this, of course, the noun phrase the man, identical to that in the structure immediately above it, is converted into a relative pronoun here who (but in some regional variants what and even which). Such an example also serves to point to the defining characteristic of the pronoun itself. A pronoun is a word which is usually used for the second of two identical nouns in an utterance: thus, in a sentence like John1 said that John2 liked Mary, where the second John refers to a different individual (John Smith as against John Jones), then it remains as a noun. However, if the two Johns refer to the same individual, then the second of the two is pronominalised to, in this case he, although the form of the pronoun is sensitive to the sex, animacy and human-ness of the noun to be replaced, producing personal pronouns like: he, she and it. Where the identical Noun Phrases occur in the same sentence with different semantic functions, say agent and affected, then the second identical NP is not only pronominalised, but sees the addition of the word self to the pronoun itself: thus John1 saw John1 in the mirror becomes John saw himself in the mirror. Clearly, the use of a pronoun for a full noun strongly relates to the knowledge the speakers and hearers have of the structure of the discourse. When they know what or who is being talked about then pronominal usage is high (as in much
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face-to-face spontaneous conversation). On the other hand, when the discourse (or text) is unfamiliar, or deals with complex topics normally outside the speaker/readers usual range (as in much scientific and technical and legal discourse), then pronominal forms are low in frequency, and the use of full nouns is normally to the fore.
2.2 Time, tense and aspect

Tense is the technical grammatical term used to describe the ways in which a language can express time relationships. Traditionally, the English language is viewed as having three tenses: the present, the past and the future. We will wish to argue here that, in fact, it is best to see English as having only a two-fold time reference system a past and a non-past ; a before-now and a now . On the other hand, the future tense is perhaps best considered as related not so much to time reference but to the kinds of functions we associate with modal verbs . English marks time reference in two main ways. In the first of these, suffixes can be added to the main verb in the sentence (when it stands unsupported by an auxiliary, in which case it is the auxiliary verb which marks the tense). Thus Mary likes/liked Bill; Mary doesnt/didnt like Bill. Such a contrast merely relates to a simple dichotomy between the now and the before-now characteristic of the time-frame within which the utterance occurs. And recall that it is the entire utterance which is time referred, not just the verb (which in English, but not all languages, is used as the place to mark the temporal distinction). Fine detail, especially with reference to past events, is achieved by using temporal adverbs like yesterday, five years ago, quite recently and so on. An important characteristic of utterances such as John likes Mary or John liked Mary is that they are statements, assertions which the hearer can verify as true or false. An answer yes or no can be given as to their truth value. Notice, though, that this does not hold for those utterances which contain forms traditionally referred to as the future tense: John will like Mary tomorrow. It is impossible to verify this claim and one cannot say yes or no with any certainty as to its truth value. What the speaker is doing in such cases is not making a statement of fact, rather the speaker is making a claim or a prediction which may or may not turn out to be true. In other words, when we contrast utterances like John liked Mary and John will like Mary tomorrow, what we are comparing is not a difference in temporal activity in itself, rather we are evaluating two different kinds of speech acts: the one a statement (which can hold for the now or the before-now), the other a prediction (of necessity appertaining to something beyond the current
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temporal horizon). The concept of different kinds of speech act is an important one and is associated with an interpretation of the modal verbs, of which category we argue below that will and shall are members. The activity associated with verbs in sentences is not merely tied to temporal relativity. While a sentence like John eats chocolate places the action in the now sphere, an utterance like John is always eating chocolate has a temporal reference covering both the before-now, the now and, arguably, the after-now. In other words the use of the -ing suffix on the verb suggests continuity, repetitiveness and that the activity is ongoing, even recurrent. In other words, what we are dealing with in utterances like this is the state of the verbal action as well as its place on a time continuum. In the ways in which it can reflect the state of a verbal activity, the English language (in comparison with many other languages) is relatively deficient, in that it principally confines such expression to identifying those actions which are continuous or those which are complete or finished. The technical grammatical term used for this characteristic of utterances is (verbal) aspect . For instance, sentences such as Bill is doing his homework and I have been painting my room all week suggest that the verbal activity is not only going on, but has been going on for some time in the past and is likely to continue. On the other hand, in a sentence like John has done his homework, we assume that the activity is completed. Again, in one like John had done his homework not only is the activity deemed to be complete, but complete with reference to a time in the past, thus John had done his homework by five oclock last night. On the other hand the completed activity in John has done his homework can be taken to refer to a time reference in the present: John has done his homework now/recently and not John has done his homework by last Thursday. It is worth noting too that the completeness/incompleteness of the verbal activity can be expressed by a number of different mechanisms: for example, the contrast implied between Mary has drunk her gin as against Mary has drunk up her gin is one involving the non-finishing versus the finishing of the activity hence drinking-up time. We have already suggested that while utterances have an inherent meaning comprising the words they contain, they also reflect the kind of activity the speaker who uses them is engaged in. For instance, we argued that when a speaker utters a sentence like John will win the Lottery one day, he/she is performing an activity of prediction or foretelling. Indeed, there are some utterances which are themselves inseparable from the activity the speaker is performing at the time: thus one cannot usually say either I bet you five pounds or I name this ship
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Queen Mary without actually performing the activity of the verb at the same time: i.e. betting or ship naming. In much the same way, there is a special sub-set of verbs in English one of whose functions it is to denote the speakers attitude to the utterance. Such verbs are traditionally called modal verbs, and comprise items like may, might, can, should, would, may and must and some others. It is worth noting at the outset that these verbs have certain syntactic properties as well; notably, they do not show temporal distinctions, there is no mayed or mays, and might is not a past tense form of may: John may go to the pictures versus John might go to the pictures expresses a contrast which is not related to the point of time in which the action occurs. Again, for most regional versions of English, two modal verbs may not occur in the same sentence: there is no I might could construction although there are exceptions to this generalisation in regional versions of English in Scotland and the north-east of England as well as in some southern United States varieties. Although their interpretation is complex, there are certain attitudes, perceptions and conditions speakers place on the content of utterances which modal verbs serve to reflect. For example, in a sentence like John must work harder the speaker is expressing some kind of imperative or command emanating either from the speaker directly or from some extraneous set of events or conditions. On the other hand, in an utterance like John might work harder the speaker is expressing some conditionality, possibility or even doubt that the action will take place at all. Yet again, John may work harder can, in addition to expressing possibility, suggest that there is some set of circumstances allowing John to work harder than he did before (I/something permits John to work harder) a meaning often signalled by can, although in a sentence like John can work harder there is an interpretation which suggests that the speaker somehow allows this activity to take place, or removes obstacles to its taking place. But increasingly in the modern language, might, can, could and may are being used without such clear distinctions and, for many speakers, in sentences like Might/may/ can/could I have some pocket money, please? the modals are frequently used interchangeably.
2.3 The dummy auxiliary do

The auxiliary verb do has many uses in English, one of them not unlike the modal verbs discussed above. The distinction, for instance, between an utterance like John likes beer and John does like beer, expresses in the latter the speakers assurance and certainty of the truth-value of his statement. On the other hand John doesnt like beer carries no
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such implication, unless of course the speaker emphasises, through intonation or additional stress, the do plus negative attachment: John DOESNT like beer. In many instances, however, the do word is semantically empty or meaningless (hence its dummy appellation) and merely occurs as an automatically triggered syntactic form in certain kinds of constructions, notably in negatives, questions and imperatives . We suggested above that the characteristic structure of the English Verb Phrase looked like:
Verb Phrase
Verb
Noun Phrase
However, our discussion of the modal verbs suggested that this was an oversimplification and, to accommodate these auxiliary verbs, a structure something like the following, for the Verb Phrase in a sentence like John does/may like Mary, would be more appropriate:
Verb
Auxiliary or Modal Verb
Main Verb
Noun Phrase
does/may
like
Mary
The interest of this interpretation lies in its ability to allow us to propose a single stratagem for the formation in English of negative and question (interrogative) sentences. When English speakers wish to negate a proposition, they add a negative particle not to the first non-main verb in the sentence i.e. to the auxiliary or the modal. Thus we get negative sentences such as John doesnt like Mary and John couldnt
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like Mary and so on. This implies, of course, that the speaker of Modern English somehow knows that the structure of a sentence like John likes Mary is really John Auxiliary Verb likes Mary, the auxiliary being deleted when the sentence is positive, but brought into play and used as a vehicle on which to hang the negative particle when that proposition is denied. In the English of the Old English period, negative sentences were not formed in this way at all, the negative particle not being placed immediately before the Main Verb: John not liked Mary. The introduction of the dummy do auxiliary is an important syntactic innovation which arose in the late medieval period. It is important to bear in mind once more that it is the (non-modal) auxiliary which signals the tense in the modern language, not the main verb, thus: John doesnt want money; John didnt want money. The do verb is often described as a dummy, because it can be used to stand for all and any verbs in the language it behaves in a way pronouns do in a Noun Phrase. We have seen how, when a speaker has two identical nouns in a sentence, the second can be substituted by a pronoun. Again, a pronoun rather than a full noun can be used in spoken discourse when the speakers know (but do not overtly express) the identity of the individuals they are referring to. In the same way, do can be seen as a kind of ProVerb, used to signal that a verb should occur in its slot, a verb which has already occurred in the discourse or which the speaker can be assumed to know is being used. Thus, we can have constructions like: Priscilla likes Mars Bars and so does Helen, where the does is used as a dummy for likes. Again, in a sentence like What do you do for a living? the second do seeks a response in the shape of a full verb: I work, I am retired, etc. This dummy, auxiliary do has an important part to play in the formation of interrogative or question sentences. In English of the earliest period, questions could be formed simply by positioning the main verb (the first verb in the sentence) at the beginning of the sentence, thus: John likes Henry is questioned as: Likes John Henry? However, when the language changed so that speakers came to interpret the verb phrase in all sentences as made up of an auxiliary/modal followed by a main verb, then it was that auxiliary/modal (now the first verb in the sentence) which became positioned at the front in questions: John (do/ may) like Henry comes to be expressed as Does/may John like Henry? There is some controversy in Modern English over the issue of multiple negation. That is where negative particles are added not just to the auxiliary do but to other components in the sentence as well, notably to indefinite pronouns such as anyone, someone, anytime, anywhere
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and so on. Thus, for many speakers, a sentence like the following is regarded as well formed: Jane didnt see nobody nowhere at no time. This type of multiple negation (with no implication that its use implies that the sentence has become a positive) was, if anything, the norm in English until the sixteenth century and is still perfectly acceptable for millions of speakers today in various regional and social manifestations of the language.
Bibliography
Category A Much of the above is to be found described in varying amounts of detail in general textbooks on linguistic theory. There are many such available on the market and they vary in quality, modernity and accessibility. Excellent general introductions are to be found in the following: Aitchison, J, Teach Yourself Linguistics, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992 Crystal, D, Linguistics, London: Penguin, 1985 Finch, G, Linguistic Terms and Concepts , London: Macmillan, 2000 Fromkin, V and Rodman, R, An Introduction to Language, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980 Jarvie, G, Grammar Guide: Grammar Made Easy, London: Bloomsbury, 1993 Traugott, E and Pratt, M L, Linguistics for Students of Literature, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980 Verspoor, M and Sauter, K, English Sentence Analysis, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2000 (contains useful CD) Yule, G, Explaining English Grammar, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 Category B All of the following are useful for more detailed discussions of sentence structure, time/tense, modality and negation. Langacker, R W, Language and its Structure: Some Fundamental Linguistic Concepts , New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973 Pinker, S, The Language Instinct, London: Penguin, 1995 Quirk, R, English in Use , London: Longman, 1990 Quirk, R; Greenbaum, S; Leech, G and Svartvik, J, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, London: Longman, 1985
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Smith, N and Wilson, D, Modern Linguistics. The Results of Chomskys Revolution, London: Penguin, 1979 Trask, R L, Language: The Basics, London: Routledge, 1995 Works which deal in a relatively introductory fashion with questions of syntax Burton-Roberts, N, Analysing Sentences, London: Longman, 1997 Huddleston, R, Introduction to the Grammar of English, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 Leech, G, Meaning and the English Verb, London: Longman, 1971 Palmer, F, The English Verb, London: Longman, 1974 Quirk, R and Greenbaum, S, A Students Grammar of the English Language, London: Longman, 1990 Radford, A, Transformational Syntax: a First Course, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 Wekker, H and Haegeman, L, A Modern Course in English Syntax, London: Croom Helm, 1985
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THE SOUNDS OF ENGLISH AND THEIR STRUCTURE
SECTION 3
3.1 A description of some of the main sounds used in English

