Exam 1 - History of the English Language

Phonetics

The specific way that we articulate sounds

Phonology

How sounds are organized in a language

Orthography

How a language is spelled (different from phonetics and phonology)

Phone

The specific way that a sound is produced in all of its details. Uses diacritics to add this detail.

Phoneme

The psychological idea of a sound (ex: /t/), but doesn’t provide detail about how it is pronounced in all of its detail. Smallest meaningful unit in phonology.

Allophone

A set of phones that alternate with each other in an organized way

Minimal Pair

A set of two words that are identical save for one sound (ex: met and pet); /m/ and /p/ are separate phonemes

Morpheme

The smallest meaningful unit in the structure of a word (ex: in-escap-able is composed of three morphemes)

Inflectional Morphology

Always suffixes that add grammatical information (not many in English). Examples: Plural -(e)s in “books” and “churches”, Past tensed -ed in “finished”, plural internal vowel change from “man” to “men”, etc.

Derivational Morphemes/Morphology

Either prefixes or suffixes; used to build new words. Prefixes do not change the part of speech of the base word, suffixes usually do. (ex: noun + -ful = adjective “hopeful”)

Three Types of Verbs

Lexical verbs, Auxiliary Verbs, Modal Verbs

Lexical Verbs

Most verbs are lexical; they describe actions such as run, talk, read, etc. They possess a quality called transitivity (there are three states of this).

Intransitive verbs

Only require subjects (ex: sarah runs)

Transitive verbs

Most common type of verbs. They require a subject and a direct object (ex: sarah bought a new computer)

Ditransitive verbs

Require a subject, direct object, and an indirect object (ex: Haley gave ten dollars to the charity). Generally express the idea of transfer.

Auxiliary verbs

Used with participles. “Be” is used with the present participle, for example, “Mary is working in the library”.

Modal Verbs

Change the mood of the sentence (ex: can, could, will, would, shall, should, ought, used to, etc.)

Preposition

Words that indicate spatial relations (under, beside, to, etc.)

Particle

Look like prepositions but form constructions with verbs (verb particle constructions). Ex: Hannah looked up a word in the dictionary.

Lexicon

Deals with word choice. Different places use different terms for the same thing. Ex: Soda, pop, and coke.

Pragmatics

A word can be used differently in different contexts. Ex: the terms of endearment of love and baby, honorifics in the south (miss and mr).

Lexifier

The language from which necessary vocabulary is drawn

Descriptive Grammar

Examining grammar as people actually use language

Prescriptive Grammar

Sets out rules that people are told to follow

Prescriptive Rules

Always tell you what not to do. Ex: don’t split infinitives (to boldly go), don’t end sentences in prepositions (who did you eat dinner with), don’t use multiple negatives in a sentence

What motivated prescriptivism?

higher education in the 18th-19th century was conducted in Latin because it was a dead language and the rules never changed. Because of this, prescriptive grammarians borrowed rules from Latin and urged they be imposed on English even though the rules of Latin don’t apply to english

Noah Webster

Famous for 2 books, a speller and a dictionary. He was influential because he introduced a number of spelling reforms in order to make American English different from British English (ex: colour to color, theatre to theater, gaol to jail, kerb to curb)

Amelioration

Words change meaning from negative to positive. Ex: old “pretty” = sneaky, new “pretty” = attractive.

Perjoration

Words change meaning from positive to negative. Ex: old “amateur” = someone who loves to do something, new “amateur” = non-expert or novice.