When we use speech as a means of communication it is important to realise that none of the physical (anatomical) devices we employ the tongue, the vocal chords (or vocal folds) and so on are designed specifically for speech production. They have other primary functions (for example, the vocal chords prevent liquid entering the lungs) which have been adapted as a means of making audible communication. We can outline here (avoiding, where possible, an over-abundance of complex terminology) the main mechanisms which are used in the production of speech sounds. There is one single and crucial contrast which serves to separate two major classes of speech sound. When air leaves the lungs it can either be allowed to proceed through the mouth in an obstructed or (relatively) unobstructed way. If the former, then the resultant sound is usually a consonant, if the latter, some kind of vowel. We can think of the process as akin to the passing of air through a tube the tube can be left open for the air to pass through unhindered, or closed up to various degrees to impede, or even completely stop, the flow of air through it. This constitutes the basic vowel/consonant dichotomy. A sound like the vowel in cat represents an unimpeded flow of air through a wide cavity or tube (the open mouth in this case), while the [p] sound in pie represents one where the tube has been completely constricted at one end (in this case the front end, at the lips), the air being forced through the obstruction by a kind of explosion. We have to add to this basic contrast at least one other adaptation of a physical mechanism which is essential for the production (and especially the comprehension) of human speech sounds. Breathing through a tube produces little or no audible noise, certainly nothing that can be heard over any distance. To make sound audible at any remove, the air in the tube has to be agitated or vibrated (placing a tuning fork at one end can achieve this). The anatomical device used in human speech is to cause the folds behind the Adams Apple in the larynx to vibrate. These pieces of tissue (the vocal folds) seem to be hard wired to the brain and we can control the rate and manner in which they vibrate. Vowel sounds in English usually involve a vibrated air stream like this as do some consonants: the contrast between sound using vibrated and non-vibrated air is technically known as voiced versus voiceless sound.
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For instance, if we hold the fingers against the adams apple during the production of the first sounds in words like pit, sit, kit we will feel no vibration, while a well defined vibratory activity can be experienced when the first sounds in words like bit, zip and get are uttered. 3.1.1 Consonantal (blocked tube) sounds
Consider, firstly, those cases where the tube (the mouth) is completely blocked at some point, and the air from the lungs has to force its way past the blockage, causing an explosion. Sounds produced in this way are called, unsurprisingly, stops or plosives. They are best described in terms of the place in the tube where the blockage takes place. The complete blockage at the very front of the tube is caused by closing the lips (bilabial ), at the front by the tongue touching the region of the upper teeth (dental). On the other hand a blockage can be made at the back of the tube, where the tongue touches the hard palate (palatal ), as well as at the very back, where the rear of the tongue is hitting the wall of the larynx ( glottal). Blockage of the tube need not be complete, however, and a very small space can be left between the lips and the tongue and various parts of the roof of the mouth to allow the air literally to squeeze through. These incomplete blockage sounds are characterised by much turbulence in the airstream itself, producing a typical hissing sound. In the front position with the lower lip against the upper teeth [f]/[v] in the initial sound in words like fine and vine and with the tongue against the dental region as in the initial sound in words like thick and thy. In the back position, with the tongue against the palate, we have the final sounds in German words like ich and ach and in some varieties of Scottish English such as nicht and loch. Even at the very front position, air may be allowed to escape between the lips, a sound still heard in some Scottish English dialects the initial sound in some Aberdeenshire pronunciations of a word like what. Sounds like these are generally known as fricatives, and can be either voiceless (the initial sounds in see, for, thick) or voiced (the initial sounds in zoo, very and thy). Yet other sounds can be produced as the result of a combination of complete blockage followed by partial blockage (and hence hissing). These can be heard in the first and last sounds in words like church (voiceless) and judge (voiced). Such sounds are called affricatives.
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3.1.2
Vowel (unblocked tube) types
In English (but not in all languages) this important set of sounds usually involves the airstream being vibrated through vocal chord activity (they are voiced sounds). The differences produced to these vowel sounds in words like kit, Kate, get, cat, too, toe, toggle and path are achieved by manipulating the shape of the tube (the mouth) through which the air from the lungs passes. Basically two main shapes are involved: one where the tongue is shaped so that there is a relatively small opening at the front of the mouth and a larger one at the back i.e. the air first passes from the lungs through a large cavity, then through a smaller one. This shape is characteristic of front vowels, like those in words like see, Jane, get and sat. The other is a mirror image shape, with the air from the lungs first passing through a relatively small space, followed by a relatively larger one: vowels formed in this way are called back vowels. Examples of these are the vowels in words like too, toe, God and Southern British Standard English bath. Individual front and back vowels are produced by altering the vertical height of the raised part of the tongue: FRONT high mid low Front Vowels Back Vowels BACK FRONT BACK high mid low
Thus high front vowels are [i] in see and [ I] in sit; mid vowels are [e] in Jane and (a little lower still) [E] in get, while the low front vowel is the [a] in cat. Back vowels follow approximately the same pattern with high in [u] two, mid in Joe (with a slightly lower mid in [O] got) with the low back [A] vowel the Southern British Standard vowel in path and bath words. Notice too how all the back vowels seem to involve the lips in a rounded position, while for the front vowels the lips are spread apart.
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There is also an important set of vowels produced when the tongue is in a position where the tube is concave in the centre, with the tongue in a middle position in the mouth and at slightly different heights. These are known as central vowels, of which there are usually only two common in English, the lower of which is the sound heard in many unstressed vowels, as in the second vowel in a word like father or mother [] and often referred to as the indeterminate vowel. The other, and showing a slightly higher tongue position, is the sound [] heard in the first vowel in words like butter and mother. Another characteristic of vowel sounds is that they can show varying degrees of length or duration. For instance, a speaker of Southern British Standard English will pronounce words like pull and pool with the same vowel, but of different lengths the first short, the second long [puul] with length increase scripted by a doubling of the vowel symbol although, in some notations, vowel length is shown by the addition of a colon symbol after the vowel, thus [pu:l]. For Scottish English speakers, both pool and pull show short vowels, and are thus non-contrastive for length. All the vowels we have so far considered have been simple vowels or made up of only one component. There are instances where we find two vowels at the same point in a syllable, two vowels which are involved in a transition from one tongue position to another . Complex vowels like this where we have a movement from one position to another are called diphthongs. Common diphthongs in English are to be found in words like house, my and boil, showing respectively double vowel characteristics such as: [Au], [AI] and [OI]. So far, all the sounds, both vowel and consonantal, which we have been considering have been produced through the tube of the mouth they are oral sounds. However, there are several others where a different tube or cavity is involved in the production of the sound the nose cavity, responsible for nasal sounds. These can be illustrated by the final sounds in words like fun, mum and sing. It is important to realise that all these nasal sounds, although they are produced through the nose, are, in fact, controlled by changing the shape of the mouth (since the tissue inside the nose cannot be manipulated). Thus, a sound like [n] shows an oral position similar to that for [d], [m] for [b], and [N] for [g], making nasals similar to stops in showing a very front, front and back positional characteristic. It is worth observing too that, for English at any rate, nasal sounds are usually voiced and that many nasalised dialects (notably some forms of United States English and Liverpudlian English) show vowel sounds which are simultaneously oral and nasal.
22
3.1.3
Vowel-like consonants
There is a very common and important set of consonantal sounds in English (and many other languages) which appear to share the characteristics of both vowels and consonants that is, while they occur in a tube where the airflow is unblocked, they nevertheless simultaneously show the tongue involved in a contact with another part of the mouth which would normally result in a blockage taking place. Consider the first sound in a word like life: here the [l] sound has the tongue blocking the mouth at the upper front teeth, yet there is no explosion, the air being allowed to flow around the blockage. Like vowels, sounds like this sometimes known as sonorants or continuants can be sung try singing [p]! Other sonorant sounds are [r] and all the nasal sounds, [n] , [m] and [N]. This set of sounds is particularly important in that while they are consonantal in many of their characteristics their similarity to vowel sounds is so great that speakers often perceive them as if they were actually full vowels. Notice, for instance, the Glaswegian habit of substituting a vowel for a word final [l] channo tunno for Channel Tunnel.
3.2 The structure of sounds

It is really quite remarkable that communication through speech sounds in the air can take place at all successfully, given that speech rarely takes place in anything other than very noisy environments other people talking simultaneously, buses going past and the like. There remains the fact too that no speaker is capable of ever producing the same sound in exactly the same way on different occasions. The fact that spoken communication works so well under such difficult conditions suggests a number of things: the part of the brain which processes speech is highly sophisticated and complex; and the speech signal itself carries a very high load of additional information and cues, enabling the listener to work out what the message is, even though bits of it are missing or unintelligible. Most importantly, it suggests that speech is highly structured and governed by a set of rules and conditions that the language user is able to deduce and apply, thus making sense of messages which may in other ways be highly ambiguous or unclear. 3.2.1 The basic units of speech sounds
Consider words like pin, tin, sin and kin. The only sound distinguishing these words from one another is the initial consonant. These consonants are contrastive; interchange them and the meaning of the
23
words alters. These consonants can therefore be seen as small distinctive units serving to act as a means of keeping meanings of words apart. Languages have sets of these distinguishing sounds called phonemes and they can be considered to be the building blocks of a languages sound system. Thus, a word like Bill has three phonemes [b], [I] and [l] an item like pretty [pr I t I ] having four [p], [r], [ I], and [ t]. However, compare words like mill and Mull. For most speakers of Modern English the two [l] sounds will be quite distinct. In the first the tongue blockage will occur around the area of the upper teeth, while in the latter, it will occur much farther back on the palate. We can represent the difference between these two kinds of [l] sound sometimes called light and dark [l]s symbolically as [l] and [:] respectively. But are these two [l] sounds contrastive and distinctive? If we interchange them in the two words in question does their meaning change? Clearly not indeed a listener might not even perceive the difference, although it is there. It is obvious that the choice of light versus dark [l] is quite predictable if the [l] is preceded by a front vowel, then it is light, if a back vowel it is dark. The quality of the vowel determines the selection of the continuant [l] sound. So the two [l]s are not meaning-distinctive phonemes, but predictable outcomes for the same phoneme in a particular sound context. The technical term they are given is allophones. Consider again the [p] phoneme in words like peak and speak. If you place a piece of paper against your lips you will see that, after pronouncing the [p] sound in peak a puff of air is produced which quite distinctly disturbs the paper. After the [p] in speak no such puff of air aspiration occurs. Speakers can then deduce that there are two versions (two allophones) of the [p] phoneme one aspirated [p ], the other when it follows an [s] fricative not so ( unaspirated). But in some languages, such differences are genuinely contrastive and words can have a new meaning when an unaspirated [p] is substituted for an aspirated one, or when a dark [l] is substituted for a light one, all the other sounds in the words remaining the same.
24
Bibliography
Category A Perhaps the best general introduction to the sounds and sound structures of English is to be found in Part Four, Chapter 17 of The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language (ed. D Crystal), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 23447. Abercrombie, D, Elements of General Phonetics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967. An excellent basic account of the English sound system and the mechanisms for describing it. Katamba, A, An Introduction to Phonology, London: Longman, 1989. Although this book has a very wide remit and covers some areas of phonology of too advanced a nature for Advanced Higher, it nevertheless contains in its first two chapters (pp. 134) an excellent and very readable introduction to the basics of both phonetics and phonology. Knowles, G, Patterns of Spoken English, London: Longman, 1987. The first three chapters of this book offer a very clear and accessible account of the sound system of Modern English. The style is most readable and clear and examples are helpful and plentiful. There are sets of exercises and the Appendices offer excellent lists of sounds against symbols (pp. 22133). Ladefoged, P, A Course in Phonetics, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1982. This is the classical, detailed description of English sounds and the techniques used to describe them. Somewhat technical in places, but it contains a useful glossary of terms and helpful sets of exercises. Chapters 14 are especially helpful. Other introductory guides to both phonetics and phonology are to be found in: Wells, J C and Colson, G, Practical Phonetics, London: Pitman, 1971 Roach, P J, English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course, London: Cambridge University Press, 1983
25
Category B The following are reliable but sometimes technical works on the sounds of language and the kinds of structures they can enter into. So they may be best used in tandem with the more elementary books in the previous section. Giegerich, H J, English Phonology: An Introduction , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 (especially Chapters 15, pp. 1129). Pullum, G K and Ladusaw, W A, Phonetic Symbol Guide, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986. An extremely useful reference work which describes in clear detail the types of symbols used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the description of speech sounds. Category C The following are more technical and exhaustive, state-of-the-art reference works on the subjects of phonetics and phonology: Lass, R, Phonology: An Introduction to Basic Concepts , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 Laver, J M H, Principles of Phonetics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994
26
3.3 Sounds and symbols

There follows a selection of some of the common sounds of the English language with symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) which are used to represent them. Consonantal sounds Obstructed or stop sounds [b] as in bit [p] as in p it [d] as in down [t] as in town [g] as in gown [k] as in clown [/] as in some Scottish English water Partially obstructed or fricative sounds [v] as in vine [f] as in fine [z] as in zoo [s] as in Sue [D] as in thy [T] as in thigh [] as in judge [] as in church [Z] as in a zure [S] as in shoe [] as in Scottish English nicht [x] as in Scottish English lo ch Vowel-like consonants (sonorant sounds) [l] as in lick [x] as in luck [m] as in mine [n] as in mine [N] as in si ng [|] as in r un Other vowel-like sounds [w] as in we [] as in Scottish English wh ale [j] as in you [h] as in house
27
Vowel sounds (a) (1) Simple vowels Vowels formed in the front of the mouth (unrounded)
High tongue position [i] as in see [I] as in sit Mid tongue position [e] as in Scottish English say [E] as in get Low tongue position [a] as in cat (2) Vowels formed in the back of the mouth (rounded)
High tongue position [u] as in you [] as in the United States pronunciation of the vowel in words like look and book; this sound is half-way between the sound in a word like luck and that in pull Mid tongue position [o] as in Scottish English go [O] as in got Low tongue position [A] as in Standard English bath [] as in the United States pronunciation of the first vowel in a word like Bobby; this sound is a little lower in the mouth than [O] (3) Vowels formed in the central part of the mouth
[] as in the second syllable of a word like father: in Standard English [fAAD] or in Standard Scottish English [faDr] (this is sometimes called the schwa sound or the indeterminate sound and is not unlike the vowel in s it) [] usually long and preceding an [r] sound which has been lost in Standard English, as in fur [f] and term [tm]
28
(b)
Complex vowel sounds (diphthongs)
Where first element is lower than the second (rising diphthongs) [EI] as in Standard English s ay [aI] as in my [ou] as in Standard English g o [OI] as in boy [au] as in house Where first element is higher than the second (falling diphthongs) [i] as in some Working Class Scottish English here; f eel [E] as in some Working Class Scottish English there Diphthongs arising from the substitution of sonorants by vowels (vocalisation ) : [io]; [Eo] where the [o] substitutes for the [l] sound in words like feel or fell in many types of Working Class Central Belt Scottish English ([l]-vocalisation ).
29
30
THE STRUCTURE OF WORDS
SECTION 4
4.1 Sound structures

All speakers of English recognise that words like [bIt ] bit, [prUv] prove and [klasp] clasp are well formed entities, while sound combinations such as [lpIpf] or [mfag N] are not. There appears to be a set of conditions upon the order of the elements which go to make up words, such that for example a fricative like [f] may not precede an obstruent like [p] at word beginnings, or an obstruent like [g] precede a nasal continuant like [N] at the end of words. In principle, however, the set of conditions which governs the shape of words in English is relatively straightforward. Recall how we differentiated three separate kinds of sounds, defined in connection with the kind of tube the airflow passed through: a completely unblocked or unobstructed tube giving vowel sounds; a completely blocked tube giving obstruent sounds; a partially blocked tube giving fricative sounds; and a set of sounds which seemed to show both characteristics of vowels and obstruents combined giving sonorants like [l], [m], [n]. Importantly, this implies that a scale exists between the various types of sound, such that some are more or less vowel-like (vowelly) than others. Vowels are the most vowel-like, sonorants the next most vowel-like, fricatives a bit less vowellike, while obstruents tend to be entirely unvowel-like. For the proper formation of English words, sounds must appear in an order such that (1) obstruent precedes continuant, (2) fricative precedes obstruent. In this way, words may begin with combinations such as [fl-, flow; [tr- , trust; [fr- frank; and [kl- clear; but not with groupings like [lf- or [rg-. In other words, there is some kind of governing principle in the formation of phonetically well formed words. If we take the vowel to be the centre of the word, we can work leftwards and rightwards from it in a series of steps, such that the level of vowelness in the sounds involved decreases:
obstruent + fricative + sonorant + vowel + sonorant + fricative + obstruent [p]
like
[f]
like
[l]
[au]/[a]
[n]/[N]
[s]
like like
[k]
non-vowel- more vowel- vowel-like vowel vowel-like less vowel- non-vowel-
That is, if we work away from the vowel centre, there is a kind of decrescendo in vowel-ness or, conversely, there is a crescendo of vowel-
31
ness from the edge of the word to its centre. In this way, words like flounce [flauns] and plank [plaNk] can be formed (as shown in the diagram on the previous page). Not all the segments need, nor indeed can, be present obstruents and fricatives tend to be mutually exclusive, so there are no words beginning or ending in [pf-] or [df-]. There is usually an order of sounds in which a kind of crescendo to a vowel peak followed by a decrescendo away from it has to be achieved for words to be well formed. There are, of course (and as always in language) some exceptions to such a general condition on word well formed-ness, notably in the case of word-initial clusters of consonants involving [s]: [strit] street and [spju] spew clearly offend the otherwise universal condition that obstruents and the more vowelly fricative consonants are mutually exclusive at word beginnings and endings.
4.2 Meaning structures

Individual words obviously have a semantic meaning: bird, house, philosophy are items to which we can attach either a physical or intellectual co-relation in the real world. At the same time, it is possible for individual words to combine in a way which enhances or expands the meaning of their individual components: words such as blackboard, White House and even a combination of words like Weetabix (wheat and biscuits). Each of the components of these words black, board is itself indivisible without having an effect which will destroy its meaning; we cannot meaningfully break down black into bl and ack and in any way preserve the original concept the word denoted. The indivisible and meaning-bearing components of words are known as morphemes; thus blackbird is made up of two morphemes, while bird is a single morpheme (and a single word). However, a language like English has the ability to produce words made up of several morphemes, some of which cannot stand on their own and make meaningful sense. Consider a word like indescribable. Clearly we have here a word which has a core morpheme (describe) which is modified by other elements like in- and -able which, although meaningful, cannot usually stand on their own as words. In other words, an item like indescribable has an internal meaning-structure which we might characterise as: [ 1in[2[ 3describ 3]able 2] 1]
32
or as:
in
describe
able
Although they cannot stand on their own as individual words, both in- and -able have recognisable meanings not and capable of being meanings which can be equally well used with other core morphemes such as indecipherable, incomprehensible and so on. Words like thoughtlessness and restlessness show a similar complex meaning structure with the affixes less and ness, the former adding the concept of negativity, while the latter the ness performs a grammatical function by changing what is an adjective thoughtless into a noun. Notice, though, that while an English speaker will analyse words like thoughtlessness and uselessness as comprising three components, with thought and use as the core or root component, a word like recklessness has come to be analysed as having two component parts only reckless and ness since there is no longer any root, stand-alone morpheme like reck in modern English. Meaningful components attached to the left-hand side of the root morpheme (often called prefixes) the in in indescribable are usually meaning bearing. Thus prefixes like un in unappealing, anti in anticlimax, super in superhuman, re in reapply and co in cohabit can be said to modify the meaning of the base component in the compound morpheme in a variety of different ways. Morphemes added to the end of base components suffixes likewise modify or add to the meaning of the base morpheme, hence a contrast like lion/ lioness or star/starlet. However, suffixes in particular can perform a purely grammatical role in that they can change one part of speech into another nouns and adjectives into verbs (orchestrate; deafen; advertise); concrete nouns into abstract nouns (mile/mileage; friend/ friendship); adjectives into adverbs (quick/quickly; sudden/ suddenly); nouns from verbs (speak/speaker; ride/rider), adjectives from nouns (socialist/social; capitalist/capital) and adjectives from verbs (like/likeable; drink/drinkable), among others. However, but only very occasionally, prefixes can have a grammatical function as well the change of noun to verb in friend/befriend, rage/enrage and compass/encompass. The general name given to this type of morphology which performs a grammatical role is derivational morphology.
33
It is interesting to record too how the addition of both prefixes and suffixes may, on occasion, have consequences for the pronunciation of the affix and even of the root morpheme itself. Notice how the in prefix assimilates to its root initial consonant in illogical and irredeemable, while the addition of ity suffixes can have consequences for the shape of the vowel in the root: thus cave but cavity, astound but astonishment, and profound but profundity. So too there is the effect on the vowel of the addition of the nounmaking suffix (th) in words like strong versus strength (but not, notice, in warm/warmth). It is obvious that English uses suffixes in other types of context as well. Notably, English uses an -s suffix to denote the concept of more than one (plural), thus contrasts such as boy/boys, dog/dogs, cat/cats, match/matches showing a (predictable) pronunciation contrast in [s], [z] and [z]. This same signal is used on modern English verbs to denote the grammatical category of person: for instance, the person spoken about in the discourse (who is not necessarily present at the time): he/she/it thinks as against those instances where the speaker is involved (I think and is present). In the case of where the person spoken to (and present) is involved: you think, no suffix is used in the modern language, although there were such suffixes in both contexts at earlier stages of English thou lookest, she knoweth for example as late as the seventeenth century. Notably too, English employs a suffix on most verbs to denote that its action takes place before now (the past tense): thus I looked versus I look. However, it is important to recognise that contrasts such as one/ more-than-one and now/before-now can also be expressed through other mechanisms (often the result of residues from processes which were in some way predictably motivated at earlier times in the languages history), thus: goose/geese; foot/feet; man/men; see/saw; take/took as well as, in the instance of time marking, through the use of quite separate morphemes go/went, am/was. The general name given to the type of morphology which signals person, number and time relationships is inflectional morphology.
34
4.3 Word formation

English not unlike German has had considerable success in increasing its stock of words by the device of combining existing words in several different ways: a process called compounding. Some of these combinations are rather exotic and are often to be found in advertising contexts: Lipsmackinthirstquesnchinacetastinmotivatingoodbuzzincooltalkinhigh walkinfastlivinnevergivincoolfizzin PEPSI. Here is a single adjective built from a succession of individual adjectival units. Again Guintelligence Test a combination of Guinness and intelligence or Schweppervescence a combination of Schweppes and effervescence. Such blends are common in everyday English as well and include items such as breathalyser (breath + analyser), Oxbridge (Oxford+Cambridge), smog (smoke+fog); motel (motor+hotel) and many others. More common, perhaps, are compounds which involve the bringing together of two root morphemes: blackbird, gunboat, businessman, redcoat, cowboy, steamboat. Yet the grammatical relationship which exists between the two components of the compound is not always the same. Thus, while a redcoat and a blackbird describe a coat which is red and a bird which is black, this kind of relationship clearly does not hold between steam and boat or between cow and boy. There are also common compounds in use one of whose components is not found as a standalone morpheme in the language: agriculture, alcoholic, microchip. New words can be formed too by shortening or clipping existing morphemes, thus: bus (for omnibus); piano (pianoforte); porn (pornography); fridge (refrigerator), sitcom (situation comedy). Again, additional vocabulary items have been added to English by naming objects or conditions through the names of those individuals or places perceived to have been associated with them (eponyms), thus: sandwich, wellington, dunce (Duns Scotus, the medieval Scottish theologian), Stetson (John B Stetson, the nineteenth-century US hatmaker); Balaclava (protective headgear worn at Balaclava by soldiers during the Crimean campaign in the nineteenth century).
35
Bibliography
Category A Many of the books on this subject are rather technical and more suitable for the advanced student. However, Crystal, D, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 198205, and the discussion under WORD FORMATION in McArthur, T (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the English Language , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 11224, provide helpful statements of first principles and a selection of good examples. Category B Adams, V, An Introduction to Modern English Word Formation , London: Longman, 1973 Bauer, L, English Word Formation , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 Matthews, P H, Morphology: An Introduction to the Theory of Word Formation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974
36
WORDS AND MEANINGS
SECTION 5
The lexicon and semantics

This is perhaps the most difficult area of linguistic activity to describe in any fully satisfactory fashion. It might seem obvious that the meaning of a sentence is simply the sum total of the meanings of its individual words. Thus the meaning of a sentence like My cat likes her milk can be gathered by merely knowing the meanings or references of individual words (lexemes) such as my, cat, like and so on. But matters are rarely this simple since, at the very least, we also have to know that certain lexemes by definition have implications for the selection of others; for instance, a sentence like My cat paints milk is clearly not acceptable, because despite its being perfectly well formed from a syntactic point of view native speakers of English know that the referents of words like cat and dog do not normally participate in the activity of painting, nor indeed does the activity of painting itself imply that it can usually be applied to milk. A verb like paint normally implies a human subject, and it normally suggests an object like a picture or a scene. In other words, individual lexemes have meaning implications in their internal structure; thus a verb like marry entails, as part of its meaning, that two humans are involved in the activity (and usually humans of the opposite biological sex but this inference is currently under review), while also inherent in its meaning is some sense of causation: thus John married Mary can either mean that John, as a priest or minister, caused Mary to be married to Bill, or that some unnamed priest/minister caused John to be married to Mary. Consider again sentences such as John fixed the car as against John made the car: while the car is the object of the sentence in both instances, the speaker knows that in the former the car already exists and has existed for some time; while, in the latter, it comes into being through Johns agency. It might appear obvious that the use of a word like not changes the meaning of sentences in a predictable fashion to deny their truth value: thus Priscilla loves Charles as against Priscilla doesnt love Charles. However, in sentences such as I didnt see some boys I knew/ I didnt see any boys I knew or Many girls didnt go to the party/Not many girls went to the party, the effect of the negative is less easy to assign to a single consequence, changing the meaning of the positive sentence in a way different from that in Priscilla doesnt love Charles.
37
WORDS AND MEANINGS
At the same time, it is difficult to ascribe to some lexemes a single and all-embracing meaning. While it would be possible to give fairly precise dictionary-style definitions to all the lexemes in a sentence like: Henry patted the dog beside the road, the lexeme beside would perhaps be the least easy to pin down to a specific and repeatable meaning. Notice again how the meaning of a sentence is not merely the sum of its component lexemes but is heavily dependent upon our knowledge of the syntax of the utterance itself. The meaning of a sentence like John asked how clever Mary was depends upon the speaker/hearer knowing that the string of words is structurally ambiguous . The sentence can either mean: John asked someone to tell him the degree to which Mary was clever or John inquired after the health of clever Mary. There is the difficult question too of equivalent in meaning lexemes synonyms. Sentence such as John is a bachelor and John is an unmarried man can be said to be synonymous. However, a sentence like John received a letter from Bill and Bill sent John a letter are not necessarily so, since in the former the letter, although authored by Bill, may not necessarily have been physically sent by him. Likewise, one could argue that complete identity of meaning does not exist between sentences such as The book is in the cupboard and The cupboard contains the book. The dictionary is, par excellence, the source of appropriate meanings which can be ascribed to individual lexemes. However, our comments above have cast some doubt on its usefulness as a vehicle for enabling us to ascertain the meanings of combinations of individual lexemes in sentences. There are other limitations to the usefulness of a dictionary. Language users are aware that almost all the words in their vocabulary do not exist as separate, unique entities; they can have relationships with other lexemes. Thus, in the case of a word like dog, there are lexemes such as wag, bark, collar, bone, even faithfulness, which can be associated with it, or which collocate with it in a semantic field. The dictionary itself tells us very little about such a phenomenon and we have to turn to the thesaurus to gain information of this type. A thesaurus can be defined as a list of words (usually arranged alphabetically as in a dictionary) which are semantically related to each other in various ways for example as being synonyms (identical in meaning) or as antonyms (opposite in meaning). Sometimes, in preference to an alphabetic ordering, the items in a thesaurus can be arranged according to Themes or Notions. For instance, under the theme/topic of STEALING we find listed in Rogets Thesaurus, lexemes such as: lifting; robbing; theft; shop-lifting; larceny; robbery with violence; body-snatching; abstraction; copyright infringement; fiddle; plundering;
38
WORDS AND MEANINGS
looting; sacking; fraud; deception; androlepsy. Clearly, we are not dealing here with a list of synonymous words or expressions, but a set of lexemes which all relate to a shared field of meaning, a network of related signs. Another important function of the thesaurus is the identification of hyponyms an ordered or hierarchical set of relationships existing between related lexemes. Thus flute, piano, banjo, drum and cello are all hyponyms of the concept MUSICAL INSTRUMENT, and building, column, dome, arch, portico hyponyms of ARCHITECTURE, while stone, gem, granite, diamond and oil might all be seen as hyponyms of GEOLOGY. It should be obvious that notions such as semantic field or collocation of lexemes infer that the language user is able to bring to bear certain presuppositions and implications relating to the connectivity of different areas of meaning. For example, the speaker knows that a sentence like John X is dead implies also that John X is no longer alive. Similarly, the speaker knows that I have never been to Glasgow contradicts I live in Glasgow now. In the same way an utterance like The Queen visited Australia presupposes that there is a Queen in the first instance. On the other hand, East is East and West is West are tautologies. These types of shared knowledge or presuppositions existing between speakers belong to the domain of linguistic Pragmatics. Pragmatics is a difficult area to define and covers a wide range of linguistic and extra-linguistic activity. In essence, Pragmatics deals with the ways in which hearers try to uncover what speakers are trying to communicate to them and what the intentions of the speaker are in so doing. This can often be reflected in extra-linguistic behaviour such a co-operation in the taking of turns at speaking in spontaneous conversation, or through the use of markers of politeness to signal our attitudes and feelings towards other speakers: Would you mind closing the window, please? as against Shut the window, will you?
39
WORDS AND MEANINGS
Bibliography
The Lexicon Category A Hurford, J R and Heasley, B, Semantics: A Coursebook , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 Quirk, R, Words at Work, London: Longman, 1986 Category B Aitchison, J, Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994 Bolinger, D L, Meaning and Form , London: Longman, 1977 Hofman, R T, Realms of Meaning, London: Longman, 1993 Hudson, R, Word Meaning , London: Routledge, 1995 Jackson, H, Words and their Meanings , London: Longman, 1988 Jeffries, L, Meaning in English, London: Macmillan, 1998 Leech, G, Semantics. London: Pelican, 1981 Palmer, F R, Semantics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 Sweetser, E, From Etymology to Pragmatics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 Pragmatics Green, G, Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding , New York: Erlbaum, 1988 Leech, G N, Principles of Pragmatics, London: Longman, 1983 Levinson, S, Pragmatics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 McCawley, J D, Everything that Linguists have Always Wanted to Know about Logic but were Ashamed to Ask, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981. A very useful introduction to the study of Semantics, Pragmatics and Presupposition.
40
VARIATION IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH
SECTION 6
6.1 Language in society: social variation

The study of language in society the discipline of Sociolinguistics is relatively new. Its remit is to examine the ways in which social factors determine and affect the type of language speakers use; how linguistic habits reflect speakers perceptions of their place in society both from their own point of view and that of others. We often label speakers according to our prejudices as to how they use vulgar or polite language (in their pronunciation, syntax and vocabulary). Nevertheless speakers will, consciously and subconsciously, adapt their speech habits to the audience they are addressing as well as to the nature of the social situation in which they find themselves. Language can be an identifying characteristic of (among other factors) a speakers age, gender, social class, education, occupation and the level of awareness they show to their language being observed by others in the situation. Speakers are constantly varying their language as a consequence of such social perceptions and will readily accommodate to the usage of those with whom they engage in discourse or to whose speech they attach prestige this is called change from above. On occasion, these changes can even occur in the opposite direction innovations can appear in Middle Class speech as the result of the influence of forms normally associated with the Working Class user change from below. There are perhaps three major extra-linguistic factors that affect social definition and identification through language. These are gender, social class, and consciousness of being linguistically observed by others. Indeed, all these factors normally interact and none is by itself wholly definitive, although gender seems to have an especially important role to play. Standard models of sociolinguistic theory see linguistic variation as principally mapped against: (1 ) social class (based on a wide range of criteria, with educational attainment playing an important role). The customary division here is between Upper Class, Middle Class and Lower Class usage; the level of formality in the context where the speech event takes place (the level to/at which the speaker is conscious of being observed for the way they speak). To assess the latter speakers are observed along a scale of contexts in which the speech act takes place:
(2)
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(a)
(b) (c)
when reading pairs of words and lists of words (i.e. when speakers know they are being tested for their linguistic habits and even for which ones); in relatively informal (often group) interview situations when speakers may only be indirectly aware of being observed; when speakers are completely unaware that they are being observed (surreptitiously recorded spontaneous conversation).
The classic pattern (sometimes known as the Labovian paradigm ) shows that stigmatised, or vulgar forms not surprisingly increase with a lowering both of the social class of the informant and the decrease of formality in the linguistic situation or context. For example, the following chart shows what has been found to be the prevalence of glottal stop substitution for [t] among Glaswegian speakers in words like water [wa/r], hit it [hI/ I/] mapped against social class categories. The stigmatised glottal is high among Working Class speakers (especially when speaking in informal contexts), low among Upper Class speakers (typically when they are conscious that their speech is being observed); see Figure 6.1 below. Figure 6.1: Glottal stop by social class in Glasgow
100 80
percent

60 40 20
0 Class One (Upper Middle)
Class Two (Middle)
Class Three (Working)
However, we need to qualify such an obvious conclusion. There are no speakers in any social class whose language is homogenous. Both Upper and Middle Class speakers show glottalisation of voiceless [t] and [k]; indeed, the evidence from several surveys including those of Glasgow and Edinburgh shows glottalisation spreading to the Middle Classes from the Working Class a change from below characteristic. Again, Working Class speakers themselves show a reluctance to use stigmatised forms like glottals in those contexts when they are conscious that others are paying attention to the way they speak (as when they are reading aloud, for example).
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The following graph shows how both Upper Middle and Working Class speakers in some parts of England will tend to use more prestigious forms like [N] rather than a stigmatised [n] for the final sound of words like looking, seeing, as their consciousness of being observed increases. On the one hand, in casual speech contexts, speakers from all social classes (and especially the Working Class) are likely to produce the [n] phoneme [lUkIn]. However, note how (a) Upper Middle Class speakers themselves have some stigmatised usage even in the most formal of contexts, while (b) it is the Lower Middle Class speaker (perhaps the most upwardly mobile member of society) who is most conscious of the stigmatised nature of the [In] suffix, rejecting its use to a greater extent than speakers in the social class immediately above, as can be seen from the topmost line of the graph in Figure 6.2: Figure 6.2: Frequency of present participle [IN ] for [In ] mapped against formality of situation
90 80 70
percent
60 50 40 30 20 10

UMC LMC WC
0 casual
reading
word pairs
Indeed the Lower Middle Class speaker will show a greater resistance to the use of the dental [n] nasal than the social class immediately above and may well hypercorrect that is, go as far as to avoid the use of a dental [n] nasal in those sets of words where speakers in all social classes would otherwise use it thus producing [kapt IN] for captain, and [gAAdIN] garden. In other words, while speakers of all social classes are conscious of linguistic variation and demonstrate it, it would appear that there are certain groups of speakers who are more conscious than others of the social value of their speech habits. This phenomenon is probably a characteristic in Western societies of those individuals who are socially and upwardly mobile those who strive to reach the apex of the social pyramid, but who have not yet achieved that goal. Such may well be a feature too of the language of many groups of female speakers.
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Indeed, the gender of the speaker is a powerful determinant of the way language is used in social contexts. The following graph (Figure 6.3) maps prevalence of [t] glottalisation in Glasgow against gender and social class. It is immediately clear that (a) female speakers outside the Working Class are less likely to use the stigmatised glottal than are males; and (b) that this tendency is especially strong among Lower Middle Class female informants: Figure 6.3 : Use of the glottal stop in Glasgow
90 80 70 60
percent

50 40 30 20 10 0 males females
Upper Middle Class Lower Middle Class Working Class
General observations like these have been supported by a number of different surveys and suggest that, in general, female speakers speak less vulgarly than do their male peers and that they, like males, tend to be even more conscious of the social value of language when they live in a Lower Middle Class socially aspirant environment. However, matters are not always as clear cut as this. Several instances have been recorded where a cross over effect exists that is, where speakers do not necessarily react in a fashion that their social class might predict. Much comment has been made on the Edinburgh Morningside [E] for [a] pronunciation for items like cat, sat, etc.: [kEt], [sEt]. This raising of the low front vowel is a feature especially typical of females in the Upper Middle Class who are over 50 years of age. However, the daughters of these speakers, enjoying the same educational and social backgrounds, avoid this pronunciation regarding it as too stereotypically Morningside a phenomenon known as reverse accommodation or stereotype avoidance. These younger women will produce only [kat], [sat] pronunciations.
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Again, it has been shown that the glottalisation of voiceless stops in both Glasgow and Edinburgh is fast becoming a characteristic of the speech of the Middle Classes especially among young males with whom, one supposes, some Working Class forms have a macho image. In Edinburgh too, while Working Class female speakers especially when they are conscious of being recorded avoid the stereotypically male low back vowel [A] in words like back and cat preferring the more standard [bak], [kat] pronunciation their husbands, even under conditions when they are maximally conscious of being recorded and observed, retain the macho low back [A] pronunciation in such words in nearly all circumstances, such is its significance as a Working Class macho, male feature. These speakers show an allegiance to a vernacular standard rather than to any more socially prestigious norm. It is important to stress that the study of sociolinguistics is itself the study of language change in action linguistic innovation is often driven by factors which are best described as sociolinguistic. For example, a recent study of the linguistic behaviour of incomers from London to Milton Keynes New Town, Buckinghamshire, has shown how it is the speech habits of older children (those around 1416 years of age) which are the most advanced and innovative, and are at the leading edge of change; their younger brothers and sisters tending to be identified with the language of their parents. The older children especially the girls innovate according to the linguistic conventions of their own peer group, in effect establishing their own standard, often based on the Working Class norms (a covert prestige). For instance, while the parents of these children (largely from the Working Class East End of London) produce pronunciations like [Arm], [nOIt], and [fED] for arm, night and feather, the young adults innovate to produce: [AAm] , [naIt], and [fEvA] and it is on their usage that the next generation of speakers pronunciation may well be based. It is important to realise too that young Working Class speakers can often demonstrate a very high degree of linguistic subtlety in their speech, while Middle Class usage can be fairly homogenous. For example, a survey of Working Class schoolchildren in County Durham demonstrated that they systematically utilised (in predictable contexts) more than half a dozen different phonetic realisations for the sound [t] aspirated, non-aspirated, checked, glottalised, partially glottalised, [r] substituted (gorra for got to), and so on. However, the speech of their teachers (characteristic of Middle Class North Eastern English) in general showed a contrast only between aspirated and unaspirated forms.
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It is obviously extremely important that the teacher of language recognises that the speech habits of children (especially Working Class children) are not slovenly or incorrect. Rather such speech often shows features of peer group esteem, as well as linguistic innovation which itself may become the Middle Class standard of the next generation. Even in the late nineteenth century, the dropping of the vowel-following [r] in words like <first> and <nurse> (now a prominent characteristic of Middle Class Standard English or Received Pronunciation) was regarded as a major social gaffe. In the same period, the use of the long low back [AA] vowel in words like path and bath (in contrast to the low front [a] vowel as in cat, sat) was considered sufficiently vulgar to evoke from one observer the comment: We ask of every man if it would not disgust him to sickness (W H Savage, The Vulgarities and Improprieties of the English Language , 1833). Both earlier vulgar usages have now entered Middle Class speech in many parts of the UK another instance of change from below.
Bibliography
Category A Trudgill, Peter, Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society, London: Penguin, 1983. Although now a little dated, this is perhaps still the standard work on sociolinguistic theory and its applications. The book is very useful as an all-round introduction to most of the core issues in the subject, is user-friendly and contains much of interest on the correlation between modern British and American English usage and the age, social class and gender of the speaker. The book is useful too in the way in which it goes beyond the more obvious sociological aspects of modern English usage, branching out to discuss social interaction, language and nation, and wider geopolitical issues. The book is essentially a distillation by Trudgill of his Edinburgh PhD thesis on the Sociolinguistics of English in Norwich City. This is a benchmark work, published under The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Trudgill, Peter, Sociolinguistic Patterns in British English , London: Arnold, 1978. This is one of the best introductory textbooks dealing with the Labovian model of sociolinguistics, illustrated through discussions of surveys carried out in a wide set of communities in Britain and the USA. An essential first guide.
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Romaine, S, Language in Society. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. This is an excellent introductory guide to the main issues in sociolinguistic theory, clearly written and readily accessible to the non-specialist. Its strength lies in the way it emphasises the sociological as well as the linguistic in determining language variation. Indeed, the book is an attempt to provide, in a very readable form, a unified theory of variation that embraces both the quantitative approach taken by the linguist and the societal and cultural approach of the sociologist. The author is most certainly correct to stress the inter-dependence of these two issues. Strong on gender-related variation, the book also provides considerable insights into the workings of Pidgin and Creole languages and the implications these have for sociolinguistic theory in general. Other excellent and very general introductions to the major concepts and models relating to sociolinguistics are to be found in: Bell, R T, Sociolinguistics: Goals, Approaches and Problems, London: Batsford, 1976 Holmes, J, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, London: Longman, 1992 Hudson, R A, Sociolinguistics: A Brief Introduction, Rowley, MA: Newbery House, 1971 Wardhaugh, R, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 Category B Labov, William, Sociolinguistic Patterns, Oxford: Blackwell, 1972. This is the sociolinguists Bible, containing as it does, all the foundation observations by the worlds most eminent practitioner of the discipline. The book is notable for the way it attempts to address the theoretical and practical issues in the study of language in society, and is particularly important for the way it stresses the interaction between sociolinguistic methodology, language change, and level of education of the speaker. Much of the exemplification is taken from New York and North Eastern United States English, and there are detailed studies of the social stratification associated with several variables, notably post vocalic [r]. The work shows too, for the first time, how certain groups of speakers use hypercorrection as a signalling device, and there are especially useful comments on the co-relation between language and gender. For the educationalist the work is particularly significant in that it clearly demonstrates the subtleties of Lower Class (in this case African/American) usage, relating these to processes of linguistic change which take place in English as a whole.
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Chambers, J K, Sociolinguistic Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. This is a recent textbook bringing together the developments that have occurred in the last thirty years to the early Labovian model. The book is extremely useful for the way it examines and criticises the building blocks of sociolinguistic theory; linguistic variables, sociological and sociocultural factors, and the techniques involved in sampling are all given an insightful overview (Chapter 2). The book is especially strong too in its treatment of social networks and the mechanisms for the reinforcing and establishment of peer group hierarchies. It also contains one of the most in-depth studies of the important role played by gender in social identification and language change (Chapter 3). The book explores in detail the purposes and social meanings of linguistic variation, one of its really novel features being the way it attempts to describe the roles of standard and non-standard speech, notably the functions of covert prestige in determining variation type and frequency. Category C Fasold, R, The Sociolinguistics of Society, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. This introductory work is a useful counterweight to the essentially quantitative approach taken by Labov and Trudgill. It very much stresses the sociological aspects of language variation as against the purely quantitative listing of linguistic variables. The book deals, in a very conversational fashion, with topics such as multilingualism in the broadest sense, diglossia, language planning and standardisation as well as language in education. Particularly useful are the sections dealing with statistical methodology and interpretation, attitudinal characteristics and the factors governing language choice in multilinguistic communities. Fasold, R, The Sociolinguistics of Language , Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. A very important work on the communicative aspects of sociolinguistics and an excellent counterweight to the approach taken by Labov and Trudgill. The book contains chapters on Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, Conversational Implicature and an enlightening discussion of Language and Sex. Cameron, D and Coates, J (eds), Women in their Speech Communities: New Perspectives on Language and Sex, London: Longman, 1988. Probably the best collection of papers dealing with womens language, largely from a feminist perspective. The Introductory chapter is particularly useful as a guide to current thinking in this area of sociolinguistic research.
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6.2 Regional variation in the modern language

English shows an enormous diversity of regional types. With over 500 million speakers claiming English as their first language worldwide and as many again choosing English as their first second language, it is not surprising that over the past two hundred years or so, major differences have appeared and that region-specific forms of the language have surfaced. Although there have been many communicative advantages in the rise of English as a world language, the downside has been the almost mass extinction of other languages across the globe, particularly in Africa, India and South America. Perhaps as many as two or three hundred of the worlds languages are lost each year. It is important to stress that regional variation goes hand in hand with sociolinguistic and temporal variation. Each regional dialect has its own sociolinguistic characteristics and shows the effects of temporal linguistic change differentially. The distinction is often made between dialect (regional variation) and standard, dialects being seen as somehow having less status than standards. It is important to stress that standard dialects are themselves just that dialects variant forms of language with a specific sociolinguistic status in a particular geographical area. Standard English (or Received Pronunciation), for example, is spoken today by something under two percent of the UK population and is often not recognised as a prestigious standard at all by speakers from other parts of the English-speaking world. 6.2.1 British regional variation
Regional differences in pronunciation, vocabulary and syntax are very obvious in Modern British English (and it is a myth that dialects are dying). Sometimes these differences are even very obvious across small geographical areas for example, between the broad Scots spoken on one site of the Tweed Bridge at Coldstream, Berwickshire, and the distinctive Northumbrian spoken on the English (Cornhill-on-Tweed) side. But in general, dialect boundaries (sometimes known as isoglosses) are not sharply distinct, but fuzzy, with a mixture of both dialect types on either side of the line. However, we can generalise and say that there are several major and distinct North/South regional differences in modern Britain, with North meaning northwards of the English Midlands. Perhaps one of the most salient of these is the FOOT/STRUT split. Speakers (especially Working Class speakers) North of the English Midlands tend to use a (historically earlier) [ U] vowel in words like
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butter, love and come. Speakers (especially Middle Class speakers) to the South of the English Midlands (and throughout Scotland) use the lowered and centralised [] , thus leading to a [lUv]\[lv] contrast, although it has to be stressed that even Working Class speakers in these areas will attempt to produce [lv] pronunciations when they are conscious that their speech is being observed. A somewhat similar regional and social distribution occurs with the BATH/TRAP split. Middle Class speakers in the South East of England will produce long low back [AA] vowels in words like glass and bath. Nearly all Scottish as well as Northern English Lower Middle and Working Class speakers use [a] (short) vowels instead. However, as we might by now expect, Lower Middle Class speakers in these areas and even in Scotland will accommodate to the long low [AA] vowel in such words when they are speaking formally. But usage is far from settled, even in Middle Class communities in the South East, since there is still to be heard an [a]/[AA] alternation among such speakers in words like plastic, disaster, banana and some others. [h] adding and dropping is also a good marker of a speakers region of origin. Although it is primarily best considered as a sociolinguistic marker of Working Class speech throughout England, loss of word initial [h] in words like happy, heavy and hit is very commonly to be found in (East) London and the North of England however, it rarely, if ever, occurs among Scottish speakers. An excellent marker of South Eastern and East Anglian English is the phenomenon of [j]-dropping in words like new, few, beautiful. Many Working Class speakers in East London and, in particular, in East Anglia (Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex) will pronounce these words as [nU], [fU] and [bUtIfUl]. On the other hand, many older Working Class speakers in the East of Scotland, will produce the opposite effect, adding a [j] in words like book and hook, thus [bjUk]. Again, the presence or absence of the post vowel [r] sound in words like here, car and mother is a strong marker of regional origin, with only the peripheral Eastern and South Western areas of England and the whole of Scotland in general retaining the [r], which is characteristically deleted (or replaced by a vowel) elsewhere. Thus [hi] here and [kAA] car. Midland, in particular West Midlands speakers (notably those from Birmingham and Liverpool) show typical pronunciations of the -ing suffix in words like going, looking. As the spelling suggests, at an
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earlier period of the language, this suffix was pronounced [INg ], a practice still retained, especially by Working Class speakers, in these areas. Indeed, many such speakers also devoice the final [g] to give pronunciations like [kUmINk] coming and [dUINk] doing. The regional pronunciation of Scotland is very varied, of course, but a few generalisations can be made concerning some of its main contrasting characteristics:
Many Middle Class speakers (particularly in the West of Scotland) can
show a distinct vowel preceding the r sound in each of the following words: dirt, pert, hurt: [dIrt], [pErt] and [hrt ]. In Standard Southern British English, such vowels before (the lost) [r] can be collapsed under a single sound (thus [dt], [pt] and [ht]), although it has to be said that this is a characteristic of the speech of prestigious Middle Class speakers in Edinburgh and Glasgow as well.
In contrast to Southern British Standard English, Scottish speakers
tend to show a difference in the pronunciation of the diphthongs in words like tide [tId] and tied [tAed], and produce a monophthong in words like say [se] and go [go] rather than a diphthong [seI], [goU]. Many Scottish speakers too show the same vowel in pairs like pull/pool [pUl] : cot/caught [kOt ], with Southern British Standard English speakers producing [pl]\[pUUl] and [kot]\[kt] contrasts.
In many (especially non-prestigious) social contexts the vowel in a
word like kit sounds like the vowel in come.

Many Lower Class male speakers in particular pronounce house and
cow as though they were written hoose and coo.

Speakers (increasingly in all social classes) tend to substitute the
glottal stop for t and p in words like butter and upper.

The l sound when following a vowel is often realised as a vowel
itself, thus a word like tunnel sounds like tunno.

Some speakers produce fricative sounds in words like light and
brought which are pronounced as if written licht [lI?t] and brocht [brOxt], much after the fashion of the German ach/ich distinction.
Words like which and witch, Wales and whales are pronounced
with a different initial sound in many varieties of Scottish English ([hw] versus [w]), whereas in Standard Southern British English they are homophones.
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6.3 Overseas (or extra-territorial) regional variation

6.3.1 United States English
North America probably boasts the largest group of native Englishspeaking communities on the planet. Not only that, but North American English notably a type spoken in the United States has now become the version of English most familiar to non-native speakers and the one which they prefer to acquire. The United States itself is, of course, rich in regional dialect differences, variations being regularly found between the Northern area (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York, Michigan, Indiana and Minnesota) and the Southern area (the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas). The remainder, especially that spoken in the west of the United States, is often called General American. Differences in vowel pronunciation between British and US English are, of course, many and varied, but perhaps the most obvious are the merger of the vowels in words like dawn and Don. In these items Southern British Standard English speakers will show an [o]/[O] contrast, while United States English speakers (like most Scottish speakers as well) generally merge the words under the [O] vowel, or use the vowel [] for both; US speakers tend to use the same vowel [E] in words like Mary, merry and marry; in words like new and duke many US dialects show the loss of the [j] sound, realising [duk], [nu] (much like speakers in East Anglia and in Working Class districts of London). Perhaps the most obvious consonantal differences between British and American English is that the latter generally (but not universally) keeps post-vocalic [r] in words like far and car. Again many American English speakers will pronounce words like writer and rider as if they were homophones, the intervocalic [t] sound being realised as a tap [|]. Differences in the pronunciation of several items of vocabulary have an almost anecdotal status: General American [lEvr] lever as against Standard Southern British [liiv], and General American [tmeI|oU] tomato as against British Standard [tmAAtoU].
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6.3.2
Southern Hemisphere English
Southern Hemisphere English including the versions spoken in Singapore and the Philippines is perhaps best seen in the varieties of English spoken in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand which, in some respects, share many features of their pronunciation. South African speakers are very likely to pronounce words which in Standard British English show [AA] items like past, laugh, path with the long rounded back [] vowel, so that words like last and part in South African English sound close to Southern Standard British lost and pot. Both South African and Australian English speakers pronounce the diphthongs in words like wide and high as [OI], not unlike pronunciations heard among Working Class London speakers. Likewise, the Southern British Standard diphthong [eI] in words like day and may, appears as a wider diphthong like [aI] or even [I] (again not unlike some Working Class London speakers). It is quite common to hear Southern Hemisphere speakers produce a vowel in words like sit, hit as somewhat higher, fronter and closer to [i] (making them sound like Scottish pronunciations of seat and heat). Australian English speakers in particular tend to produce the [E] vowel in words like get and set as if it were the same as the vowel in sit, hit. The consonantal system in Australian English is characterised by the loss of initial [h] in words like Harry, help (again like Working Class London English) as well as the loss of [w] in words beginning with [kw]. Thus quarter and caught her can sound almost the same. Like United States English, Australian English also changes intervocalic [t] in words like butter, writer to something approaching (but not identical to) the United States tap [|]. That there are so many similarities between modern London and South Eastern English and some varieties of Southern Hemisphere English may reflect immigration patterns into these countries from Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although such a claim is the subject of much controversy. The English spoken in the Indian subcontinent India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh is extremely varied, and reflects the very large numbers of speakers using the language on a day-to-day basis, their geographical and social separation and, not least, the fluency with which they can use the language. Yet another factor is the influence which the features of their mother language (or, more likely, mother languages) have upon their use of English. A very few general features can be noted here. Where British and American English speakers use aspirated voiceless obstruents like [p], [t], [k] in words like pit, tin and kit,
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Indian speakers tend to use unaspirated forms. Semi-vowels like [j] and [w] are sometimes lost or added unetymologically at the beginnings of words: hence we find on the one hand [oont] for wont and, on the other, [jEvri] every, [woold] old and (with a typical Indian subcontinent [v] for [w] substitution) [von] own. But perhaps the most obvious characteristic of sub-continental speech to the British ear is the use of the backed pronunciation of the dental [d] and [t] sounds, sometimes to alveolar [d1]\[t1] (the tongue touching the hard ridge behind the upper teeth), or even as far back as to the retroflex []\[] (where the tongue touches the back of the hard palate) . 6.3.3 New Englishes
In one sense new Englishes are being created all the time through the processes of historical and sociological change, dialect contact and regional separation. While we can be fairly certain that this type of change will continue unabated, there is little of certainty to indicate in which direction changes will take place or even whether, in the next hundred years, say, all varieties of English will even be mutually intelligible. There are, however, specific cultural and economic situations that give rise to the production of new forms of languages. This is particularly the case when an economically or militarily dominant culture comes into contact with another that is less developed. In trading between the two groups, a new form of the dominant cultures language is created, a form which although it may resemble the target language in many respects is in most ways a simplification of it. Such simplified versions of languages are called Pidgins. Pidgins are to be found in many parts of the world today Swahili is pidginised in East Africa; Anglo-Romani occurs in Europe; Pidgin Hindi and Malay occur in Asia; while Spanish and French are pidginised widely in Central/South America, the Caribbean and West Africa. However, perhaps the most successful Pidgin today is that version of English spoken and written in Papua New Guinea Tok Pisin ( Talk Pidgin). This has become the national language of Papua New Guinea perhaps one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world, with over seven hundred indigenous languages so far recorded and with Tok Pisin performing the function of a non-tribal lingua franca. Although they can be, and are, used for almost every conceivable purpose from state laws to biblical translation and car maintenance manuals, Pidgins are essentially simplifications of the languages they attempt to emulate. For example, they rarely show any morphological marking for case, number or tense. Thus, for I got the books, a Tok Pisin speaker might say i get di buk dem, with buk representing the plural as well as the singular form and get the past as well as the
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present. Likewise, there is rarely any use made of morphology to mark the possessive. So Johns book is buk belong John. However, there can be some use of auxiliary verbs to mark tense: i bin kam, he came (literally he been come). Again, there is no difference in form between different parts of speech such as noun, adjective and adverb: thus i get plenti strong: he has a lot of strength; i bin di trong: he was getting stronger and pulam trong: pull strongly. There is only one form of pronoun i for males, females and inanimates. Questions, commands and negative sentences are also characterised by a simplicity of syntactic structure notably in the lack of the use of do and changes in word order. Thus Yu go long haus can, in Tok Pisin, signify You are going home, Are you going home? and Go home! The vocabulary of Pidgin languages can be very inventive, relying often on reduplication for emphatic effects, thus luk: look but lukluk: stare; tok: talk but toktok: chatter; bikpela: big but bikpela bikpela: very big. At the same time lexical innovation can be startling: mausgras: mouth grass moustache; hul bilong nus: hole belong nose nostril; long haus sik: hospital; pikinini man/pikinini meri: male/female (Mary) child; skru bilong fut: ankle; skru bilong han: elbow; skru bilong lek: knee.
When a Pidgin language is the everyday language of the home and is thereafter acquired as a first language by the children in the household, then it is generally transformed into what is known as a Creole language. Creole languages are generally less linguistically simple than Pidgins, are more like the real target language and may eventually evolve into a very close version of the target language itself. While speakers of Pidgin English from all over the world are mutually intelligible, geographically separated Creole English speakers are usually not so.
6.4 New dialects, new standards

Recent sociolinguistic research has pointed to the ways in which new regional and social dialects can be formed. Indeed, these new dialects are coming to be used across wide geographical areas and their influence can be felt well outside what one would normally expect from contact between speakers of different (especially contiguous) dialects. A
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study of the language of London incomers to the new town of Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire showed that considerable innovation was taking place in the language of the children of the incoming population. While the speech of the very young children (the 5- to 10-years-olds) very much mirrored that of their parents, the language of the older, adolescent children (the 12- to 14-year-olds) was very different from both. In particular, the usage of the adolescents is difficult to associate with the immediate geographical region in which they live; it is bland. For example, for the diphthong in a word like goat the parents of these children show a quite wide range of pronunciation, ranging across [o U][AU][aU][aI] where the first element in the diphthong [o] is being fronted, so that words like coke and cake are beginning to sound alike in the dialect of the older generation, incomers from Working Class London areas. Their older children, on the other hand, show a much smaller range of variation and focus on one form usually a kind of compromise or intermediate form in this case [aU] . Although the older children too especially the older females who seem to be leading these changes are adopting pronunciations like [fri] three, [fEvA] feather [fio] few and thus sounding like Milton Keynes Cockney, in actual fact their speech is quite distinct from Working Class London and represents a new dialect where marked regional forms are not much in evidence. But perhaps the most surprising thing of all is that this bland region-less form of speech is now to be found across large geographical swathes of the South of England, so that it is difficult to tell from pronunciation alone whether an adolescent female (in particular) comes from Norwich, Dover or Reading. This new dialect is sometimes known as Estuary English , prevalent as it is throughout the catchment area of the River Thames and its estuary. Recent studies have shown that this cockney influence is to be found in the Working Class speech of young speakers in Glasgow (inevitably known as Jockney). These speakers distance themselves from the local Middle Class standard form of speech by introducing pronunciations from well outside their normal geographical range and where actual face-to-face contact with speakers who have such dialectal characteristics is unlikely. The forms they appear to be innovating are not unlike many of those to be found in Estuary English notably [v] for [D], thus [favr] for [faDr] father and [smfIN] for [smTIN] something. Interestingly too, these younger speakers are abandoning the almost shibboleth status of the fricative [x] pronunciation in words like loch for what would normally in the recent past have been considered an anglicised approximation pronunciation in [lOk]. To date, there is no evidence that such changes are the result of media (soap opera) influences.
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The process is, however, very widespread and more and more speakers appear to be using use fewer marked, identifiable forms; i.e. those pronunciations, for example, which are very strong signals of social class (upper and lower) or geographical, adopting instead forms which are supra-local and not easily identified with any particular dialect or position on the social scale; a new kind of bland English is appearing. Indeed, this kind of usage was recently observed to have even become a feature of the language used by Her Majesty the Queen in her Christmas broadcasts a Royal Estuary English.
Bibliography
British regional variation Category A Perhaps the best way of approaching this subject is first to read the appropriate chapters in (a) Graddol, D; Leith, D and Swann, J, English: History, Diversity and Change, London: Routledge, 1996, Chapter Five (pp. 180219) and Chapter Seven (pp. 25989), alongside (b) Crystal, D (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, Chapter 20 (pp. 298363). An excellent and general account of language variety on the contemporary scene can be found in Bailey, R W and Robinson, J L, Varieties of PresentDay English, New York: Macmillan, 1973. More detailed accounts are to be found in: Hughes, A and Trudgill, P, English Accents and Dialects , London: Arnold, 1979. An excellent general survey which includes both pronunciation and grammatical variations associated with dialect differences. Very useful in that it provides extensive examples of actual regional dialect materials, including samples from London, Norwich, Bristol, Liverpool, Tyneside, Edinburgh and Belfast, among others. Petyt, K M, The Study of Dialect: An Introduction to Dialectology, London: Deutsch, 1980. As its title suggests this book is mainly concerned with general models for and theories of dialectology in general. However, it does present, in an accessible way, good accounts of regional variation in Britain (Chapter 3) and detailed surveys of urban dialects in the United Kingdom and the USA (Chapters 6 and 7).
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Trudgill, P, The Dialects of England, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. This short book is possibly one of the best overall guides to regional variation in England. While it does have an element of specialised terminology, it should be useful for the beginner. It is particularly strong in its description of dialect differences in syntax and vocabulary and has an excellent section on dialect words. It is well illustrated throughout with dialect maps. Wakelin, M F, English Dialects: an Introduction, London: Athlone Press, 1972. A useful book for beginners, with a minimum of linguistic terminology. Concerned mainly with rural dialects and accents of England, but perhaps now a little dated in its approach and conclusions. Category B Trudgill, P and Chambers, J K (eds), Dialects of English: Studies in Grammatical Variation, London: Longman, 1991. A collection of mostly very readable essays by international experts on regional variation as seen through the syntax and phonology of the modern language. Part Six (pp. 2916) contains a very useful summary of the current state of dialectology theory, while for the Scottish student Browns paper on Double Modals in Hawick (pp. 74103) would be of special interest. Trudgill, P, On Dialect: Social and Geographical Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. A collection of useful essays covering a wide range of variational topics, but setting out to stress the relationship at every level between social and geographic variation in language. Students might find particularly interesting the insightful essay Acts of Conflicting Identity: The sociolinguistics of British Pop Song pronunciation (pp. 14160). Wells, J C, Accents of English, three volumes: Volume One: An Introduction (277 pp.); Volume Two: The British Isles (pp. 279465); Volume Three: Beyond the British Isles (pp. 467673), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. These volumes are the bible of the student of regional variation in Modern English. They provide an excellent reference for almost the entire range of pronunciation differences to be found in the language today. The work is so arranged as to be readily accessible according to pronunciation variables and in general keeps terminological complexity to the absolute minimum. It provides an excellent source of examples and explanations.
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Category C There are several major data-base collections of regional varieties in the British Isles: Mather, J H and Speitel, H H, The Linguistic Atlas of Scotland: Scots Section: Volume Three: Phonology, London: Croom Helm, 1986 Orton, H et al, Survey of English Dialects: Introduction , Leeds: Arnold, 19621971 Orton, H et al, Survey of English Dialects: Basic Material, Leeds: Arnold, 19621971 Orton, H and Wright, N, Word Geography of England, London: Seminar Press, 1975 Orton, H; Sanderson, S and Widdowson, J, Linguistic Atlas of England, London: Croom Helm, 1978 English overseas Category A Excellent and basic introductions to International English can be found in: Crystal, D (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, Chapter 20, pp. 298363 Grlach, M, Englishes: Studies in Varieties of English 19841988 , Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1991 Trudgill, P and Hannah, J, International English: A Guide to Varieties of Standard English , London: Edward Arnold, 1982 Category B Bailey, R W and Grlach, M (eds), English as a World Language, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1982 Bailey, R W, Images of English. A Cultural History of the Language, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1991, Chapters Three to Six, pp. 59177 Kachru, B B, The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992 Ricks, C and Michaels, L (eds), The State of the Language, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990
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United States English Category B The following are all reliable and detailed exemplifications of the major characterising features of modern United States English and all provide excellent sets of examples for further study: Bronstein, A J, The Pronunciation of American English, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1960 Cassidy, F G, Geographical Variation in English in the United States, in Bailey, R W and Grlach, M (eds), English as a World Language, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1982 Dillard, J L, A History of American English, London: Longman, 1992 Krapp, G P, The English Language in America, New York: Frederick Publishing Company, 1925 Mencken, H L, The American Language, London: Kegan Paul, 1936 Shuy, R W, Discovering American Dialects, Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1967 Simpson, D, The Politics of American English 17761850 , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 Wells, J C, The Accents of English: Volume Three, Chapter Six (pp. 467 559) Category C Major data-bases for modern United States English can be found in: Carver, C, American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1987 Kurath, H and McDavid, R I, The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1961 Southern Hemisphere English Category B The following contain accessible accounts of the major linguistic features of SHE and Indian English. While they are all extremely detailed, many provide short and useful summaries of the main characteristics of the geographical types they describe and place them in a local, historical as well as an international setting. De Villiers, A (ed.), English-Speaking South Africa Today, Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1976
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Lauder, Afferbeck, Let Stalk Strine, Sydney: Ure Smith; London: Wolfe, 1966 (an amusing, yet insightful look at Australian English) Mitchell, A G, The Pronunciation of English in Australia, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1965 Nihalani, P; Tongue, R K and Hosali, P, Indian and British English. A Handbook of Usage and Pronunciation, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979 Ramson, W S (ed.), English Transported. Essays on Australasian English, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970 Turner, G W, The English Language in Australia and New Zealand, London: Longman, 1966 New Englishes: Pidgins and Creoles Todd, L, Modern Englishes: Pidgins and Creoles , London: Blackwell, 1984. This is perhaps the most informative and readable book on the history, structure and characteristics of Pidgin English, especially of Tok Pisin, the form widely used in Papua New Guinea. The book also contains materials on the problems of bilingualism in the classroom. The following are very useful as follow-ups to Todd and contain examples of Pidgins and Creoles from many parts of the globe with further discussion of the problems they raise for the teacher in the English classroom: Platt, J; Weber, H and Ho, M L, The New Englishes, London: Routledge, 1984 Romaine, S, Pidgin and Creole Languages, London: Longman, 1988 Estuary English The majority of studies on this topic are still confined to the pages of specialist linguistics journals, but an excellent description of the phenomenon of dialect contact and subsequent levelling can be found in: Cheshire, J; Edwards, V and Whittle, P, Non-standard English and dialect levelling, in Milroy, J and Milroy, L (eds), Real English: the Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles, London: Longman, 1993 Kerswill, P, Milton Keynes and Dialect Levelling in South-Eastern British English, in Graddol, D; Leith, D and Swann, J, English: History, Diversity and Change, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 292300
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ENGLISH FOR SPECIAL PURPOSES
SECTION 7
7.1 Functional variation

The description English for special purposes is something of a misnomer since on the one hand it implies that there are non-specialist purposes for which the language is used and, on the other, it does not recognise the fact that English can be used for any communicative function deemed necessary by its speakers. It is perhaps best to talk about the use of English for specific purposes, occasions where either through convention or in response to the dictates of the extra-linguistic situation (classically the noisy background against which most face-toface conversation takes place) particular forms of syntax, morphology, vocabulary and even phonology are deemed to be appropriate. The functional range of English is vast and we shall only present background reading materials here for a few of the more obvious and common types: conversational English, English in advertising and the media, the English of literary texts. Perhaps the most interesting and insightful background reading for the teacher in this area is Bolinger, D J, Language: the Loaded Weapon (London: Longman, 1980), a classic and most readable work on the nature and function of language as a way of influencing other people and projecting our goals and priorities on to them. General introductory works dealing with language variety Crystal, D, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, Chapter 22, pp. 394423 Crystal, D and Davy, D, Investigating English Style, London: Longman, 1969 Freeborn, D; French, P and Langford, D, Varieties of English: An Introduction to the Study of Language , London: Macmillan, 1986 Moody, H L B, Varieties of English , London: Longman, 1970 ODonnell, W R and Todd, L, Variety in Contemporary English, London: Allen & Unwin, 1980 Quirk, R, The Use of English, London: Longman, 1968 Trudgill, P, Accent, Dialect and the School, London: Arnold, 1975
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7.2 English of face-to-face conversation

Discourse Analysis Category A Both of the following titles provide a detailed but approachable discussion of the structure of discourse, turn-taking and narrative structure. Stubbs, M, Discourse Analysis: The Sociolinguistic Analysis of Natural Language, Oxford: Blackwell, 1983 Traugott, E C and Pratt, M L, Linguistics for Students of Literature, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, pp. 24163 Category B Brown, G and Yule, G, Discourse Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 Edmondson, W, Spoken Discourse: A Model for Analysis , London: Longman, 1981 Nash, W, Designs in Prose, London: Longman, 1980 Category C More advanced is: DeBeaugrande, R and Dressler, W, Introduction to Text Linguistics , London: Longman, 1981
7.3 The language of literary texts

Category A Although neither of the following is overtly linguistic theoretical in its approach, both nevertheless contain many valuable informal insights into the characteristics of literary language and the tools available for their description and analysis. Crystal, D and Davy, D, Investigating English Style, London: Longman, 1969 Nowottny, W, The Language Poets Use, London: Athlone Press, 1975
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The works by Fowler, although perhaps now a little dated, provide excellent and readable analyses of texts themselves and the principles behind such analyses: Fowler, Roger, The Languages of Literature: Some Linguistic Contributions to Criticism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971 Fowler, Roger, Linguistic Criticism, 2nd edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 Fowler, Roger, Linguistics and the Novel, London: Methuen, 1977 Fowler, Roger, Literature as Social Discourse: the Practice of Linguistic Criticism, London: Batsford, 1981 Page, N, Speech in the English Novel, London: Longman, 1972 Widdowson, H, Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature , London: Longman, 1975 Category B Chapman, R, Linguistics and Literature: An Introduction to Literary Stylistics, London: Arnold, 1973 Freeman, D C (ed.), Essays in Modern Stylistics, London: Methuen, 1981 Leech, G N, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, London: Longman, 1969 Leech, G N and Short, M H, Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, London: Longman, 1981 Short, M (ed.), Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature, London: Longman, 1989 Turner, G W, Stylistics, London: Pelican, 1975
7.4 General functional varieties

Fowler, Roger, Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press, London: Routledge, 1991 Graddol, D; Leith, D and Swann, J, English History, Diversity and Change, London: Routledge, 1996, Chapter Eight Leech, G N, English in Advertising, London: Longman, 1966 Nash, W, The Language of Humour , London: Longman, 1985 ODonnell, W R and Todd, L, Variety in Contemporary English, London: Allen & Unwin, 1980, Chapters Five and Six: The Media and Advertising Vestergaard, T and Schroder, K, The Language of Advertising, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985
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HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
SECTION 8
8.1 Language change

Human language appears to be in a continuous state of change, a condition apparently impossible to arrest or affect to any significant extent. Even within a relatively brief timescale, changes (especially those involving pronunciation) are obvious, as can be observed by listening to 1930s BBC News reports delivered in a form of Southern British Standard English which is very different from that used today. While a modern English speaker could probably understand another speaker from around the beginning of the twentieth century (although the social signals might well be very different), communication with a speaker from around 1800 would be very much more difficult, and a conversation with Shakespeare or Milton would be fraught with the possibilities of incomprehension and misunderstandings. Face-to-face communication with Chaucer would be extremely difficult using modern English, while a speaker of English from the time of King Alfred could just as well be speaking a foreign language as far as the twenty-firstcentury English speaker is concerned. The changes that have taken place across time have affected every aspect of the language its pronunciation, syntax, and morphology as well as the range and meaning of its word stock. Language change is not yet fully understood, but there are at least three main factors. In the first place, language has to be learnt anew by every speaker and without tuition; children have to acquire the rules of language by hypothesising on their nature from the basis of what they hear around them. Such a process inevitably produces linguistic innovation, so that the speech of each generation can show significant differences from that of the previous one. There is too a kind of language internal dynamic for change the structure of language itself will predispose its users to modify it in certain well defined and even predictable ways. Secondly, there can be external influences. Contact with different cultures can lead to the adoption of new words and new expressions for introduced ideas and objects, while face-to-face communication with speakers of different dialects and even different languages can also have an effect. Thirdly, there are strong sociolinguistic motivations for language change especially for the direction it might take and the means by which individual changes are spread through the language.
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It is important to realise too that many language changes can be immediate and dramatic and not in the least surreptitious and nonobvious to language users at the time. Innovation in linguistic usage can be quite sudden, and even local, and is hardly ever accountable by reference to notions like laziness or sloppiness.
8.2 The origins of English

The ancestor of what is now the most widely spoken language on the planet was not spoken in England itself. Rather, English arose from a coming together of several languages originally spoken in continental Europe, notably in what is now Northern Germany, Belgium, Holland and Frisia. Speakers of these Germanic languages settled in England and Scotland in the early sixth century and their movement from continental Europe to Britain was part of a much wider diaspora of Germanic-speaking peoples in Europe during the decline of the Western Roman Empire. At the time of this British settlement there were two major languages spoken in what is now called the British mainland: (1) Latin spoken especially by the highly Romanised Romano-British population in southern England, and (2) probably the more widespread, a Welsh version of the Celtic language family . Accounts by observers notably Bede and Gildas writing many years after the events themselves, describe the English settlements as either great victories over Celtic savages or (from Gildas point of view) as savage and nonChristian incursions into Welsh-speaking territories. Place name evidence in particular points to an Anglicisation of the British mainland as far North as the Lothians in Scotland and as far West as the Welsh border with England by the early ninth century. North West England, South West England and large parts of Scotland remained and still partially remain Celtic speaking. At about the same time as English speakers were settling Northumbria and Berwickshire in Scotland, there took place an invasion of Irish Celtic speakers from Northern Ireland into the south and west of Scotland. Remnants of this Irish version of Celtic (Scottish Gaelic) are still to be heard in some parts of western Scotland today.
8.3 Old English

The earliest surviving form of English is generally called Old English (less accurately Anglo-Saxon based upon the names of two of the three principal Germanic peoples who settled in Britain) and is usually taken to cover the versions of English spoken in Britain between AD500 and
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AD1000. Very little of this language survives and available written texts are understandably scarce. However, sufficient remains for us to be able to make some very general statements concerning the nature of the languages grammar. The most extensive surviving texts are probably the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (although it refers to events relatively late in the period) and the Old English Laws as well as a substantial amount of literary material (especially poetic including the great heroic poem Beowulf). The language of these texts differs dramatically from Modern English and is generally unintelligible to the modern reader who has not undertaken a study of the language (although in many ways it resembles modern German). Differences occur at every level syntax, phonology and vocabulary. 8.3.1 Syntax and morphology
Old English (rather like Modern German) was a language that in many contexts placed the verb at the end of the sentence (rather than following the subject as in Modern English). So we find sentences equivalent to John Mary kissed rather than John kissed Mary. Question sentences too were very different, so that the equivalent of Did John kiss Mary? would have been Kissed John Mary? i.e. questions could be formed simply by placing the verb at the beginning of the sentence. Another important difference lay in the mechanism for denying utterances forming negative sentences. While we now negate the assertion that John kissed Mary by a rather complex process of inserting a do word incorporating a negative marker not before the verb, Old English speakers could show negation by placing a negative word in this case ne directly in front of the main verb. So, instead of John kissed Mary being denied as John didnt kiss Mary, we find John ne kissed Mary. Very commonly too (as in many versions of Modern English I didnt do nothing never) double negation was used: John ne kissed not Mary with no suggestion that a positive statement is being evoked. Perhaps though it is in the languages inflectional morphology (see Section 4.2) that the greatest differences are to be found with Modern English. The modern language has a relatively depleted system of inflectional morphology, in general only signalling: (1) (2) (3) possession: Johns book; more than one (plural): two books and perhaps two oxen; the person spoken about in the discourse in the present tense: John kisses Mary (as distinct from the speaker and spoken to: I kiss Mary; you kiss Mary where the verb is morphology free).
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(4)
Time reference in the past (the before now also shows an inflection): John kissed Mary.
In comparison, Old English was rich in such morphological signalling. For instance, there were a number of inflectional endings which could signal plurality: gief/giefu gifts; dag/dag es days; hand/handa hands; cniht/cniht as boys; scip/scipu ships. At the same time, the modern man/m en (vowel change) plural was much commoner at this early period than today and we find bro ther/brether brothers; book/bek books; burg/byrg cities. This morphological diversity is especially obvious in two other areas: (1) (2) when showing case relationships (see Section 2.1) who is doing what to whom, where and with what; in identifying person be it speaker (first person), spoken to (second person) or spoken about (third person).
In Modern English, in a sentence like The boy threw the gift to the man in the park, relationships between the nouns and the verb such as doer (the boy); affected object (the gift); direction (to the man); location (in the park), are expressed either by the pre-verb position in the case of the doer and by small words (like to and in) preposed before their nouns (prepositions). In Old English, however, these case relationships could all be expressed through the use of inflectional morphology attached to the right-hand side of nouns, thus: Gum+a (the man) threw the gief+u (the gift) to the cniht+e (boy) in the weald+e (wood). In the instance of person identification in present-tense contexts, an Old English speaker would signal this by inflectional contrasts on the verb: thus I luv+ e, you luv+ est, he/she luv+ eth (the last two still regularly found in the seventeenth century) with even luve+ath in the plural for they love. The past tense of verbs (describing activities occurring before now) is signalled in Modern English by three main mechanisms: the use of temporal adverbs then, yesterday, and so on; inflectional morphology; vowel change (see Section 2.2). In the modern language the default type utilises inflectional morphology in the shape of a dental suffix, thus I love/I lov+ed although vowel change can appear with a limited set of verbs: I sit/I sat. The latter group is relatively small in the modern language and language acquirers
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have to learn the set by heart as it were, since the verbs in question have no other mark of their identification. Mistakes can arise because of this, of course, and very young children will often produce the default system: I sitted this way lies language change. In Old English the vowel-change type was somewhat more common than now and the language learner had to learn a larger list of verbs falling into this category: I help/I halp; I sleep/I slap; I reap/I rap and many others. Two other features of Old English syntax make it appear very different from the historical forms which follow it. Firstly, the language had a system of grammatical gender , not unlike that of modern French or German. The form of the definite article (and other noun qualifiers) changed according to what the speaker knew of the gender category of the noun in question. Thus the word for the for nouns performing a doer (subject) case function could be se (masculine), seo (feminine) or that (neuter) according to the gender of the noun. Thus, we find se mann (the man); seo giefu (the gift) and that wif (the woman). The last example shows that gender did not always correspond to sex assignment since the word for woman (wif ) and young girl (magden) were neuter gender (as in Modern German). The personal pronouns: he, she, it and they were very different in their appearance in Old English and were often assigned according to the grammatical gender of the replaced noun, rather than its sex or animacy category. While the Old English he and hit are recognisable as the modern he and it, the word for she seo is very different, as are the words for they, their and them: hie, heora and heom, the modern forms only appearing at the very end of the Old English period. 8.3.2 Spelling and pronunciation
The spelling system used by Old English scribes in general uses a font, based on an Irish original, called insular minuscule. This script (unlike many of those which followed it in the next thousand years) is extremely easy to read and, in its most elaborate manifestations, as in the Lindisfarne Gospels, is exceptionally beautiful. While the symbols used are for the most part based upon Romano-Greek (and Phoenician) styles, like those of the modern alphabet, there were also a few idiosyncratic symbols derived from other writing style sources. Four such symbols are prominent: < D>/<> eth (value [D] or [T]); < Z> yog (value [j]) both stemming from Irish minuscule; <> thorn (value [D] or [T]), taken from the Runic alphabet, and </> ash (value [a]) possibly from Irish or even Romano-Greek.
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The pronunciation of Old English is a complex and much disputed topic and only a few generalisations can be made here. The consonantal system is much the same as in the modern language, although Old English speakers still produced the palatal and velar fricatives in [] and [x] in words like <niht> night and <soht> sought, much in the same way as some modern Scottish English speakers still do. In consonantal groups beginning words like know and gnat, both consonants were pronounced: [kn-] and [gn-], while (although there is still dispute on the issue) the vowel represented by <a> and < > was likely to have been equivalent to the modern Southern British Standard [A] (as in path, fast), rather than as in many modern dialects [a ] (as in bat, pack). It seems likely too that post vocalic [r] was pronounced on all occasions as in words like hard, far its loss being a feature of the language which only occurs late in the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century.
8.4 Middle English

Middle English is the generic term given to English between the (arbitrary) dates of 1000 and 1450. For this period we possess a vast number of written texts, ranging from literary and religious to governmental materials and including documents relating to cooking, medicine and hunting. The huge range of extant materials is of particular interest to the historical linguist, and covers evidence from many geographical regions as well as across a wide time span. The period corresponds with two major political and social events which, in their own way, can be said to have had some effect on the language. The beginning of the period in particular is characterised by settlements across most of England (but especially in the North East) of incomers from Scandinavia. Danish Vikings in particular settled and farmed Northumbria, Berwickshire and Yorkshire from the ninth century and it is possible, since their language was closely related linguistically to the English spoken in these areas, that some kind of koineisation took place and a mixed dialect developed; a process which may well have affected the way in which English evolved in these areas. The year 1066 saw the famous Norman victory at Hastings (by another group of Scandinavian Vikings the English army itself being also commanded by one, in the shape Harold Godwinson). The Norman invasion is often seen as a major contributor to linguistic change in the period, but it is important to stress that the (rather small) Norman army was not all French-speaking (there being many Flemish and German speakers present as well), while the majority of what was genuine French influence on English (especially in matters of vocabulary) was achieved a generation earlier through the efforts of the Francophile king, Edward
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the Confessor. It is easy to over-emphasise the influence on English linguistic change in this period as a result of contacts made with French and Scandinavian speakers although some scholars have even gone as far as to make the highly controversial claim that Middle English developed as a Pidgin version of Old English used by French speakers. The greatest influence of the Conquest was the near universal use of French as the language of bureaucracy and government and the pressures this development brought for reform of the spelling and graphic systems of Old English. 8.4.1 Syntax and morphology
Although the process took several hundred years to complete, the linguistic change most characteristic of English throughout the medieval period was its consolidation as a language of the S(ubject)+V(erb)+ O(bject) word order type; i.e. the verb came to be placed in the sentence in a non-final position, unlike in Old English where a verb final position was a possibility. However, it is important to stress that Old English itself was probably in a transitional stage between a verb final and non verb final type. Closely related with a syntactic system which places the verb at the end of the sentence is a reliance for signalling case relationships, number and person in terms of inflectional suffixes. Verb final languages tend to be heavily inflected. With the change from SOV to SVO there is a consequent and characteristic depletion in inflectional systems as a whole. It is this depletion of inflection that is the outstanding feature of the grammar of English between 800 and 1300. Endings previously placed upon nouns to signal whether they performed the function of agent, affected object, instrument through which the verbal action took place the noun case marking system were largely abandoned. In their place arose a system whereby such relationships were shown by placing in front of the noun (preposing) a small word a preposition to carry the appropriate signal. In our earlier (Old English) example: Gum+a (the man) threw the gief+u (the gift) to the cniht+e (boy) in the weald+e (wood), meanings like agent, affected, direction towards and place in which are all signalled by endings added to the right-hand side of the noun (postposed). By the end of the medieval period, such meanings could be realised much as in Modern English: the man threw the gift to the boy in the wood where direction towards and location in are now shown by the presence of the proposed to and in. The concepts of doer (agent) and affected (direct object) are now flagged by their word-order position vis-a-vis the verb: agents first, direct objects following. It was during the medieval period that this process was most active, as a consequence making texts from that period much easier for the modern reader to understand.
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The only inflectional markers which have survived into the modern language from Old English are: (a) (b) plural (more-than-one) marking on nouns by suffixing an <s> spelling ([s][z][z] in sound); possession marking on nouns by a similar device.
However, relic or residual forms for plural marking still exist in such contrasts as goose/geese; foot/feet and perhaps even ox/oxen; brother/brethren, although the last is confined to special discourse contexts. Over a period roughly encompassing 9501250 two other very important innovations occurred: (1) there was a complete loss of the system of grammatical gender the definite article became restricted to a single the form, regardless of any concern for the gender value of its noun; (2) the personal pronoun system came to look much more like the one we are now familiar with: in particular, we find the Old English word for the female pronoun seo changed into she and the plural third person (the persons spoken about in the discourse) changed from hie, hiera, hiem to they, their, them, although the former are still to be found used in London in Chaucers lifetime in the late fourteenth century. Many of these characteristic Middle English changes to the languages morphology appear first to have occurred in the Northern part of England especially in the North East and are therefore (and perhaps too readily) ascribed to Scandinavian language contact influence. But the arguments for language contact and indigenous change are complex and far from being resolved. 8.4.2 Spelling
The Middle English period is particularly important for the way in which the spelling system of the language was reformed, indeed transformed. Most of the changes result from the adoption of French and other continental spelling practices. In particular, the earlier Old English symbols taken from Irish and Runic alphabets < D>/<> eth, <> thorn, <Z> yog and </> ash were replaced by the modern <th>, <y> and <a> in many Middle English manuscripts, especially after 1200. Again, Old English spellings like <cw> cwen for queen, <sc> fisc for fish, and <cg> ecg edge were substituted by the<qu> and <dg> forms we are familiar with today.
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However, perhaps the most profound innovation occurred with respect to the development of a national spelling system. We are familiar today with the concept that everywhere in the world (with the exception of a few British/American English differences, such as colour/ color, theatre/theater) the English language is spelt the same way. In medieval times there was a very different state of affairs and the diversity of spelling possibilities at first sight suggests that the system was completely arbitrary and that one could spell as one pleased. For instance, we find spellings for a word like earth as erthe; eerthe; erethe; eorthe; orthe; ierthe; irthe; urthe; yerthe; Zorthe, among others. Many of these differences reflect contrasts in pronunciation according to the regional dialect of the speaker. Indeed, it has recently been shown that Middle English spelling is very far from being as random as it appears at first sight. Scribes were taught to spell according to the traditions of the scriptorium or writing school (often attached to a major cathedral or church) at which they were trained in orthographic skills. Some of the spellings they learned at these regional centres (Winchester, Bath, Durham, Hereford, etc.) could reflect local pronunciation differences, others were merely a reflection of local spelling custom. But the important thing to realise is that in medieval times we appear to have what is in effect a set of regional spelling systems and standards, not a national one. There are even some cases where scribes trained to the system of one scriptorium would continue to use it when they were transferred to another centre which used a different system individual pages of the manuscripts they copied would show their distinctive and foreign spelling system. Yet by the end of the Middle Ages this situation was beginning to change, and certainly by the middle of the fifteenth century (and encouraged by the invention of the printing press) we start to see documents (usually governmental documents) being spelt using the same system, regardless of where in England they were written. The model for the new standard system was adopted from the use of scribes working in the Lord Chancellors office in London and is often referred to as the Chancery Standard. It is on that standard that the internationally used spelling system of English is now broadly based. 8.4.3 Pronunciation
There are two important changes that occurred to the pronunciation of vowels in the medieval period, both of which involve vowel lengthening and both of which still have repercussions for the modern language. Changes in vowel length are common in the history of English and they are often triggered by the influence on the vowel of the number and type of consonants which immediately follow it in the
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word. This is very clear when we consider the pronunciation of many speakers of English in Scotland today. In words like breathe, wave and grove (where the vowel is followed by a voiced continuant consonant) the vowel is long; on the other hand, in words like leaf , fake, load where the following consonant is voiceless or where it is non-continuant, the vowel is short. A process like this can be found in Middle English as well. For example, when vowels occurred before clusters of consonants like [ld], the vowel was lengthened thus Old English [<ild] child becomes [<iild], but where the vowel is followed by more than these two consonants, as in children, no change takes place a contrast still to be seen in modern English child/children. Again when the vowel is followed by a single consonant and another vowel, as in a verb like Old English <macan> to make the vowel becomes long [maakn]. This contrast is very obvious when we compare modern English staff with staves the latter showing vowel lengthening as the result of the addition to the singular form of the plural inflection: thus Middle English singular [staf], plural [staavz] two staffs, a contrast still evident in the modern staff /staves alternation. However, as we shall see below, the lengthened vowels seem to undergo yet another set of processes, which, although they commence in the Middle English period, reach their fruition in the sixteenth century. The consonantal system emerged almost unchanged from the Old English period, still showing the [x] and [ ] fricatives (as in some Modern Scots dialects nicht and brocht) and with <w> pronounced in words like write and with final <b> still heard in words like lamb, climb, tomb.
8.5 Early Modern English

Between 1450 and 1750 the English language takes on many of the characteristics of pronunciation and syntax with which we are familiar in the modern language. The range and type of data we have from this period is very large and very diverse (overseas varieties, for example, appearing for the first time). Very importantly too we find the beginnings of language science taking place. Numerous language commentators make their appearance commentators who describe the workings of the language (often in quite sophisticated detail) and who offer us close insights into the contemporary processes of change which were taking place. Many of these commentators were driven by a desire to see a reform in the spelling system of the language which they felt failed to reflect pronunciation in any logical way. They argued for a spelling system in which there should be a one symbol/one sound principle, with no redundant symbols permitted like the <gh> in
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bought or the <h> in while and so on. However, the concern of these spelling reformers sometimes referred to as orthoepists was not confined to orthography alone and they often provide us with detailed and insightful information as to the languages pronunciation throughout the period. It is important to stress that especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we have, for really the first time, reliable and contemporary observations, comments and analyses of historical versions of the English language. 8.5.1 Sounds and spellings
Major changes took place in this period that affected the long vowel system, bringing it into a form more like that of Modern English. The changes, which are extremely complex, affected both high and non-high vowels. (See Section 3.1.2 for more on vowel types.) Taking the high front and back long vowels [ii] and [uu] first, we see that before 1450 words like Christ and house were pronounced with vowels which were [ii] and [uu] respectively. However, by the beginning of the sixteenth century we find that observers and spelling reformers are suggesting a diphthongal pronunciation for the vowels in these words, something like [kreist] and [hous]. (Notice, however, that this diphthongisation did not affect high back vowels in many Northern dialects where [huus] house and [kuu] cow forms remained.) The mid long vowels too show considerable alteration in this period. Before 1500 we know from the comments of grammarians and phoneticians that the vowel in words like seat and hear was the low mid [EE], thus [sEEt] and [hEEr ]. Commentators a century later tell us that these vowels have now become raised to [ii], realising modern pronunciations like [siit] and [hiir]. In the same way, the back low mid vowel [OO], recorded in words like goose and loose in the fifteenth century, is described a hundred years later as showing a raised [uu] vowel [guus]. Even by the eighteenth century, a word like Rome could rhyme with room suggesting an [OO] to [uu] shift in pronunciation. However, this raising of mid vowels did not always occur, and we find seventeenth-century commentators recommending pronunciations for words Jesus and conceived as <dZe-zus>; <konsevd> , that is with an [ee] (high front mid vowel), suggesting that pronunciations like [eezUz] and [knseevd], or Jaysus and consaved (still found among some Irish English speakers) were the norm. The long low vowels were also affected. Phonetic spellings in the early part of the period, such as maker and Mary, suggest [aa] rather than
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the modern mid vowel [e ]. Later observers in the period, however, show that these [aa] vowels could be realised as [ee] in such words, pronunciations like those in many modern dialects today (notably Scottish English): [m ekr] and [merI]. This suggests that approximately between 1400 and 1600 there was occurring a macro change affecting the pronunciation of long vowels such that: (1) (2) (3) High vowels became diphthongs [miin] [mein] mine; [muus] [mous] mouse. The mid and low vowels [aa] and [EE] are being raised to [ee] and [ii] respectively: [grav I] [grevI] gravy; [swEEt] [swiit] sweet. A process like this is occurring at this time with the back vowels as well, the high back [uu] appearing as a diphthong [au] as in words like house, mouth and town (still appearing with [u] vowels in some varieties of Northern and Scottish English). What were in Middle English words containing [oo] mid vowels, as in goose and fool (values still reflected in the fossilised spelling), show vowel raising to high [uu] values in most Southern varieties of English by 1700.
Although there is considerable dispute among linguists as to the details of its operation, this set of changes whereby high vowels are diphthongised and non-high vowels raised is often referred to as the Great Vowel Shift. The importance of this set of changes for the evolution of English pronunciation is profound. 8.5.2 Syntax: modals and auxiliary verbs
Although they can perhaps be said to have their beginnings in the late medieval period, two very great changes to the syntax of English occurred from around 1500. These changes affected the class of verbs sometimes called auxiliary verbs, and include such types as will, shall, can, ought, should, could, do. The modal verbs (see Section 2.2) in particular saw a great change in their linguistic status. Verbs like can, may, should, will and shall have a rather special status in modern English. For example, unlike other real or full verbs, they cannot occur with an infinitive to; they cannot take direct objects I must the car; and they cannot appear with -ing suffixes: it is maying to be done. Likewise, they cannot appear with have + -en constructions: I have been sick, but not I have mayen sick, nor can they appear with inflections marking person or tense: I look/she looks/she looked but not I can/she cants/ I canted (the I can/I could contrast clearly
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involves something other than tense). All this was rather different in the Middle and especially Old English periods when, in fact, what are now modal verbs like may, can, must all performed the function and showed the characteristics of main verbs. Thus we find sentences equivalent to The money that he ought (where ought means owed); by the faith I shall to God (where shall means owe); yet can I music too (where can means know about). While the use of can as a main verb meaning know is still to be found in some Northern British dialects I ken Bill well; do you ken him? a major syntactic change has taken place whereby verbs such as can, will, shall, may have lost their main verb status, signalling instead prediction it will rain tomorrow (sometimes called future tense); permission John can marry Mary, as far as I am concerned; possibility John might marry Mary next year; imperatives and obligations of varying strengths John ought to marry Mary, John should marry Mary. Along with these changes in meaning have come changes in syntactic function as well, the new modal verbs now losing their ability to take direct objects or to occur with -ing, etc, behaving more like auxiliary verbs (especially in negative and question contexts) such as have: thus John has not eaten his meal yet/ John may not eat his meal; Has John eaten his meal?/Will John eat his meal? Notice, though, that in a sentence containing a modal verb like: John may marry Mary, when it is changed into a negative or question type a number of things happen: (1) (2) the negative word not is placed after the first verb the may and not the main verb marry; in questions it is the modal verb may and not the main verb which is brought to the beginning of the sentence (as it was in Old English): May John marry Mary? and not Marry John Mary?
There appears to have been a syntactic consequence of this distribution of modal auxiliaries in negative and question sentences. In those sentences where there was no modal auxiliary present, a dummy version (see Section 2.3) was added (in the shape of do), making negative and question formation the same for modal and non-modal sentences: thus May John marry Mary?/Did John marry Mary? and John may not marry Mary/John did not marry Mary, so that in each case it is the first verb in the sentence which either attracts the negative word after it or which gets moved to the front of the utterance.
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Both this re-interpretation of what were historically main verb words like may, shall, ought and the use of the dummy do (sometimes called the do-periphrasis) are possibly the two main syntactic changes which have taken place between Middle English times and the present day. 8.5.3 Vocabulary
Additions to and losses from the word stock of English have been prevalent at all periods in its history, no more so than today. Innovations to the vocabulary are the result of many factors and words can change their meaning under various pressures: changes in society, technical innovation and discovery as well as contact with other languages all lead to the borrowing of words as well as the re-formation of those already in the language. There were two major historical, social and cultural events in this period which led to wholesale innovation and change in the vocabulary of English. The first was the revival of interest in classical art, literature and culture emerging from Northern Italy in the fifteenth century. The effects of this cultural renaissance were very widespread, not least upon the vocabulary of English where many new words were introduced from classical Latin and Greek. Items from Latin such as conspicuous, dexterous, jocular, malignant, expectation, jurisprudence, and from Greek, atmosphere, autograph and many more appear for the first time in the language (although some were shortlived, such as denunciate, appendance and consolate). Closer contact between England and France and Italy meant that there was a considerable reinforcement of this tendency through the adoption of French and Italian loans, thus: equipage, essay, shock, surpass, ticket. Contact with New World countries also brought vocabulary extension from Spanish and Portuguese sources, thus : anchovy, apricot, alligator, frigate, grotesque, potato, negro and many others. But there was considerable contemporary resistance to this uptake of new words from foreign language sources, some writers arguing that the language should stay unmixed and pure and free from unknowen wordes. Perhaps the most famous reaction was that of Sir Thomas Chaloner in 1549, who criticises those writers who poudre theyr bokes with ynkehorne termes, although perchaunce as unaptly applied as a gold rynge in a sowes nose. Indeed, in a reaction against the use of such inkhorn terms, there was a native revival led by Sir Thomas Cheke whose New Testament translation often replaces Latinate words with English equivalents; thus he uses foresayer for prophet, crossed for crucified, hundreder for centurion and so on.
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8.6 The late Modern period (17501900)

8.6.1 The age of prescriptivism and talking proper
Although perhaps less intense than in the early Modern period, the passion for spelling reforms has persisted from 1750 even to the present day. New alphabets were devised, new orthographic conventions proposed many motivated by a desire to improve literacy skills in education in general. However, the main motivation behind almost all linguistic activity in the period between 1750 and 1900 lay in attempts at the promotion of what was seen as a proper form of English. It was argued that language change had brought about linguistic (and therefore social) corruption and low standards. Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift, among many others, considered the language to have become vulgar and debased. It was seen as the duty of the Establishment, therefore, to promote a proper, correct and essentially metropolitan Upper Class mode of English and to endeavour to preserve that standard for all time thereafter. Indeed, it was argued, if spelling could be reformed and then fixed and made unchangeable, then language change itself would cease to occur. Such views were widely held throughout the English-speaking world and in Europe as well. Academies for the preservation and protection of what was considered to be (and often dictated as being) proper usage were formed in Italy and France, while in Germany and Britain, although Academies never came into being, other means of prescribing and proscribing linguistic usage were widely used. The eighteenth century in particular saw this movement at its height. While it was the great age of dictionary making (notably Dr Johnsons Dictionary of the English Language, 1755), it should be remembered that these collections were often aimed not only at providing the meanings and etymologies for hard words, but also as an instrument through which the dictionary user could gain access to the correct, true or proper pronunciation of words. Specialised (phonetic) alphabets were used to provide for each word a kind of visible speech whereby the reader could hear the correct pronunciation even when there was no speaker of the accepted usage available. Pronouncing dictionaries were extremely popular throughout the period 17501900 and in various (often pamphlet) forms reached a very wide audience. Some were aimed specifically at women. Indeed, it was the appearance of a new and wealthy Middle Class (earned wealth made possible partially as a result of the Industrial Revolution) which led to a demand for a lifestyle and set of manners echoing what had previously been the preserve of the inheritors of wealth among the aristocratic classes.
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8.6.2
Spellings and sounds
Spelling reformers in the period were careful to produce innovations which improved upon the one spelling, one sound principle of the grammarians of the early Modern period. To this end some writers (notably Thomas Spence of Newcastle) resorted to an alphabet which contained many new and additional symbols, while others used numbers and letters placed over vowels and consonants in an attempt to denote an unambiguous value for the sounds themselves. Yet others scrambled the standard alphabet into new combinations. Several of the foremost authors of these new spelling techniques were themselves provincials Irish (Thomas Sheridan) and, especially, Scottish (James Elphinstone and James Adams) an unsurprising fact given that dialectal usage was seen as especially vulgar and worthy of correction. Provincial grammarians (both in the United States and Great Britain) were seen as having a particularly central role to play in rooting out impropriety of usage (as well as in the dis-establishment and even outright suppression of indigenous languages like Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Welsh). Even a Scotsman like James Buchanan can be moved to write in 1757: The people of North Britain [i.e. Scotland] seem, in general, to be almost at as great a loss for proper accent and just pronunciation as foreigners. There are some major (and, from a sociolinguistic point of view, surprising) differences between the pronunciation of English in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that of Standard Southern British English as it is spoken today. For the majority of speakers in the English-speaking world there has been (certainly from the early eighteenth century, if not before) a split in the pronunciation of the high back [u] vowel in words like foot and strut. Consider the phrase come to judge as the phonetician John Hart represents it in the sixteenth century: kum tu dZudZ. The same <u> symbol is used in both to, come and judge words, where, certainly in standard present-day British and American English, a [u]/[] contrast is generally to be found between the first and the second two. This has come to be known as the FOOT/STRUT split (see page 49). It would appear that, for Hart at least, the split has not yet occurred and his pronunciation of come and judge would, like that of a Working Class speaker in Northern British English, utilise the [u] vowel for both words. The lowering and centring of [u] to [ ] seems not yet to have occurred. For the grammarian John Wilkins, writing a century later, some kind of contrast seems to be beginning to appear, since in the same phrase he uses a <y> symbol for come and judge, but a <> symbol for to.
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It is difficult to be certain precisely when Middle and Upper Class speakers adopted the FOOT/STRUT split in Britain, although it may have been well into the nineteenth century before the alternation was fully incorporated. This is also the period when we begin to see a difference in pronunciation of words like bath and cat. In modern standard British English, there is a clear and socially salient contrast between [AA] and [a] in such words. The use of [AA] in path, half , cast words seems to have been regarded as socially unacceptable even as late as the midnineteenth century, one commentator writing of its use (as we saw on page 46) in the following disparaging way: We ask of every man if it would not disgust him to sickness. It would seem that yet again we have here an instance of what was originally a Working Class form coming to be used in Middle and Upper Class contexts a change from below. All eighteenth- and especially nineteenth-century commentators speculate widely on the use of post vocalic [r] in words like, far, girl, etc. Right up to the close of the nineteenth century (and even beyond) the loss of this syllable final [r] was regarded as a considerable social gaffe and characteristic of Lower Class speakers. The situation in Southern British Standard English is, of course, the reverse today with post-vowel [r] almost universally lost. Indeed, this syllable final [r] loss is often a marked signal for heightened awareness of context and social class among those speakers in whose regional dialect the [r] is otherwise present. The socially acceptable loss of [r] is another good example of linguistic change coming from below. The non-etymological insertion of [r] in syllable final contexts was equally stigmatised in the nineteenth century; in particular, renderings such as <harsp> hasp; <arskes> asks; <debburty> deputy; <rarther> rather; <yaller> yellow; <feller> fellow all being regarded as very low. However, much like the pronunciation [drorIN] drawing and sarnie for sani (sandwich) heard from many younger Estuary English speakers today, even in the nineteenth century there appears to have been some social acceptance of <arnt> aunt; <stigmer> stigma; <eperlets> epaulettes; <garstly> ghastly and several others of that type, although few of them have survived as standard features. A very similar situation exists in the use of syllable initial [h] in the period. The deletion of word/syllable initial [h] is perhaps regarded as the greatest social gaffe of them all at this time, and examples to be avoided are often quoted: <air> hair; <appy> happy; <ere> hear;
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<arry> Harry; and the like. There seem only to be a very few cases in the period where unetymological and possibly hypercorrect [h] adding is at all acceptable: <hayther> either; <hedge> edge; <thehayter> theatre. Alongside [h] loss, all commentators point to the complete vulgarity of [w]/[v] interchanges: <conwulsed> convulsed; <vot> what; <wittles>< victuals; <wolley> volley; <warmint> vermin. During the late Modern period we also see the beginnings of the [uu]/ [ju] contrast in words like duke and new, with some modern United States and Working Class London speakers still using the [duk] forms, while some Scottish speakers produce [ju] pronunciations in words like hook and book: [hjuk], [bjuk]. In the eighteenth century in particular, grammarians are already in dispute about the propriety of tshooter, tewter and tooter for tutor. 8.6.3 Syntax
Although the process has been going on since the seventeenth century, the late Modern period has seen the extension of the use of complex combinations of auxiliary verbs like have and be to denote verbal aspect (as well as tense). Verbal aspect refers to the state of the verbal activity (not just to its place in time): i.e. whether an action is complete, continuing, starting up and so on (see Section 2.3). Thus we can now have syntactic expressions such as: I have been thinking about Mary for years; I had been eating my cake, when John appeared; I was going to have been in London by the seventeenth. Even in passive contexts we can now find sentences like: the ball is being kicked by every player on the field, constructions which a few hundred years ago would have been regarded as slovenly, corrupt or even illogical.
Bibliography
Category A Aitchison, Jean, Language Change: Progress or Decay?, Fontana, 1981. A very readable and popular account of the basic mechanisms underpinning language change through time. Succeeds, where many others fail, in presenting complex theoretical arguments in a form understandable by the non-specialist. Recommended as a first text in general language change.
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Barber, Charles, The English Language: A Historical Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 Barber, Charles, Early Modern English, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Both of these books offer, in a very readable way and with a minimum of linguistic terminology, clear and concise overviews of the processes of language change and how they affect the English language through time. The English Language: A Historical Introduction is still probably the best and most readable general history of English, while the same can be said for Early Modern English as an entry level book to the language of Shakespeare and Milton. Both books come with excellent bibliographical materials, although it has to be said that the theoretical position they adopt is somewhat out of date; but that is perhaps part of their usefulness for the non-expert. Brook, G L, A History of the English Language, London: Longman, 1958. Although now very out of date, this short book provides a general overview of Englishs history which is mainly external event and vocabulary oriented and less interested in phonology and syntax. The book is still useful for the complete beginner and non-specialist, although it has to be used with caution since it tends to over-simplify the linguistic motivations for change through time. Crystal, David, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Part One of this superb book (Chapters Two to Five) offers what is perhaps the clearest and most inclusive account of the general history of the English language enclosed in a beautifully illustrated and colourful format. Samples of texts are provided from all periods and there are reproductions of manuscript pages with much illustration of syntactic, pronunciation and vocabulary change, all very easy to read and assimilate and with suggestions for follow-up work and reading throughout. Freeborn, David, From Old English to Standard English, London: Macmillan, 1992, 1998. An excellent general introduction to the history of English. The greatest strength of the book (most successfully realised in its 1998 or second and recommended edition) lies in the way it provides extensive textual illustration from every period. Texts are produced in both original and transcribed formats and linguistic events of historical interest are very clearly indicated. For both teacher and student the second edition in particular is extremely helpful with its provision of useful (and doable) activities and follow-up work, every activity and case study carefully related to the topic under discussion with appropriate texts provided for further study.
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Graddol, D; Leith, D and Swann, J, English History, Diversity and Change, London: Routledge, 1996. Chapters Two to Four provide a useful, but essentially external history of English, concentrating upon orthographic changes and the political and social events which have helped to shape the language. Nicely illustrated and containing sample texts, activities and exercises for the student. Category B Baugh, A C and Cable, T, A History of the English Language, London: Routledge, 1991. This is perhaps the best (certainly the best known) general work of reference on the subject. The book offers a complete and detailed description of English at every period in its history and is an essential core text for a library. The approach is strongly external history oriented, being if anything weak on language internal motivations for change; its theoretical framework is somewhat outdated. Nevertheless, it is still probably the core reference work and contains much detailed information and extensive bibliographical materials. Hogg, Richard (General Editor), The Cambridge History of the English Language, London: Cambridge University Press. Still largely in preparation, although some volumes have appeared, this claims to be the most detailed survey yet produced of the history of English. Contributions are provided by leading academics in their fields and state-of-the-art accounts of individual periods of the language are provided and projected. An extremely useful tool for the advanced reader. The volumes which have appeared to date are: Hogg, R (ed.), The Beginnings to 1066, 1992; Blake, N (ed.), 10661476, 1992; Burchfield, R, English in Britain and Overseas: Origin and Development , 1994 Leith, Dick, A Social History of English, London: Routledge, 1993. An interesting (but not always convincing) attempt to relate and explain linguistic change in history to sociolinguistic criteria. Smith, Jeremy J, Essentials of Early English, London: Routledge, 1999. This is possibly one of the best basic introductions to the difficult topics of Old and Middle English. Examples are carefully chosen to illustrate the most important points of difference and contrast and the theoretical knowledge assumed of the reader is minimal. Nevertheless the book succeeds in describing and explaining most of the peculiarities of English in the Dark and Middle Ages.
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Strang, Barbara M, A History of English , London: Methuen, 1970. An excellent and inclusive account of Englishs historical development, approached uniquely from the modern period back to the earliest times. Has many sound linguistic observations allied with a strong command and control of the historical data, both internal and external. A most useful reference work which is more theoretically convincing than Baugh and Cable. Category C Other books of general and specialised reference on the history of English are: Barber, Charles, Linguistic Change in Present Day English, Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1964 Burnley, D, A Guide to Chaucers Language, London: Macmillan, 1983 Cusack, Bridget (ed.), Everyday English 15001700: A Reader , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999 Ekwall, E, A History of Modern English Sounds and Morphology, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980 Jones, Charles, A History of English Phonology , London: Longman, 1989 Pyles, T and Algeo, I, The Origins and Development of the English Language , New York: Harcourt Brace, 1982 Scragg, D G, A History of English Spelling, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974 Serjeantson, M, A History of Foreign Words in English, London: Methuen, 1935
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GENERAL BOOKS ON LANGUAGE

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

GENERAL BOOKS ON LANGUAGE

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

The syntax of Modern English

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

The young boy

the old man

The young boy

the old man

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

VP NP NP Nominal VERB DA ADJ NOUN DA ADJ NOUN Nominal

Nominal represents the structure embracing the adjective + noun grouping.

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

2.1 Complex sentences; sentences within sentences

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

Bill lifted the table

Or, in the form of a branching tree:

Sentence Verb Phrase

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

VP Art Art the fact #that John liked Henry VP Verb

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

NP Verb Art N shot the man

#the man lent Bill a car

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

2.2 Time, tense and aspect

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

2.3 The dummy auxiliary do

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

Auxiliary or Modal Verb

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MEANING

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SOUNDS OF ENGLISH AND THEIR STRUCTURE

3.1 A description of some of the main sounds used in English

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SOUNDS OF ENGLISH AND THEIR STRUCTURE

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SOUNDS OF ENGLISH AND THEIR STRUCTURE

Vowel (unblocked tube) types

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION

THE SOUNDS OF ENGLISH AND THEIR STRUCTURE

ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION