Master of Arts (MA)

Translation Studies

MTS-11
Introduction to Linguistics

SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES
TAMIL NADU OPEN UNIVERSITY
 Introduction to Linguistics
(MTS-11)

UNITS 1-9

School of Humanities
Tamil Nadu Open University
577, Anna Salai, Saidapet,
Chennai – 600 015.
 © Tamil Nadu Open University

First Edition- 2016

Course Team

Chairperson : Prof. M. Bhaskaran

Vice-Chancellor
Tamil Nadu Open University

Course Writing, Design : Dr. K. Murugan

& Editing Professor & Head
School of Humanities
Tamil Nadu Open University
© All rights reserved. No part of this book must be used in any form without obtaining a prior
permission from the University

Contents

Unit 1 : An Introduction to Language

Overview 1
Learning Objectives 1

1.1 Language: Features and Functions 2

1.1.1 Features 3

1.1.2 Functions 10

1.2 Spoken and Written Language: Similarities 13

1.3 Spoken and Written Language: Differences 17

Summary 24
Keywords 25

Unit 2: Developmental Psycholinguistics

Overview 27

Learning Objectives 28
2.1 Variation in Language 28

2.1.1 Geographical area 29

2.1.2 Caste/Community 32

2.1.3 Urban-Rural 33

2.1.4 Social class 34

2.1.5 Ethnic varieties 36

2.2 Variation and Physical Features 38

2.2.1 Age 38

2.2.2 Sex 38

2.3 Language Variation and Context 41

Summary 43

Unit 3: Descent of the English Language

Overview 45

Learning Objectives 46

3.1 Indo-European Languages: Origins 46

3.1.1 Consonant shift 48

3.1.2 Stress shift 51

3.1.3 Vowel shift 53

3.2 Influences on Old English 57

3.2.1 Britons and Romans 57

3.2.2 Scandinavians 58

3.2.3 The Norman conquest 60

Summary 63
Keywords 64
References/Sources 65
Answers to Learning Activities 65

Unit 4: Middle English: Beginnings

Overview 67

Learning Objectives 68

4.1 Middle English: An Introduction 68

4.2 Transitional Period: From Old to Middle English 72

4.2.1 Literature 72

4.2.2 Spelling 73

4.3 Vocabulary Expansion 76

4.3.1 Sources of borrowing 76

4.3.2 Indigenous devices 78

4.4 Change of Meaning 84

4.4.1 Extension 85

4.4.2 Specialization 85

4.4.3 Metaphorical application 85

4.4.4 Degeneration 86

4.4.5 Regeneration 88

4.5 Grammar 89

Summary 93
Keywords 93
References/Sources 94
Answers to Learning Activities 94
Unit 5: English: the Renaissance and Beyond

Overview 99

Learning Objectives 100

5.1 Growth of Vocabulary 100

5.1.1 Latin loans 100

5.1.2 Adaptation of words 101

5.1.3 Debate over borrowings 104

5.1.4 Coinages 105

5.2 Spelling and Pronunciation 108

5.3 Grammar 111

5.3.1 Nouns: inflexions and genitives 112

5.3.2 Pronouns 112

5.3.3 Verbs 113

5.4 Punctuation 115

5.5 Standard English: An Introduction 117

5.5.1 Spread of English 120

5.5.2 Indian English 125

Summary 127
Keywords 128
References/Sources 128
Answers to Learning Activities 129

Unit 6: What is Linguistics?

Overview 131
Learning Objectives 132
6.1 The Study of Language: Aspects 132

6.1.1 Phonetics and phonology 135

6.1.2 Morphology 137

6.1.3 Syntax 141

6.1.4 Semantics 147

6.2 Speech Acts 152

6.2.1 Common speech acts 153

6.2.2 Direct and indirect speech acts 154

6.2.3 Felicity conditions 154

6.2.4 Context and co-text 155

6.3 Discourse Analysis 157

6.3.1 Cohesion 158

6.3.2 Coherence 158

6.4 Applications of Linguistics 159

Summary 162
Keywords 163
Suggested Reading 164

Unit 7: Morphology

Overview 165
Learning Objectives 165

7.1 Morphology: Some Terms 166

7.1.1 Lexeme 166

7.1.2 Morpheme 167

7.2 Word Formation Process 172

 7.2.1 Affixation: Inflection and derivation 173

7.2.2 Other processes 176

Summary 178

Unit 8: Syntax

Overview 179
Learning Activities 180

8.1 Sentence/Phrasal Ordering 180

8.1.1 Linear order 180

8.1.2 Phrase 182

8.1.3 Hierarchical order 186

8.2 Basic Division of a Sentence 189

8.3 Phrases: Internal Structure 194

8.3.1 Noun phrase (NP) 194

8.3.2 Verb phrase (VP) 199

8.3.3 Adjective phrase (AdjP) 203

8.3.4 Adverb phrase (AdvP) 203

8.3.5 Prepositional phrase (PP) 204

Summary 205

Unit 9: Semantics and Pragmatics

Overview 207
Learning objectives 208

9.1 Semantics: Properties of Meaning 208

9.1.1 Levels of meaning 208

9.1.2 Anomaly, redundancy, contradiction and

Synonymy 211

9.1.3 Ambiguity 213

9.1.4 Presupposition 218

9.1.5 Entailment 219

9.2 Pragmatics 223

9.2.1 Conventional implicature 223

9.2.2 Conversational implicature 225

Summary 227
Unit 1
An Introduction to Language
STRUCTURE

Overview
Learning Objectives

1.1 Language: Features and Functions

1.1.1 Features
1.1.2 Functions
1.2 Spoken and Written Language: Similarities
1.3 Spoken and Written Language: Differences

Summary

OVERVIEW

We will begin this Unit by describing language, and in this context, we will distinguish
human language from animal ‘language’. We will identify the sophisticated use of sound
signals and the elements of arbitrariness, duality, structure-independence, etc., as unique
characteristics to human language. We will then touch upon the functions of language. We
will then consider the similarities and differences between spoken and written language with
special reference to English.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After completing this Unit, you should be able to:

 differentiate between human language and animal ‘language’ by listing the

characteristics of the former;
 describe the functions of language in general;
 identify the features that are common to spoken and written language;
 state the characteristics that differentiate spoken and written language.


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1.1 LANGUAGE: FEATURES AND FUNCTIONS

Language is all pervasive. It permeates our thoughts, is used as a means

for the transmission of the bulk of human knowledge and influences our relations with other
human beings. We use it as a means of expressing ourselves and understanding our society.
We use language to resolve some of the problems arising out of our interaction with our
fellow beings. Can you imagine human life without language? However, language is now so
much part of our daily lives that we tend to take it for granted.

But, can we say one language is superior to the other? As on date, there is no linguistic
instrument or measure to evaluate languages and rate their excellence in linguistic terms, or
even in aesthetic, literary, religious or philosophical terms. According to modern linguistics,
political or economic influence of a community should not be used as a scale for evaluating
the superiority of language. That is to say, as a linguist we cannot accept parochial views that
some languages are primitive and, therefore, inadequate; some languages are inherently
superior to others, etc.

Language is a cognitive skill whose roots are situated in the evolution of the brain. We do not
know exactly when our ancestors began to speak, though estimates suggest that it could be
from 30,000 to 100,000 years ago. We do not also know what triggered them to do so, but
once they started, there was no stopping them. From such humble beginnings, the 7,000 and
odd languages, we assume to exist today, have evolved.

No wonder, the discipline of linguistics – the scientific study of language – came into being.
It is a descriptive discipline rather than a prescriptive one, which means that linguists do not
lay down hard and fast rules about how to use a certain language, but rather concentrate on
describing the rules which (especially native) speakers seem to have internalized. Apart from
this, there are various different ways of ‘doing’ linguistics. For example, we can concentrate
on language as used at a certain point of time (say, in 1959) and this is called synchronic
linguistics. Alternatively, we can look at language from a diachronic point of view, which
involves analyzing the development of a language during a certain period of time, say during
Middle English or in the 1950s, etc. Linguistics is a science, which can either be studied in a
theoretical way (e.g., how we form questions in English) or a more applied way (e.g., the
knowledge of how we form questions in English is used in language teaching and learning).
We shall study more of these later in Unit 6.

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1.1.1 Features

Most linguists agree that although animals are able to communicate, they do not have
language in the sense that humans do. Birds may chirp; cats purr; dogs bark; apes grunt,
scream and even chatter, etc., but are these sounds considered languages? The term
language in the present context of this Course is used to refer to the method of human
communication using spoken or written words. Language, thus, is the major attribute that
distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Let us now look at the features that characterise human language, setting it apart from other
means of communication by various species and by human beings themselves.

Use of sound signals

Animals communicate with each other by a variety of means. Bees, for example, use the
complicated series of dances to indicate where the source of nectar is, and crabs wave their
claws at one another to communicate. The use of sounds to communicate is more wide
spread among animals and birds and is employed by human beings as well. In other words,
human language is a signalling system which uses sounds, i.e., the characteristics shared by a
large number of animal systems.

Displacement

This is the ability to use language to talk about times, places and people other than the ‘here
and now’. Bees are said to be able to convey some of this information in their ‘dance’, which
they employ to pass on information about food sources. Aren’t we also able to say things,
which we know are false, i.e., to lie? Do other animals in the animal kingdom have this
ability?

Arbitrariness

Human language is arbitrary. There is, however, a difference between the systems of
communication between animals and human beings. In animal communication, there is a
frequent connection between the signal and the message sent, and the system is mainly
inbuilt, genetically. Bee dancing, for example, is more or less the same in different parts of
the world, with only small variations. In human language, on the other hand, there is no link
between the signal and the message in a majority of cases. The symbols used are mostly
arbitrary. There is no intrinsic connection, for example, between the word ‘horse’ and the
animal it symbolises. Nor is a sentence like ‘These mangoes are delicious’ intrinsically
connected with food. There is no doubt that onomatopoeic words such as ‘hiss’ or ‘bang’ in
English exist in all languages, but these are relatively few compared with the total number of

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words. Note that when language tries to mirror or echo the sounds made by animals and
objects, this is called onomatopoeia (e.g., Cuckoo; squelch; tick-tock, etc.)

Being genetically inbuilt, the system of signals in animal communication does not have to be
learnt. Most animals automatically know how to communicate. Even in cases where an
element of learning may be involved, this is minor. This differs from the long learning
process needed to acquire human language, which is culturally transmitted. It is evident
from the rare instances of children brought up by animals without human contact that a
human being brought up in isolation simply does not acquire language. This is not to say that
human language is totally conditioned by the environment. In fact, children display an
amazing ability to become fluent speakers of any language. But this innate potential can be
activated only by long exposure to the language in question. This is evident from the fact that
children with hearing impaired are unable to speak a language for lack of exposure to it.

This means that there is generally no natural, inherent relationship between the signs (i.e.,
sounds or letters) we produce and their meaning. For this reason, different languages can
use different signs to refer to one and the same thing, e.g., a flower in English is a Blume in
German or a fleur in French. Occasionally, we find examples of iconicity, where someone has
tried to overtly create a resemblance between the sign and its meaning (e.g., small; tall; fat).

Arbitrariness also enables languages to evolve, both in the sense that existing signs can come
to mean new things (e.g., pen which used to refer to a quill), but also that new signs can be
introduced for existing things. Animal languages, in contrast, are more likely to have fixed
reference, i.e., a certain sign has a specific and fixed meaning.

Duality

Human language has duality. Duality, or double articulation, refers to two separate layers of
language working together to provide us with a pool of sounds, which we can combine to
communicate with one another.

Animals that use vocal signals to communicate have a number of basic sounds, which vary
according to species. It is said that a cow has 10, a chicken has around 20, and a fox over 30.
Dolphins have between 20 and 30, and so do gorillas and chimpanzees. The number of
messages an animal can send is restricted to the number of basic sounds or sometimes the
basic sounds plus a few simple combinations. Their signalling systems are based largely on
the principle ‘one sound, one meaning’. For example, an animal may have one sound,
meaning ‘this is my territory’, and another meaning ‘there’s danger here’ and so on. So, the
total number of different things such an animal can communicate is no larger than the
number of different sounds.

Human language works rather differently. Each language has a number of basic sound units
or phonemes, the average number being between 30 and 40. But each phoneme is normally
meaningless in isolation. It becomes meaningful only when it is combined with other

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phonemes to form meaningful words in the language concerned. The English language has a
limited number of discrete sounds (e.g., the 44 sound units called phonemes in English. We
will study phonemes later in this Course) which in isolation have no inherent meaning, e.g.,
‘b’, ‘i’, or ‘n’. On the other hand, we have a virtually unlimited number of distinct meanings
which we can create by combining these sounds in certain ways, e.g., ‘bin’, or ‘nib’. Various
other combinations, for example, ‘bni’, ‘nbi’, are not meaningful in English, but could
possibly be in other languages. Similarly, if you were asked what the English phonemes, ‘p’
or ‘t’ or ‘s’ are meant, you would not be able to answer that question. But, if you were to
combine these individual sounds to form words like ‘pat’, ‘tap’, ‘sap’ and ‘sapped’ (‘ed’ is
pronounced as ‘t’) you would have no trouble in answering the question, ‘what do these
words mean?’

All the words are meaningful in English. This organisation of language into a layer of basic
sounds, which combine into a second layer of larger meaningful units, is known as duality.
This property in the human communication system makes it very flexible because the
number of different meanings we can express, and the number of messages that can be sent
is far greater than the number of basic sounds.

You must note that duality was, at one time, considered to be a characteristic unique to
human language. But, now some people claim that it exists in bird song also, where
individual notes combined into longer sequences rather than each individual note, constitute
a meaningful melody. However, duality is extremely rare in the animal world.

Similarly, human language is unique in that it can be used to communicate things and events
that are far away in time and place as well as those that are present. We do not have any
difficulty in talking about our own childhood, or about yesterday’s tennis match or about the
disastrous earthquake last year. With equal ease, we can talk about the war in Iraq, or the
devastating effect of tsunami in South India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. This phenomenon,
known as displacement is very uncommon in the animal world, and no animal
communication is found to have both these factors.

Cultural transmission

This refers to how languages are acquired by our children. The assumption is that there is no
genetic component (although Noam Chomsky challenges this with his theory of Universal
Grammar), which would enable a child to simply start speaking, e.g., English at a certain age,
but rather that children need to be exposed to a language (and culture) in order to acquire it.
This means, for example, that a child born in Korea to Korean parents but then adopted by
French parents in France will tend to grow up speaking French as his/her first language and
not Korean (unless the French parents make sure the child is also exposed to Korean). Many

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animals, however, do seem to pass the ability to communicate on to their offspring
genetically, e.g., dogs will bark even if they have never heard another dog barking.

Creative, patterned and structure-dependent

This is an important characteristic of human language, allowing us to continuously create

new utterances, combining the building blocks of language in so many new ways, be they
sounds, words or sentences. Human languages are, therefore, continually evolving.

As mentioned, the number of messages most animals have is very limited. For example, bees
can communicate only about nectar, and dolphins, in spite of their intelligence, seem to be
communicating about the same things again and again. Even the clever vervet monkey,
which is claimed to make thirty six different vocal sounds, repeats these over and over. Of
course, as mentioned above, given the absence of duality in animal communication, this
should not be a surprise.

In human language, we do not find the kind of restriction that we find in animal
communication. Human language is essentially creative and not confined to a few repetitive
messages. But then, what do we mean by ‘creative’? By ‘creative’ is meant, human beings can
use language to create an infinite number of meaningful utterances in different situations. A
person can utter a sentence, which has never been said before, and he or she is not obliged to
say the same thing each time in similar situations.

Though human language is productive and human beings can use it creatively to utter any
number of new sentences, they cannot do so in a haphazard or random manner. This is
because human language is not just a jumble of individual items. Nor does it consist of a
simple list of elements. It has a well organised internal system which is rule-governed and
enables human beings to generate sentences that are based on well-defined patterns.

Let us, for example, look at the English sounds ‘b’, ‘s’, ‘t’, ‘g’ and ‘a’. Combinations of these
can form English words such as ‘bags’, ‘bats’, ‘tabs’, ‘stag’, ‘stab’, ‘tags’, ‘sag’, ‘gas’ and so on.
But combinations such as ‘tsab’, ‘Sabg’, ‘gast’, ‘sgab’ are not permissible because the rules of
the English language do not allow such combinations, and native speakers of English would
not accept these combinations even for new words. Similarly, consider the arrangement of
strings of words like She sings so sweetly. Only two combinations are possible: She sings so
sweetly and So sweetly she sings. All other combinations are impossible, such as sweetly so
she sings or Sings sweetly she so. Also, in the English sentence, The dog barked loudly, we
cannot replace the word dog with horse or cat or cow, though all these words stand for
animals. Nor can we replace the word barked with amazed, which would give us an ill-
formed sequence like The dog amazed loudly.

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In short, we have seen that in language, every sound or word has its role to play in the total
pattern, and occupies its own characteristic place in that pattern. Every language can be
regarded as an intricate network of items that are interlinked and interdependent. They
have an identity within the total framework of that language.

Another property of human language is that it has a basic structure which cannot be learnt
by merely counting the number of elements in a sentence mechanically. For example, if we
try to work out how the third person singular form of the verb is expressed in English, we
cannot simply say, add ‘s’/’es’ to the second word in every sentence. It might yield correct
sentences like She leaves for Bombay at 8’0 Clock. But it also results in sentences such as
Her lefts hand feel numb or we need to find the component (the verb, in this case) to which
the ‘s’/’es’ has to be attached. The structure-dependent operations found in language are
thus often quite complicated. Elements of structure can change places or even be omitted.
For example, in question forms, the verbal element changes place with the subject: Kala
should go home early becomes Should Kala go home early? And in Ira runs faster than her
sister, it is generally agreed that Ira runs faster than her sister runs, and that the second
occurrence of runs is understood.

In addition, human language has an element of reflexiveness. That is to say, we are able to
use the language to talk about language, which is typically what linguists do. Also,
discreteness is a unique element of human language. This means that the sounds of a
language differ sufficiently from one another for a (native) speaker to distinguish them and
thereby know which sign with which meaning is being used, at any one time.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 1.1

Explain the uniqueness of human language.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check answer with your academic counselor.

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Having studied the uniqueness and complex nature of human language, let us now consider
the functions of language. Why do we use language and for what purposes?

1.1.2 Functions

As we know the primary function of language is to facilitate communication between people.

Language is used to give or receive factual information and essential commands, and to
exchange opinions.

The primary function of language is to give and receive factual information; to convey
essential commands and as a means of transaction between human beings to exchange
opinions. Language is also used in other ways. It can be used to communicate feelings and
emotions. We often use language as a means to get rid of our nervous energy when we are
under stress. This is often called the emotive or expressive function of language.

In addition to being used to give or receive information and to exchange opinions and ideas
through transactions, language also serves as a means of maintaining social contact on a
friendly level. For example, everyday social exchanges such as greetings, enquiries about
welfare, compliments, apologies etc., do not communicate any special ‘information’ or ‘ideas’
in the usual sense, but help to maintain a comfortable relationship between people.

Utterances like ‘Hello, how are you?’ ‘Good morning!’, What can I do for you?’ are fixed
expressions. So, referring to this function of language, Malinowski (1884-1942), an
anthropologist, coined the phrase phatic communion. The topics permitted under phatic
communion may vary from culture to culture. But there is no doubt that most of the
languages of the world have a social function. This arises out of a need human beings feel to
signal at least a lack of hostility if not friendship.

Another pleasing function of language derives from a property of the spoken language, that
is, rhythm. Rhyme and repetitive rhythm in various contexts have a pleasant effect on both
children and adults. For example, children enjoy nursery rhymes and games. The chants, the

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slogans of audiences watching sports and games, the rhythmic chanting of prayers by a
congregation in places of worship, the sounds and rhythm of popular songs and poetry, etc.,
demonstrate the power of rhythm and sound in language. Indeed, so powerful is sound in
language that when we listen to the arrangement of sounds, and the rhythm of a poem in a
language unknown to us, we are often able to associate them with the theme of the poem and
the feelings conveyed.

Our use of language can tell our listener or reader a great deal about us. In other words, it
functions as an expression of the identity of social groups and an individual’s identity – the
region to which they belong, the level of education, their occupation, age, sex, personality
and social background. Language has also a purely aesthetic function in that it is used by
creative writers, media persons and others as an instrument of thought and ideas.

There are other ways in which language is also used. For example, it can be used to express
feelings and emotions. This is known as the emotive or expressive function of language.
Emotive language can also be used when we are alone and there is no one else present to
whom we address ourselves. For example, when we are angry or frustrated we use swear
words, or when we react verbally to anything beautiful, or when we express fear or affection.
This aspect of language is not so well developed for sharing information, probably because
we, like other primates, can convey emotions by signs, screams, cries, grunts, gestures and so
on. So we need language only to elaborate there primitive signals of emotion.

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 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1.2

1. Write down as many contexts as you can, in which language is

used to give or receive information and exchange opinions.
2. Give examples from your mother tongue of topics permitted
under phatic communion.
3. Can you think of nursery rhymes and poems in your mother
tongue that you enjoy? Point out the rhyme or/and the repetitive
rhythm in them.
4. Can you think of differences in the use of words in your mother
tongue that signal the region to which a person belongs?

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

In a society, almost all the people use the spoken language to communicate, and a large
proportion of those who are literate use both the spoken and the written form of a language.
This is so because speaking and listening come naturally to children who grow up listening
constantly to a particular language being spoken by adults. This is not, however, true of
reading and writing which they are taught as part of the process of being educated. Reading
and writing are thus associated with literacy. This does not mean that one of these mediums
has superiority over the other. In fact both these mediums are equally effective for
communicating with other speakers of a particulars language and for achieving the goals for
which they are used. Each of these mediums requires the use of appropriate language and
the development of special skills, some of which may be common to both.

Having looked into some of the major functions of language, let us now consider the
similarities and differences between spoken and written language in Sections 1.2 and 1.3,
respectively.

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1.2 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE: SIMILARITIES

As we have already said, essentially language – whether it is written or spoken – is intended

to convey meaningful messages, which constitute an integral part of the process of
communication between speakers of a particular language. Thus, the main function of both
spoken and written language is to enable people to communicate with each other effectively.

Whether we communicate in the spoken medium or the written medium, our choice of words
and structures is determined largely by the context in which we interact. In other words, the
relationship between participants (friendly or formal), the location or setting where the
interaction takes place (office, home, get together, etc), the subject/ topic (academic,
business, social, etc.) on which the communication is based largely determine our choice of
words and structures and the style we use for communication. Both mediums use styles
ranging from very formal to very informal, which are reflected in the language we use.

In this context, let us consider a couple of examples of spoken and written forms. First, we
shall look at the following two samples of conversation:

Conversation 1

De: Professor Daniel, I’d like to introduce you to Professor Rahman.

Prof. Daniel: How d’you do? (or, the more common, Pleased to meet you.)

Prof. Rahman: How d’you do?/Pleased to meet you.

Dev: Professor Rahman is Head of the Mobile

Technologies at the National University.

Prof. Daniel: Oh, I see. I’m a linguistics historian. At present, I’m heading the
School of Humanities at the Global University.

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 Prof. Rahman: Are you the person who is to head the committee appointed to revise
the history books for undergraduates?

Prof. Daniel: Yes, but we haven’t started the project yet.

Prof. Rahman: I understand it’s a time-bound project?

Prof. Daniel: Yes, it is. It won’t be long before we start. All the formalities will be
completed by the end of the week.

Conversation 2

Savi: Rasi, meet Gaaya.

Rasi: Hello/Hi, you gave a Bharatanatyam dance performance last week. Didn’t
you?

Gaaya: Yes.

Rasi: I must say you’re a very graceful dancer. I enjoyed your performance.

Gaaya: You did? Thanks. I’m dancing at the Kavya Foundation next Friday.

Rasi: That’ll be lovely. I’ll certainly be there.

What do you notice in both the conversations?

In both the conversations, people are being introduced to each other. But the two
introductions differ from each other in some respects. Can you identify the differences? You
must have noticed that in the first conversation, the people are introduced to each other in a
formal style. In the formal introduction, the ‘titles’ of people being introduced are used, that
is, they are addressed as ‘Professor’ Daniel and ‘Professor’ Rahman and not just by their first
names as in the case of the informal introduction. You must have also noticed that the
person in the formal introduction, the person who is doing the introductions, has a formal
relationship with the persons she introduces. She is either junior to them in age or status or a
teacher at a University, and the Professors are not her friends.

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In the informal introduction, on the other hand, the introducer obviously knows the people
she introduces very well. They are either her friends or her classmates or her relatives. This is
evident from the fact that she addresses them by their first names. The difference between
the formal and informal style can also be seen in the manner of greeting: ‘How d’you do’ or
‘Pleased to meet you’, is formal, whereas ‘Hi’ is informal.

The above two conversations are only a sample of some of the differences between the formal
and informal use of language in oral interaction in a particular context, i.e., introductions.
Similar differences are reflected in the kind of language used in other contexts as well. Not
only in the spoken format but also in written language, similar differences in style can be
perceived. Let us look at correspondences – one official and the other personal. Read the
contents of the two letters below carefully and make a note of the differences:

Letter 1

Dear Dr. Sumit,

This has reference to your letter No. ____________ dated ____________

regarding the preparation of courses for the B.A. II year (English) programme at your
University. I shall be happy to associate myself with this programme.

Kindly send me the syllabus for this programme before the meeting of course writers is
held.

With regards,

Yours Sincerely

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Letter 2

Dear indomitable Gaay,

In spite of all the doubts and uncertainties, I find myself installed in quasi-viceregal
splendour, in the Metropole; ‘wish you were here’. They told me at the reception desk
that the ……… had great difficulty in getting me in here; and the room is mine only for
tonight, unless a cancellation comes my way tomorrow.

The Hotel, alas, through perfect to all external appearance, has not quite come up to
expectations………………

My creature comforts were much better looked after at the hotel and I am indeed
grateful. I am going to miss our tête-à-tête at the Coffee House; and I am selfish
enough to hope that you will miss them too. I doubt whether we shall ever be in a
position to repeat them. The thing I shall remember best though is our expedition to
the Fort, with you, in your white caftan, if that is what it is called, making your way
nimbly up the hillside.

………………………………………………………………….

……………………….. ………………….. ……………………

Take care,

GKR

Notice that this is only an extract from a personal letter which is rather long. Formal letters
in contrast are short and contain only the subject matter under consideration. The styles and
the forms of the two letters are strikingly different; the former has a formal manner of
addressing the addressee, i.e., by his title and surname, the latter on the other hand, is rather
informal and friendly and the writer has taken the liberty to add and adjective to the first
name, a liberty that the writer of the formal letter cannot take. It is thus the relationship
between the writer and the addressee, and the subject matter that determine the form and
style of the letters.

14
The relationship between participants, the subject matter and purpose of communication
together comprise what we have called ‘context’; and the context in which communication
takes place influences the style participants use in written as well as in spoken language. The
contexts presented in the spoken and written modes above, are only one example of the
numerous contexts that may form the basis for written and spoken communication.

1.3 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE: DIFFERENCES

When we consider the differences between the spoken and written mediums, we find that
most of them can be traced to two main sources situational and the very nature of the two
mediums.

The first source, i.e., situational, refers to the presumption that the communicator of a
message makes regarding the receiver of the message when s/he communicates with
her/him. In written communication, we presume that the person(s) to whom the message is
addressed is/are absent and cannot respond to the message immediately. As a result, it
becomes necessary for the writer to be as explicit as possible and be careful in their choice of
words and sentences. Even in an informal letter like the one above, the writer has word
sentences and not just the odd word or gesture as is generally used in conversation.

In spoken language, on the other hand, the speaker generally addresses himself/herself
directly to the hearer. In other words, the speaker and hearer are most often face-to-face.
This makes it possible for the speaker to use gestures in addition to the word or phrase they
utter, to ensure that the hearer understands them. The hearer can in turn by word or look
assure the speaker that s/he has understood the message. Thus the feedback from the hearer
is almost immediate.

Spoken language, therefore, does not necessarily have to contain complete and well-formed
sentences. This applies particularly to conversation. Writing, on the other hand, tends to be

15
relatively more permanent than conversation and therefore has complete and well formed
sentences.

It would be pertinent to add that ‘spoken language’ here refers to spontaneous speech and
not any prepared text that is ‘spoken’ to an audience on radio or television or at conferences
and seminars.

Spoken language also refers to conversation rendered in the written mode, for example, as
the conversation between characters in a novel or a play. E-mail and Short Message Service
(SMS) messages that are informal can also resemble the spoken medium. The response can
be almost immediate. People also ‘chat’ on internet, and though the listener is not present
physically, his/her response is almost immediate. Informal telephone conversation too can
be said to be ‘spoken language’ in the sense that the response from the hearer is immediate.
In all these cases, the hearer is absent and therefore the people interacting with each other
cannot use gestures, eye contact, etc., in addition to the words they utter/write.

The second source of difference between the two mediums arises from the very nature of the
devices used by them for the transmission of language. In written language, the mode we use
is marks on the page. Each of these marks combine with other marks to form words, and
words combine to form meaningful sentences. Each language uses its own system of marks
known as a script.

For example, English uses the Roman script, Hindi uses the Devanagi script, Punjabi uses
the Gurumukhi script, the languages of the North East use the Roman script, Telugu uses the
Brahmi script. These marks or orthographic signs are not always adequate to represent the
various devices that we use for the transmission of language by the spoken word, e.g., the
sounds and their pronunciation in words, rhythm and intonation.

Even in languages that have a common script, there is more often than not, a difference in
the pronunciation of words represented by the same letters of the alphabet. Numerals in
different languages, for example, may be written in the same script and have the same value
and yet be pronounced differently. In German, French and English, the numbers on the page

16
are the same and are written thus: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, etc. But they do not give us any
clue as to how they are to be pronounced in each of these languages.

Similarly, though these three languages, the tribal languages of North East India and some
other languages of Europe use the same script, the letters of the alphabet do not always
represent the same sounds in all the languages, nor do they indicate which sounds can
combine to form words in each language.

In fact, there is a lack of one-to-one correspondence between spelling and sound in these
languages. The spelling of words helps us to recognise words, their meaning and their
association with other words in a particular language, but do not necessarily indicate how
they are to be pronounced. For example, in English, the words ‘thumb’, ‘oven’, and ‘receipt’
have the following meanings;

 thumb: the long jointed part in your hand which is nearer your wrist than your other
four fingers.
 oven: part of a cooker like a box with a door, inside which food is placed to be cooked.
 receipt: a piece of paper that you give or send someone to confirm that you have
received money or goods from them.

While the meaning of these words is clear, the spelling does not indicate which sounds they
represent. The word thumb has five letters but only 3 sounds. The letters th represent one
sound and the letter b is silent (not pronounced). In the word oven, there are four letters and
four sounds. The letter o is pronounced like the letter u in the word cut. The letter v is
pronounced like v in victory, e like the e in mother, and n like n in no. The word receipt has
seven letters but only 5 sounds. The letter r is pronounced like r in road, e like i in bit, c like s
in sit, ei like ea in tea, and t like t in tea, p is silent.

Thus, while we recognise the words on the page, we are not always sure of how they are
pronounced. Moreover, words as well as sentences in each language have a rhythm that is
characteristic of that language. The rhythm and intonation of languages are essentially

17
properties of the spoken medium, and may vary from one language to another, for example,
English has a rhythm that is quite different from the rhythm of Indian languages.

A unique feature of English rhythm is that some words are shortened or contracted. These
words are normally structure words, the negative not, and the verb to be (is, are). In the first
case, the negative is weakened or shortened to n’t and attached to an auxiliary verb, e.g.,
wouldn’t, couldn’t, weren’t, aren’t, isn’t, wasn’t, shan’t (shall not), can’t (cannot). In the
second case, the auxiliary verb is weakened and attached to a Pronoun, e.g., I’ll, we’ll, they’ll,
he’s, she’s, I’ve, we’ve, they’ve, I’d, we’d, they’d, he’d, she’d, etc. They are the weakened forms
of will, is, have, would.

Notice that these contracted forms when represented in writing have the apostrophe to
indicate that they are to be pronounced exactly as they have been written. In the written
medium, however, these forms are generally avoided and the full forms are used, that is, will
not, could not, were not, I will, I shall, he is, she is, they have, we have, I would, they would,
etc. Indians generally find it difficult to pronounce the contracted forms which are an
integral part of the rhythm of English. They tend to use the full written forms given above.

Another difference between spoken and written language is owing to the separate societal
function of the two mediums. For example, in our daily lives, we find that writing is used for
social contact, that is, for letter writing, and other personal correspondence such FAX and E-
mail messages. It is also used for instructions to the public, e.g., public signs on stations,
roads; labels on various products, such as medicines, food etc.; instructions in guides for
electronic and electric goods, on city maps on bills, menus, in telephone directories,
computer manuals and so on.

Writing is also used in newspapers, journals, magazines, creative writing, textbooks,

advertisements in the newspapers, magazines and hoardings, in medical and other reports.
Here, the primary function of writing in all these cases is to provide information and to
entertain.

18
On the other hand, we use only the spoken form of a language for face-to-face interaction,
that is, at interviews, for discussion in the classroom and at seminars or conferences, on
television, on radio, at the theatre, and for day-to-day interaction at the workplace and at
home. We also use the spoken form of a language in situations where the speaker and
listener are not face-to-face, e.g., on the telephone, on the dictaphone, etc.

From the above, it is clear that speech and writing are used in different contexts, for different
functions, though there may be a certain amount of overlap. In other words, there are
different functions to which each one is appropriate. For example, we do not write down
household conversations or daily interaction at the workplace. Similarly, we do not go
around reading the regulations or an airline ticket or railway ticket aloud.

As a result of the difference in function, the two mediums have some differences in
vocabulary and in structure.

Differences in vocabulary

In conversational English for day-to-day interaction, for example, words that often stand for
large classes of phenomena are very often used. For example, words such as get and do are
often used to mean different things. In written English, on the other hand, there is a separate
word for each of the different meanings these words have in spoken English.

In conversational English, the word get can mean understand as in ‘D’ you get what I
mean?’, it can mean receive as in ‘Did you get her letter?’, it can also mean reach as in ‘You
must get there within half an hour’, and it can mean suffering from as in ‘They’ve all got
jaundice. In written English understand can be substituted for get in the first case, receive
can be substituted for get in the second case, reach can be substituted for get in the third
case, and in the fourth case the written sentence would be, ‘They are all suffering from
jaundice’.

19
Similarly, the word do can have different meanings. For example, do can mean arrange as
in, ‘Let her do the flowers. She enjoys it. It can have different meanings, when used to talk
about performing an activity or task.

Differences in structure

The written word, being more permanent, is the final draft and therefore complete in its
form or structure. It cannot depend on prosodic (rhythm, intonation, etc.) and paralinguistic
features (gestures, eye contact, etc.) for meaning as spoken language does. It would,
therefore, normally be difficult to ‘translate’ the written word directly into ‘talk’. But in order
to study the difference in structure, we would need to ‘imagine’ what the form of spoken
sentences would be if the written sentences were given.

And this is what Halliday (1985:61-62) does. He ‘translates’ some written sentences into a
form that would be more likely to occur in speech which is not specially ‘colloquial’. Let us
now look at some of the sentences.

Written Spoken

(a) Investment in a rail If you invest in a rail facility, this

facility implies a long- implies that you are going to be
term commitment. committed for a long term.

(b) Some migrants acted Some people migrated because they

upon encouraging were encouraged by the advice they got
advice from relatives from their relatives and friends who
and friends who had had gone to the colonies before them.
preceded them to the
colonies.

(c) Business community Members of the business community

lunchers relax in this relax while they lunch in this dappled
dappled mid-city sanctuary in the middle of the city and
sanctuary while saving save something for the seagulls who
something for the live there.

20
 resident seagulls.

Have you noticed the difference between the written and the spoken form of each of the
sentences above?

Let us identify the differences.

In sentence (a) there are altogether ten words. Of these, seven (investment, rail, facility,
implies, long, term, commitment) are content words and three (in, a and a) are structure
words. In the ‘likely’ spoken form of the same sentence, the words invest, rail, facility,
implies, committed, long, term, are content words and the remaining thirteen are structure
or form words. Similarly, in sentence (b) whereas the ‘written’ sentence has eight context
words (migrants, acted, encouraging, advice, relative, friends, preceded, colonies) and nine
structure words, the ‘likely’ spoken sentence has nine content words and sixteen structure
words. In sentence (c) there are ten content words and six structure words in the ‘written’
form but twelve content words and sixteen structure words in the ‘spoken’ form.

All these sentences indicate that the ‘written’ form tends to make use of a larger number of
content words than structure words. The ‘spoken’ sentence, on the other hand, tends to make
use of fewer content words and a larger number of structure words.

The larger number of content words in the written form contributes to densely packed
information which is generally characteristic of writing. The ‘spoken’ version, on the other
hand, is longer and sparse owing to the use of a larger number of structure words.

As we said earlier, the difference in the way these two mediums of language are structured
does not imply that the one is superior to the other or more complex than the other. Both are
equally complex. In fact the differences in the ‘situation’, the function and the very nature of
the two mediums are reflected through the difference in their structure.

21
LEARNING ACTIVITY 1.3
1. Write down two more differences between written and spoken
language.
2. Write down other meanings that the word do can have in
conversational English. Give examples.
3. Write the different meanings that the words make and have can
convey in conversation. Write down sentences to show the
difference between the several meanings of each of these words
(use the dictionary for help).
4. Can you think of similar examples of differences in meaning in the
use of the same word in the spoken form of your own language?
5. The sentences below represent formal writing. Re-write them as
they would be rendered in speech, using contracted forms where
necessary. (Refer to the types of contracted forms in this Unit.)
(a) They will arrive this evening.
(b) She says she has not had the time to do it.
(c) We have told them that they need not come for the function.
(d) I do not know whether she will be in time for the play.
(e) She has made it clear that she cannot help them.
(f) They are waiting to hear from them.
(g) We are sure they will not come.

Sample: He does not want to be disturbed when he is working

(written form).

He doesn’t want to be disturbed when he’s working (spoken form).

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

22
SUMMARY
In this Unit, we said that human language is unique by giving a list of the characteristics of
human language. We then explained the several functions of language including sharing of
information, expressing opinions and ideas, maintaining social relations (phatic
communion), producing a pleasing effect through rhyme and repetitive rhythm, identifying
social groups and marking an individuals identity, expressing strong feelings or emotions,
etc. We also said that spoken and written language are similar in two ways: both are used for
the purpose of communication and both have different styles ranging from very formal to
very informal depending on the context. In closing the Unit, we pointed out the differences
between spoken and written language in terms of situation and the medium used as well as
vocabulary and structures. In this context, we said, owing to the difference in situation
written language cannot receive immediate feedback in the absence of an audience. It
therefore needs to be as explicit as possible in a more or less final form. Spoken language, on
the other hand, gets immediate feedback from the listener/s in an interaction. It need not
have will formed sentences because of the additional use of other devices such as gestures,
eye contact etc., to convey messages. We also said that written language uses marks on the
page and spoken language is not necessarily represented by orthography.

KEY WORDS

 Aesthetic function: relating to the appreciation of beauty, of art etc.

 Context: the relationship between participants, the subject matter and purpose of
communication are factors that together comprise the context.
 Contracted forms: shortened forms in English which contribute to its rhythm.
 Emotive or expressive function: use of language to express strong feelings.
 Formal: speech or behaviour that is very correct and serious and not relaxed.
 Identity: all the qualities, features of language, that make one feel you belong to a
particular group.
 Informal: relaxed and friendly
 Phatic communion: a phrase coined by Malinowski to refer to the use of language
to maintain social contact – the use of fixed expressions
 Rhyme: words that rhyme have a very similar sound, for example, down rhymes
with crown, hill rhymes with bill
 Rhythm: a regular movement or beat
 Script: the system of marks on the page or orthographic signs that the written form
of a languages uses.
 Spontaneous speech: conversation that is not prepared.

23
Unit 2
Varieties of Language
STRUCTURE

Overview
Learning Objectives

2.1 Variation in Language

2.1.1 Geographical area
2.1.2 Caste/Community
2.1.3 Urban-Rural
2.1.4 Social class
2.1.5 Ethnic varieties
2.2 Variation and Physical Features
2.2.1 Age
2.2.2 Sex
2.3 Language Variation and Context

Summary

OVERVIEW

In this Unit, we shall study language on the basis of the fact that language is not a
monolithic, homogenous system, but varies owing to the co-existence of a number of socio-
cultural factors such as geographical region, caste/community, social class, ethnic
background, physical factors, such as age, sex, and interpersonal relationships and subject
matter. In other words, one of these or a combination of these factors gives us varieties of a
language.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

24
After completing this Unit, you should be able to:

 explain variety in language;

 identify how the socio-cultural factors influence language with examples from your
own mother tongue.

2.1 VARIATION IN LANGUAGE

When we study a language in all its aspects, we tend to view it as a uniform system because
the rules of the language pertaining to phonetics, phonology, grammar, etc., do not account
for any variations in pronunciation, grammar or usage. The reason for this is that the
description accounts for the ‘standard dialect’ of a language.

What is a standard dialect? The standard dialect of any language is usually a variety (form,
style) used in print, and is normally taught in schools and colleges and to non-native
speakers who are learning the language. It is normally the variety, the spoken form of which
the radio, TV and educated people use.

The functions of a standard language variety are richly developed. This is so because when
the language is selected to be developed as a standard language. Dictionaries, grammar
books, books on usage, etc., are written on the chosen variety and everyone agrees on what is
correct. It then becomes necessary for the citizens to learn the correct forms. Its functions
are also enlarged and it is widely used by the government in all its official transactions: in
Parliament, in law, in administration, in education, in business, etc.

The standard language is used in scientific and technical documents. It owes its importance
and prestige to the fact that its speakers are members of a powerful group, and it is spoken in
the cultural and economic centre of a country, e.g., the dominance of the Parisian variety of
French, and the variety of English spoken in South East of London, known variously as the
King’s (or Queen’s) English, Oxford English, BBC English, Public School English, Standard
British English.

25
From what we have discussed so far, it is clear that the standard dialect or the standard
variety of a language acquires status and prestige because language as a social phenomenon
is associated with the social structure or value systems of society. In other words, there are
no linguistic or scientific reasons that make a standard language more prestigious.

Linguistically speaking, it cannot be more correct or more logical, or more beautiful than
other varieties. Most scholars have made a scientific study of language and are convinced
that all languages and all dialects of a language are equally ‘good’ as linguistic systems. They
are all complex rule-governed systems which are completely adequate for the needs of their
speakers. In essence, value judgements concerning the correctness and purity of linguistic
varieties are socio-political rather than linguistic in nature.

We have said that the standard variety of a language is only one of a number of varieties of
that language, and it is not the only form. We shall examine the various factors that
contribute to differences between the varieties of a language.

2.1.1 Variation and geographic area

When we travel through one of the States of India, as we move from one village to the next
and one town to the next, we often notice differences in the language used even though the
people across the State speak the same language. In areas that are adjacent to each other, the
differences in language are generally very small.

But in areas that are geographically far apart the difference is noticeable. For example, the
Tamil Spoken in North Tamil Nadu differs from the Tamil spoken in South Tamil Nadu.
However, as we move from North to South, the differences in Tamil from one town to the
next are small and not as noticeable.

Similarly, the Kannada language is spoken throughout Karnataka but the variety of Kannada
in North Karnataka differs from that in South Karnataka. Along the borders between
Karnataka and Maharashtra, owing to contact with Marathi, the variety of Kannada on the
border differs from that in Central Karnataka.

26
Similarly, the Punjabi dialect spoken in Punjab is different from the variety spoken in Delhi.
The Marthi dialect spoken in and around Amritsar differs significantly from the Lehnda
dialect spoken in and around Multan (in Pakistan), so much so that it is not intelligible to
Punjabi speakers in Punjab.

Areas of difference

In what respect do these regional varieties of language differ? Are the speakers of the
different varieties of the same language aware of the differences? The speakers of one variety
of a language are generally able to identify some of the features that make another variety
different form theirs. But only a systematic study of two varieties can enable us to identify
the differences in detail, because sometimes two dialects can be mutually unintelligible as is
the case with the Maghi and Lehnda dialects of Punjabi.

Generally, the areas of difference between two varieties of a language can be vocabulary,
sounds, rhythm, tone and grammar. Let us look at a few examples in varieties of English:
Standard British and Standard American:

Verbs: British English: Past American English:

Present tense & Past Participle Past & past Participle

dive dived dove/dived

lean leant/leaned leaned
smell smelt/smelled smelled

Note that both differ in their use of grammatical forms, vocabulary and pronunciation. Their
use of the past and past participle tense of verbs also differs. In addition, they also differ in
their use of vocabulary as shown below:

British English American English

lift elevator
petrol gas
tin can
tap faucet
wind screen (front glass of a car) wind shield
indicators (of a car) turn signals
plaster band-aid

27
 trousers pants
tracksuit sweats

British English also differs from American English in respect of pronunciation. One of the
major differences, for example, is the pronunciation of the ‘r’ in the spelling before
consonant sounds, and in the final position in words in American English and the absence of
it in the same positions in British English. In the words desert, girl, certain, colour, figure,
paper, the ‘r’ is pronounced in American English, whereas in British English, it is silent. The
vowel in ‘hot’ is pronounced like the vowel in ‘lot’ in British English. But, it is pronounced
like the vowel in ‘car’ in American English.

Similarly, there are differences between native and non-native varieties of English. For
example, in Indian English also the ‘r’ is pronounced before consonant sounds, and in the
final positions in words, but the pronunciation of ‘r’ differs from its pronunciation in
American English. Words in British English have acquired a different meaning when used by
Indians. For example, the word ‘mishap’ in British English means ‘a small accident or piece
of bad luck that does not have serious results’. But in Indian English, the word ‘mishap’ is
used to mean major accidents which result in loss of life.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 2.1

Give examples of variation (in grammar or vocabulary, or pronunciation) in the speech of
your language group from different regions in your State.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

28
2.1.2 Caste/Community

In countries where the caste system prevails and where each community is marked because
of the predominance of a single caste and society is stratified into different castes, several
distinctions exist between the languages of communities belonging to different castes.

This is true of many parts of India, particularly rural India, where these caste dialects were
spoken by marked groups that acquired a particular caste by virtue of their heredity. They
had no possibility of changing their caste, or becoming members of another caste. For
example, the Brahmin variety of Tamil differs significantly from the non-Brahmin variety of
Tamil in respect of grammar, vocabulary and patterns of pronunciation.

Look at the following examples:

English Brahmin Tamil Non-Brahmin Tamil

Vocabulary
‘sleep’ tũngu orangu
‘wash’ alambu kaluyu
‘water’ jalõm thanni
Phonology
‘haircut’ krãfu kräppu
‘sugar’ jini cini
‘banana’ vãrepparo vãreppolo/ vãleppolo
Grammar
‘it’ -du -ccu
‘it came’ vandudu vanduccu
‘he does’ pantran pannuhãn
(Examples from W. Bright and A. K. Ramanujan, 1984)

2.1.3 Urban – Rural

Language varies along the urban-rural parameter as well. In countries where there is a sharp
demarcation between urban and rural populations, differences in language are clearly
perceptible. Urban people come into contact with speakers of several languages. This contact
results in language change. Rural people, on the other hand, rarely come into contact with
speakers of languages other than their own and hence the difference between the two.

29
In countries like India, where there is a fairly large rural population, the distinction between
urban and rural varieties of language is evident. Differences in vocabulary, pronunciation
and grammar are owing to the maintenance of language and culture in rural areas as
opposed to language change and the merger of different cultural traditions in urban areas.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 2.2

Can you think of any variation in your language in urban and rural speech? Give examples.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

2.1.4 Social class

Varieties of language may also result from the way in which people are organized into
hierarchically ordered social groups or classes. Social classes are not clearly defined but are
aggregates of people with similar social or economic characteristics. For sociolinguistic
purposes and for studies to determine the significant correlation between social class

30
background and language, ‘social class’ has meant recognizing only broad distinctions such
as ‘high vs. low’, or ‘upper vs. middle vs. lower class’.

However, one does not need a sociolinguist to sense that the way people talk has something
to do with their social position or level of education. Most of us have developed a sense of
values that make us judge some accents as ‘posh’ and others ‘low’; some features of grammar
and vocabulary as ‘refined’ and others ‘uncouth’ or ‘uneducated’.

It is never possible to make a simple statement about language variation and social class
because of the presence of other factors such as movement up and down the social-economic
hierarchy, interaction between social status and region, and sex of the speakers. For
example, let us look at British English. In the diagrams given below, it is clear that the
vertical dimension represents social variation and the horizontal dimension represents
geographical location:

Dialects
Highest class: Standard English

Social variation
Lowest class: Non-
standard English
Regional variation

Accents

Highest class: standard

English pronunciation

Social variation

Lowest class: Most

localized accent

Regional variation
(Adapted from Peter Trudgill 1974 pp 41 – 42)

31
Notice in the figures above that at the top of each pyramid are the speakers of the highest
social class. They speak the standard dialect with very little variation. Also, at the top are
speakers of the educated British accent, which signals no information about region at all.
According to Trudgill, it is neutral. As we move down the class scale, we find that the further
we move down the more we encounter regional accent and dialect variation. When we reach
the lowest social class, we come across the widest range of local accents, and dialects.

Thus, according to Trudgill, speakers from the top social class will all use the same word
headache, and give it the same standard pronunciation, but speakers from the lowest class
will use skull ache, head warch, sore head and other forms in a variety of pronunciations,
depending on where they are from.

In other countries, the factors that combine to signal social status may vary, because of
differences in socio-cultural relationships.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 2.3

Are there any marked caste distinctions within your

language group? If there are, can you give example of
differences (in vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation) in the
language used by people belonging to the higher caste and
those belonging to the lower caste?

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

2.1.5 Ethnic varieties

Varieties of language can also signal ethnic identity. Ethnic identity is loyalty to and support
for a group with which one has ancestral links. A current usage of the term ‘ethnic’ applies to

32
everyone, and not just to those who practise a traditional rural culture. However, questions
of ethnicity arise most often in relation to the needs and demands of those who are an ethnic
minority within a community, such as the many groups of immigrants in many countries
including USA, UK, and Australia.

Immigrants that have a strong language loyalty to the original language of the group
generally have some identifying features in their speech; and a large number of features are
carried over to the new language. In the course of time, many of these features have become
established, resulting in new varieties of the majority language. Well-known cases include a
range of English accents and dialects associated with speakers from India, West Indies,
Puerto Rico, etc. Where there is a history of discrimination or segregation, a large number of
features get carried over to the new language.

One of the clearest examples of ethnic linguistic variety is provided by the contrast between
the ways the Black and White Americans speak. This does not mean that there is a simple
correlation between colour and language because there is considerable variation within both
racial groups, and it is perfectly possible for Black speakers to ‘sound’ more like White
speakers and the vice-versa, depending on educational social and regional factors.

Some of the features of the English spoken by Blacks, or the Black English Vernacular,
include:

 The use of the verb ‘be’ to mark habitual meaning but without changing its form (i.e.,
invariant ‘be’), e.g., She be nice and happy; Sometimes they be walking round here.
 No final ‘s’ in the third person singular present tense, e.g., He walk, She go, etc.
 No use of forms of the verb ‘be’ in present tense, when it is used as a ‘linking verb’
within a sentence, e.g., They real fine, If you interested, etc.
 Use of the double negatives, e.g., Won’t nobody do nothing about that?, He don’t
know nothing, etc.

2.2 VARIATION AND PHYSICAL FEATURES

Let us now consider how language varies according to the social and physical characteristics
of speakers, i.e., the region to which they belong, their social class, caste, sex, age, etc.

2.2.1 Age

33
In several sociolinguistic studies, it has been observed that there is a marked difference
between the speech of the older generation and that of the younger generation. From a
audio-recording, it is easy to identify the difference in the speech of a baby, a young child, a
teenager, a middle aged person, or a very old person.

Not much is known about the patterns of linguistic change that effect older people. Though it
is clear that our voice-quality, vocabulary and style alter, as we grow older, research into the
nature of these changes is still in its early stages. It is possible to use the differences in the
speech of younger people and older people to study language change in progress. But the
reasons for the change may not always be purely linguistics. They are often the result of
social and psychological pressures that operate in different generations and get reflected in
their speech.

2.2.2 Sex

The relationship between language and sex has received considerable attention in recent
years, mainly because of public concern over male and female equality. In many countries,
there is now an awareness of the way in which language can reflect and help to maintain
social attitudes to men and women. It is argued by many that the linguistic bases clearly
reflect a male-oriented view of the world and foster unfair sexual discrimination, leading to a
denigration of the role of women in society.

The language that has received more discussion than any other language is English. This is
largely due to the impact of early American feminism. Some areas of grammar and
vocabulary have been cited. In grammar, the issue that has attracted most attention is the
lack of a sex-neutral, third person singular pronoun in English, especially in its use after
indefinite pronouns, e.g., ‘If anyone has an extra copy, he can lend it to her’. While the plural
form they can be used, in the singular no suitable, stylistically acceptable option exists: while
‘one’ is considered to be very formal, the use of ‘he/she’ (which has been used for a long
time) is stylistically awkward. (You may, however, note that it is quite acceptable now to use
‘they’ for the singular form, i.e., ‘If anyone has an extra copy, they can lend it to her.’)

Feminists provide other examples of linguistic bias from the vocabulary we use. For example,
attention has been paid to the use of male items in sex-neutral contexts such as ‘man’ in
genetic phrases, e.g., ‘the man in the street’, ‘the bronze-age man’, etc., and the potential of

34
replacing it by genuinely neutral terms, e.g., chairman – chairperson, salesman – sales
agent, etc.

Another problem area in the lexical field is marital status, where bias is seen in such phrases
as ‘X’s widow’ but not usually ‘Y’s widower’. There is also the practice of changing the
woman’s surname at marriage, and the use of ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’. In place of ‘Mrs’ or ‘Miss’, a
more neutral alternative ‘Ms’ has been introduced, and now woman retain their maiden
surnames even after marriage.

Thus, the effect of feminist criticism has had some impact of sexist language, though the
effect has been far more noticeable in writing.

Linguistic research has, however, concentrated on the differences between male and female
speech in many societies. Languages provide many instances of males and females learning
different styles of speech as in Japanese, Thai, Carib, Chukchi and Yana. Pronunciation,
grammar, vocabulary, and context of use can all be affected.

A clear case of linguistic sex-discrimination is Japanese. Well-defined styles of speech have

been known since the 11th century. Books on feminine etiquette fostered the use of special
vocabulary and grammar, alongside norms of gentle and submissive behaviour. This
traditional view is undergoing considerable change today; but clearly defined roles still
predominate, and distinct linguistic forms are widely encountered. Some examples of forms
of words that are different for Japanese males and females include:

Women’s form Men’s form English equivalent

onaka hara ‘stomach’

taberu kuu ‘eat’
watashi boku, ore ‘I’
okasan ohukuro ‘mother’
oishu umai ‘delicious’

Similarly, in Koasati, a native language spoken in Louisiana (U.S.), many words have
different endings when used by women and by men. For example, the word meaning ‘lift it’ is
‘lakawhol’ in women’s speech but ‘lakawos’ in men’s speech.

35
English has nothing quite on this scale, but investigations have shown that men and women
do indeed speak rather differently in English and there is a difference in the frequency of use
of words. For example, women tend to use emotive adjectives as ‘super’ and ‘lovely’,
exclamations such as ‘goodness me!’ and ‘oh dear!’ and intensifiers such as ‘so’ and ‘such’
(e.g., They had such a terrible time!) more often than men. This use of intensifiers has been
noted in several languages including German, French and Russian.

Women have also been found to ask more questions, make more use of positive and
encouraging ‘noises’ (such as ‘mhm’), use a wider range of intonation and a more marked
rhythmical stress, and make greater use of the pronouns ‘you’ and ‘we’. Men, by contrast, are
much more likely to interrupt, to dispute what has been said to introduce new topics into the
conversation and declare fact or opinion more often.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 2.4

Find out whether there are any differences in the speech of men and women in your language
group.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

36
Having considered how language varies according to the social and physical characteristics
of speakers, let us now look at variation in speech, according to the context or situation the
speakers find themselves in.

2.3 LANGUAGE VARIATION AND CONTEXT

Several factors contribute to the kind of language a speaker uses in different situation.
Variation in language correlates with a combination of the following contextual factors.

Relationship between participants

The language of participants in an interaction differs according to the relationship between

them. By relationship is generally meant the degree of formality or informality between
participants. The relationship between a boss and an employee is more formal than one
between two colleagues and the relationship between colleagues is more formal than one
between two friends. Thus, the relationship between participants can range from very formal
to very informal.

This type of variation is more formally encoded in some languages than in others. In Hindi,
for example, different terms are used to address the person one is speaking to, depending on
the degree of familiarity that exists between them, and also the amount of respect the
speaker wishes to show for the person he interacts with. The Punjabi pronouns ‘tusi’ and ‘tũ’
are formal/respectful and informal/familiar, respectively. In French, the pronoun ‘Tu’ is
reserved for close friends/family and the pronoun ‘vous’ is formal.

The formality–informality scale is also affected in complex ways by communicative and other
developments in modern society. Most often, it correlates with the personal relationships
between participants and their roles in a particular social set up. Although English does not
express formal–informal relationships by using distinct pronouns, it makes available definite
options to indicate one’s relationship with the person one is addressing. One example of
making a distinction between formal–informal can be addressing people by their titles and
surnames in formal interactions and using only first names in informal ones.

Subject matter

There is also a relationship between formality–informality and the subject matter of

conversation. Compared to the variety of language used to discuss politics or cooking, a

37
discussion on Mathematics of Physics or Economics, is likely to be more formal because of
the technical terminology that characterize it.

Channel

Language also varies according to the medium chosen for communication, i.e., speech or
writing mainly and visual forms such as advertisements, etc. In English, the written language
tends to be more formal than the spoken language. This is true of other languages as well.
However, we need to remember that both written and spoken language has a formality–
informality scale depending on the type of activity in which a participant is engaged, e.g.,
creative writing, debating, cross-examining, presenting a paper, having a conversation, etc.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 2.5

(a) List some situations in which an informal use of spoken

language would be required and list also some situations in
which a formal use of spoken language would be required.
(b) Can you give examples from your own language of variation,
according to a formal and an informal activity in the spoken
medium?

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

SUMMARY
In this Unit, we pointed out language is not a monolithic, homogenous system, but varies
owing to the co-existence of a number of socio-cultural factors such as geographical region,
caste/community, social class, ethnic background, physical factors, such as age, sex, and
interpersonal relationships and subject matter. We also said that one of these, or a
combination of these, factors gave us varieties of a language.

38
Unit 3
Descent of the English Language

STRUCTURE

Overview
Learning Objectives

3.1 Indo-European Languages: Origins

3.1.1 Consonant shift
3.1.2 Stress shift
3.1.3 Vowel shift
3.2 Influences on Old English
3.2.1 Britons and Romans
3.2.2 Scandinavians
3.2.3 The Norman conquest

Summary

OVERVIEW

In Unit 1, we described language by distinguishing human language from animal ‘language’.

In this context, we said the sophisticated use of sound signals and the elements of
arbitrariness, duality, structure-independence, etc., as unique characteristics to human
language. We also gave an outline of the functions of language and then looked into the
similarities and differences between spoken and written language with special reference to
English. In the Unit that followed, i.e., Unit 2, we studied the factors such as geographical
region, caste/community, social class, ethnic background, physical factors, such as age, sex,
and interpersonal relationships and subject matter that gave us varieties of a language.

Having discussed language in general, in the present Unit, let us focus on the origins of
English.

39
LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After completing this Unit, you should be able to:

 trace the origin of the English language in Indo-European languages;

 discuss the influences on Old English.

3.1 INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES: ORIGINS

We tend to think that English is the language of the Britons, i.e., the original inhabitants of
the British Isles. But, in reality, this is not so. Britons spoke a language belonging to a family
of the Celtic languages. When they were subjugated by the Romans around 43 A.D. and were
under the Roman rule for about 400 years, the Britons had to learn Latin as well.

Later, Germanic invaders settled down in the British Isles. It is believed that the English
language, as we know it now, originated from the Germanic languages, spoken by the
Germanic invaders. Note that the Germanic languages are also known as the Teutonic
languages.

Language scholars believe that the root of the Celtic languages, Latin and the languages of
the Germanic invaders is the same. According to them, the root, or parent, language was
Aryan or Indo-German or Indo-European. Since little information is available about the
Indo-European language or the people who spoke the language, it is generally assumed that
the language would have been spoken by nomadic tribes.

Being a language of the nomads, the Indo-European language could have undergone various
changes, influenced by the local milieu in the habitats of the nomads. One such change,
believed to be the earliest of the changes, took place in sounds. With the introduction of
writing, grammatical structures led to further differences in the language of the different
nomadic groups.

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Indo-European dialects and languages

According to philologists, the Indo-European people lived in one locality. However, when
they moved away in groups, their language split up into a number of dialects. While many of
these dialects become extinct, some others developed into full-fledged languages.

The English language historians identify the following eight dialects belonging to the Indo-
European language:

1. Albanian
2. Anglo-Saxon (which developed first into Middle English and then Modern English)
3. Armenian
4. Balto-Slavonic
5. Eastern (Sanskrit)
6. Germanic (from which we have Gothic, Scandrnavian and West-Germanic, and from
West Germanic, German and Dutch)
7. Greek
8. Italic (from which we have Latin and from Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
and Rumanian).

However, we do not know for certain what dialects of the Germanic languages the dominant
Germanic tribes, i.e.., Angles, Saxons and Jutes, spoke. We can only assume that Old English
resulted from the inter-mingling of the dialects spoken by these tribes. But, in order to
understand better the influences that helped to develop English as a distinct powerful
language, we need to compare it with some of the dialects of the Indo-European language.

The changes that had taken place to differentiate the Teutonic languages (from the Romance
languages) were sound changes, the most important of which are the consonant changes,
vowel changes, stress shifts, gradation and mutation. We do not know when these changes
took place but from comparative philology we get the evidence that they took place over a
long period of time, before Anglo-Saxon or Old English came to be recognized as a distinct
language different from other languages that descended from primitive Germanic.

41
Note that it is not within the scope of this Course to go into the details of these changes. All
that we need for the purpose of this Course is a description of these changes with a few
examples, which will help us understand some of the features of Modern English.

3.1.1 Consonant shift

The consonant shift is known as Grimm’s Law, as it was supposed to have been formulated
by Jacob Grimm, a German philologist. Though Grimm’s Law is not complete in all respects,
a study of the Law will give us sufficient information about the consonant shift.

It is usually assumed that Latin and Greek retain some of the sounds of letters in the Indo-
European alphabet. Therefore, a comparison of words in these languages with Anglo-Saxon
(Old English) and Modern English has helped philologists to trace the roots of some English
words.

What is more important for us Indians is what Baugh and Cable (2002, Fifth Edition) refers
to as the “Discovery of Sanskrit”. They refer to a famous paper written in 1786 by Sir William
Jones, who served as a Supreme Court Justice in India. Jones noticed the similarities among
the three languages Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, and suggested that the similarities show that
these languages descended from the same source. Subsequent researches on the topic
confirmed his view.

According to Grimm's Law, ‘p’ in Latin or those languages that retain the sound of Indo-
European is changed into ‘f’ in Anglo-Saxon and is carried on to Modern English. Consider
the examples given below:

 p>f
Latin Anglo-Saxon Modern English

42
 pes, pedem fōt foot

Here, if we compare the word with the Sanskrit word pado:, we find that the initial ‘p’ has
changed into ‘f’ but ‘d’ in Latin has changed to d’, and the ending of the Latin word ‘em’ has
changed into ‘ɔː’. Similar is the case with the Latin word ‘pater’ (Anglo-Saxon, ‘faðer’ and
Modern English ‘father’). In Sanskrit, ‘pita’/’pitri’ retains the initial ‘p’ of Indo-European but
the ‘t’ in the central position of ‘pita’ changes to ‘ð’ in Anglo-Saxon and to the ‘th’ in Modern
English.

However, we cannot say that the ‘t’ of Sanskrit is changed to Anglo-Saxon ‘ð’ or Modern
English ‘th’, as Grimm’s Law states. The Sanskrit word ‘trini’ is somewhat similar to the Latin
word ‘tres’, which changes to ‘dri’ in Anglo-Saxon and ‘three’ in Modern English. Here too,
we find the same difference between ‘t’ and ‘t’ and the ending is entirely different. The
similarities, however, do indicate that Sanskrit and Latin have descended from the same
source but due to different influences, some of the sounds have undergone minor changes.
We may also note that the sounds ‘t’ and ‘d’ do not occur in English.

If we compare the Latin and Sanskrit words with the corresponding words in some of the
languages of India that has descended from Sanskrit, we find that some of the sounds both
from Latin and Sanskrit are recognizable, where as in other words the sounds have changed
completely. Thus, in colloquial Bengali, the word ‘baba’ (father) has little similarity with
either the English word or its Sanskrit and Latin equivalents. But, in the 19th century and
early 20th century in formal Bengali writing, the Sanskrit word ‘pita’ was often used. We may
also compare the Sanskrit word ‘pata’ (foot) with the colloquial Bengali ‘pɑː’ where only the
first syllable of Sanskrit with a lengthening of the vowel is retained. Consider the following
changes as well:

 k>h
Latin Anglo-Saxon Modern English

canis hund hound

 kw > hw

43
 Latin Anglo-Saxon Modern English

quis hwā who

 b>p
Latin Anglo-Saxon Modern English

lubricus slūpan slip

 d>t
Latin Anglo-Saxon Modern English

decem tien ten

 g>k
Latin Anglo-Saxon Modern English

genu cnēo knee

(see Wood, 1948: pp. 18-19 for other examples)

Note that there were several such comparisons of words in these languages. We do not
intend to discuss it in any detail in this Course. Essentially, our purpose in giving the
examples is to inform you that changes among the Indo-European languages did happen.

Scholars, however, noticed that some of the consonant sounds did not undergo changes the
way Grimm’s Law suggested. Another Law, thus, was propounded by Karl Verner, one of the
disciples of Grimm, and is known as Verner’s Law.

Verner’s Law

To illustrate, Verner’s Law, let us take just one example.

44
For the present purpose, we may take the English word ‘hundred’, which is supposed to show
the change ‘t > d’, i.e., from Latin ‘centum’ to English ‘hundred’. Here the initial consonants
‘c’, pronounced ‘k’, and ‘h’ were in accordance with the Grimm’s Law. However, the ‘t’ of
‘centum’ does not change to ‘p’ in Anglo-Saxson but to ‘d’. Verner explains this by stating that
when the stress in Indo-European is not on the vowel, immediately preceding the consonant
but following it, the voiceless fricative ‘p’ becomes a voiced ‘d’. Verner also shows how some
of the other consonant changes had taken place due to placing of the stress on the vowel
following the consonant that changed.

3.1.2 Stress shift

In languages that have descended from Italic and Latin such as French, we find that the
stress in multi-syllabic words is arbitrary. The stress is sometimes on the first syllable,
sometimes on the second and so on. In the Germanic languages, the stress comes to be
placed on the first syllable or the syllable that is the most meaningful part of the word. To
illustrate the difference, let us consider the following two sets of words:

Set 1: ‘democrat, de’mocracy, demo’cratic, democrati’sation.

‘politics, po’litical, poli’tician.

‘family, fa’miliar, famili’arity.

‘photograph, pho’tographer, photo’graphic.

Set 2: ‘man, ‘manly, ‘manfully, ‘manlier’, ‘manliness’.

‘love, ‘lover, ‘loving, ‘lovingly, ‘lovely, ‘loveliness’, ‘loveless, ‘lovelessness.

The words in Set 1 have retained the stress in Indo-European. We may conclude that these
words though borrowed from other languages retain the original stress of Indo-European,
and the words in Set 2 are original Anglo-Saxon words with Anglo-Saxon suffixes.

45
There exist several views to explain as to why stress-shift took place. One view is that it is a
mechanical change because it is easier to put the stress on the first syllable of a word. The
other view is that the part of the word that is most meaningful was stressed. It was thought
that usually the first syllable of a word is the most important and valuable. So, the stress was
put on the first syllable. However, in words like be'get, for'get, over'come, out'do, etc., the
stress is on the second syllable though they are not all borrowed words. This suggests that
the second view is more acceptable. Note that this, however, does not render the first view
unreasonable.

Whatever the reason, by fixing the stress on the first syllable, the English language gained in
the following three ways:

1. the pronunciation of words was less likely to change very quickly and it became easy,
particularly to foreign students, to recognize words that have the same root.
2. the language sounds more logical.
3. the vowels were also affected to give them a new grammatical function. (The vowel
change from cur'on to cor'en, for example, shows the difference between the plural
past form and the past participle.)

LEARNING ACTIVITY 3.1

We have seen that the words that came down to English from the
Germanic languages underwent two types of shifts: the consonant shift
and the stress shift. All languages borrow words from other languages
and change them according to convenience. We have given the example
from Bengali: ‘Baba’ (father) and ‘Pa’ (foot) which probably came from
Sanskrit.

Study your own language and see how many loan words you can find in
your language, what sound changes they have undergone, if any, and
explain these changes.

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Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

3.1.3 Vowel shift

Altogether, three types of vowel changes had taken place in the English language: gradation,
mutation and the Great Vowel shift. The first two changes took place during the period the
Angles, Saxons and Jutes started invading the British Isles and ultimately conquered the
Britons completely, and the Great Vowel shift took place between the time of Chaucer
(towards the end of the 14th Century) and the time of Shakespeare (towards the end of the
16th Century).

Let us now touch upon each of these vowel changes.

Gradation

Gradation or Ablaut is a vowel change that gives a word a new grammatical function. As
mentioned earlier, when the stress of the vowel is shifted in a word, it affects not only the
pronunciation of a word but often brings about a change in the grammatical function.

47
Those verbs in Old English that formed their past tense and participles with the ‘-ed’ ending
by a change of vowels were called ‘strong verbs’ (e.g., Anglo-Saxon, cēas - cur'on - cor'en with
the Modern English equivalence of choose - chose – chosen) and the other verbs were called
‘weak verbs’.

The terms ‘irregular verbs’ and ‘regular verbs’ are used to refer to strong verbs and weak
verbs, respectively. In the strong verbs that have come to Modern English from Old English,
it is difficult to trace the effect of gradation. This is because, in the course of time, the
inflexional endings of strong verbs that changed the preceding vowel, due to the stress on the
following one, have lost their inflexional endings, and in Modern English only the vowel
change is retained.

Consider some examples below:

Infinitive Past Past Participle

see saw seen

speak spoke spoken

bear bore borne

drink drank drunk

You may note that the past participles in these verbs do not always show a vowel change, but
unlike the irregular verbs (which have an ‘-ed’ suffix) they have an ‘-en’ suffix.

48
Mutation

Mutation or Umlaut (German for ‘alteration’ or ‘change’) is attributed to a vowel change that
occurs in a noun to form their plural forms by changing the vowel when the vowel is followed
by an ‘i’ or a ‘j’. If a rule is to be formulated for this change, we may say that in Germanic
words where the vowel in a stressed syllable is followed by an ‘i’ sound or a similar vowel-like
sound ‘j’, the vowel in the root syllable changes, and as the ‘i’ or ‘j’ is no longer necessary to
indicate the plural, the syllable containing it is dropped.

For example, the Old English ‘fōt’ and the Modern English ‘foot’. The plural of the Old
English word was probably ‘fotiz’ with the stress on ‘fō. The ‘ō’ in the Old English word
changed to ‘ē’ and gives us Modern English ‘feet’. In Modern English, there are only seven
nouns which form their plural by a change of vowel (e.g., man > men; foot > feet; goose >
geese; mouse > mice; louse > lice, and on on). These are probably the result of the ‘i-
mutation’ before the Old English period and have been retained in Modern English.

Examples of other parts of speech derived from mutated vowels include the following:

 Mutated abstract nouns derived from adjectives: Consider the following examples:

Old English Modern English

long (adj) long (adj)

longidu (quality of long-ness) length

strengdu strength

fūl (dirt) filth

hālidu (freedom from illness) health

49
 Verbs derived by mutation from cognate nouns: The Anglo-Saxons formed certain verbal
infinitives by adding ‘-jan’ to a noun. For example, the Anglo-Saxon word ‘dōm’
(judgement) gives the Modern English noun ‘doom’ with a change of meaning. The verbs
that were derived from this word were: ‘dōmjan’ (‘deem’, i.e., to make a judgement),
‘fedan’ (‘feed’).

 Verbs derived from adjectives by mutation: Consider the following examples:

Old English Modern English

hāljan (from hāl = whole) to health

fulljan (from the adj. full) to fill

 Mutated comparatives and superlative degrees of adjectives: Only one example of this derivation is
retained in Modern English, i.e., (Old English) ‘cāld’ (meaning, ‘old’) = (Modern English) ‘elder’, ‘eldest’.
(For further details, see Wood, 1948: 32-34).

The Great Vowel Shift

The Great Vowel Shift affected the long vowels that were current in the 14th Century, e.g., i: –
ryden, e: - sweete, heath, a: - name, u: - houre, o: - good, c: - holy. If you are interested in the
details, see Dennis Freeborn, 1998 (From Old English to Modern English, 2nd Edition, pp.
293-302).

However, before you read further, consider the following examples:

Middle Chaucer Modern Shakespeare

English English

50
 ɪ [fi:f] five [faɪ v]

ē [me:də] meed [mi;d]

ē [klε:nə] clean [kle:n]

ā [na:mə] name [ne:m]

ō [gɔːtə] goat [go:t]

ō [ro:tə] root [ru:t]

[du:n] down [dɑun]

LEARNING ACTIVITY 3.2

Make three columns with the headings, ‘Gradation’, ‘Mutation’,

‘Great Vowel Shift’ and put each of the following words in the
appropriate column: spoke, five, clean, men, chosen, feet, length,
goat, root, down, strength, deem, drink, borne, met, heal, name,
fill, elder and filth.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

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3.2 INFLUENCES ON OLD ENGLISH

The history of the English language has been divided by scholars into three periods: Anglo-
Saxon (450/600-1100/1150), Middle English (1100/1150-1500) and Modern English (since
1600).

Let us discuss the first of these periods in the remainder of this Unit by examining the
influences of other languages during this period on Old English.

3.2.1 The Britons and the Romans

We mentioned that the English language did not descend from the Celtic language of the
Britons. It was the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who were invited by them to protect them, gave
England its language and its name. We also noted that the Britons had borrowed a few
simple words from the Romans. Some of these words might have been brought to England
by the Germanic tribes. After the Christianization of England, other Latin words such as
‘church’ (Old English ‘cyrice’ from Greek ‘kurialcon’), ‘minister’ (Old English ‘mynester’),
‘apostle’, etc., were adopted.

We do not know exactly for how long the Britons (or the Celts as they are sometimes called)
inhabited the British Isles or where they came from. But, we know that the Britons borrowed
some words from the Romans; and these were probably borrowed by the Anglo-Saxons, who
had already come into contact with Latin in their wandering. The Celts contributed very little
to Old English except for a few simple everyday words and names of some places.

The name ‘London’ itself comes from the Celts, though this is rather uncertain. The Kingdom
of Kent comes from the Celtic ‘Canti’ or ‘Cantion’. The greatest number of Celtic words
survives in the names of rivers such as ‘Thames’ and hills such as ‘Bredon’ (in Welsh, ‘Bre’
means ‘hill’).

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Other Celtic words borrowed by the Anglo-Saxons were few in number. Some of them are
‘binn’ (= basket, crib), ‘crag’, ‘luh’ (= lake), etc. This, however, is not the end of the history of
Old English, but just the beginning. Other influences on Old English were the results of the
Scandinavian conquest, mainly by the Danes (878) and the Norman conquest in 1066.

3.2.2 The Scandinavians

The Scandinavians were Germanic tribes who had settled in the Scandinavian Peninsula and
Denmark. Of these tribes, the Danes and the Norwegians began sudden raids on English
shores from about the year 787. There were fierce battles between the English and the
Scandinavians, particularly the Danes, until the triumphant battle in which King Alfred
signed a treaty. According to this treaty, a line was demarcated from Chester to London, to
the East of which the foreigners, called the Vikings by the English, were to remain.

If we try to trace the root of the word ‘Viking’, we may see the similarity between the
languages of the English and the Scandinavians. According to Baugh and Cable (2002: 92, 5th
Edition), the term ‘Viking’ is usually thought to be derived from Old Norse, ‘vik’, a bay, as
indicating “One who came out from or frequented, the inlets of the sea”. It may, however,
have come from Old English ‘wic’, meaning a camp, “the formation of temporary
encampments being a prominent feature of the Viking raids”.

Besides these words, which were slightly dissimilar in sound and meaning, there were quite a
number of words that were identical in Scandinavian and English, e.g., man, wife, father,
mother, stand, sit, set, bring, hear, see, etc. Only the Old English literature from before the
invasion gives us a clue to whether they are original English words or loan words from
Scandinavian.

Whatever may be the source of the words that have come from the Old English period to
Modern English, there may be little doubt that the Old English users and the Scandinavians
could understand one another without difficulty. So, for a long time, many Old English and

53
Scandinavian words were used simultaneously. This practice often led to confusion between
dialect speakers when one dialect adopts the Old English form and another adopts the
Scandinavian.

The Scandinavians left evidence of their settlement in England for about 200 years in place
names such as those ending in ‘-by’ (Scandinavian word for ‘town’), e.g., Rugby, Derky,
Gransby, etc. The word ending ‘-by’ also gives the Modern English word ‘by-law’, which does
not mean an inferior law but means the law of a town or village. Other place names of
Scandinavian origin end in ‘-thorpe’, e.g., Northorpe, Mablethorpe, Goldthorpe, etc. Other
endings of place names are ‘toft’ as in Eastoft, Sandstoft, Lowestoft, etc.

Apart from loan words mentioned above, Scandinavian helped revive some of the Old
English words that had become obsolete or almost obsolete, e.g., till, dale (Old English
‘dael’), barn (Old English ‘beam’), ‘blend’, etc.

Another influence of Scandinavian on English words was that the Old English form was
retained but with a change of meaning. For example, ‘dream’ in Old English meant ‘joy’; the
modern meaning is derived from Scandinavian (‘draumr’), Danish ‘dröm’ means ‘bread’, but
‘bread’ in Old English meant ‘fragment'); the word ‘bloom’ existed in Old English, but its
meaning is not clear; it could be ‘mass of metal’); ‘freond’ meaning ‘friend’ but Scandinavian
‘freendi’ and Danish ‘freende’ mean ‘kinsmen’, etc.

Again Scandinavian had some influence on the pronunciation. The English had adopted the
practice of hardening some of the sounds of letters such as ‘c’, ‘g’ (e.g., ‘caster’, chester in
place names such as Doncaster). Words such as ‘kettle’ (Old English ‘chettel’), yive (Old
Engish meaning ‘give’), ‘yift’ (Scandinavian meaning ‘gift’ in Old English), etc., also show the
same hardening tendency.

The influence of Scandinavian on the grammar of English is not very significant. Some of the
grammatical niceties of Scandinavian affected only the dialects of English.

54
Simplification

Scandinavian seems to have facilitated the process of simplification which had already
started in Old English. The main difference between the two languages was in their
inflexional endings, while the stems of words were greatly similar. Though the Scandinavians
and Anglo-Saxons could understand one another easily, the inflexions might have caused
some confusion and there was a tendency to drop the inflexions.

Syntax

There is hardly any evidence that there was any effect of Scandinavian syntax on Old English
as no Scandinavian written texts survive. However, because of the close contact of the two
people speaking languages that are very similar, it is possible that the syntax may have been
affected to some extent. Jesperson, a language historian and a Modern Dane himself, points
out that the relative clauses without any pronoun are found in very rare cases in Old English
but are frequently used in Middle English, and speculates that this practice may be due to
Scandinavian influence.

3.2.3 The Norman conquest

The Scandinavians were neither the first nor the last foreigners to influence Old English. The
foreigners who came next to England were the Normans. The Normans came from
Normandy, a district in the North East Coast of France, opposite England. The English
Channel divided the two peoples. The Normans spoke a dialect of French, which was
different from the Central French of Paris, and was considered inferior to it. It was this
Norman French dialect that was brought to England by William the Conqueror, who became
King of England with the title of William I.

After the death of Edward the Confessor, who died childless, William, a second cousin of
Edward, laid claim to the throne. He knew his claim was not strong enough to let him win

55
the Crown without a battle. He conquered the English in 1066. The English people resisted
him for sometime but ultimately accepted him as King.

As the French came as conquerors and rulers and were considered superior to the English in
everyway, the upper ranks of the English people learnt French, and in course of time, it
became fashionable for them not only to speak French but also follow them in other respects.
The French were considered superior to the English not only as rulers and administrators,
but they also brought in with them new ideas that not only helped to expand the vocabulary
but gave a boost to their economic and cultural uplift. After a long period of French
dominance, the English patriotic feelings were aroused and English regained its former
position.

As the French came as conquerors and soon took charge of the government, administration
and legal affairs, we find that the words borrowed by the English belong to these areas and
others such as art, sports and cuisine, in which the French were superior. It is impossible to
give a list of all the words that were borrowed as many of them went out of use. So, we will
just quote a few words cited by Jesperson, and these are:

 Words relating to government and administration: crown, state,

government, to govern, reign, realm, sovereign, county, power, minister, authority,
Parliament, etc.
 Legal terms: Justice, just, judge, jury, court, suit, sue, a plea, plead, to summon,
attorney, etc. (We may note here that some of the terms probably introduced by
lawyers in court have become a part of the everyday non-technical vocabulary, e.g.,
case, marry, marriage, oust, false, heir, etc.)
 Words pertaining to military matters: army, war, peace, battle, arms, armour,
assault, siege, etc.
 Feudalism and related words: fief, feudal, vassal, etc.
 Words connected with the church: religion, service, trinity, saviour, virgin,
saint, clergy, parish, baptism, sacrifice, altar, miracle, preach, pray, etc.
 French cuisine: beef, veal, mutton, pork, bacon, venison, etc.

56
  Words relating to art: art, beauty, colour, image, design, figure, ornament, to
paint, etc. From architecture was borrowed such words as arch, tower, pillar, vault,
porch, column, aisle, etc.
 Words relating to sport: chase, scent, track, sport, cards, dice, ace, etc.
 Fashions: apparel, dress, costume, etc. (Jesperson, 1978, 9th Ed. pp 79-88)
Apart from the words mentioned above which belong to different aspects of life, there were
some words borrowed from French because of their similarity with English words. These are
Old English ‘rice’ (powerful, rich) and French ‘riche’ (French and Middle English ‘richesse’
and Modern English ‘riches’). Modern English ‘gain’ (noun and verb) was from French in the
15th century ‘gain’ (gaain, gagner, gaaignier) but in Old English, there was a noun ‘gain’ (also
spelt ‘gein’, ‘geyn’, ‘gayne’, etc).

LEARNING ACTIVITY 3.3

Fill in the blanks in the following sentences:
(a) The people living in the British Isles before the Germanic
Tribes conquered them were the ____________.

(b) The inhabitants of Britain were ruled by the __________

before they were conquered by the Germanic tribes.

(c) The Germanic tribes that conquered the Britons were the
______, _________, _________.

(d) The Old English language descended from ____________.

(e) The Old English language developed from the intermingling of

the languages of the _____, ______, _______.

(f) The important sound changes that took place before the Old
English language come into existence were the ________,
__________, _____________, ________________.

(g) Old English was highly ______________.

(h)It was gradually simplified by dropping the _____________.

(i) The foreign influences on the Old English language were that of
_________, ________, _________ and ___________.

(j) The influence of the foreign languages was mainly to increase

the ________ and _____ the language.

57
 Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

SUMMARY

In this Unit, we discussed the descent of the Old English or Anglo-Saxon language from
primitive-Germanic and the influences that had helped to mould the language. We have seen
that the English language did not originate from the Celtic language(s) spoken by the native
inhabitants of the British Isles, i.e., the Britons. The English language developed from the
intermingling of the languages of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Before these Germanic tribes
settled down in England and the Anglo-Saxon or Old English language developed, several
sound changes had taken place in the language(s) of these Germanic tribes.

The first sound changes relate to the ‘consonant shift’, also known as Grimm's Law, which
was later modified and made more complete by Verner's Law. The other changes that we
have discussed are the stress-shift, vowel changes, gradation (ablaut) and mutation
(umblaut). We also discussed the Great Vowel shift, which, however, took place much later

58
than the Old English period. It took place between the 14th century and the 16th century, i.e.,
it began towards the end of Chaucer's period and ended by the period of Shakespeare.

Apart from the above sound changes, we discussed the influence of other languages such as
Celtic, Latin, Scandinavian and Norman French. It is on these early influences that the
foundations of Old English was built. In the subsequent Units, we will discuss further
changes that take us from the Old English period to Modern English.

GLOSSARY/KEY WORDS

 Ablaut or Gradation: A vowel change that gives a word a new grammatical

function, e.g., write – wrote.
 Abstract nouns: Nouns that denote ideas, concepts, etc., (e.g., love, hate, strength)
as opposed to concrete nouns, which refer to physical entity (e.g., chair, table, house
etc.)
 Fricatives: Consonant sound produced when two vocal chords come so close
together that thy produce audible friction e.g., ‘b’, ‘v’, ‘d’, ‘g’, etc.
 Infinitives: An infinitive, in many languages, acts as the basic form of the verb
without indicating tense number, mood, etc, e.g., in English to jump, to sing, to play,
etc., are infinitives.
 Inflexions: In grammar, an affix that shows the grammatical relationship of a word
with other words in a sentence, e.g., case, tense, etc. (For example, ‘The boy’s shirt’,
‘They laughed at the joke’, etc.)
 Mutation or Umlaut: A change in the quality of a sound because of the influence of
adjacent words or morphemes, e.g., ‘teeth’ (Old English ‘todiz’ was the plural of ‘tod’
and changed to ‘ted’ which gives us ‘teeth’ in Modern English).
 Romance languages: Languages that descended from Latin, e.g., French, Italian
and others.
 Teutonic languages: Languages that descended from Primitive Germanic,
including Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon.

REFERENCES/SOURCES

Baugh, A.C. & Cabe, T: A History of the English Language. 5th Edition. Pearson Education
Inc.

Chrystal, D (ed) (1995): Cambridge Encyclopedia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

59
Freeborn, D (1992): From Old English to Standard English. 2nd Edition. Palgrave Publishers
Ltd.

Jesperson, O. (1982): Growth and Structure of the English Language. 10th Edition. Basil
Blackwell Publishers.

Wood, T (1941, 1948): An Outline History of the English Language. Macmullan & Co. Ltd.

Answers to Learning Activities

Learning Activity 3.1

You have to find an expert in your language to help you correct your work. Almost all Indian
languages have borrowed words from, or loaned words to, English, e.g., table, chair, school,
sports, etc. While we retain the English pronunciation in the first three words, at some places
in India, ‘school’ is often pronounced as ‘ishkool’ and ‘sports’ as ‘isports’.

Learning Activity 3.2

Gradation Mutation Great Vowel Shift

spoke length clean

feet strength five

chosen deem root

men heal goat

drink fill down

met filth

elder

60
Learning Activity 3.3

(a) The Britons. (b) The Romans before they were conquered by the Germanic tribes. (c) The
Angles, Saxons and Jutes. (d) Primitive Germanic. (e) Angles, Saxons and Jutes. (f) The
consonant shift, the stress shift gradation and mutation. (g) Inflected. (h) Inflections. (i)
Celtic, Latin, Scandinavian and French (j) The vocabulary … simplify….

61
Unit 4
Middle English: Beginnings

STRUCTURE

Overview
Learning Objectives

4.1 Middle English: An Introduction

4.2 Transitional Period: From Old to Middle English 4.2.1
Literature
4.2.2 Spelling
4.3 Vocabulary Expansion
4.3.1 Sources of borrowing
4.3.2 Indigenous devices
4.4 Change of Meaning
4.4.1 Extension
4.4.2 Specialization
4.4.3 Metaphorical application
4.4.4 Degeneration
4.4.5 Regeneration
4.5 Grammar

Summary

OVERVIEW

In the previous Unit, we touched upon the descent of Old English from primitive Germanic;
the sound changes that had made the Germanic languages different from other branch of the
Indo-Germanic languages as well as the foreign language influences that gave Old English a
distinct shape. In the present Unit, we will attempt a comparison between the Old English

62
period (450-1150) and the Middle English period (1150-1500) and consider the changes that
took place in the language during these two periods. Given this focus, in this Unit, we will
discuss at a reasonable length vocabulary expansion, meaning changes as well as changes in
grammatical relationships among words.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After completing this Unit, you should be able to:

 describe the influences and major historical events that affected the language during
the transitional period (from the Middle English period to Old English period);
 discuss the means of vocabulary expansion;
 explain the different ways through which the meanings and grammatical
relationships of words changed.

4.1 MIDDLE ENGLISH: AN INTRODUCTION

Scholars like Otto Jesperson, (1982: 87), Bough and Cable (2002: 78) and others had taken
statistical counts of French words introduced into English between 1050 and 1250 and
between 1851 and 1900. They were of the opinion that very few words were borrowed from
French before 1251 and pointed out that the greatest period of loan words introduced into
English was between 1250 and 1400. There was a decline in borrowing from French since
the 1400.

One of the reasons for this probably is that the English common people, in the beginning,
were not eager to associate closely with the foreign rulers and royalty. Also, as they did not
know French and the French nobility continued to speak their own language, there was little
scope for them to learn each other’s language.

With the passage of time, the resentment of the English against the foreign rulers gradually
vanished. The people of the two nations came closer to one another through intermarriage.

63
Some of the English nobles were already connected by marriage to French wives and had
acquired land in Normandy. In England, many nobles got land from the King and through
marriage.

Another reason for the popularity of French, apart from the fact that the English people had
a great deal to learn from them, was the rise of the middle class in England. One of the
reasons for the rise of the middle class was a peculiar disease called the Black Death, which
killed a large number of the poor peasantry. Those who could afford, saved themselves by
shifting to safer places. As a result of this, prices of agricultural products went up and the
peasantry became richer.

The English middle class, who were mainly merchants, needed to learn French to sell their
wares to the richer classes. On the other hand, some of the sermons in the churches and
government documents had to be translated into English for popular understanding, so
some of the clergy and a few of the French nobility had to learn English.

From the year 1204, the friendly relations between the English and French began to be
embittered. In 1200, King John fell desperately in love with a beautiful French lady, Isabel
of Angouleme and married her. She was already betrothed to Hugh of Lusignan, the head of
a powerful family. Fearing that the Lusignans may try to take revenge, John attacked them.
The Lusignans appealed to their common overlord, King Phillip of France.

King Phillip summoned the English King to his court. King John refused to appear at the
court of Paris, maintaining that as King of England, he was not under the jurisdiction of the
Paris court, though, besides being the King of England, he was also the Duke of Normandy.
The result was, on the decision of the court, King Phillip invaded Normandy and Normandy
was lost to the English King. This created, a further distance between them.

Soon after, an announcement was made by King Phillip that those who had land in both
England and France should relinquish one or the other as they could not serve two masters.
In retaliation, King John announced that those people who were of French origin, especially
of Normandy, who had land in England should give them up (Bough and Cable, 2002: 128 -

64
129). This incident, along with the hundred years’ war (1337 – 1453) in which the English
won a few victories, was the beginning of a patriotic feeling being aroused among the
English. This patriotic feeling turned the attention of the English towards their own
language. After the conquest, it was mainly Latin and French that had dominated the scene.

In the few homilies and short chronicles that survived from the early Middle English period,
the resentment against William the Conqueror and his descendents was evident for giving
away land to their countrymen, and generally against the French nobility (Bough and Cable,
2002 pp. 112 – 113 and 144 – 145; Freeborn, 1998 pp. 80 – 81).

To some extent, we can draw a parallel between this situation in France and the situation in
India under the British rule. Initially, the English came to India mainly as missionaries and
traders. The missionaries found that the indigenous religions in India were firmly
established, but due to the caste system, the lower classes were often discontented. Besides,
these lower castes were not educated. So the missionaries learnt the local languages to
convert these people. They also gave a written script to those tribal who did not have one
and did a lot to educate them both in their mother tongue and in English.

As far back as the 18th century, we have evidence of educationists writing books, after
bilingual primars, to teach the lower class businessmen (e.g., the fishermen) the English
language. From the mid 1920s, Michael West, an Official of the British Government in India,
wrote his New Method Readers, after undertaking research in the area, for school children.
The upper classes were mostly fluent in three languages: their mother tongue, Sanskrit or
Urdu, and English. But after the English people took over the administration of India, the
middle classes began to be interested in learning English with the hope of getting clerical
jobs in the British government.

Many of the household words such as ‘table’, ‘chair’, etc., were borrowed from the English
and we use them more frequently, though we have Indian alternatives for them. Some of the
words that the English people had borrowed from the French have also been borrowed by the
Indians from the English. These are ‘sauce’, ‘roast’, ‘jelly’, etc. Other words borrowed from
English are some of the ranks of the armed forces such as ‘chieftain’, ‘captain’, ‘colonel’,

65
‘lieutenant’, etc. Words like ‘police man’, ‘goal’, ‘jail’, ‘prison’, etc., have probably been
borrowed by the Indians from the English.

Of course, we have deviated a little from our topic, i.e., what was happening in England
during the period 1066 -1150. But this diversion will help us understand first hand, what
happens when two languages come into contact for a prolonged period.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 4.1

(a) Write down two words of Scandinavian origin that the Indians
have borrowed from the English.

(b) Write down as many words as you can of French origin that
the Indians have borrowed from the English.

(c) List the similarities and dissimilarities between England under

French rule and India under British rule, and compare their
influences on their languages.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

66
4.2 TRANSITIONAL PERIOD: FROM OLD TO MIDDLE ENGLISH

With a few differences, the Old English letters of the alphabet were very similar to those of
Middle English. The letters of the Old English alphabet were a, æ, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m,
n, o, p, r, s, t, p, á, u, w, y. These symbols were still in use in the Middle English period with a
few occasional changes. For example, some times, ‘-th’ is used for ‘p’.

Chrystal (1996: 40) refers to the Peterborough Chronicle and points out that the symbol ‘p’ is
used in the manuscript but has been represented by ‘w’; ‘u’ is also used for this sound. The
letter ‘g’ is used for the sound ‘ ʒ’. Sometimes ‘a’ is used in place of ‘æ’; ‘u’ is used where in
Modern English ‘v’ would be used as in ‘gyuen’ and æver (ever); ‘c’ and ‘ch’ stand for the
same sound as is seen in the pronunciation of ‘cyreciæyard’ (church yard) and ‘i’ stood for
the same sound as ‘y’. (See Chrystal (1996: 18) for a detailed list of the letters with modern
examples and the International Pronunciation Association (IPA) symbols with the modern
equivalents of the letters.)

If we compare the Old English period with Middle English, we will find that though the
transition has been slow, it is significant in that changes were taking place in spelling,
pronunciation and most important of all, in the loss of inflexional endings, that makes it
easier for a modern student to read Chaucer than any Old English text.

4.2.1 Literature

It has been easier for scholars to compare the spelling and pronunciation of the two periods
we are discussing because of the availability of a considerable number of texts. The early Old
English period was rich in literary texts, but because of the Viking invasion and continuous
unrest in the country, only Beowulf and a few shorter poems survived.

But, as the English people began to realize that their language and literature were being
neglected because of the dominance of Latin and French, they turned their attention to their
own literature and it came to be revived again. In this period was written the famous Pier's

67
Plowman by William Langland (1362 - 1387), The Canterbury Tales and a poem, Troiless
and Creseyde by Chaucer. Other poems written by little-known poets include the romance,
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and some religious poems, of which Pearl is a most
beautiful one. Not only poetry but also prose flourished during this period. John Ulycliffe
who translated the Bible was one among the known prose writers.

By the 15th century, English had thus re-established its temporary loss of glory. However,
French had not completely disappeared from the picture. What had disappeared was
Norman-French, which was regarded as inferior to the French of Paris.

4.2.2 Spelling

Before Caxton introduced the printing machine in 1476, texts were copied by scribes, who
often followed their own conventions in writing. Often they were influenced by the dialect
they heard in the region where they stayed and wrote. Being human, they were also liable to
make errors. Chrystal shows in his Encyclopedia how the word ‘might’ was spelt in twenty
different ways by scribes. After listing all the twenty variants and given probable reasons for
them, Chrystal mentions Caxton's own spelling ‘myght’ which brings us nearer to the modern
spelling (Chrystal, 1996:40)

We have already mentioned that instead of the letter ‘f’, ‘th’ was sometimes used. There were
other spellings that were also gradually changing, as given below:

 ‘se’/‘ʃ’ were replaced by ‘ch’/‘sch’ as in ‘ship’ which was formerly spelled as ‘scip’
 ‘c’/’t’ were replaced by ‘ch’/’ech’ as in ‘church’.
 ‘dʒ’ previously spelled as ‘cg’/‘gg’ became ‘dʒ’ as in ‘bridge’.

Thus, we find from these examples that the spelling was gradually moving towards the
Modern spelling and was becoming more or less fixed. (Note that the convention to indicate
sounds/phonetic scripts is the ‘//’, e.g., the phonetic script for the sound ‘ dʒ’ should be
shown as /dʒ /).

68
The changes mentioned above are probably only changes in spelling and not pronunciation.
However, words borrowed from French are also interesting for the influence they had on the
pronunciation. In the words borrowed from French in the earlier period, English retained
the old forms of the French spelling and pronunciation, while at a later time, they were
changed in French. For example, the Old French word ‘feste’ (feast) was initially borrowed
into English as ‘feste’. Later, it changed into ‘feast’. In French, the ‘s’ disappeared and the
word later became ‘fête’. Similarly the ‘s’ disappeared in other words such as ‘forest’, ‘hostel’,
‘beast’ and the French words became ‘forêt’, ‘hôtel’, ‘bête’, respectively. In English, both the
words ‘hostel’ and ‘hotel’ are retained with a change in meaning. These words not only show
a difference in spelling but also in pronunciation.

Words borrowed from French at a later date have adopted both the French spelling and
pronunciation. Some of these words include ‘chamois’, ‘chaperon’, ‘chiffon’, ‘rouge’, etc. The
word ‘chivalry’, however, is an early borrowing and should have been pronounced with a ‘ê’
but it has been influenced by words like ‘chevalier’ and by modern French.

Words such as ‘police’ and ‘ravine’ show that it was not only the pronunciation of consonants
but also that of vowels were influenced by French pronunciation. In these two words, we
pronounce the ‘i’ in the French way. If the two words given above were not influenced by
similar English and modern French words, they would have been pronounced to rhyme with
‘nice’ and ‘vine’, respectively.

In other cases, we see changes in the dipthongs. For example, in Old French, the dipthong
‘ui’ was stressed on the first element ‘ui’. This stress was retained in Anglo-Norman, and the
‘i’ disappeared, leaving a simple u (y). This did not happen in Middle English. In Middle
English, the place of ‘y’ was taken by ‘u’ or ‘iu’ with various spellings such as ‘u’, ‘ui’, ‘ew’, etc.
This change can be illustrated by the English word ‘fruit’.

In French, the dipthong ‘ui’ underwent various changes but in the modern period it is spelled
like the English word though pronounced differently in French. In Middle English, there
were words such as ‘leal’ and ‘real’, which in Anglo-Norman became ‘leil’ and ‘reial’. Later,
both in English and French, these words changed to ‘loyal’ and ‘royal’ (Baugh and Cable,
2002: 174 -175)

69
 LEARNING ACTIVITY 4.2

(a) Which of the following words changed their Old English spelling
but retained the pronunciation under French influence and
which of them adopted both the French spelling and
pronunciation: chamois, scip, church, bridge, chaperon, chiffon,
police, ravine, rouge, chivalry?

(b) Which of the following words were borrowed from French and
retained the early French spelling though these words
underwent a change in French or English later: fruit, loyal, feast,
forest, hostel, beast, hotel, royal?

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

4.3 VOCABULARY EXPANSION

We mentioned that at the beginning, the English language borrowed words from Latin as
well as adopted Latin words from the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. During the Middle English
period, English borrowed words mainly from French. The impact of French on English was
so powerful that even Latin words entered English mainly through French.

Synonyms: Latin, French and English

When two languages are used simultaneously, as in the case of Old English and Scandinavian
borrowings, synonyms develop. However, it has been said that English has no exact
synonyms. Even though it is difficult at times to distinguish the subtle differences in
meanings of synonyms, they are of great use to the writer or speaker in avoiding the use of a
word repeatedly.

70
That English has no synonyms with exactly the same meanings many become clear by
comparing the English, French and Latin triplets that developed in the Middle English
period. We will mention some of them here. Try to see if you can make out any difference in
the meanings of the following sets of words:

English French Latin

fine age epoch

kingly royal regal

goodness virtue probity

rise mount ascend

holy sacred consecrated

fine flame conflagration

4.3.1 Sources of borrowing

Apart from Latin and French, English had also borrowed words from other languages. For
example, as William the Conqueror’s wife was Flemish, interaction between the people of
Flanders and the English continued for a long time. This was mainly because the wool of
England was exported to Flanders and Holland. The Flemish people and the Dutch, in
return, exported cloth to England. So, some Flemish and Dutch words were adopted into
English. However, it is difficult to distinguish between them as the languages of the low
lands were very similar. Some words that we still find in Modern English are: deck, lighter,
dock, freight, rover, mart, etc. Later borrowings were cambric, gin, gherkin, etc. These words
are mainly of Dutch origin.

Words from other countries include ‘cork’ (Spanish), ‘sable’ (Russian), ‘marmalade’
(Portuguese), ‘laugh’ (Irish), ‘suffron’, ‘admiral’, ‘mattress’, ‘algebra’, ‘alkali’, ‘zenith’
(Arabic). These words were not always borrowed through direct contact with speakers of
these languages but often entered English through contact with other languages, which had
first borrowed them. For example, the words related to the game of chess, e.g., chess, rook,
check-mate, were adopted by the English from French, but they are actually Persian words.
Similarly, the word ‘paradise’ was adopted from French but it again is a Persian word.

Apart from the languages mentioned, English also borrowed other words of Eastern (Indian)
origin. These include ‘azure’, ‘scarlet’, ‘orange’ (originally ‘narange’), and some of the names
of the eastern animals such as ‘elephant’, ‘panther’, ‘crocodile’, etc. It is not certain when

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these words were adopted. At a later date, particularly, during the British rule, the English
adopted a great member of words from India.

After the British left India, they have dropped many of these words, but some are still
retained. We may mention words such as ‘begum’, ‘bungalow’, ‘cot’, ‘calico’, ‘cashmere’,
‘khaki’, ‘sahib’, ‘chutney’, ‘curry’, ‘loot’, ‘gymkhana’, ‘polo’, etc. Most of these words were
borrowed during the 18th and 19th centuries. English has expanded its vocabulary through
borrowings. Though it has borrowed from a great number of languages, it has not lost its
own individual identity. This is because English has a number of indigenous devices, which
are also effective in expanding its vocabulary.

4.3.2 Indigenous devices

English used various indigenous devices to expand its vocabulary in addition to borrowings.
Let us touch upon some of these devices in this Subsection.

Synonyms

We have seen that apart from loan-words, synonyms that develop from them with slight
differences in meaning also helped English expand its vocabulary. This was most copious in
the Middle English period with the French and Latin synonyms that could be used in
different language contexts.

Affixes

Another device that the English used for vocabulary expansion is through the use of affixes,
i.e., prefixes, infixes and suffixes. English has practically no infixes, but the prefixes and
suffixes that it has helped the growth of its vocabulary from the very beginning. There are
purely English words, with English stems and English suffixes, such as kingdom, freedom,
worship, etc. At an early date, the adding of suffixes also gave rise to hybrid words, i.e.,
words with a foreign stem and an English suffix, e.g., English suffixes were added to Latin
words such as ‘preasthad’ (‘priesthood’), ‘clerichad’ (‘clerichood’), etc.

Crystal (1996: 22) shows how from one loan word from Scandinavian ‘heill’ six Old English
words were formed: hãl, hãlig, hælan, hælp, hãligian, hælend (saviour) and later, throughout
the ages up to the Modern period, we have a number of Modern English words. These are
‘whole’, ‘wholesome’, ‘wholesale’, ‘wholly’, ‘holy’, ‘holiness’, ‘holiday’, ‘hallow’, ‘halloween’,
hale’, ‘heal’, ‘healthy’, ‘healthful’, etc.

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During Middle English, we find English suffixes were added to French loan words such as
‘faintness’ (14th Century) ‘closeness’ (half a century later), ‘courtly’ ‘princely’, etc. Also,
French suffixes were borrowed and added to English stems to form new hybrid words. Some
of these are ‘-ess’ (shepherdess, goddess), ‘-ment’ (endearment, enlightenment, etc., 17th
Century (Jesperson 1982). Though English suffixes are fewer in number than prefixes they
are used more frequently to create a large number of words. They not only help to expand
the vocabulary but may change their class, e.g., the word ‘beauty’ is an abstract noun, but
when added the suffix ‘-ify’, it becomes a verb, ‘beautify’.

Conversion

Words belonging to one grammatical class in English can be used as a word of another class
without making any changes at all. For example, any part of a human body, which are nouns
can be used as verbs, e.g., ‘eye’ is a noun and ‘to eye’ is a verb, ‘hand’ is a noun and ‘to hand’
is a verb, ‘finger’ is noun and ‘to finger’ is a verb, etc. Similarly, verbs can be used as nouns,
e.g., ‘smoke’ is a verb but ‘have a smoke’ is noun, ‘cheat’ is a verb but ‘a cheat’ is a noun.
Adjectives can also be used as nouns, e.g., principal (from a principal performer). Many
examples of this device is found in our everyday speech and writing.

Word-composition or compounding

This is a process by which two words are joined together to form a new word, e.g.,
‘blackbird’, ‘flowerpot’, ‘bookcase’. Examples of this kind of compounds are common and
when written as one word, as the examples given above, or sometimes written with a hyphen
as in ‘fairy-tale’ are not difficult to understand. But, sometimes, they are written
separately and may have more than one meaning. In that case, we have to depend on the
context to understand whether it is a compound or two different words, e.g., ‘The black bird
is sitting on a branch’ and ‘The black bird is a species of bird’. In this example, on the basis of
the context, we may say that the ‘blackbird’ in the second sentence is a compound word.

Telescoping

Telescoping, though very similar to word composition, is not exactly the same, as in this
process two or more words are combined in such a way that the original meanings are
completely lost. For example, the word ‘doff’ is a creation by combining the two sets of
words ‘do on’ and ‘do off’. Similarly, the word ‘atone’ was earlier two words ‘at one’ that was
combined into one after the Middle English period (1557)

Meta-analysis

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The word meta-analysis means re-analysis or different analysis. In the Middle English
period, a small lizard like animal was known as an ‘ewt’ but by 1420, it came to be called a
‘newt’, i.e., the ‘n’ from the article ‘an’ was detached from the article and added to the noun.
Similarly, an ‘ick’ name, i.e., an extra name given to a person became a ‘nick name’.
Sometimes, a vowel was detached from the original word and was used as an article, e.g., ‘an
umpire’ became an ‘umpire’ and ‘a narange’ became an ‘orange’.

Portmanteau

These are words formed when part of one word is added to another word, e.g., tragi-comedy,
melodrama, radio-gram, electrocute, etc.

Syncopation

This process is a little different from other devices listed above. In the syncopation process,
nothing is added but a vowel in the body of a word is omitted and two consonants on each
side are brought together to form a new word, e.g., Old English words ‘ones’, ‘elles’, ‘henes’
which loses the vowel ‘e’ in the middle and become ‘once’, ‘else’ and ‘hence’, respectively.

Back-formation

Back-formation, like syncopation, is a process of forming words by leaving out a part of the
word. The difference is that in the back-formation process, a part of a word is taken to be a
derivative suffix. For example, the words ‘grovelling’, ‘sideling’, ‘darkling’ are adverbs as in
the sentence ‘He lay grovelling in front of his captor’. In such a sentence, the ‘-ing’ is
mistaken for a participle and the word ‘to grovel’ is formed. Similarly, the words ‘sidle’ and
‘darkle’ were formed. Nouns ending in ‘-er’ (-ar, -or) have also helped to form some verbs.
For example, ‘rover’, ‘pedlar’, ‘bunglar’, ‘beggar’, ‘editor’, etc., have given the verbs ‘to rove’,
‘to peddle’, ‘to bungle’ , ‘to beg’ , ‘to edit’, etc.

Other devices

There are a number of other devices, some of which were used more frequently in the early
Old English period and others are more recent. The earliest of these is probably imitation or
onomatopoeia. These words are formed imitating the sounds, e.g., bang, busy, click, hiss,
etc.

Corruption and misunderstanding

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We have an interesting example of misunderstanding of an English word ‘expire’ in India. In
English, it refers to the coming to an end of a period of time, e.g., ‘His term office expires
next year’. In India, we talk of people ‘expiring’, that is, death.

The word ‘jeopardy’ is a corruption of the French term ‘jew parti’ (an evenly matched game).
Some of the words commonly used today, e.g., ‘goodbye’ (‘God be with you’), ‘drat it’ (‘God
rot it’), ‘Great Scott’ (‘Great God’) are really euphemistic terms initially used by Christians,
who according to the Bible, are not supposed to take the name of God in vain, and to avoid
direct swearing.

There are words that are formed because of a misunderstanding of the root of a word, i.e.,
etymology. An example of this is the word ‘island’. The Old English word was ‘igland’.
During the Renaissance, some related the word to the Latin word ‘insular’ and thus added
the ‘s’.

Abbreviations

Monosyllable is one of the most characteristic features of Modern English (Jesperson, 1978:
165). Many of the monosyllable words of English, e.g., ‘lord’ from ‘hlàfond’; ‘lady’ from
‘hlàfidge’; ‘miss’ from ‘mistress’. Some are shortened form of foreign phrases, e.g., ‘mob’
comes from the Latin phrase ‘mobile vulgus’ (literally 'the fickle crowd'); ‘cab’ comes form
the French ‘cabriolet’, and ‘taxi’ from ‘taximeter-cabriolet’.

Words derived from proper names

The word ‘sandwich’ came from one of the Earls of Sandwich who introduced them as a
convenient form of refreshment for his card-parties. The flower, ‘dahlia’, is named after the
Botanist Dahl who first cultivated it. The verb ‘to boycott’ came from captain Boycott, an
agent of a certain English peer in his Irish estates, who became so unpopular for his harsh
treatment of the tenants that an organized strike was planned against him.

Words manufactured from initials

We are all so familiar with terms hike MA, BA, MP, IOU, BBC, etc., that these need no
explanations. Sometimes these initials are converted into words, e.g., PLUTO (Pipe Line
Under the Ocean)

Slang terms

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In every age, there have been words that are not regarded as part of polite language.
Formerly, these words were known as ‘cant’. The word ‘slang’ seems to have come into
general use in the 18th century. In the course of time, many of these words are accepted in
Standard English. Words like ‘bet’, ‘fun’, ‘shabby’, ‘trip’, etc., were regarded as slang in the
beginning of the 18th century but today they are accepted in polite society.

Conscious and deliberate coinages

Whenever something new is invented or we come across a new object or idea, we have to find
a name for it. Some of the names that are initially coined may be clumsy, or for some other
reason, unacceptable. Then, the experts or sometimes the common people, try their hand at
coining appropriate words. For example, the earlier name for a ‘bicycle’ was ‘velocipede’,
which probably sounded too scholarly and the word ‘bicycle’ was coined. On the other hand,
an ‘aeroplane’ was named a ‘flying machine’ which didn't sound appropriate, so the new
word was formed. With the invention of wireless, the word ‘broadcast’ and other related
words were coined. Many of the scientific inventions are named with words that are Latin
and Greek hybrids, e.g., automobile, television, dictaphone, etc.

In India, after independence, when the issue of making Hindi the National Language was
discussed, some people objected to it on the ground that Hindi did not have adequate words
to name the things we have already become familiar with in English. An attempt, therefore,
was made to coin Hindi equivalents of various English terms. But, when words like phutani-
ka-dibba to replace the English equivalent ‘vanity bag’ began to be coined, the attempt was
given up.

Freak formations

Sometimes, a word is formed by chance when people play with language or make fun of
others’ pronunciation. Thus, the term ‘funny bone’ is a play of words by scholars on the
anatomical term ‘humerus’. Another word of this kind is ‘teetotal’ (and ‘teetotaller’). This
freak formation is said to have come from the attempt of a stammering advocate who
supported total abstinence and tried to pronounce the word ‘total abstainer’. But most of
these freak formations are dropped after a while, and only a few are retained. See Baugh and
Cabe (2002), Chrystal (1995 & 1996), Jesperson (1982) and Wood (1948) for more details
about vocabulary expansion that we discussed earlier.

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 LEARNING ACTIVITY 4.3

(a) Bring out the difference in the meanings of the sets of

synonyms given below with examples of each:

English French Latin

fine flame conflagration
holy sacred consecrated
rise mount ascent
goodness virtue probity

(b) Give 5 examples of your own of words formed by addition of

suffixes.
(c) Give 5 examples of words that have the same form for nouns
and verbs.
(d) Say how the words ‘duff’, ‘nickname’, ‘melodrama’, ‘else’ and
‘sidle’ were formed.
Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

4.4 CHANGE OF MEANING

If the growth of vocabulary is one way of enriching the vocabulary, change of meaning is
another. In the latter, no word is added to the language by borrowing or through coinage, but
an existing word acquires a new meaning. There are various ways a word may change its
meaning. Baugh and Cable (2002: 308-311) list five commonest ways in which words change
their meanings: extension of meaning, narrowing, degeneration, regeneration and slang.
(Note that slang is not really a change of meaning).

Let us look at each of these ways, next.

4.4.1 Extension

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This is a process by which a word widens its meaning. Examples that Bough and Cable
(2002: 308) give are the common words ‘lovely’ and ‘great’. ‘Lovely’ meant that which is
lovable and ‘great’ meant the opposite of small. But, today, we can see that these meanings
are being extended. ‘Lovely’ has come to mean anything that is enjoyable, amusing and
‘great’ has come to mean a remarkable ability or character, important, of high rank, etc.

Other words of this category are ‘board’, which originally meant a ‘long, thin flat piece of
wood with squared edges used for building’. It then extended its meaning to the ‘stage of a
theatre made of boards’, ‘deck of a ship’, ‘table made of wood’, ‘the food served at table’, etc.
Similarly, the word ‘box’, originally the name of a tree, the wood of which was used to make
small boxes to keep precious things, is now being used in the meaning of a container.

4.4.2 Specialization

There are quite a number of Old English words that have acquired a specialized meaning,
e.g., ‘meat’ and ‘fowl’, meaning ‘food’ and ‘bird’ in general in Old English, respectively, have
acquired a more restricted meaning. The Old English word ‘wed’ meant ‘to come to an
agreement or make a promise’ (not necessarily related to marriage). When the word ‘marry’
was borrowed from French, both the words were used, more or less in the same sense. The
word ‘deer’ meant ‘a wild animal’. It acquired a specialized meaning by the 14 th century,
when the Latin word ‘beast’ and the French word ‘animal’ were introduced into the language
and came to be used in a generalized sense.

4.4.3 Metaphorical application

A metaphorical application of a word is its use, not in its literal sense, but to indicate
something different. For example, if we say ‘he has a heart of stone’, we don't mean it
literally but only simply that ‘he is hard hearted’ or ‘his heart is hard like stone’. All
metaphors, however, do not lead to a change of meaning. It is only when the metaphorical
use adds a new word to the language that we can say a change of meaning has taken place.

For example, the term ‘keen’ is used to refer to points or edges (of a knife for example) as
sharp. But when we say a person has a keen intelligence, the idea of ‘sharp’ is still implied
but we actually mean his intelligence is far above the average. Similarly, ‘gall’, a bitter liquid
in the body made by the liver to help digestion, is used metaphorically, e.g., ‘his words were
full of gall’. In these words, we find that both the literal meaning and the metaphorical
meaning are retained but are used in different contexts. We may say that each of them is
equivalent to two different words.

These words usually refer to a person's feelings, or character. There are others that retain
both the literal and metaphorical sense but are used more often metaphorically. For

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example, ‘sully’ which means ‘to stain’ is usually used figuratively to stain or discredit
someone's character. There are a few other words in which the literal meaning is forgotten
completely and now are used only in their metaphorical sense.

One such word is ‘silly’ which is Old English, meaning ‘happy’ or ‘innocent’ and has came to
acquire its modern meaning. Another word is ‘sad’ which till the Elizabethan period meant
‘sober or serious’.

4.4.4 Degeneration

Some words which are used neither in a good or bad sense, due to some reason, acquire a
derogatory meaning. Some refer to this process as degeneration or polarisation or colouring.
There are various ways in which a word may acquire a derogatory meaning. One of this is
association of ideas. During the Middle English period, a word ‘villain’ meant a worker. It
gradually came to be associated with the qualities of character that the upper classes
associated with the workers, particularly because the villains often played the role of a
ruffian in drama. In the modern period, the word ‘villain’ has acquired a derogatory
meaning.

Other examples of this kind are ‘common’, ‘popular’, ‘vulgar’, etc. We must remember,
however, that all words that change their meanings through association of ideas do not
always acquire a derogatory meaning. For example, the old use ‘pious’ meant ‘to be dutiful to
parents’. Today, it means ‘deep devotion to religion’. The word ‘crescent’, i.e., the present
participle of Latin ‘creseens’ meaning ‘growing’, now gives us the adjective ‘crescent’ (moon).

The word ‘yarn’, which meant thread which has been spun for knitting or weaving, came to
mean colloquially story, which is sometimes used in a colourless sense and at times in a
derogatory sense, when we mean a story made up to deceive the hearer.

Euphemism is another means by which a word acquires a derogatory meaning. The

inspiration behind euphemism is to avoid giving pain to others by avoiding words that may
cause pain. Thus, for words relating to death we have various euphemisms such as deceased,
passed away, etc. But the problem with euphemistic terms is that they soon acquire the
meaning associated with the original idea. Other words ‘accident’ (Latin ‘accident’ = a
happening), ‘fatality’ or ‘fatal’ (something attributable to fate) now mean ‘deadly’ or
‘something causing death’. The word ‘insane’ meant unhealthy and came to acquire the
meaning ‘mad’.

Another way words acquire a colouring is through prudery, i.e., an extreme or exaggerated
sense of propriety. We all know that there was an age when it was impolite even to mention
the leg of a chair, table or piano in front of ladies. The word ‘Victorian’ itself, because of the
prudery of the age, has acquired a derogatory meaning. In fact, every age has some words

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that are taboo, but most often, after a period of time, they are either dropped or lose their
derogatory colouring.

Wood (1948: 190) gives the examples from Dickens’ Oliver Twist how the tinker warns Giles
when he thinks that the latter is about to utter the word ‘trousers’: “Ladies present, Sir”. And,
Giles immediately says he drew on a “pair of shoes". Euphemistic words often lose their
derogatory sense and are used in their ordinary sense when the age of prudery is past. For
example, the word ‘smock’ was once taboo but now it means ‘a woman's garment’.

4.4.5 Regeneration

Just as some words acquire derogatory meanings at some times, there are others which lose
their derogatory sense and become part of standard speech. There are very few words which
lose their distinctive colouring once they become taboo. The words that we have mentioned
in Unit under ‘slang’ are accepted in colloquial language only. However, it is quite likely that
they may be accepted in the course of time as part of Standard English.

Wood (1948:188) mentions three words, ‘policy’, ‘politics’ and ‘politician’ as words having
lost their distinctive colouring. However, in colloquial or journalistic use, the words ‘politics’
and ‘politician’ still retain a semi-derogatory sense.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 4.4

Give the original meanings of the following words and say how they
changed their meanings: deer, helpmate, bedlam, deck, scan, keen,
villain, decease and brave.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

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4.5 GRAMMAR

In this Section, we will touch upon grammatical changes that helped the transition of Old
English to Modern English.

Word order

The greatest difference between Old English and Modern English syntax is in the word order.
In Modern English, the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order is more or less fixed and differs
only in rare cases. The difference between Modern English and Old English is in the place
the verb occupies. In Old English, most often, the verb appeared before the subject and
sometimes at the end of a clause. This variance of the word order was possible because Old
English was an inflected language, i.e., the functions of a word in a sentence was indicated
through word endings.

There are similarities between the structure of Old English and that of Modern English:
adjectives, prepositions and other grammatical words came before the noun. The Middle
English period was a period of transaction between Old English and Modern English. In
Middle English, the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure was used frequently. But even in
Chaucer's writing, though the SVO structure was predominant, the verb was quite often
found to precede the subject.

The Old English word order could vary so much because the language was inflected. There
are two types of endings or suffixes in English: derivational (see our discussion under
‘Affixes’ in this Unit) and inflexional.

The inflexional suffixes in Old English showed the difference between number (singular and
plural) and case. The case system in Old English was not as complicated as in some of the
other Germanic languages such as Latin or Sanskrit. There were four cases in Old English:
nominative, genitive, dative and accusation.

Nouns

The declensions, i.e., inflexional endings, varied with different categories of nouns, pronouns
and adjectives. However, a tendency towards the inflexions being gradually simplified can
be noticed from the Old English period itself. By the time, we came to the Middle English
period, most of the numerous endings were gradually dropped and the ending ‘-s’ of the
possessive singular and the nominative and accusative plurals were retained.

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 The ‘-s’ and ‘-es’ endings were assumed to be plural endings and were used in almost all
nouns. The only other plural ending that survives in some words today are the ‘-en’ ending
(e.g. Oxen, which is seldom used) and the false double endings of ‘children’ and ‘brethren’.
In Old English, the plural for ‘child’ was ‘childer’ but an ‘-en’ ending was added to make it a
double plural. Both the singular and plural forms in Old English of ‘broder’ were identical,
but it had a singular in the dative case ‘brother’. This gives us two plural forms used today
‘brothers’ (for blood brothers) and brethren for those who consider themselves to be
brothers but do not have any blood-relationship.

Adjectives

Adjectives in Old English had an elaborate system of declensions. Nouns that were preceded
by an article, demonstrative or possessive pronoun had endings that were known as strong
declensions, e.g., ‘së gõda mann’ (the good man). Those words that were not preceded by
such words were known as weak declensions, e.g., ‘gõod mann’ (good man). By the early
Middle English period, all these declensions were dropped and the only ending that survived
for sometime was the ‘-e’ ending. But, as this had no meaning once the inflexions were
dropped, it ultimately disappeared.

Verbs

In Old English, there were three main kinds of verbs and all the three survive in Modern
English, and these are:

i) Those that formed their past tense by adding ‘-ed’ to the root verb, e.g. ‘walk’, ‘walked’.
These verbs were common in Old English and remain so now.
ii) Those verbs that form their past tense by changing the vowel in the root, e.g., fall – fell,
and these were called strong verbs in Old English. In Middle English some of the
present tense endings of strong verbs weakened and disappeared soon after the Old
English period. However, the endings of 2nd and 3rd person singular were retained and
changed into the ‘-est’ and ‘-eth’ forms in Middle English, e.g., ‘thou’- ‘turnest’ (2nd
person present tense), ‘thou’ - ‘turnedest’ (2nd person past tense), ‘turneth’ (3rd person
present tense), ‘turned’ (3rd person past tense).
iii) Those verbs that are entirely irregular, e.g., ‘can’, ‘will’ and ‘be’. The past tense of ‘be’
has changed little since the Old English period, except for the loss of the plural ending
‘wæron’.

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LEARNING ACTIVITY 4.5
Fill in the following sentences:
(a) The greatest number of French loan words was borrowed from
_______ to ________.
(b) William the Conqueror conquered England and became its King
in the year_____
(c) The reason for the low number of French loan-words borrowed in
the beginning of the Middle English period was that the English
resented the fact that the Norman rulers _____ a great number
of their countrymen to come and settle in England and showed
them ______ ______
(d) The two events for the renewal of interest in French towards the
end of the Middle English period were the _____ ____ _____,
and the rise of the _______ ________
(e) Old English ‘j’ ‘s/ʃ’, ‘e’/‘t’ and ‘dʒ’ changed, respectively, to ___
____ _____ and _____.
(f) The English language has borrowed words extensively from a
great number of languages but the language has not lost its
_______ identity because it has also coined a great number of
words with the help of _____ ______ available to it.
(g) Apart from borrowing and coinages, the English vocabulary has
expanded through change of ______ of existing words.
(h) In Old English, the verb usually came before the subject or at the
end of a clause; in Middle English the _______, ________ and
_______ order came to be used more frequently.
(i) An inflected language is one in which the grammatical
relationship of words in a sentence are shown through the
addition of affixes of ______ and _____ .
(j) The three types of verbs that have been retained in Modern
English from the Old English period are ______, ________
and _______
Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

83
Loss of grammatical gender

In Old English, there were three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. But they did not
depend on the biological differences of sex. For example, ‘stãn’ (stone) and mõna (moon) are
masculine but ‘sunne’ (sun) is feminine. On the other hand, ‘mægden’ (girl) and ‘wif’ (wife)
were feminine and ‘cild’ (child) was either feminine or masculine or neuter.

The reference of the pronouns and the inflexions of the adjectives were affected by these
differences of gender. By the Middle English period, the grammatical gender gave place to
neutral gender, depending on whether the noun or pronoun referred to was a male or female
human being or an animal or inanimate object. The inflexions of the definite article,
personal pronouns and demonstratives were dropped and the English language took a large
step towards simplification that brings it nearer to Modern English.

SUMMARY

In this Unit, we focused on the developments in the English Language from the Old English
period to the Middle English period. We began the Unit with the identification of similarities
and differences between the conditions in England under the Norman rule and those in India
under the British rule. We also discussed the changes that were taking place in spelling,
pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.

GLOSSARY/KEYWORDS
 Accusative case: An inflexion that typically identifies the object of a verb.
 Affixes: A meaningful form that is attached to another form to make a more complex
word, e.g., un+kind+ness.
 Case: In an inflected language, the form of a noun, adjective or pronoun, showing its
grammatical relationship to other words.
 Dative case: In inflecting languages, a form that typically expresses an indirect
object relationship
 Declension: In an inflecting language, a set of nouns, adjectives and pronouns that
show the same inflections.
 Derivational suffixes: Suffixes added to a word to produce a new word, e.g.,
help+less.
 Genetive: An inflection that expresses such meanings as possession, and origin, e.g.,
the girl's bag, the man's story, etc.
 Inflexional suffixes: An affix that shows a grammatical relationship of words in a
sentence, e.g., case, tense, etc.
 Nominative: An inflection that typically identifies the subject of a verb, also
sometimes called the subjective.

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REFERENCES/SOURCES

Baugh, A.C. and Cable .T. (2002): A history of the English Language.
Prentice Hall Inc.
Crystal, D (1995): Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.
Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
Freeborn, D (1998): From Old English to Standard English.
Palgrave Publishers Ltd.
Jesperson, O (1982): Growth and Structure of the English Language.
Basil Blackwell Publishers.
Wood, T. (1948): An Outline History of the English Language.
Macmillan & Co. Ltd.

Model Answers to Learning Activities

Learning Activity 4.1

(a) shirt and skirt.

(b) Some examples are given in the Unit are sauce, jelly, chieftain, captain, etc. You can give
your own examples or look up some more examples from Baugh & Cable, Jesperson,
Wood and others mentioned in the reference section.

(c) Differences and similarities between the Norman Conquest and the reign of the English
.
Differences

England India
The Normans came to Vasco da Gama came to India as
England as conquerors and an explorer with the help of the
William, the Duke of Spanish and the Portuguese. This
Normandy, became the first event opened the eyes of other
Norman King of England. European countries to the wealth
of India as traders. They founded
the ‘East India Company’ in 1600.

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 The Normans did not take Later, mainly with the help of
much interest in the English Robert Clive, and at the request of
Language and literature. petty Indian Chiefs, the English
got involved in Indian polities and
ultimately made India a part of the
British Empire.
The English missionaries learnt
the Indian languages and later
some of the officers of the East
India Company took an interest in
education and established the
Modern Education system in
India.

Similarities
England India
English vocabulary was Both the English and Indian
greatly expanded due to vocabulary was expanded greatly
French Influence. because of the close contact of the
two languages.

The French helped to

accelerate the process of The English had influenced the
simplification of the English development of the languages of
Language that had already backward classes, some of the
started in the Old English backward classes didn't have a
Period. The inflectional written language and the
system of the language was missionaries worked out written
greatly modified. languages for some of these
classes.

Learning Activity 4.2

(a) Those words that changed the spelling but retained the pronunciation: scip (ship),
church, bridge.
(b) Those words that adopted both the French spelling and pronunciation: chamois,
chaperon, police and rouge (chivalry, ravine and chiffon are early borrowings but have
retained the French spelling and pronunciation)

Learning Activity 4.3

English French Latin

fire = condition of French ‘flame’ = a Latin ‘conflagration’ =
burning, e.g., “The portion of burning a great and distractive

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kitchen fire was gas, e.g., “The candle fire, especially one
burning.” flame was flickering that destroys
in the breeze.” buildings or forests,
e.g., “The
conflagration
destroyed half the
market-place.”
holy = associated with sacred = (more formal consecrated =
God or religion, e.g., then “holy”) to be something that has
“He is a holy person”. treated with great been made sacred,
respect, e.g. “Nothing e.g. “He consecrated
is sacred to these wild his life to the service
youths”. of God.”
rise = to get up, mount = to go up (a ascend =to go up or
to appear, e.g., “The hill), to get on to (a come up e.g., “We
sun rises in the East”. horse), to become watched the mist
greater in amount, ascending from the
e.g., “Our living valley.”
expenses are
mounting”. “He
mounted his horse
and rode off”.

goodness = quality of virtue = any probity = uprightness

being good, e.g., particular kind of of character; honesty,
“Don’t take advantage goodness or e.g., “Probity is rate
of his goodness.” excellence, e.g., among politicians”.
“Patience is a virtue.”

Words of your own formed by addition of suffixes - Examples: happiness, freedom,

entertainment, etc.
Words having the same form for verb and noun: One example ‘smoke’ - “He was having a
smoke.” (Noun). “That oil lamp smokes badly”. (Verb)
How words are formed: ‘doff’ (telescoping) ‘nickname’ (meta-analysis) ‘melodrama’
(portmanteau) ‘else’ (syncopation) and ‘sidle’ (backformation).

Learning Activity 4.4

‘deer’ (specialization), ‘helpmate’ (popular misunderstanding), ‘bedlam’ (proper nouns

becoming ordinary parts of speech), ‘deck’ (extension of meaning/generalization), ‘scan’
(transference followed by differentiation), ‘keen’ (as in keen intelligence, metaphorical
application), ‘villain’ (association of ideas), ‘decease’ (euphemism), ‘brave’ (regeneration/loss
of colouring).

Learning Activity 4.5

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(a) The greatest number of French loanwords was borrowed by the English from 1251 to
1400.
(b) William the Conqueror conquered England and became its King in 1066.
(c) The reason for the low number of loanwords borrowed in the beginning of the Middle
English period was that the English resented that the Norman rulers invited a great
number of their countrymen to settle in England and showed them special favours.
(d) The two events for the renewal of interest in French towards the end of the Middle
English period were the hundred years’ war and the rise of the middle class.
(e) The changes in spelling of Old English words and Middle English are the following:
Old English Middle English
ð th
s/ʃ sh
e/t ch/sch
ðʒ dge
(f) The English language has borrowed words extensively from a great number of languages
but the language has not lost its individual identity because it has also coined a great
number of words with the help of indigenous devices available to it.
(g) Apart from borrowing and coinages the English vocabulary has expanded through change
of meaning of existing words.
(h) In Old English the verb usually came before the subjects or at the end of a clause, in
Middle English the Subject – Verb – Object order came to be used more frequently.
(i) In inflected language, the grammatical relationships of words in a sentence are shown
through addition of affixes of case and tense.
(j) The three types of verbs that have been retained in modern English from the Old English
period are strong verbs, weak verbs and irregular verb.

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Unit 5
English: the Renaissance and Beyond
STRUCTURE

Overview
Learning Objectives

5.1 Growth of Vocabulary

5.1.1 Latin loans
5.1.2 Adaptation of words
5.1.3 Debate over borrowings
5.1.4 Coinages
5.2 Spelling and Pronunciation
5.3 Grammar
5.3.1 Nouns: inflexions and genitives
5.3.2 Pronouns
5.3.3 Verbs
5.4 Punctuation
5.5 Standard English: An Introduction
5.5.1 Spread of English
5.5.2 Indian English

Summary

OVERVIEW

In this Unit, we will touch upon the changes that have taken place in English vocabulary,
spelling, pronunciation, grammar and punctuation during the Renaissance. We will also give
you a description of the evolution of Standard English and Indian English.

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LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After completing this Unit, you should be able to:

 explain the pattern of vocabulary growth in English during the Renaissance;

 discuss the issues of spelling, pronunciation, grammar and punctuation during the
Renaissance English.
 explain the evolution of Standard English and Indian English.

5.1 GROWTH OF VOCABULARY

We have already seen in Unit 4 that English has been expanding its vocabulary through
borrowings since the Old English period. Latin was the earliest source of borrowing and the
trend continued in the Middle English and later periods. However, the words borrowed from
Latin differ from one period to another, owing to the particular needs of each period.

English borrowed a great number of words during the Renaissance, or the cultural
revival/reformation, period. Apart from Latin, Greek and French loans, the vocabulary in
English expanded due to borrowings from other languages. Let us touch upon some of these
loan words in Sub-sections 5.1.1 and 5.1.2.

5.1.1 Latin loans

Jesperson (1982) compared the loan words in English borrowed in the Renaissance period
and those borrowed earlier. He remarked that the words borrowed from Latin at the
Renaissance period were different from those borrowed in the earlier periods in that the
former are abstract or scientific words, adopted exclusively through the medium of writing.
As such, he said, these words had never attained to the same degree of popularity as those
borrowed in the earlier periods.

Chrystal (1995) has also given a long list of Latin words. Some of these words are so common
place in English that we hardly recognize them as foreign words, e.g., absurdity, allusion,
benefit, capsule, climax, conspicuous, contradictory, crisis, delirium, disability, disrespect,
emphasis, encyclopaedia, idiosyncracy, immaturity, jocular, exact, fact, habitual, soda, etc.
According to Bough and Cable (2002), the words that were introduced during the
Renaissance period were basic words denoting nouns, adjectives and verbs. In their list, they

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repeat some of the words listed in Chrystal. Of the nouns they cite, most of them were
probably technical words as were some of the words cited by Chrystal and may have been
introduced through writing, e.g., dexterity, emanation, jurisprudence, halo, etc. The
adjectives they mention are agile, appropriate, conspicuous, dexterous, expensive, external,
habitual, hereditary, impersonal, insane, etc. Verbs mentioned by them include adapt,
alienate, assassinate, benefit, consolidate, disregard, etc. There were also words contributed
by the reformation and these are the result of controversies between the Catholics and the
Protestants, e.g., saintly, reprobate, self-righteousness, selfish, self-denial, etc.

5.1.2 Adaptation of words

Some of the Latin and Greek words retained their original form and others were modified
probably to suit the needs of the English. Most of the words mentioned in this Sub-section
retain their original form. Those that have been modified followed a process by which the
Latin endings, which seemed to be unfamiliar to English, were deleted.

Examples of these include, conjectural (Latin: conjectural - is); consult (Latin consult - are),
exclusion (Latin: exclusion - em) and exotic (Latin: exotic - us). The Latin ending ‘-us’ in
adjectives was changed to ‘-ous’, e.g., conspicuous (Latin: conspcell - us). Sometimes, the ‘-
us’ ending was replaced by ‘-al’, e.g., external (Latin: externus). The English ‘-ty’ ending
replaced the Latin ‘-tas’ ending, e.g., brevity (Latin: brevitas).

These changes were partly influenced by French because of the large number of French
words borrowed by the English in the Middle English period.

Other nouns ending in ‘-antia’, ‘-entia’, due to French influence appear in English with the
endings, ‘-ence’, ‘-ancy’, ‘-ency’, e.g., concurrence, constancy, frequency, etc. Adjectives take
the usual English (or French ‘-ble’), e.g., considerable, susceptible, etc. Verbs borrowed by
the English at this time often end in ‘-ate’, e.g., create, consolidate, eradicate, etc.

The Renaissance had another effect on words of Latin origin borrowed through French at an
earlier period. This was to modify the spelling in conformity to the Latin origin. The words
‘debt’ and ‘doubt’ were borrowed from French as ‘dette’ and ‘doute’. In the Renaissance
period, the ‘is’ was added to conform, to some extent, to the Latin ‘debitum’ and ‘dubitum’.
Though the spelling was changed, the pronunciation remained the same. Other words so
affected are ‘indite’ which became ‘indict’ and ‘quire’ became ‘choir’. In other words, the

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inserted letter came to be pronounced, e.g., ‘foute’ became ‘fault’ ‘penfyt/parfyt’ became
‘perfect’ (Latin: perfectus).

Loans from or via other languages

English continued to borrow words from French or Latin or Greek words via French.
English borrowed a considerable number of words from, or via, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
as well as other languages. Let us touch upon some of these.

 From or via French: Many of the Latin and Greek words entered English through
French, as these words were borrowed by the French first. Along with these, quite a
number of French words were also borrowed in this period. These include alloy,
anatomy, battery, bayonet, begot, bizarre, chocolate, comrade, detail, duel, entrance,
equip, explore, invite, moustache, muscle, passport, pioneer, progress, shock, ticket,
tomato, volunteer, vogue. The printing press helped the middle class to get hold of a
great number of books, and this in turn helped them familiarize themselves with
foreign ideas and words.

 From or via Italian: Some of the words are balcony, cornice, corridor, design,
giraffe, lottery, macaroni, opera, rocket, sonnet, soprano, stanza, violin and volcano.

 From or via Spanish and Portuguese: Some of the words in this category are
alligator, apricot, armada, escapade, banana, barricade, bravado, canoe, cockroach,
cocoa, lime (the fruit), cannibal, hurricane, guitar, maize, mosquito, negro, potato,
port (wine), tank, etc.,

 From various other languages: Words under this category include sago, ketchup,
bamboo (Malay), caravan, turban, bazaar (Persian), horde, coffee, yoghourt
(Turkish), easil, knapsack, yacht, landscape (Dutch), curry, pariah (Tamil), flannel
(Welsh), gumi (Hindi), harem, sheik (Arabic), trousers (Irish)

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 LEARNING ACTIVITY 5.1

(a) Identify the language from which following words were

adopted into English: alloy, alligator, apricot, disrespect,
giraffe, muscle, cocoa, fact, moustache, design, lottery, lime
(the fruit), cannibal, exact, cockroach.

(b) Say how the following words were modified before being
adopted into English: consultare, conjecturalis, exclusionem,
exotieus, externus.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

5.1.3 Debate over borrowings

The effect of the Renaissance in its earlier phase was a vast expansion of the English
vocabulary. Along with this, texts by classical scholars were first written in the classical
languages and printed. They were then translated into English to popularize them. Thus,
works of famous classical and literary writers such as Plato, Seneca, Aristotle, Virgil, Homer
and so on were translated into English.

The extensive borrowing of foreign words and translations of publications raised the
patriotic feelings and people opposed this practice. Those who opposed were called the
“purists” because they wanted to keep the English language “pure”, i.e., free from foreign
elements.

Among the purists was Sir John Cheke. He opposed to foreign terms to such an extent that
in his translation of the Gospel of St. Mathew in the Authorized Version, he wrote ‘mooned’

93
for ‘lunatic’, ‘toller’ for ‘publican’, ‘hundreder’ for ‘prophet’, ‘by-word’ for ‘parable’, ‘crossed’
for ‘crucified’, ‘gain rising’ for ‘resurrection’.

There were others who felt that the foreign influence was helping to enrich the language.
Among the latter were writers like Sir Thomas Eliot, who initially advocated writing in
English, but later felt that it was necessary to use a few classical words. And, writers before
him such as Sir Thomas More, Shakespeare and other writers also used a great many foreign
words. Thomas More, for example, used a large number of Latin words for the first time in
English in his writing. These include absurdity, acceptance, anticipate, combustible,
congratulatory and various others.

Eliot used many of the words used by More, and also introduced others such as
accommodate, infrequent, inimitable, modesty, etc., in his writing. Though Shakespeare
made fun of the practice of using foreign words, he himself used newly acquired words freely.

The controversy between the supporters of borrowed words and the purists was resolved
towards the end of the Elizabethan rule, when scholars agreed that words could be borrowed
or coined, provided there was a genuine need for a new word to express a new concept.

5.1.4 Coinages

While the controversy for and against borrowed words were going on, the English vocabulary
was getting enriched, as happened during the other periods, through coinages with the help
of indigenous devices. The following are some of the devices used for coining new words
during the renaissance period:

 Addition of prefixes: The examples for this include counterstroke , forename ,

disrobe, endear, interlink, nonsense, submarine, uncivilized, uncomfortable, etc.,
 Addition of suffixes: Some of the examples are considerable, changeful,
delightfulness, drizzling, gloomy, immaturity, etc.
 Compounding: The examples in this category include commander-in-chief, French
woman, heaven-sent, laughing stock, pin-cushion, rosewood, etc.

While prose writers like Cheke tried to enrich the language by substituting English words for
classical words, the poets after the Renaissance tried various means of adding to their poetic
repertoire.

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Let us touch upon some of these means next.

Imitation of Chaucer

Chaucer’s success and popularity inspired a group of writers to imitate him and borrow
words from his works. Not all the imitators of Chaucer were successful though. But, some
from the North, known as the Scottish Chaucerians, carried the literary traditions of the
Middle English period to the Renaissance period. However, it is not through their works that
the English vocabulary was enriched in this period, as the words they might have used were
already familiar to the general educated Englishmen and came to be referred to as
‘Chaucerisms.

Among several other ways in which the poets tried to retain the ‘Englishness’ of their
language were revival of old words, coinages and adaptations.

Revival of old words

Some of the old words revived during the Renaissance include astound, blameful,
displeasure, enroot, doom, forby, (hard by, past) empight (fixed, implanted) natheless,
nathemore, mickle, whilere (a while before). Words such as ‘blameful’ and ‘enroot’ are
derivations from old words, while others may be modifications.

There are a few new words such as askew, flout, freak, flinch, etc., the origins of which are
unknown. They may have been taken from dialects. Edmund Spenser was well known for
reviving obsolete words. Some of these were little known words from English dialects, e.g.,
algate (always), sicker (certainly), etc. Spenser also coined words such as belliborne, blatant,
braggadocio, chirrup, cosset, etc. We have no way of knowing whether the Modern English
word is in any way related to Spenser’s image.

Sidney and Ben Jonson were among the greatest critics of Spenser. But he had his supporters
as well. While many of the words Spenser used are accepted today as “poetic licence” and
have not been accepted as part of Standard English, some others regarded as his
contribution to the English vocabulary.

Idiomatic expressions

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The English language has acquired many idiomatic expressions from the works of
Shakespeare and King James’ Bible. Let us consider a few examples from each of them here:

 From Shakespeare: ‘in my mind’s eye’, ‘be cruel only to be kind’ and ‘brevity is the
soul of wit’ (Hamlet), ‘its Greek to me’ (Julius Caesar), ‘play fast and loose’ (Antony
and Cleopatra), ‘dance attendance’ (Henry VIII), ‘with bated breath’ (Macbeth), ‘love
is blind’ (Merchant of Venice), etc.

 From King James: ‘a good old age’, ‘eye for an eye’, ‘the apple of his eye’, ‘the people
arose as one man’, ‘a still small voice’, ‘go from strength to strength’, ‘at their wit’s end’,
‘eat sour grapes’, ‘cast your pearls before swine’, ‘new wine in old bottles’, ‘if the blind
lead the blind’, etc.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 5.2

State which of the following idiomatic expressions originate from

Shakespeare and King James: a good old age; new wine in old
bottles; a still small voice; cast your pearls before swine; with bated
breath; brevity is the soul of wit, eye for an eye; dance attendance,
eat sour grapes.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

96
5.2 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION

The problems of spelling and pronunciation, which existed in earlier periods, continued
during the Renaissance. Earlier, when books were written by hand by scribes, the only means
of guessing the pronunciation was through rhymes in poetry. This problem persisted even
after the introduction of the printing machine in England by Caxton. Caxton himself used the
spelling ‘booke’ and ‘boke’ in the same passage and used double letters and final ‘I’ in a fairly
haphazard manner.

This problem of spelling was further aggravated by the modification of words of Latin origin
with the French pronunciation. Thus, in the words ‘debt’ and ‘doubt’, borrowed earlier from
French, with the French spelling and pronunciation, respectively, ‘delte’ and ‘doubt’, only the
spelling has been affected and the ‘b’ remains silent. Chaucer wrote ‘premature’, following
the French ‘peinture’, but now, in the word ‘picture’, both the pronunciation and spelling
have changed.

Another problem of pronunciation, if not of spelling, during the Renaissance period was that
English borrowed a considerable number of words from the Romance languages which did
not follow the stressing system of Old English. This makes it difficult for foreign learners of
the language to decide where to put the stress in a multi-syllable word. A still greater
problem is when the same word is used as a noun and a verb, e.g., import.

Before the printing machine was introduced in England and books were written by hand,
very few people had access to them. No one seemed to have been much concerned about the
difficulties that English spelling and pronunciation presented. The scholars of the Middle
English period were more concerned about people writing in English rather than French and
Latin. Their worry was not what spelling to use – as we have seen with reference to Caxton’s
use of two or three different spellings for a word in the some text – but whether to use a word
from a dialect, and if so which dialect.

A small group of scholars experimented with phonetic spelling. However, their works did not
gain much favour either with the scholars or the general public. This is because they tried to
be too innovative. For example, a thirty-four letter alphabet marked with long vowels was
introduced.

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With all the borrowing, careless spelling and the individual innovations, the English
language was changing rapidly. At the end of the 17 th century, some scholars felt that the
rapid growth and uncertainty was making the language corrupt and barbarous.

Various dictionaries of foreign words were written throughout the 17th and early 18th
centuries. However, it was Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary published in 1753 that gained wide
acceptance. It was for the first time that dictionary contained a great number of words and
explained words with the help of examples and quotations. As Johnson says in his Preface,
“One great aim of this undertaking is to fix the English language”. He also explains what he
means by “fixing” the language. “This is my idea of an English Dictionary, a dictionary by
which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed, and the attainment and its duration
lengthened (Quoted in Bough and Cable, 2002: 273).

Sound changes

During the end of the Middle English period, a very important sound change took place, and
this was, as we pointed out earlier, the Great Vowel Shift. This affected the long vowels, /i:/
e.g., ryden; /e:/ e.g, sweets; /ε:/ e.g., heeth; /a:/ e.g., name; /u:/ e.g., house; /o:/ e.g., good;
and /‫כ‬:/ e.g., holy. The effects of this change were felt mainly in the Renaissance period.
Even in Shakespeare, the modern pronunciation was not apparent. For example, in
Shakespeare ‘clean’ was pronounced like the modern ‘lane’. The modern pronunciation
appeared in the 17th century and became general by the 18th century. Though this was the
greatest change, other changes in pronunciation also took place in the realm of
pronunciation.

Before this period, vowels in words like ‘son’, ‘run’, etc., were pronounced like the modern
‘put’. In the 17th century, they came to be pronounced like the modern ‘cut’, e.g., /kt/, /sn/
etc. Again, in modern pronunciation the /r/ is not always sounded before consonants, e.g.,
cart /ka:t/, form /f‫כ‬:m /, hard /ha:d/, etc. But, earlier the /r/ was sounded before
consonants and at the end of a word. It stopped being pronounced in Received
Pronunciation (RP) in the 18th century. This affected the vowels in the word.

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Two new consonants were introduced in the language at this period. These were /ŋ/ in such
words ‘sing’, as pronounced in the Middle English period but always followed by a ‘g’ or ‘k’.
The other phoneme /ʒ/ developed in the 17th century from /z/. The difference between the
two may be seen in the two words, ‘measure’ and ‘measles’.

The convention for vowel-use in spelling also was changing during this period, e.g., the use of
the silent ‘e’ at the end of a vowel to increase the length of the preceding vowel as in ‘shade’,
‘made’, ‘name’, etc. Another convention that was introduced was the use of the double vowel
to indicate length, as in the word ‘soon’.

Another change that took place was in the use of ‘u’ and ‘v’. These symbols were
interchangeable. The difference between them was in their position. For example, ‘v’ was
used initially and ‘u’ medially. Under continental influence, they acquired fixed values: ‘v’
came to be taken as a consonant and ‘u’, a vowel. Similarly, ‘j’ came to be accepted as a semi-
vowel and ‘i’ a full vowel.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 5.3

Describe the spelling and pronunciation problems that existed during the Renaissance
period.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

99
5.3 GRAMMAR

The grammatical changes that took place in the Early Modern English period were very
significant. As we have seen earlier, most of the significant changes such as the Subject–
Verb–Object (SVO) word order, loss of inflexional endings, declensions in adjectives, more
frequent use of the Old English weak verbs (those that formed the past tense by the addition
of ‘-ed’ ending), replacement of grammatical gender by the notional gender system had all
taken place in the Middle English period, before the Renaissance. Some of these changes
were maintained in the language during the Renaissance and have become part of Standard
English.

5.3.1 Nouns: inflexions and genitives

The inflexions that are retained are the ‘-s’ ending of the plural forms of the noun and the
possessive (genitive) singular. Apart from a few exceptions such as when we have the same
form for the singular and plural (e.g., deer – deer, sheep – sheep) and some muted plurals
(e.g., goose – geese), the ‘-s’ ending has become the general plural ending.

The genitive form in Old English singular ended in ‘-es’. In Middle English, the ‘-es’ ending
was unaccented and was often written as ‘-is’ or ‘-ys’. These endings were often taken to be
the pronoun ‘his’ with the ‘h’ dropped, which was a common practice at the time. Under
French influence, the apostrophe was introduced as the genitive marker for the singular. It
became widespread in the 17th century. In the 18th century, the ‘-e’ from the genitive marker
for the singular was dropped and the apostrophe was extended to the plural.

Another form of the genitive that became generally used at this time was the group genitive
(e.g., the sister of his brother’s friend; the Duke of Gamester’s heir, etc). Sometimes, when a
noun is preceded by ‘of’, it is very similar to the genitive case of the noun, e.g., The book’s
cover, The cover of the book, etc. This is known as ‘of genitive’. This is used usually for
inanimate nouns, where as the regular genitive form (i.e., with apostrophe) is used for
human beings and higher animals.

5.3.2 Pronouns

The genitive form of pronouns (i.e., possessive pronouns) such as ‘my’, ‘mine’, ‘our(s)’, ‘his’,
‘her(s)’, ‘their (s)’ and ‘your(s)’ also came to be used more frequently in the Middle English
period. They gradually became part of standard speech.

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In Old English, the pronominal system beginning with ‘h’ (he/his, him/her, her/hire and
hero) was likely to create confusion. So after the settlement in English of the Scandinavians,
the Scandinavian forms ‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘their’ that seemed to have greater affinity with the
Old English pronouns beginning with the same sound (i.e., that, this) was borrowed. By the
Middle English period, they replaced fully the Old English forms.

During the sixteenth Century, the personal pronouns (thou, thy, thee) had undergone
changes in their usage. In Old English, there was a distinction between ‘thou’ and ‘ye’. There
was the singular form and the plural form. Later, in the Middle English period, a convention
arose to address people with whom one was very familiar and those of inferior rank with the
singular forms ‘thou’, ‘thy’ and ‘thee’. The plural forms ‘ye’ ‘your’ and ‘you’ were used to
address people of equal rank (with whom one was not so familiar), strangers and superiors.
This practice in the Middle English period was probably influenced by the use of ‘vous’ in
place of ‘tu’ in French. By the Early Modern English period, these distinctions practically
disappeared and the plural form ‘you’ was used in all cases without any distinction of
number or social status.

5.3.3 Verbs

In the Middle English period, certain forms of the verbs were introduced which had a great
impact in the language in later days. These include:

 Introduction of the progressive or ‘-ing’ forms: These were not fully developed
even in Shakespeare's time. In Hamlet, Polonious asks Hamlet, “What dost thou read,
my lord?” whereas in the Modern period, the form ‘What art thou (you) reading …?’
would be used. The expansion of the ‘-ing’ forms to show distinction of tenses such as
‘What were you reading?’; ‘What have you been reading?’; ‘What will you be reading?’
that express subtle differences of meaning, developed later.

 Introduction of the auxiliary verb: The auxiliary or helping verbs (e.g., have, can,
do and was) used with the main verb to indicate grammatical distinctions appear in the
Middle English period. Initially, there seems to be no consistency in their use (e.g.,
‘perfective’ and ‘progressive’ aspects). The Modern progressive form, however, requires
an auxiliary (i.e., a form of ‘be’). To avoid confusion, therefore, in course of time ‘have’
came to be used for the perfective aspect (e.g., ‘I have finished reading the book’) and
form of ‘be’ for the passive and progressive.

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In Old English and Middle English, ‘do’ was used as verb to substitute another verb in a
sentence to avoid repetition of the same verb, e.g., ‘to do me live or die’ (Chaucer).

In the Middle English period, this use of the verb was gradually dropped, and ‘do’ came to be
more frequently used as an auxiliary. However, its grammatical function was not always
clear. For example, quoting the phrase “they do offend our sight” (from Shakespeare’s Henry
V), Crystal (1996) comments that this phrase means no more than ‘they offend our sight’.

In the early Modern English period, the use of ‘do’ in sentences became more systematic.
Today, it is used mainly to form the expanded present and past tenses for the interrogative
and negative sentinels, e.g., ‘Does/Did he ask for it? (interrogative); He doesn't/didn't know
the truth. The ‘do’ form is not used in declarative and affirmative sentences, except for
emphasis, and then the ‘do’, ‘does’ or ‘did’ is always stressed, e.g., ‘Yes, I do believe him’
(affirmative); ‘Those who do attend to their work will always succeed’ (declarative).

LEARNING ACTIVITY 5.4

(a) When was the apostrophe introduced into English as a
genitive marker?
(b) Give two examples each of ‘group genitives’ and ‘of
genitives’.
(c) Name the auxiliary verbs.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this
Unit.

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5.4 PUNCTUATION

The chief symbols of English pronunciation entered the English language during the
Renaissance period. Initially, there were only three symbols: the oblique stroke ( / ), the
period ( . ) and the colon ( : ), but there wasn’t any systematic way of using them. The
‘oblique mark’ was found both as a long or short stroke, the ‘period’ was found at different
heights and the ‘colon’ had a much wider range of rhetorical functions than the Modern one
of introducing a list or a summary.

John Hart, in his The Opening of the Unreasonable Writing of our English Toung (1551)
discusses in detail the punctuation system which he called ‘pointing’. Though he refers to
them in different terms from the ones used in Modern times, he discussed almost all the
symbols of English punctuation. He talks of the point (period or full-stop), joint (colon)
comma, asker (question mark), wonderer (exclamation mark), clozer (parenthesis), notes
(square brackets), tourner (apostrophe), joiner (hyphen), sounder (diacresis) and great
letters (capital letters).

Other symbols also appeared, under names different from those used today, during the
Renaissance period. These include ‘semi-colon’ (also called ‘comma colon’, ‘hemi-colon’ or
‘sub-colon’) which in the 16th century came to be used interchangeably with the colon and
‘turned double commas’ to open direct speech (i.e., quotation marks or inverted commas).

LEARNING ACTIVITY 5.5

(a) Name and illustrate the three punctuation symbols initially used
during the Renaissance period.
(b) Apart from those introduced by Hart, list the punctuation symbols
that appeared in English during the Renaissance.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

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5.5 STANDARD ENGLISH: AN INTRODUCTION

The concept of Standard English is a comparatively new one. It is “a widely used term that
resists easy definition but is used as if all educated people nonetheless know precisely what it
means….” (Mc Arthur 1992, quoted in Chrystal, 1996: 110)

In the Old English period, England was divided into seven Kingdoms, together known as the
Heptarchy. However, there were only four dialects: Northumbrian, Anglian, Kentish and
West Saxon. A considerable body of texts had developed in the West Saxon dialect, but due
to the repeated invasion of the Vikings and the ultimate conquest of Britain by the Normans,
the West Saxon dialect could not develop into Standard English.

The Middle English dialects remained more or less the same as Old English. But, different
terms were used to distinguish them, and these are: Southern, Kentish, East, Midland, West
Midland and Northern. However, till the end of the Middle English period, not one of these
dialects was used for writing throughout the country. This is because the necessity for it did
not yet arise, as the language of the ruling class was Norman French immediately after the
Norman Conquest in 1066. By the 12th century, Parisian French was adopted as the language
of the court. French was also the language of education till late in the Middle English period.

During the period between 1066 and 1150, things gradually began to change. Several social
and political events brought the English and French together, and at the same time, made
the English take an interest in their own language. Of the many, three main socio-political
events that contributed to the popularity of English were the Black Death which resulted in
the rise to the Middle class, the marriage of King John of England to a French lady and the
patriotic fervour that favoured English over French. The popularity of French was declaiming
towards the end of the 14th century.

English literature developed in England by the end of the Middle English period. This
literature was, however, not written in any one of the existing dialects. The reason for this
was that the writers were writing in their own dialects, or sometimes scribes copied texts

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using their own spelling and words from different dialects. Even after Caxton set up his
printing press in 1476, there was no uniformity of spelling and, as mentioned earlier, Caxton
himself mentions the problem of identifying the dialect to choose the words from for writing.

But after the printing press was set up in London – the seat of government – a dialect was
gradually developing, which we may refer to as the ‘London dialect’. This dialect developed
around the East Midland dialect, but for various reasons, it was free from dialect variations.
The English language was introduced in schools in place of Latin and French. Letters,
private and official, came to be written in English. From 1383, the practice of writing wills
in English had begun. Subsequently, the wills of Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI were all
written in English. By the 15th century, official documents were written in English.

Towards the later part of the Middle English period, literary and religious writings came into
being. However, they by themselves were not enough to develop a standard language,
because a standard language is the language for conducting the practical affairs of life. These
affairs are affairs of government, law courts, commerce, education, etc. It is because of this
that a standard language needs to be widely understood.

In the case of British Standard English, various factors were instrumental in helping the
London dialect to develop around the dialect of East Midland. The Midland district was
situated between the Northern Districts and the Southern Districts. As a result, it was free
from the conservatism of the south and the radical tendencies of the North. The surrounding
countries probably had an affect on the East Midland dialect as well. So, it was already
acquiring elements from other dialects and gradually shedding some of its peculiar features.
Secondly, the East Midland district was one of the largest, most populous and agriculturally
rich. So, naturally the people of the district played a prominent part in the economic affairs
of the country.

Another important factor was the establishment of the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford
in the region. The people were prosperous and educated. And London being the seat of
government and commerce, a large number of people from this and other districts visited
London. This had a great influence on the language.

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The Londoners assimilated elements from the dialects spoken by all these people and the
London dialect began to assume a universal character. The people who came, in their turn,
learnt from the London dialect and took these back to their districts. So, through them the
‘London Standard’ was widely disseminated. However, the process of standardization, which
in a sense had started in the 12th century, was going on till it was more or less stabilized by
the 18th century.

Development of Standard English: Contribution of chancery

Standard English, regarded as the most prestigious form of English, is a variety of English
free from any elements of any local dialects. Its distinctive feature is uniformity in spelling,
vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation.

This uniformity in writing was brought about by the chancery scribes. The chancery
(originally, chancellery) was the Count of the Lord Chancellor. The task of the scribes of this
Count was to maintain the government records.

In the beginning, a few of these scribes travelled with the King and wrote down the records
on parchments, which were sewn together and rolled up for safe-keeping. It was the works of
these scribes that helped to standardize the spelling and bring the English grammar and
spelling nearer to those of Modern English. Caxton’s press also greatly helped to bring about
uniformity in their work, particularly in vocabulary, spelling and grammar.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 5.6

State the contribution of chancery to the development of Standard English.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

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5.5.1 Spread of English

As revolutions, poverty and famine in Europe compelled the people to seek more
comfortable and safer homes, the English language spread to other countries.

America and Canada were the two countries where the British settled first and brought their
language with them. The beginning of the spread of English dates from 1607, when the
members of a British expedition settled permanently in America, they called the place they
settled in Jamestown (named after King James I) and the area Virginia (named after the
Virgin Queen Elizabeth.) Various groups continued to come and settle in different parts of
America. The greatest number of immigrants settled in America in the 19 th century.

British migration to Canada had started in the 16th century when groups of English-speaking
settlers were attracted to the country by farming, fishing and fur-trading industries.
However, the largest number of migrants settled there after America declared independence.
This time, the migrants were those who were still loyal to Britain.

Various other expeditions took the English speakers to different countries.

English speakers are grouped into the following three categories:

i) Inner Circle: This refers to English speakers belonging to those countries, where
English is the mother tongue of the people and is used for conducting the affairs of all
important institutions. The countries belonging to the inner circle are U.K., Ireland,
U.S.A., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
ii) Outer or Extended Circle: The countries belonging to this circle are those where
English is not the mother tongue or native language but has acquired the status of a
link language in a multilingual setting and plays an important role in the country’s
institutions. The speakers of this circle belong to Singapore, India and a considerable
number of other countries.

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iii) Expanding Circle: These are speakers of English in countries, which recognize the
importance of English as an international language. But they have not given English
any special status in their language policy. These are speakers of English in countries
such as China, Japan, Isreal, Greece, Poland, etc., where English is taught as a foreign
language (Adopted from Chrystal, 1996 and Kachru, 1985).

The concept of a world standard

English spoken in different countries of the world varies from one another. Countries
belonging to the 'inner circle' wish to retain their identity by the variety of English that has
developed in these countries. So now we talk of the different varieties or ‘nature’ English
such as British English, American English, Australian English, etc. Even some of the
speakers of English in the ‘outer circle’, who use English as a second language, claim that a
distinctive variety of English has developed in each of these countries, e.g., Indian English,
Singaporean English, etc. With all these varieties of English throughout the world, is it
possible to talk about a world standard?

If we look at the other side of the picture, we must admit that the present world situation
with facilities for international travel, world press, television, multinational corporations,
etc., where English is the language of daily communication internationally, there is a
common core of English that is internationally intelligible. Some regard this ‘common core’
as the ‘world standard’ around which national or regional varieties of Standard English(es)
has/have developed (McArthur, 1987).

McArthur’s representation is acceptable to the extent that the English took their language,
wherever they migrated or stayed for a long period of time. However, the language they took
with them soon changed due to the influence of various factors. If we compare the
development of British and American Standard English(es), this will become clear.

Towards the beginning of the 18th century standard British English was more or less
stabilized and towards the end of the same century, the Americans felt the need for
developing a standard American English mainly for political reasons. But apart from this
natural desire to preserve their identity, we must keep in mind that a language inevitably
changes when shifted to a new environment and comes into contact with other languages.

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When the Americans noticed that new vocabulary items from Spanish, native American
words, etc., were being absorbed into the language without any check, like the English in the
earlier part of the 18th century, they become concerned about preserving the identity of their
language. So, a conscious effort was made towards the end of the 18 th to establish the
identity of American English as distinct from British English.

About thirty years after Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) was published in England, Noah
Webster’s Dissertation on the English Language (1789) was published. In 1828, Webster
published An American Dictionary of the English Language in two volumes. While the
scholars were trying to give a distinct shape to American English, the language was
undergoing natural changes. The most conspicuous of these was borrowing of words from
various dialects or languages and the merger of these in such a way that their own identity
was lost. So the title of Isreal Zarguill’s play, The Melting Pot (1909) has become a part of
World English to describe how American English came into existence through merger of
various dialects and influence of other languages.

Gradually, American accent and vocabulary became more and more different from British
English and through the conscious efforts of scholars like Webster, spelling also became, to
some extent, different from British spelling. In spite of these differences, Chrystal, quoting
the speech of Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of Gettaysbury civil war cemetery (19 th Nov.
1863), points out that though the sentiments are nationalistic, there is nothing in the
vocabulary, grammar or rhetorical style to show that it is of American origin. This speech of
Lincoln, according to Chrystal, is Standard English free from national boundaries (Crystal,
1996: 83)

If we study the development of Standard English in any of the countries in the ‘inner circle’,
we will probably find similar processes at work. The urge to establish a separate identity will
induce the scholars and intellectuals to work towards a national standard, the development
of which will be facilitated by environmental factors. In each country, again, there will be a
small minority, who have to take part in international affairs, whose speech will be free from
national features of grammar, vocabulary, accent and style, and will be intelligible
internationally. But a variety of English of this standard has not yet developed that is
accepted all over the world as a world standard.

Possibilities of developing a world Standard English are there, but it is a remote one. It is
unlikely that the whole world will accept any one of the existing varieties of English as a
mother tongue, i.e., English in the inner circle as a world standard, as such a standard may

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not meet all their practical needs. Merger of dialects are likely to take place when the
geographical distances of the countries whose language is to merge are not very great. With
the distances that separate English, mother tongue speaking countries and countries where
English serves as second language are so great that it is unlikely that the English they speak
will naturally merge into one dialect.

Another possibility of consciously tailoring the language to include its most communicative
features of grammar and vocabulary seems to be the most feasible. However, it is not only
grammar and vocabulary that makes English of one nation or one region different from
others but stress and rhythm also plays an important part, as we shall see when we discuss
Indian English in the next section.

At present, all we can say about world English is that in spite of differences in different
countries and regions English is understood by some speakers all over the world, depending
on their practical needs for using the language. The variety of language they choose also will
depend on their needs. This is true to some extent in the countries of the inner circle, who
have to decide which dialect to choose on a particular occasion, but this is absolutely
necessary for the countries of the outer circle, who use English to meet particular needs at
the international level where the variety English they speak within the country may not be
intelligible to outsiders

LEARNING ACTIVITY 5.7

Is there a need for a World Standard English? State your reasons.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

110
5.5.2 Indian English

The long period of British rule in India (1765-1947) has given a special status to English in
India. During the British Raj, it was the sole official language. After Independence, it was
retained as a lingua franca (link language) with a few States accepting Hindi as the national
language. There was, however, a strong political drive to discard English and this gave rise to
prolonged conflict over the language issue, which has not yet been fully solved.

In multi-lingual States such as Manipur, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Tripura and the Union
Territories, English still remains the official language. The Southern States prefer to use
English as a lingua franca rather than Hindi. To solve the language problem, the three-
language formula was introduced in 1960. According to this formula, children in school are
to learn three languages: mother tongue, Hindi and English (where Hindi is the mother
tongue, a South Indian language is to be learned along with Hindi and English).

However, these attempts have not been able to reduce the importance of the English
language in the country. The number of English speakers in the country holds a third
position after U.S.A and U.K. But it is not only the numbers that give English a special status
in India, but also its use in most of the important institutions of the country such as the legal
system, armed forces, government administration, secondary and higher education, tourism,
business, etc. The use of English in all these various areas has brought the language in close
contact with the native languages.

Indian English is often referred to as the South Asian English, as English is used more or less
in a similar way in the neighbouring countries in the region, namely, Pakistan, Bangladesh,
Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan. No serious research has yet been undertaken to find out how
similar or dissimilar the English language(s) are in these countries. However, on an
impressionistic basis, the features of the South Asian English have been identified as under
(Chrystal, 1996: 360):

 The rhythm: South Indian languages have a syllabic-timed rhythm, i.e., the
syllables occur at regular time intervals. In these languages, all syllables have equal
force. This is in contrast with the stress-timed rhythm of English, where the stressed
syllables occur at regular intervals. It is this difference in the rhythm that makes it
difficult for the native English speaker as well as for some Indians who have been
exposed only to British English or something near it, to understand South Asian
English.

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  Grammar: As regards grammar, the salient features are the following: (a) The
progressive forms, e.g., ‘I am understanding’, ‘She is knowing the answer’. (b)
Variations in noun, number and determiners, e.g., ‘He performed many charities’;
‘She loves to pull your legs’. (c) Tag Questions: You’re going, isn’t it? (d) Word order,
e.g., ‘Who you have come for?’, ‘They are late always’, ‘My all friends are waiting’ and
(e) Yes or No agreeing with the form of the questions, e.g., Questions: ‘You didn’t
come in the bus? Answer: Yes, I didn’t.
 Vocabulary: Some of the words often used in the South Asian English are allottee (a
person allotted property); ayah (nurse); bandh (labour strike or industrial action);
chapatti (Indian flat bread); cousin-brother/sister; cow-worship; crore (10 million);
dharna, dhobi; doordarshan; eve-teasing; godown (warehouse); goonda, head-bath;
Himalayan blunder; inter-marriage; issueless; jawan; kaccha road; lakh (100
thousand) and others.

Nonetheless, we cannot assume that people in South Asia use a common English dialect. In
other words, there exist regional variations. But, one thing is certain and that is English is
gaining greater importance than ever before because of various reasons including increasing
use of English in trade, commerce, economy, educational or intellectual pursuits,
entertainment, the Internet, etc.

SUMMARY

In this Unit, we discussed the issues relating to English vocabulary, spelling, pronunciation,
grammar and punctuation during the Renaissance. In the course of our discussion, we
pointed out that the first problem that English had to face was the issue of borrowing words
from various languages. From the Old English period, loan words had been a characteristic
feature of English. During the Middle English and the Renaissance, the largest number of
words was borrowed from French, Latin and Greek. Many of the Latin words were borrowed
from French with the French spelling and pronunciation when the English came under the
influence of the Renaissance scholars. So in many words, the spelling was modified but the
pronunciation was retained.

We said that a controversy arose between the purists, who wished to free the English
language from the foreign language influence and those who accepted the influence as a way

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to enrich the language. This controversy was by and large resolved in the 18th century with
the introduction of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary.

We also discussed the irregularity in spelling and pronunciation, which was later resolved by
the consensus that usage should determine the spelling and pronunciation. In addition, we
discussed the grammatical changes the language underwent during the period and the
evolution of punctuation marks. We closed the Unit by giving a description of the evolution
of Standard English, American English and Indian English.

GLOSSARY/KEY WORDS

 Affirmative: A sentence or a verb that has no negative marker.

 Auxiliary: A verb used along with lexical verbs to make grammatical distinctions.
 Diphthong: A vowel where there is a perceptible change in quality during a syllable
change (time, road)
 Homophones: Words with the same pronunciation but different spellings (road,
rowed.)
 Idiom: A sequence of words that is a unit of meaning (‘kick the bucket’ = death).
 Negation: A process expressing the contradiction of some or all of a sentence.
Negative forms include ‘not’, ‘un’, etc.
 Possessive: A linguistic form that indicates possession (‘my’, ‘mine’, John’s, etc.)
 Received pronunciation: The regionally neutral, prestige accent of British English.
 Rounding: The visual appearance of the lips, permitting contrast of round /u:/ and
unround /i:/

REFERENCES/SOURCES

Baugh, A C and Cable T (2002): A History of the English Language. Pearson Education Inc.
Chrystal, D (1996): Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language. Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
Freeborn, D (1992): From Old English to Standard English. Palgrave Publishers Ltd.
Jesperson, O (1982): Growth and Structure of the English Language. Basil Blackwed
Publishers.
Kachru, B.B (1965): ‘The Indianization of Indian English’. Word 21 391 – 410

Kachru, B.B. (1985): ‘Standards, Codification and Socio-linguistic realism: The English
Language in the Outer Circle’. In R. Quirk and H.G. Widdowson (Eds) English in the World.
UK. Cambridge University Press. (Quoted in Chrystal, 1966:360.)
McArthur, T (1987): ‘The English Language’. English Today. Vol. 11. pp. 9 -13. (Quoted in
Chrystal, 1996:111)

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McArthur, T (1992): The Oxford Companion of the English Language. UK. Oxford University
Press. (Quoted in Chrystal 1996:110)

Wood, T (1948): An Outline History of the English Language. Macmillan Co. Ltd.

Answers to Learning Activities

Learning Activity 5.1

(a) alloy (from or via French); alligator (Spanish/Portuguese), apricot

(Spanish/Portuguese); disrespect (Latin); giraffe (from or via Italian); muscle (from or
via French); cocoa (from or via Spanish/ Portuguese); fact (Latin); moustache (from or
via French); design (from or via Italian); lottery (from or via Italian); (the fruit) lime
(from or via Spanish/Portuguese); cannibal (from or via Spanish/ Portuguese); exact
(Latin); cockroach (from or via Spanish/ Portuguese)

(b) By deleting the ending ‘-are’ in consultare; by deleting the ending ‘-is’ in conjecturalis; by
deleting the ending ‘-em’ in exclusionem; by deleting the ending ‘-us’ in exoticus and by
changing the ending ‘-us to ‘-al’ in externus.

Learning Activity 5.2

“Good old age” (King James); “New wine in old bottles” (King James); “a still small voice”
(Shakespeare); “Cast your pearls before swine” (King James); “with bated breath”
(Shakespeare); “Brevity is the soul of wit” (Shakespeare), “eye for an eye” (King James);
“Dance attendance” (Shakespeare) and “Eat sour grapes” (King James).

Learning Activity 5.4

(a) In the Middle English period.

(b) “King of Nepal’s Soldiers” (group genitive), “A friend of his uncle” (of genitive)
(c) have, can, do, was.

Learning Activity 5.5

(a) oblique/stroke, period and colon.

(b) semi-colon (or comma colon) and turned double commas.

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Unit 6
What is Linguistics?
STRUCTURE

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Overview
Learning Objectives

6.1 The Study of Language: Aspects

6.1.1 Phonetics and phonology
6.1.2 Morphology
6.1.3 Syntax
6.1.4 Semantics
6.2 Speech Acts
6.2.1 Common speech acts
6.2.2 Direct and indirect speech acts
6.2.3 Felicity conditions
6.2.4 Context and co-text
6.3 Discourse Analysis
6.3.1 Cohesion
6.3.2 Coherence
6.4 Applications of Linguistics

Summary

OVERVIEW

In the first 5 Units of this Course, we provided you with a foundation for the discussion of
linguistics. In these Units, we described what language is and how human language is unique
from the rest. We then gave you a compendious account of the origin and development of
English as a language. Having thus given a basis, we shall in the present Unit explain
linguistics as a scientific study of language and describe the various aspects of language study
such as phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics with particular
reference to English. We will then touch upon the concepts of speech acts and discourse
analysis, and close the Unit with a brief explanation on applied linguistics.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After completing this Unit, you should be able to:

 discuss the various aspects involved in the study of language;

 explain the concepts of speech acts and discourse analysis;

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  state the meaning of applied linguistics and explain the application of linguistics in
different fields.

6.1 THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE: ASPECTS

Language has been a fascinating subject for study over the last two centuries. Prior to the 19 th
century, language was of interest mainly to philosophers. It is significant that the Greek
philosophers Plato and Aristotle contributed in a big way to the study of language. For
example, it is said that Plato was the first to distinguish between nouns and verbs.

The scientific study of language in all its aspects is the domain of linguistics. There have been
three major directions in linguistics over the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 19th century, there
was an interest in Historical Linguistics. In the early and mid-20th century, the emphasis
shifted from language change to language description, that is, to Descriptive Linguistics.
From mid-20th century to late 20th century, there was a major shift to Generative Linguistics
and to a search for Language Universals.

The interest in historical linguistics was inspired by an Englishman, Sir William Jones, who
in September 1786 pointed out that the language structures of Sanskrit, Latin, Celtic and
Germanic were similar. So striking were these structural similarities that he concluded they
must have sprung from one common source. The scholars who were inspired by him,
concentrated on writing comparative grammars. These grammars attempted to set up a
hypothetical ancestor, Proto-Indo-European by comparing the linguistic forms found in the
Indo-European language family.

According to Jean Hutchison (1995), the following the languages were recognised as Indo-
European languages in the 19th century:

Indo European

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Indo-Iranian Balts Salvonic Italic Celtic Germanic
Albanian Aremenian Greek
(Sankrit etc) (Russian etc) (Latin etc) (Welsh etc.)(German, English
etc.)
In the mid-19th century, interest developed in the evolution of language. In the last quarter of
the century, a group of scholars in Leipzig known as the ‘Young Grammarians’ claimed that
language change is ‘regular’. For example, in Old English, the word ‘chin’ was pronounced
‘kin’ and spelt ‘cinn’. The change from a ‘k’ sound to a ‘ch’ sound affected all other ‘k’ sounds
that occurred word initially before ‘e’ or ‘i’. So we get ‘chest’, ‘chew’, ‘cheese’, ‘chide’, ‘chill’,
‘chip’, ‘child’, ‘chicken’, etc. Though this claim has been modified, it was an important step
forward for linguists to realize that language changes were not just optional, but definite and
clearly stateable.

In the 20th century, the emphasis shifted from language change to language description.
Linguists started concentrating on describing single languages. A Swiss scholar, Ferdinand
de Saussure (1857-1913) was largely responsible for this change. His view that language was
a system in which each item was defined by its relationship to all the others, initiated the era
of Structural Linguistics. ‘Structural’, in the broad sense, means the recognition that
language is a patterned system and does not necessarily refer to a branch of linguistics. The
label ‘structuralist’ is also used for the descriptive linguists who worked in the USA between
1930 and 1960.

In America, linguistics began as an offshoot of anthropology. In the early 20 th century,

anthropologists were keen to record the culture including the language of the fast-dying
American Indian tribes. Though the work of the early scholars was interesting, there were no
firm guidelines that linguists could follow in their description of these languages. It was the
comprehensive work of Leonard Bloomfield entitled Language (1933) that laid down
rigorous procedures for the description of language. His interest was more in the way the
items in language were arranged rather than in their meaning. According to him, meaning

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was ‘the weak point of language study and will remain so until human knowledge advances
very far beyond its present state’.

Bloomfield had a tremendous influence on linguists working on descriptive grammars of

unwritten languages. For many, the ultimate goal of linguistics was to perfect discovery
procedures, i.e., principles which would enable a linguist to use foolproof methods to
discover the linguistic units of unwritten language. Because their primary interest was in the
structure of a language, such linguists are generally called ‘structuralists’.

In 1957, Noam Chomsky’s book entitled Syntactic Structures started a revolution in

linguistics. According to Chomsky, simply to describe a corpus of actual utterances cannot
account for language creativity. In Chomsky’s opinion, a linguist’s task is to discover the
rules that specify which sequences of a language are possible and which are impossible.
These rules constitute the grammar of a language. Such a grammar is a Generative
Grammar. The particular type of generative grammar that Chomsky favours is
Transformational Grammar.

In addition to initiating the above, Chomsky has also focused attention on language
universals. He suggests that the universal constraints within which language operates are
inherited ones. Linguists should, above all, aim to specify these constraints. Chomsky calls
this inherited core a universal grammar. According to him, the major task of linguistics is to
specify what this core consists of.

Chomsky’s work has succeeded in creating an increasing interest in language among social
scientists. Collaborations between linguists and social scientists had led to the development
of areas such as psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, which emerged as major fields of
study in their own right.

Against this background of a general perspective on the linguistics movement, let us now
look at the various aspects of the study of a language.

6.1.1 Phonetics and phonology

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The spoken form of language has always been considered as the primary medium. To study
speech, linguists have to decide how to represent utterances in writing. This is necessary
because it is not always the case that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the
sounds of a language and its spelling. In English, for example, the spellings are not always an
indication of the pronunciation of words. So, one would need a device to represent the
pronunciation of English words like ‘receipt’, ‘psychology’.

The spoken word involving speech sounds, i.e., those sounds that are used by humans to
communicate, can be analyzed under two mutually dependent categories, phonetics and
phonology. While phonetics describes the concrete, physical form of sounds (that is, how the
speech sounds are produced, heard and how they can be described), phonology is concerned
with the function of sounds (that is, status and inventory of speech sounds in a language.)

Phonetics

The aim of phonetics is to provide a notation for transcription of sounds as well as to analyze
speech into its basic units.

Phonetics studies the vocal organs, which we use to articulate the sounds of speech. It also
studies the sound waves, that is, the physical way in which sounds are transmitted through
the air from speaker to listener. In addition, phonetics studies the way in which human
beings perceive sounds through the medium of the ear. These three modes of study are
known as articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics and auditory phonetics, respectively.
The phonetician, in other words, describes, classifies and compares sounds in articulatory,
acoustic and auditory terms.

Stress, rhythm and intonation in languages are also studied in one or all of these terms.

The International Phonetic Association devised a system of notation known as the

International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA in which one symbol represents one sound only.
This is the best known system of notation. In this system, while a number of symbols are

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familiar because they are taken from the English alphabet, others are taken from the Greek
alphabet and a few symbols are invented. Sometimes, ‘diacritics’, or marks, are added to the
symbols to denote different sounds. The IPA has, thus, built up a large number of symbols,
which can represent the sounds of most languages in the world, and can be used to
transcribe ‘speech’ in any language.

We will discuss phonetics elaborately in the forthcoming Course in this Programme.

Phonology

Phonology studies the patterns of relationship into which the kinds of sound fall in a given
language. It is different from phonetics in that phonology deals with sounds and contrasts
between sounds only within the context of some language, whereas phonetics studies sounds
without any specific reference to their function in the sound-system of a language. For
example, when we make a statement like, ‘the sound ‘p’ in the English word ‘spot’ is
produced by a complete closure of the articulators (the lips, in this case) a compression of air
behind the closure, and the release of air with explosion, owing to the sudden parting of the
lips’, it is a phonetic statement. A statement such as `there are six short vowels in English…’
is a phonological one.

As mentioned earlier, phonology deals with the function of sounds. This function is basically
one of meaning differentiation. Other functions such as an expressive function of vowel
lengthening (e.g., ‘That was coooooool’), however, are also possible. All sounds, which have a
meaning-differentiating function within a given language, are considered phonemes within
that language system. In other words, phonemes, in contrast to phones, are defined by their
function within the language system, i.e., langue. These are abstract, idealized units within
our minds or parts of our model of a language that we design. In language use, i.e., parole,
phonemes are always realized as phones.

The test for the smallest distinctive sound units of a given language system is the minimal
pair test, i.e., when a difference in sound structure also causes a shift in meaning. Consider
the phonemes or sound units of English [k] in cable and [t] in table, indicated by the
notation /k/ and /t/. Note that we are dealing with the actual sound structure of these
phonemes and not with spelling. So, ‘tea’ and ‘he’ are a minimal pair, while ‘see’ and ‘sea’ are

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not. Also, minimal pairs are only pairings that differ in exactly one segment; so, ‘pin’ and
‘tin’, or ‘tin’ and ‘ten’, are minimal pairs, while ‘pin’ and ‘ten’ would be not.

6.1.2 Morphology

Morphology comes from a Greek word, meaning ‘shape’ or ‘form’, and is used in linguistics
to denote the study of words, both with regard to their internal structure and their
combination to form new or larger units.

Words

The term ‘word’ may be in common, everyday use, but one which linguists cannot easily
define. For example, is the expression isn’t one word or two? And, is mother-in-law one
word? It denotes one concept, but is formed out of three recognizable ‘words’: mother, in and
law. Linguists, therefore, prefer other terms to ‘words’, and refer to morphs, morphemes and
lexemes when talking about ‘words’.

Morpheme types

Morphemes are defined as the smallest meaning-bearing units in language. These are
abstract units, realized in actual language by a morph, or if there are various ways of
realizing one morpheme by its allomorphs. If morphemes are free they will coincide with
what we call a word, but morphemes can also be bound, in which case, they are less than a
word (although they carry meaning). The free morphemes are generally also referred to as
lexemes, and the bound ones as affixes.

Note that lexemes can be simple, i.e., consisting of just one free morpheme or complex
consisting of 2 or more morphemes of which at least one is free. Affixes which come in front
of a free morpheme are prefixes, and those which come after are suffixes. For example, in the
word, ‘trees’, ‘tree’ is an example of a free morpheme as it can stand on its own and has a
lexical meaning. But, ‘-s’, is simply a letter (or graph)/sound (or phone) which turns the
lexeme tree into a plural. It is a separate morpheme, as it contributes grammatical meaning
to the whole, i.e., trees. The ‘-s’ cannot stand on its own and is, therefore, a bound
morpheme, a suffix.

Some special sub-types of morph are the following:

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  Cranberry or unique morph, which only occurs in one lexeme in a particular
language.
 Zero morph, which has a meaning/function but no form.
 Portmanteau morph, where more than one morpheme (or meaning) is fused together
in one form.

To reiterate, morphology is the branch of grammar, which studies the structure or forms of
words, mainly the means of the morpheme construct. A morpheme is the smallest distinctive
unit of grammar or the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words. It cannot be
cut into smaller units. There are two main types: free and bound. Free morphemes can occur
alone and bound morphemes must occur with another morpheme. An example of a free
morpheme is “bad”, and an example of a bound morpheme is “ly.” It is bound because it
cannot standalone. It must be attached to another morpheme to produce a meaningful word.

Affixes are often the bound morpheme. This group includes prefixes and suffixes in English.
Prefixes (e.g., ‘re-‘ in ‘redo’) are added to the beginning of another morpheme; suffixes (e.g.,
‘or’ in ‘editor’) are added to the end. There are two categories of affixes: derivational and
inflectional. The main difference between the two is that derivational affixes are added to
morphemes to form new words that may or may not be the same part of speech and
inflectional affixes are added to the end of an existing word for purely grammatical reasons.

In English, there are only eight inflectional affixes, shown below:

1 3rd person singular

-s She waits…
present

2 -ed past tense He walked…

3 -ing progressive She’s watching...

4 -en past participle She has eaten…

5 -s plural Three tables...

6 -‘s possessive Holly’s cat…

7 -er comparative You are taller…

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 8 -est superlative You are the
tallest…

In essence, for anyone studying a language, it is important to identify different types of

words. In order to do this, the linguist has to use certain discovery procedure. Morphology,
generally, comprises the study of inflections (inflectional morphology) and the study of word
formation (lexical or derivational morphology). A method that can be used to identify
morphemes is one in which a wide variety of utterance that are similar are compared. For
example, in the English sentences, ‘They laughed loudly as they walked slowly down the
street’ and ‘They shouted lustily as they climbed effortlessly up the hill’, the similarity
between ‘laughed’, ‘walked’, ‘shouted’ and ‘climbed’ enables us to isolate the element ‘ed’,
and the partial similarity between ‘loudly’, ‘slowly’, ‘lustily’ and ‘effortlessly’ makes it possible
to isolate ‘ly’.

An inflectional morpheme provides further information about an existing lexical item. For
example, the ‘ed’ at the end of the lexical items ‘climb’, ‘laugh’, ‘walk’, ‘shout’ in the sentences
above, is an inflectional morpheme, indicating that these activities occurred in the past.
However, the ‘ly’ at the end of ‘loudly’, ‘slowly’, ‘lustily’, ‘effortlessly’ is different. It is a
derivational (suffix) morpheme, which creates an entirely new word. Similarly, the words
‘democrat’, ‘democracy’, ‘democratic’ and ‘democratisation’ mean different things.

There are, thus, three main angles from which we can view a morpheme:

(1) It is a formal or physical unit and has a phonetic shape. For example, the past tense
forms of verbs in English – packed, pronounced with a ‘t’ sound at the end, turned
pronounced with a ‘d’ sound at the end and wanted or landed pronounced with an ‘id’
sound at the end. And, the plural forms of nouns as in ‘caps’, ‘bags’, ‘bushes’, are
pronounced with ‘s’, ‘z’ and ‘iz’ sound, respectively.
(2) It has a meaning.
(3) It has a syntactic role to play in the construction of larger units. For example, the
following sentence is built up of morphemes: The + tall + er + boy + s + in + the + class
+ help + ed + the + short + er + one + s. In this sentence, we have shown that the
smallest functioning unit, of which words are composed, is the morpheme.

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The other type of bound morphemes is called bound roots. These are morphemes (and not
affixes) that must be attached to another morpheme and do not have a meaning of their own.

Furthermore, note that when we talk about words, there are two groups: lexical (or content)
and function (or grammatical) words. Lexical words are called open class words and include
nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. New words can regularly be added to this group.
Function words, or closed class words, are conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns;
and new words cannot be (or are very rarely) added to this class.

There are six ways to form new words, and these are:

1. Compounds: These are a combination of words, e.g., ‘doghouse’.

2. Acronyms: These are derived from the initials of words, e.g., ‘scuba’ for Self-
Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.

3. Back-formations: These are created from removing what is mistakenly considered to

be an affix, e.g., edit from editor.

4. Abbreviations or clippings: These are shortening longer words, e.g., phone from
telephone.

5. Eponyms: These are created from proper nouns (names), e.g., sandwich from Earl of
Sandwich.

6. Blending: This is formed by combining parts of words into one, e.g., smog from
smoke and fog.

We shall study morphology in detail later in Unit 7, in this Course.

6.1.3 Syntax

Syntax is the study of sentence-patterns. In other words, it is important for us to understand

the ways in which words can be linked together to form larger units and how these larger
units or sentences have been analysed by linguists into their component parts or
constituents. Syntax, together with inflectional morphology, belongs to what is in traditional
terminology the 'grammar of a language'.

The stringing together of words to form sentences is far from being random. Different
languages use different devices for forming sentences and for showing the relationship of one
word to another in the string.

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One of the devices used by languages is word order. The languages that rely heavily on word
order are known as configurational languages. English, for example, is a configurational
language. Two sentences in English may have the same words, but it is the order in which
these words occur that determines the meaning. Let us take up the following two sentences
in English:

(1) Radha trapped a huge rat.

(2) A huge rat trapped Radha.

The words in these two sentences are identical, but the word order is different. It is the word
order which determines who trapped whom. In languages, which are non-configurational,
word order is irrelevant. For example, in Latin word order is irrelevant.

Another device used by languages to show the relationship between words and parts of
sentences is word endings or inflections. Yet another common device, used by languages, is
the use of function words. For example, words such as ‘of’, ‘by’ and ‘that’ in English (‘The
cart was drawn by a horse’.)

However, this does not imply that sentences simply comprise random words strung together
by means of various devices. In fact, every language has a limited number of recurring
patterns. A fundamental technique of syntactic analysis is to identify these patterns by a
process of successive substitution. Thus, the sentence ‘The dog bit the child’ with five
components can be reduced to three more basic ones: ‘The dog’ ‘bit’ ‘the child’. The last two
(‘bit’ and ‘the child’) can be replaced by one – ‘howled’, thus reducing the five components to
just two: ‘The dog’ and ‘howled’.

The linguistic procedure by which sentences are divided into their component parts is known
as constituent analysis. An alternative method of showing layers of constituents is a tree
diagram, which represents the branches of a tree. In other words, the sentence above can be
shown as follows:

The dog bit the child

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 the child

The dog bit the child

Each node or joint on the tree can be labelled, so that the construction becomes clearer.
Consider the following in this context:

S (Sentence)

VP (Verb Phrase)
NP (Noun Phrase)

D N V NP
(Determiner)
(Noun) Verb)

dog
The bit D N

the child

Linguists express the information found on a tree diagram also by using rewrite rules. In a
rewrite rule, the symbol to the left of an arrow is replaced by an expanded form written on
the right of an arrow. Thus:

S NP VP means replace the symbol S by NP VP

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VP VNP means replace the symbol VP by VNP

NP DN means replace the symbol NP by DN

These rules can be supplemented by lexical substitution rules:

N child, dog

V bit, D the

Linguists are aware that with the rewrite rules above, it is possible to construct the sentence,
‘The child bit the dog’, which is not quite a likely one. But that does not matter, because the
aim of the rewrite rules is to tell us what a well-formed sentence looks like and not to tell us
about the probable behaviour of dogs or children.

Linguists have also suggested ways of identifying constituents in sentences that are more
problematic than the one above; of adding extra patterns with propositional phrases to the
rewrite rules and of analyzing more complex sentences to account for recursiveness in
language. Recursiveness is the possibility of repeatedly re-using the same construction so
that there is no fixed limit to the length of sentences. For example, “The fact that the news
that the panther that strayed into the colony had died, shocked many people, was only to be
expected”.

Thus, linguists have shown ways of analysing sentences particularly with reference to
configurational languages. There are many other and different problems involved in the
analysis of non-configurational languages. But a basic device that all syntactic analysis uses
is that of checking whether one constituent can be substituted for another.

Languages change over time, as do the needs of their speakers, and while a conversation with
your friends may be linguistically different from a political speech; a piece of poetry or a
newspaper article, it is not 'less grammatical'. The use of a sentence in actual situations (i.e.,
its utterance, may be more or less acceptable given that context; also, its content, or its

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proposition), may be untrue or may not make sense, still, any competent speaker of a
language is able to decide which strings of words form grammatical sequences (i.e.,
sentences) and which don't. It is this invisible and at the same time highly productive
grammatical system which is at work every time we construct a linguistic unit more complex
than a single word.

Just like morphology, syntax is not concerned with what a sentence means, but with the
internal structure of units and their relations to one another. In other words, syntax asks
which sentences are in accord with the grammatical rules imposed by a particular language
and which aren’t. It is important to recognize that this status of sentences is an idealized one
to some extent: Spoken language often consists of incomplete utterances and seemingly
disjointed pieces, but this does not mean that these utterances are 'less grammatical'.

Let us explain syntax further.

Syntax refers to word order and depends on lexical categories (i.e., parts of speech.) For
example, many of us may have learned in school that there are eight main parts of speech in
English. Linguistics takes a different approach to these categories and separates words into
morphological and syntactic groups. Linguistics analyses words according to their affixes and
the words that follow or precede them. Hopefully, the following definitions of the parts of
speech will make more sense and be more useful than the old definitions of school grammar
books:

Open Class Words

Nouns + plural Determiner Adjective _____ (this is

endings called a Noun Phrase - NP)
“dogs” “the black cat”
Verbs + tense Auxiliary ____ (this is called a Verb
endings Phrase - VP)
“spoke” “is talking” / “have eaten”
Adjectives + er / est Determiner ____ Noun
“small” “the young child”
Adverbs Adjective + ____ Adjective or Verb or Adverb
ly “quickly answered”
“quickly”

Closed Class Words

Determiners a, an, the, this, that, ____ Adjective Noun

these, “this heavy book”
those, pronouns,

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 quantities
Auxiliary forms of be, have, NP ____ VP
Verbs may, “the boy is singing”
can, shall
Prepositions at, in, on, under, ____ NP (this is called a
over, of Prepositional Phrase)
“in the drawer”
Conjunctions and, but, or N or V or Adj. ____ N or V
or Adjective
“desks and chairs”

Sub-categorization defines the restrictions on which syntactic categories (parts of speech)

can or cannot occur within a lexical item. These additional specifications of words are
included in our mental lexicon. Verbs are the most common categories that are
subcategorized. Verbs can either be transitive or intransitive. Transitive verbs take a
direct object, while intransitive verbs take an indirect object (usually they need a preposition
before the noun). Consider the examples given here in this context:

Transitive verb: to eat I ate a pear. (direct object)

Intransitive: to sit I was sitting on the chair. (indirect
object)

Individual nouns can also be subcategorized. For example, the noun idea can be followed by
a Prepositional Phrase or that and a sentence. But the noun compassion can only be followed
by a Prepositional Phrase and not a sentence. Note that in the examples given below, an
ungrammatical sentence is marked with an asterisk.

The idea of world peace His compassion for the poor

The idea that world peace *His compassion that the poor are
is necessary hungry

Phrase structure rules describe how phrases are formed and in what order. These rules
define the following for English:

Noun Phrase (NP) (Det.) (Adj.) Noun (PP)

Verb Phrase (VP) Verb (NP) (PP)
Prepositional Phrase (PP) Prep. NP
Sentence (S) NP VP

The parentheses indicate that the categories are optional. Verbs don’t always have to be
followed by prepositional phrases, and nouns don’t always have to be preceded by adjectives

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in English. Note that these rules apply only to English. Other languages may have different
phrase structure rules!

Passive Sentences

In order to change an active sentence into a passive one, the object of the active must become
the subject of the passive. The verb in the passive sentence becomes a form of “be” plus the
participle form of the main verb. The subject of the active becomes the object of the passive
preceded by the word “by.” To illustrate, consider the example shown below:

Active Passive
The dog saw the cat. The cat was seen by the dog.
Subject + Verb + Object Object + be + Verb + by + Subject

It must be noted that syntactic patterns do not take meaning into account. Formal linguistics
analyses language as a homogeneous system. In other words, it assumes language is a
uniform system. We will study more about syntax in Unit 8 of this Course.

6.1.4 Semantics

Another aspect of the study of language is semantics, i.e., the study of meaning. While
phonology, morphology and syntax focus on the internal structure of words and sentences,
semantics covers the domain of meaning, i.e., what a piece of language tells us about the
world.

In answering to the question, ‘what do we use language for?’, most of us say that we use
language to express and communicate meaning. This ability to express meaning is
undoubtedly an indispensable aspect of language. But, what is a meaning? This is not a
simple question to answer. Linguists have been studying meaning for many years, but have
not been able to come up with a non-controversial answer. But, semantics, or meaning,

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continues to be an important area of investigation today. A linguist, who is studying a
language, would like to know why certain words and constructions can be semantically
acceptable while others cannot. For example, in English it is quite all right to say:
‘Vasundhara is a spinister’ but not, ‘Vasundhara is a bachelor’.

The question that a linguist would ask is how people recognise this, as also the similarity in
meaning in certain phrases and sentences.

There are two things that we need to know in this context: what all the words mean in a
sentence and the details of its grammatical structure. These are quite straight forward. But
another factor in understanding meaning is what the speaker ‘implies’. It is much more
difficult to deal with ‘implied’ meaning, because the connotation of words is much more
complex.

Different languages have different sets of words and some have more sub-divisions in certain
areas than others. For example, Mongolian has several words for different types of horse;
Arabic has numerous words for different types of camel, while Inuits (Eskimos) have several
words for different types of snow. It is important for the linguist to deal with such sets of
related words in a language rather than isolated words. For example, in English, colours
would form a set and degrees of temperature of things such as ‘cold’, ‘cool’, ’warm’, ‘hot’
would form a set.

Linguists also look at the different types of relationship which exist between words. For
example, sets of words with similar meanings (synonyms) and words with opposite
meanings (antonyms). For example, the words ‘assure’, ‘certify’ and ‘confirm’, have similar
meanings, and ‘tall’, ‘short’, ‘fat’ and ‘thin’, ‘large’ and ‘small’, are pairs of words with
opposite meanings. Another way of examining how words are structured is to note how a
language classifies or includes items under a category. For example, in English ‘tea’ and
‘coffee’ are classified as beverages and beverages come under the general item drinks.
Linguists also need to pay attention to the meanings of sentences, which includes an
understanding of the words, the grammatical structure, and our ‘common sense’ knowledge
of the world.

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Note that meaning as a concept is more difficult to define than you might think. The verb
mean itself serves as an example for the different meanings a single word can take on:

Sorry, I didn't mean to offend you

Great, this means we'll have to spend another hour in the car

Dog means 'chien' in French

In the first example, the meaning of mean is roughly equivalent to 'intend', in the second it
means 'it is the consequence of something' and in the third it is equivalent of 'dog translates
into chien'. The examples show that an extremely common word like mean can easily be used
to describe very different things.

Though linguists have been studying meaning over a long period of time, there is at present
no entirely satisfactory formal system to account for meaning in language.

Conventional meaning vs. social and affective meaning

Not only can words be used with different meanings in different contexts, but the entire
description of what something means depends greatly on the type of expression we are
talking about. Compare the following examples:

 Beagles are a breed of dogs

 Hey Stan, how are you?
 Linguistics is really cool!

The first sentence differs from the second and third sentences in that it makes a statement
about the word that can be verified, or falsified. By contrast, if someone states that he/she
likes or dislikes something (the third example) this is a subjective and unverifiable
statement. Such an expression still contains important information, but it has what we call
affective meaning. Similarly, a question such as the one provided in the second example has
social meaning, as do words we use to address people (e.g., Mister, Misses, Sir, Your
Honour, Dude in English; Sie vs. Du in German, etc.), ways of greeting and saying goodbye
(Hi, Cheers, Regards, Wassup) and many other parts of language which are essential in our
everyday interactions with others.

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Semantics, however, is concerned purely with the conventional meaning of words and
sentences. Conventional (or sometimes conceptual) meaning can be described in almost
mathematical terms and it can be applied to sentences that we can often evaluate in terms of
their truth value. Beagles are a breed of dogs is such an example. It can be described as
being either true or false. Conventional meaning also captures the kind of information that
content words carry (man, New York, run, happy) but not expressions whose meaning is
purely social or affective (Yeah, cool, Hi, Regards) or grammatical (and, the).

Reference

Reference (or referential meaning) is one of the most basic ways of thinking about meaning.
The referent of an expression is essentially 'the thing in the world that it points to'.

Thus, the following expressions are linguistic expressions that have definite referents,
although they might not be entirely clear without knowing the context:

 Barak Obama
 Berlin, Alexanderplatz
 Sally's cat
 These old CDs

However, you may note that more than one person can be called Sally; she could have more
than one cat and what CDs are meant exactly in the last example depends on the situation.
And, therefore, what counts in terms of referential meaning, in this example, is the
assumption that a specific cat owned by a specific Sally is meant with Sally's cat and that
with access to the context, it would be clear what CDs are signified by ‘These old CDs’.

Multiple expressions can point to the same thing in the world, as the list below
demonstrates:

1. Hillary Clinton
2. the former first lady
3. the wife of Bill Clinton
4. the U.S. Secretary of State
5. the former U.S. presidential candidate

All of these expressions apply to the same referent, yet 3 and 4 could (at least, hypothetically)
change at some point in time. Referring expressions and referents have a dynamic

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relationship – it can change, as circumstances change. By contrast, the underlined
expressions below never point to anything in the world, regardless of the context they are
used in (and so, they are not referential):

 A bunch of people called

 He is buying a new car
 Nobody showed up
 Elephants are native to Africa

All of these examples have in common that no definite referent exists for them, yet they
certainly mean something.

Sense

As the examples above show, it is necessary to capture meaning beyond reference. Some
expressions do not have a definite referent, while others cannot be described as referential
because they point to something fictional. For example, the following expressions have
meaning, but none of them has a referent in the real world:

 Santa Claus
 Bilbo Baggins
 and
 my shiny new spaceship

The term ‘sense’ is generally used to describe the conventional semantic meaning of an
expression that is separate (or 'goes beyond') its reference. Sense is also used to describe the
semantic content of expressions that describe activities, states, qualities, attributes, relations,
etc. As you may have noticed, reference essentially only applies to nouns. Still an adjective
like heavy or a preposition like under has a conventional meaning and can be defined in
terms of their relation to other terms (for example, we could describe heavy as the opposite
of light and under as relatively similar to below).

LEARNING ACTIVITY 6.1

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Write the various aspects of language with their meaning.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

6.2 SPEECH ACTS

When language is used by human beings in real-life situations, there are generally
communicative goals associated with every utterance. Speakers express their emotions, ask
questions, make requests, commit themselves to actions – they do things with words. The
term speech act is used to describe such language actions. A wide range of utterances can
qualify as speech acts.

Speech Act Theory was developed out of the works of philosophers like Austin and Searle.
The basic idea is that when we speak, we not only report or describe actions, events, or
states, we also perform actions. The most obvious kinds of performances can be seen in a
naming ceremony when somebody says “I name this child Michael,” or when a Minister
inaugurates a bridge by saying “I hereby declare open this bridge.” Verbs that are used to
perform actions are called performatives. Verbs like promise, invite and declare can be used
as performatives.

Austin identifies three components to a speech act: (i) the act of saying (the “locutionary
act”) (ii) the act performed in saying something (the “illocutionary act” and (iii) the act
performed by saying something (the “perlocutionary act”).

Any speech act has a locutionary act by virtue of the fact that something is said. The
illocutionary act depends on what the speaker intends to do by saying something. When
somebody makes a promise by saying something like I promise to help you, the illocutionary
act is that of making a promise. Factors like the context, the intention and tone of the
speaker influence the illocutionary force of a speech act. If you say, “it is very warm here” to

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make someone switch on the fan, the illocutionary force is not very clearly marked. But we
can say that the illocutionary act of such an utterance is that of a veiled request. The
perlocutionary act is the effect of something said on the hearer. The perlocutionary force of a
speech act might be that somebody gets persuaded, convinced, enlightened or inspired.

6.2.1 Common Speech Acts

Speech Act Function

Assertion conveys information

Question elicits information
Request (politely) elicits action
Order demands action
Promise commits the speaker to an
action
Threat intimidates the hearer

There exist several special syntactic structures (sentence forms) which are typically used to
mark some speech acts as such the examples given below:

Sentence form Example

Declarative He is cooking the chicken.

Interrogative Is he cooking the chicken?
Imperative Cook the chicken!

Consequently, there are typical association between Sentence Form and Speech Act, as
shown below:

Sentence Form Speech Act

Declarative Assertion
Interrogative Question
Imperative Order or Request

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6.2.2 Direct and indirect speech acts

In everyday situations, we often do not directly express what we intend, but instead
formulate our utterances in ways which appear more polite to hearers. Compare the
utterances: Pass me the salt! and Could you pass me the salt? Both are in effect requests, but
the first one, phrased as an imperative, has a different connotation than the second, which
uses the form of a question. It is obvious to us from experience that Could you pass me the
salt is not actually a question about the ability of the addressee to pass the salt, but a prompt
to action, and responding to this prompt simply by saying Yes, I could, and not acting would
not be an appropriate reaction. Could you pass me the salt?, thus, has two pragmatic levels.
On the surface level, it is a question, but underlying this is a request. It, therefore, qualifies as
an indirect speech act, whereas Pass me the salt! is a direct speech act.

6.2.3 Felicity Conditions

Speech acts (whether direct or indirect) can be classified according to their felicity. Speech
acts are infelicitous. That is to say, they don't work as intended when certain essential
requirements are not met. A speech act is infelicitous when the utterance is illogical (e.g., I
promise to call you last year), when certain requirements aren't met (e.g., I will buy you a
Porsche, honey) or when the speaker is lying (e.g., I really like your new jacket). Note that
there is a subtle difference between the three examples.

The first one can never be felicitous, because it is inherently illogical. The second one may or
may not work, depending on whether the speaker can afford to buy her partner a Porsche –
something she might not know for sure herself at the time of making the utterance. The third
one is a flat-out lie (in this example), the speaker does not like the listener's new jacket.
Felicity conditions are determined by context and especially performative speech acts often
require a number of contextual conditions in order to be felicitous.

6.2.4 Context and co-text

Pragmatics enables us not only to describe verbal actions (speech acts) plausibly, but it also
allows us to account for language phenomena which exemplify the close connection between
linguistic signs and the settings they are used in. The term context can be broken down into
two categories for that purpose the world around us: the situation in which a piece of
discourse happens (context) and the situation surrounding the discourse (co-text, i.e., what
was previously said).

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The linguistic phenomena of deixis and anaphora serve to illustrate the difference between
context and co-text. While deictic expressions point to something in the context, anaphoric
expressions stand as replacements for something that has occurred in prior discourse

Types of deixis

(e.g., I, you) (e.g., here, (e.g., now (e.g., Sir, (e.g. this (e.g., this

there, near, soon, then, Madam, (big), so story,

far, left, right, today, next, Your Honour, (fat), like this unit,

come, go) last) Mr. President) this) (with therefore)

gestures)

LEARNING ACTIVITY 6.2

Describe the speech act theory.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given.
b) Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.

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6.3 DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Discourse analysis is one of the areas in linguistics that deals with the study of language use.
But, it is also about how sentences – the most complex units within the language system –
are actually put to use and combined with each other, i.e., are used as utterances.

Most utterances we make do not come as isolated sentences, but as longer stretches of
language use, i.e., as text and discourse. In fact, the term discourse has come to be used to
refer to all units of language use whatsoever (even discourse over longer stretches of time,
such as a political or scientific discourse relating to one particular topic), and with that
integrates many aspects of the situational and socio-cultural context of utterances. By
contrast, it is the notion of 'text' that puts the emphasis on the linguistic unit that is larger
than a single sentence and, therefore, studies more of the ‘co-text’ of an utterance. In that
sense, text can be seen as a subcategory of discourse: "A text is a passage of discourse which
is coherent with respect to the context of situation…; and it is coherent with respect to itself,
and therefore cohesive" (Halliday & Hasan, 1976: Cohesion in English).

Many elements in a language mark this textual cohesion, while others contribute to its
overall coherence with regard to its context, especially the background knowledge on the part
of the hearer or established by prior co-text. In particular, this concerns the appropriate
"packaging" of our messages within a text, also known as information-structuring. While the
lexical and grammatical devices a language has to offer to establish cohesion and coherence
apply to spoken as well as written discourse, other principles of textual organisation are only
found in spoken, interactive discourse; their analysis is grounded in a separate discipline
termed conversation analysis.

6.3.1 Cohesion

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Cohesion refers to internal relationships between the linguistic elements in a text, for
example, between words, phrases, and clauses as well as with other cohesive devices, such as
pronouns and conjunctions or other words and phrases that co-occur with or can be left out
due to previous text. Cohesive relationships can, thus, take the form of co-reference,
conjunction, collocation, substitution and ellipsis. Cohesive devices may also reflect the
semantic and pragmatic relations between sentences, paragraphs and even longer stretches
of a text; typical discourse relations of this kind are additive, temporal, causal and
adversative.

6.3.2 Coherence

While cohesion is in most forms of discourse a necessary condition for textuality, it is in

principle never sufficient. In the first place, a text must have external coherence. In other
words, a text has to be consistent with the discourse situation in which it takes place. This
implies that the text must have a recognisable discourse topic; a recognisable discourse
function and a plausible discourse structure.

If coherence of this kind does not show up overtly in the text through the internal linguistic
relationship, i.e., cohesion, it usually comes about through the mutual knowledge that both
the speaker/writer and the hearer/reader share. This knowledge constitutes a part of our
general world knowledge, organised in structures such as frames, scripts and schemata, and
serves as background knowledge for the establishment of coherence.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 6.3

Give the meaning of ‘cohesion’ and ‘coherence’ with reference to discourse analysis.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

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6.4 APPLICATIONS OF LINGUISTICS

Linguistics can have applications wherever language itself becomes a matter of practical
concern. Strictly speaking, then, the domain of applied linguistics is not a single field or sub-
field. It can range from the research on multilingualism to studies of neurolinguistic
disorders such as aphasia and of various speech and hearing defects. It includes work in the
area of language planning, like the efforts to devise writing systems for languages in the post-
colonial world, and the efforts to standardize terminologies for various technical domains, or
to revitalize endangered languages.

Examples of the applications of linguistics can be multiplied indefinitely. The techniques of

discourse analysis have been applied to the problem of avoiding air accidents due to
miscommunication and to the problems of communication between members of different
ethnic groups. And linguists are increasingly called on in legal proceedings that turn on
questions of precise interpretation, a development that has given rise to a new field of study
of language and law.

The term applied linguistics refers to a broad range of activities which involve solving some
language-related problem or addressing some language-related concern. It appears as
though applied linguistics, at least in North America, was first officially recognized as an
independent course at the University of Michigan in 1946. In those early days, the term was
used both in the United States and in Great Britain to refer to applying a so-called 'scientific
approach' to teaching foreign languages, including English for non-native speakers. Early
work to improve the quality of foreign language teaching by Charles Fries and Robert Lado
helped to bring definition to the field as did the 1948 publication of a new journal, Language
Learning: A Quarterly Journal of Applied Linguistics.

Probably the oldest forms of applied linguistics are the preparation of dictionaries and the
field of interpretation and translation, all of which have been greatly influenced by the

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advent of the computer. The applications of computers to language have not been limited to
these areas, though; they extend to the development of interfaces that enable people to
interact with computers using ordinary language, of systems capable of understanding
speech and writing, and of techniques that allow people to retrieve information more
effectively from text databases or from the Web. Not surprisingly, then, an increasing
number of linguists are working in high-tech industries.

With regard to applied linguistics, however, there appears to be consensus that the goal is to
apply the findings and the techniques from research in linguistics and related disciplines to
solve practical problems. To an observer, the most notable change in applied linguistics has
been its rapid growth as an interdisciplinary field. In addition to foreign language teaching
and machine translation, a partial sampling of issues considered central to the field of
applied linguistics today includes topics such as language for special purposes (e.g., language
and communication problems related to aviation, language disorders, law, medicine,
science), language policy and planning, and language and literacy issues.

Psycholinguistics: Language and mind

The study of language and mind is often defined as psycholinguistics. The three main
psycholinguistic topics that are generally studied are:

(a) How human beings acquire language.

(b) How human beings understand speech.
(c) How human beings produce speech.

In other words, linguists are interested in the factors that influence the acquisition,
comprehension and production of speech. Because the mind is not directly observable, they
have to devise ways of finding out how it works. In order to do this, they record spontaneous
utterances and conduct psycholinguistic experiments. But, there is no clue as to how much
language is actually pre-programmed in the human mind. However, experiments on child
language, acquisition have shown that both the individual’s innate capability for language
and the environment are important for language acquisition and the environment are
important for language acquisition.

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In addition to how children acquire speech, studies of how human beings learn, what words
mean and how they learn to recognise words, have revealed that the human mind is a very
powerful network, in which one word which resembles the one heard is automatically
activated, and, it, in turn, triggers all similar words. Experiments have also been conducted
on speech production. Features of speech such as slips of the tongue can tell us which words
are closely associated in the mind. For example, it has been found, similar sounding words
which get confused, tend to have a similar rhythm as in the use of the English word
‘incubator’ for ‘ventilator’, or ‘antidote’ for ‘anecdote’.

In their study of speech disorders or aphasia, psycholinguists have increasingly incorporated

knowledge about the brain, technically, known as neurolinguistics. This has given rise to
discussion on whether particular types of language disorder can be correlated with damage
to particular area of the brain.

Sociolinguistics: Language in society

Sociolinguistics is the study of language in society. As mentioned earlier, many theoretical

linguists concentrate on the underlying unity beneath the diversity of human languages and
study language as a homogeneous system. Sociolinguistics, on the other hand, tries to
analyse the socio-cultural factors which lead to diversity. In other words, sociolinguists deal
with language differences on the basis of the assumption that variation in language exists
within a speech community, in a single geographic area. Variation also exists in the speech of
an individual in different contexts.

Whereas theoretical linguistics studies the structure of language with the sentence as the
basis for analysis, sociolinguistics studies language use in society and uses utterances in
relation to a context on a setting, as the bases for analysis.

Sociolinguists are interested in differences in language use between men and women,
between different age groups and different professions. Such studies provide evidence of how
important language is in reflecting social attitudes and social changes. The influence of
language contact on bilingual and multilingual communities has also received the attention

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of sociolinguistics. Studies have shown the ways in which the many co-existing languages are
used to serve different purposes.

SUMMARY

In this Unit, we said linguistics means the scientific study of language and in that context
explained the various aspects of language including phonetics and phonology, morphology,
syntax and semantics. We explained each of these aspects along with examples. We then
touched upon speech acts and discourse analysis, as two important areas of concern for
linguistics. We closed the Unit with a short note on the meaning of applied linguistics as
obtained in the USA and later in the UK. In this context, we touched upon psycholinguistics
and sociolinguistics.

KEY WORDS

 Acoustic phonetics: The study of the physical properties of speech sound, as

transmitted between mouth and year, by the use of instrumental techniques of
investigation.
 Aphabia: The general word for serious speech disorders, which literally means without
speech.
 Arbitrary: Absence of any necessary connection between a word and its meaning.
 Articulators phonetics: Study of the physiological movement involved in modifying
an air flow to produce the various types of speech sounds.
 Auditory phonetics: The study of the perceptual response to speech sounds as
morpheme construct.
 Chain relationship: The relationship between one item and another horizontally
depending on what can go with what in a language.
 Choice relationship: The relationship which determines which elements can replace
an existing element vertically.
 Configurations Languages: Languages that rely heavily on word order.
 Constituent: A basic term in grammatical analysis for a linguistic unit which is a
component of a larger construction.
 Creative: The quality which enables us to produce novel utterances whenever we want
to.
 Descriptive linguistics: The description of single languages on the basis of an analysis
of actual utterances at one particular point in time.
 Derivation: A term used in morphology to refer to one of the tow main categories or
processes of word formation. The result of a derivational process is a new word e.g.
‘structure’  ‘structural.
 Displacement : The use of language to talk about things other than the here and now.
 Duality: The use of a small number of meaningless elements in combination to produce
a large number of meaningful elements.

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 Emotive function: The use language for emotional effect.
 Generative linguistics: The scientific study of speech sounds in the languages of the
world.
 Historical linguistics: The study of grammars which compared the different
linguistics forms found in the various members of the Indo-European language family
and the setting up of a hypothetical ancestor, Proto-Indo-European, from which these
languages were descended.
 Inflection: A term used in morphology to refer to one of the two main categories or
processes of word formation. It refers to affixes which signal grammatical relationships
such as plural, past tense and possession.
 Morphology: The minimal distinctive unit of grammar, and the central concern of
morphology.
 Neurolinguistics: A branch of linguistics, which studies the neurological basis of
language development and use in man and attempts to construct a model of the brains
control over the processes of speech and hearing.
 Phoneme: A minimal meaningful linguistic unit of sound.
 Phonology: The study of the patterns of distinctive sound found in a particular
language, and their function in that language.
 Psycholinguistics: A branch of linguistics which studies the correlation between
linguistic behaivour and the psychological processes thought to underlie that behaviour.
 Recursiveness: A term used in generative linguistics to refer to rules which are capable
of repeated application in generating a sentence, and also to the structure thus generated.
 Rewrite rule: A type of rule in generative grammar, which takes the form X  Y. The
symbol of the left of the arrow represents a single structural element; the symbol to the
right of arrow represents a string of one or more elements; and the arrow is an
instruction to replace or expand X by Y.
 Sociolinguistics: A branch of linguistics which studies all aspects of the relationship
between language and society.
 Semantics: A major branch of linguistics devoted to the study of Meaning in language.
 Syntax: The study of the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences
in a language.

SUGGESTED READING

Aitchison, year, 1995 Linguistics: An Introduction: Hodder and Stonghton 1995.

Chaika, Elaina, 1982 Language, The social Mirror: Newbury House publishers Inc. Rowley,
Massachusetts 1982 (Chapters 1,7,8 and 10).

Crystal, David, 1997 The cambridge Encyclopedia of Language Second edition. C.U.P. 1997.

Treask, RL, 1999 Language (Second edition): The Basics Routledge, London & New York
1999.

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Unit 7
Morphology
STRUCTURE

Overview
Learning Objectives

7.1 Morphology: Some Terms

7.1.1 Lexeme
7.1.2 Morpheme
7.2 Word Formation Process
7.2.1 Affixation: Inflection and derivation
7.2.2 Other processes

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Summary

OVERVIEW

In this Unit, we will introduce you to the concept of morpheme and associated concepts such
as root, stem, affix, allomorph, etc., and touch upon the word formation processes such as
affixation (inflection and derivation), compounding, blend, etc.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After completing this Unit, you should be able to:

 explain the concepts such as lexeme, morpheme, stem and root as well as allomorph;
 explain the word formation processes.

7.1 MORPHOLOGY: SOME TERMS

In this Section, we will introduce you to some basic concepts in the field of morphology.

7.1.1 Lexeme

One of the first things that might strike you when you undertake a serious study of an area is
the lack of clarity about even the basic concepts in that area. Take the notion of word for
instance. Linguists have made so many attempts to define what a word is, but almost all
attempts have been unsatisfactory in some way or the other. If you think about it, you might
be surprised to know that most of us rely on writing when it comes to identifying words. We

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think of a word as something written as one unit by leaving some space before and after it. If
so, do we say that ‘don’t’ is one word? There are also some words which are written with a
hyphen as ‘home-made’. As you must have concluded, leaving a space does not seem to be a
reliable test to determine whether something is a word or not.

Another problem is with different forms of the same word. Consider the following set of
words: write, writes, wrote, writing, written. Should we take the above as different forms of
one word or should we say that they are five different words?

There is obviously some sense in which all the five forms are related. We know that all these
forms are different manifestations of the same vocabulary item ‘write’. It is this knowledge
that is made use of by the dictionary writer. That is to say, in a dictionary, there won’t be five
different entries, but only one entry ‘write’. We use the term lexeme to refer to this abstract
vocabulary item. So, we can say that all the forms above are different forms of the lexeme,
‘write’.

Now let us take a look at the internal structure of words.

7.1.2 Morpheme

All of you know that sounds combine together and form words. Words, however, have
another kind of structuring. Take a look at the following words: writing, reading, sleeping.
All these words can be said to have two parts: write + -ing, read + -ing and sleep + -ing.

You see that the first part in each of the above case is a complete word, but the second part is
not a complete word. Neither is it a single sound unit. It is a morpheme. That is to say, a
morpheme is the smallest unit of language that makes a contribution to the meaning. The
branch of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words is called morphology.

What we mean by ‘smallest unit’ is that it cannot be divided into further smaller units. So, in
a unit like ‘read’, we cannot identify any smaller unit that contributes to the meaning, and,

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therefore, we can say that read is a morpheme. Of course, you can divide read into sound
units, but remember that sound units are phonemes. What this implies is that

a morpheme can be the same as that of a word. That is, in the present context, read is both a
word as well as a morpheme. It is a morpheme because it is both minimal and does have a
meaning. But, morphemes are quite often smaller than individual words. Take the case of ‘-
ing’ in words like ‘reading’ and ‘sleeping’. All speakers of English will identify ‘-ing’ as a unit
in these words. But what is its contribution to the meaning?

It is of course difficult to say what the meaning of ‘-ing’ is. That’s because the meaning of ‘-
ing’ is more grammatical in nature. In other words, ‘-ing’ signals that the word in question is
the participial form of the verb ‘read’. Some more examples of morphemes which have
grammatical meanings are the morpheme ‘un-’ in words like, ‘undress, undo’, etc.

Free and bound morphemes

An important difference between a morpheme like ‘read’ and a morpheme like ‘-ing’ and ‘un-
’ that the former can occur independently as a word, while the latter cannot. A morpheme
that can occur independently as a word is called a free morpheme and a morpheme that
cannot occur independently as a word is called a bound morpheme. Accordingly, morphemes
such as ‘read’ and ‘sheep’ are examples for free morphemes, while morphemes like ‘un-’ and
‘-ing’ are examples for bound morphemes.

Root, stem and affix

In a typical word that consists of more than one morpheme, one of the morphemes will be
basic to the meaning of the entire word. The morpheme that is basic to a word is called the
root. For instance, we saw that in the word ‘reading’ that comprises two morphemes, ‘read’
and ‘-ing’, ‘read’ contributes the basic meaning of the word and so ‘read’ is the root
morpheme in ‘reading’.

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Another important notion is that of a stem. A stem is a form to which another morpheme is
added. By this logic, in ‘reading’, ‘read’ is the form to which ‘-ing’ is added, and so we can say
that ‘read’ is the stem. In other words, ‘read’ is both the root (see the para above) and stem.

Does this mean both are same? No, they are two different concepts. But then, what is the
difference between a root and a stem?

The difference between a root and a stem will become clearer if we take into a consideration
a word like that has more than two morphemes. Consider the word ‘denationalize’. Let us
divide it into morphemes: de- + nation + -al + -ize. As you see, there are four morphemes in
the word. Can we say which one is the root morpheme? Most probably, we will say, the root
is ‘nation’. The morphemes ‘de-‘, ‘-al’, and ‘-ize’ all modify the root. But, they do not all get
attached to the root ‘nation’ at the same time. Let us see how we get the word ‘denationalize’.

The first step is the addition of ‘-al’ to the root ‘nation’, which results in ‘national’. The
second step is the addition of ‘-ize’ to form ‘national’. Now, we know that ‘national’ is not a
root, because it has already been modified by ‘-al’. Here is where the notion of stem becomes
useful. We can say that ‘national’ is the stem to which ‘-ize’ is added. The last step is the
addition of ‘de-’ to the stem ‘nationalize’. The skeptics among us might wonder how we know
that the addition of ‘de-’ is the last step.

Before we address this question, let us introduce you to some more terms.

The morphemes that modify the root are called affixes. Affixes are of various types. The most
common types of affixes are prefixes and suffixes. A prefix gets attached to the left of a root.
Let’s see some examples for prefixes in English, ‘re-’ (reappear, reread); ‘de-’ (derecognize,
deregister). A suffix gets attached to the right of a root. Here are some examples, ‘-ly’
(mysteriously, bravely); ‘-ness (happiness, haughtiness); ‘-ize’ (colonize, terrorize).

Note that we put a hyphen after a prefix and before a suffix, when we write them separately.

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 Allomorphs

A particular morpheme in a language may have different realizations. These realizations may
be conditioned by the particular context in which the morpheme occurs. (By context, we
mean here the sounds that precede or follow the morpheme in question.) Let’s take the past
tense morpheme of English into consideration. It has the following three different
realizations:

i) It is realized as /əd/ after words ending in /t/ and /d/, e.g., vote: /vəʊt/, voted: / vəʊtɪd
/, weed: /wiːt/, weeded: / wiːdɪd/
ii) It is realized as /t/ after words ending in all other voiceless sounds, e.g., kiss: / kɪss/,
kissed: / kɪst /, soak: / səʊk /, soaked: / səʊkt /. (Note that we will discuss at length the
voiceless sounds in English in another Course in this Programme).
iii) It is realized as /d/ after words ending in all other voiced sounds, e.g., love: /lʌv/,
loved: /lʌvd/, change / tʃeɪndʒ/, changed: tʃeɪndʒd /

So we can say that / əd /, /d/, and /t/ are three allomorphs of the past tense morpheme in
English. Similarly, the plural morpheme in English also has the following three allomorphs:

i) After words ending in /s/, /z/, / ʃ /, / ɪz / and / ʒ /: rose / rəʊz /, roses / rəʊzɪz /, brush
/brʌʃ /, brushes / brʌʃzɪz/
ii) After words ending in other voiceless sounds: book /bʊk/, books / bʊks /, bat /bæt/,
bats /bæts/
iii) After words ending in other voiced sounds: bag /bæg/, bags /bægz/, ball /bɔːl/, balls /
bɔːlz/.

Thus, /s/, /z/, and /ɪz/ are the allomorphs of the plural morpheme in English.

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Form and meaning

What we learnt is that a particular morpheme may not always have the same form. For
example, we saw that the past tense morpheme and the plural morpheme have three
different forms each. In some cases, you will also see that a particular form has functions
that are totally different. Take a look at the suffix ‘-s’ in the following cases:

1. Sushmita talks in a very funny manner.

2. I listened to all the talks by the visiting professor.

In the first case, ‘-s’ is added to the verb ‘talk’ to form the third person singular form. In the
second case, ‘-s’ is added to the noun ‘talk’. In terms of meaning also you can see that the two
words differ. In the first case, ‘talk’ refers to an action, while in the second one, it means a
lecture.

The question we raise is whether these two uses of ‘-s’ can be treated as one. And the answer
should be fairly obvious by now. Since these two forms are related in terms of neither
function nor meaning, we cannot treat them as one morpheme. The ‘-s’ that gets attached to
noun is the realization of the plural morpheme and the ‘-s’ that gets attached to the verb is
the realization of the third person singular agreement morpheme. By agreement here we
mean the relationship between the subject of the sentence and the verb. In English,
agreement or concord is in terms of number and person.

Another example is the suffix ‘-er’. Compare the following cases: big – bigger; small –
smaller; work – worker and dream – dreamer. In all the above words, we see that ‘-er’ is
added to the stem. Do you think we can treat all of the instances of ‘-er’ alike? In the first two
instances, the addition of ‘-er’ makes the comparative form of the adjective. The addition of ‘-
er’ to ‘work’ gives you a word which means ‘a person who works’. Similarly, the addition of ‘-
er’ to ‘dream’ gives you a word that means ‘a person who dreams’. On the basis of their
meanings, we can say that the ‘-er’ that gets attached to the adjectives ‘big’ and ‘small’ is
different from the ‘-er’ that gets attached to verbs ‘work’ and ‘dream’.

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 LEARNING ACTIVITY 7.1
i) Identify the morphemes in the following words and state which
morphemes are free and which are bound: recharge, books,
inability, book-shelf.
ii) Identify the roots, stems, prefixes and suffixes in the following
words: unaccountable, predetermined, rechargeable,
unidentifiable.
iii) State which allomorph of the past tense morpheme will occur in
the following words: created, informed, responded, wished,
baked.
iv) State which allomorph of the plural morpheme will occur in the
following words: cakes, bells, boxes, buds, watches.

Note:

a) Write your answer in the space given below.

b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

7.2 WORD FORMATION PROCESSES

In this Section, we shall look at some of the processes by which new words can be formed in
a language.

7.2.1 Affixation: Inflectional and derivational

We have already seen that a word can be modified by affixation. Affixation processes are
traditionally divided into two types: inflection and derivation. Let us now take a look at how
these two processes are different.

The first and foremost difference between an inflectional affix and a derivational affix is that
an inflectional affix can get attached to a stem containing a derivational suffix, but a
derivational affix cannot get attached to a stem containing an inflectional affix. So we can say
that an inflectional affix is attached to a word after all the derivational affixes are attached.

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Some examples of derivational affixes are ‘-ize’ and ‘-al’, e.g., pressurize. Some examples for
inflectional affixes are the past tense morpheme and the plural morpheme. As inflectional
affixes can be attached to a stem that takes a derivational affix, we can attach past tense to
‘pressurize’ and get ‘pressurized’. That is to say:

pressure + -ize  pressurize

pressurize + -ed  pressurized

Similarly, we can attach the plural suffix after the derivational suffix
‘-ation’ as in:
converse + -ation  conversation
conversation + -s  conversations

But, we cannot attach the suffix ‘ation’ after the plural suffix has been attached.
Let us now look at another difference.

An inflectional affix never changes the grammatical category, i.e., word classes or parts of
speech like noun, verb, adjective, and so on, of the word it gets attached to. For example, the
past tense morpheme or the plural morpheme does not change the grammatical category of
the word it gets attached to. Thus, both ‘create’ and ‘created’ are verbs, and both ‘book’ and
‘books’ are nouns.

But, the derivational affix may or may not change the class of the word to which it gets
attached. Let us see how a derivation suffix modifies the root. (Note that the grammatical
category of the word to which the suffix gets attached is written in subscript.)

Suffix ‘-al’

The suffix ‘-al’ gets attached to a noun and the result is an adjective.

Profession NOUN + -al  professional Adjective

Office Noun + -al  official Adjective

Suffix ‘-ness’

The suffix ‘-ness’ gets attached to an adjective and forms a noun.

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 Happy Adjective + -ness  happiness Noun
Kind Adjective + -ness  kindness Noun

Suffix ‘-ize’

The suffix ‘-ize’ gets attached to a noun and forms a verb.

Pressure Noun + -ize  pressurize Verb

Solemn Noun + -ize  solemnize Verb

Thus, we see that in each of the cases, the derivational suffix changes the category of the
word it gets attached to.

A derivational suffix that does not change the category of the word it gets attached to is ‘-
ship’ as in the following examples:

Friend Noun + -ship  friendship Noun

King Noun + -ship  kingship Noun
Here we see that ‘-ship’ gets attached to a noun and the resulting word is still a noun.

The derivational prefixes in English do not change the grammatical category of the word it
gets attached to. Some of the most common prefixes in English are ‘un-‘, ‘re-‘, and ‘in-‘. Let
us take a look at some examples:

un- + recognizable Adjective  unrecognizable Adjective

re- + paint Verb  repaint Verb
in- + human Adjective  inhuman Adjective

In all the cases, we can see that the grammatical category of the word to which the prefix is
added has not changed.

Yet another difference is productivity and semantic uniformity.

While inflectional affixes are very productive in the sense that they do not have so much
restriction, derivational affixes are usually more restricted in their usage than inflectional
suffixes. The third person singular suffix ‘-s’ gets attached to all the verbs, while a

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derivational suffix like ‘-ness’ cannot get attached to adjectives like ‘hungry’ (the noun form
of which is hunger) and safe (the noun form which is safety).

Similarly, the meaning of an inflectional affix is more grammatical in nature than the
meaning of a derivational affix. That is to say:

 In the cases of nouns, inflectional suffixes typically express changes in features like
number (singular or plural) and gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter).
 In the cases of verbs, tense or aspect is expressed by inflection.
 In the case of adjectives, the change in the degree (positive, comparative, and
superlative) is expressed by inflectional suffixes. (Thus, the suffix ‘-er’ that gets
attached to the adjectives as in ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’ is an inflectional affix.)

Derivational affixes, on the other hand, express a wide variety of meaning. Consider the
derivational suffix ‘-er’ that gets attached to verbs as in ‘work’ – ‘worker’ and cook – cooker.
In the former case, it means ‘the person who works’, but in the latter case it means ‘the
instrument that is used to cook’.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 7.2

Identify the affixes in the following words and classify them as
inflectional and derivational: accommodation, suspended, jobs,
adaptability, biggest

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

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7.2.2 Other processes

In addition to affixation, there are other processes involved in word formation, a few of
which we will touch upon in this Subsection.

 Compounding: Sometimes, new words are formed by putting two independent words
together. Take a look at some these examples:

wall + paper  wallpaper

black + board  blackboard

In these cases, we have two words joined together to form a new word. In such cases,
usually one of the words acts as a modifier that modifies the other word which is the
head of the compound. Can you say which word is the head and which one is the
modifier in the examples given above?

You will understand this concept if you try to express the meaning of the words. For
instance, ‘wallpaper’ is a kind of paper that is pasted on the walls and ‘blackboard’ is
a board that is black. Compound words are sometimes hyphenated, e.g., single-
minded, over-ripe.

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  Acronyms: An acronym is a word formed by taking the initial letters of a word or a
series of words. An acronym is usually pronounced as a word. Here are some
examples: NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) UNESCO (United Nations
Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization), etc.

 Blend: Another way of forming words is by putting together parts of already existing
words. This process is called blending. Some examples for blends are: brunch
(breakfast and lunch), smog (smoke and fog).

 Clipping: Sometimes a word is reduced to its part as in exam from examination and
gym from gymnasium. This process is called clipping.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 7.3

Identify the word formation processes involved in the formation of
the following words: submissiveness, motel, lab, weekend, FIFA

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

SUMMARY

In this Unit, we introduced the concept of morpheme and associated concepts such as root,
stem, affix, allomorph, etc., and touched upon the word formation processes such as
affixation (inflection and derivation), compounding, blend, etc.

Unit 8

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 Syntax

STRUCTURE

Overview
Learning Objectives

8.1 Sentence/Phrasal Ordering

8.1.1 Linear order
8.1.2 Phrase
8.1.3 Hierarchical order
8.2 Basic Division of a Sentence
8.3 Phrases: Internal Structure
8.3.1 Noun phrase (NP)
8.3.2 Verb phrase (VP)
8.3.3 Adjective phrase (AdjP)
8.3.4 Adverb phrase (AdvP)
8.3.5 Prepositional phrase (PP)

Summary

OVERVIEW

In Unit 7, we studied that we can divide words into different classes such as nouns, verbs,
adjectives and so on, based on their morphological properties. In the present Unit we will
introduce you to syntax, the branch of Linguistics that studies sentence structure, by
explaining some of the basic concepts about sentence structure like the linear and
hierarchical order of the constituents of a sentence. We will also introduce you to the notion
of phrase and show you how to identify the category of a phrase primarily through tree
diagrams. In addition, we will consider the basic division of a sentence. We will close the
Unit by discussing the structure of the basic sentence and the structures of different types of
phrases (i.e., noun phrase, verb phrase, adjective phrase, adverb phrase and propositional
phrase).

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LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After completing this Unit, you should be able to:

 explain linear and hierarchical ordering of a sentence or a phrase;

 describe phrase, single-word phrase, head of a phrase, categories of phrases, proform
and phrases with phrases with suitable examples;
 identify a phrase using a formal test of substitution;
 identify the syntactic category a phrase belongs to;
 analyze a sentence and a phrase in terms of its constituents with the help of tree
diagrams.

8.1 SENTENCE/PHRASAL ORDERING

As we said in Unit 7, language, like everything else around us, has structure. At the level of
the sentence, you will find that there are two different plains at which language is structured:
the linear and the hierarchical. Let us take a look at these two different levels of structuring
in this Section.

8.1.1 Linear order

All of us know that a sentence is built up of words. When you build a sentence, you
place one word after the other. That is to say there is an order in which the words
occur. This order is called the linear order because we can think of words as coming
one after the other as though in a line. Every sentence has a linear order. A change in
the linear order may either give you a different sentence or make the sentence ill-
formed. For instance, let us take three words Tom, Jerry, and chased. These three words
can be combined in the following six different ways:

1. *Tom Jerry chased.

2. Tom chased Jerry.
3. *Jerry Tom chased.
4. Jerry chased Tom.
5. *Chased Jerry Tom.
6. *Chased Tom Jerry.

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Out of these six different ways, you can see that only two combinations (i.e., 2 and 4) give
you well-formed sentences. The other combinations are not well-formed sentences of
English. (Notice that we use an asterisk (*) mark before the sentences that are not well-
formed. This is a convention followed in Modern Linguistics.)

Though the sentences at 2 and 4 above are well-formed, we cannot say that they are the
same. There is a significant change in the meaning between these two sentences. So we find
that linear order is very important in sentence formation. As mentioned earlier, a change in
the linear order may either make the sentence ill-formed or give you another sentence.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 8.1

(a) Translate the 6 sentences given above into your language. Do you
find that the result you get is not the same as that you got for
English? That is to say, do you think that your language allows
more freedom in the linear order of words than you find in
English?
(b) Though sentences at 2 and 4 above are well-formed in English, we
find that they differ in meaning. Does the change in the linear
order bring about a change in the meaning in your language?

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor .

8.1.2 Phrase

We learned that words occur one after the other in a sentence, and we used the term linear
order to refer to this phenomenon. However, there is more to the structure of a sentence
than the linear order. For example, take a look at the following pair of sentences:

(1) a. Tom chased Jerry.

b. The naughty cat chased the little mouse.

If you know about the popular animation cartoon serial that comes on TV, you will know that
there is a relation between Tom and the naughty cat on the one hand, and Jerry and the

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little mouse on the other. Even if you are not aware of the cartoon, your knowledge of
English will tell you that the naughty cat has the same function that Tom has and the little
mouse has the same function that Jerry has.

That is to say, instead of a single word Tom or Jerry, we have used three words. And these
three words have a relationship with each other. In other words, the words the, naughty and
cat form a unit together. Similarly the words the, little and mouse also form a unit together.
Such a unit is called a phrase.

In its simplest definition, a phrase is a group of words that functions as one unit in a
sentence. Let us see how this definition works. It is self-evident that the naughty cat is a
group of words, and not a single word. What do we mean by saying that a phrase functions as
a unit in a sentence? What we mean to say is that the words of a phrase have a tendency to
stick together. For instance, look at the following questions and their answers:

(2) Question: Who chased the little mouse?

Answer: The naughty cat.

We can only answer the question using the whole phrase the naughty cat. We cannot give an
answer like the naughty or naughty cat. This is because the naughty cat is a phrase, while
the naughty and naughty cat are not.

Substitution

One of the tests for phrasehood is substitution. That is to say, we can substitute a phrase by a
pronoun. Take a look at the following sentences:

(3) The naughty cat chased the little mouse, but he could not catch him.

Here you see that the phrases the naughty cat and the little mouse are substituted by he and
him respectively when they occur the second time.

Single word phrases

We know that a pronoun can be used in place of a noun. In the above example, you saw that
the pronoun he is used instead of a phrase and not a noun. In fact, you cannot use the
pronoun he to substitute the noun cat as *the naughty he is ungrammatical. If that is so,
then we will have to revise our understanding of a pronoun. Pronouns, we saw, are words

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that substitute phrases and not just words. But wait a minute! What we have said just now
goes against sentences like the following:

(4) Tom chased Jerry, but he could not catch him.

Here we see that he substitutes Tom and him substitutes Jerry. And words like Tom and
Jerry, as you know, are nouns. It turns out that a pronoun can indeed be used to substitute a
noun, when it is used on its own in a sentence. The best way to accommodate this fact into
our definition is to assume that nouns like Tom and Jerry are just like phrases when they
occur in a sentence. In other words, a phrase is a word or group of words that function as a
single unit in a sentence.

The head of a phrase

The head of a phrase refers to the only obligatory word in a given phrase. So, in a phrase like
the naughty cats, we can leave out the words the and naughty, but not the word cats. And
cats, we know, is a noun. A phrase gets its category label from its head. So, a phrase headed
by a noun is a noun phrase (NP). Note that when the word cats occurs in a sentence like the
one given below, it is both a noun and a noun phrase:

(5) Cats make very good pets.

What this means is that at the level of the word cats is a noun, and at the level of the
sentence, it is a noun phrase.

Categories of phrases

We have just seen that a phrase headed by a noun is a noun phrase. You know that at the
word level, we have categories like verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions (apart from
nouns). Corresponding to these word classes, we have their phrases as well. Thus, there are
verb phrases (VP), adjective phrases (AdjP), adverbial phrases, (AdvP) and prepositional
phrases (PP). These phrases can be substituted with the help of certain classes of words
called proforms.

Proform

A proform, like a pronoun, is a word that is used to substitute a phrase. Consider the
following examples:

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(6) a. Tom didn’t eat a cookie, but Jerry did so.
b. Jerry went into his hole, but Tom couldn’t go there.

In the first sentence, the proform so substitutes the phrase eat a cookie, and in the second
sentence, there is used to substitute the phrase into his hole. Can you say what category these
phrases belong to? Eat a cookie is a verb phrase, and into his hole is a prepositional phrase.
We shall explain the internal structure of these phrases in Section 8.3.

Phrases within phrases

Yet another property of phrases is that they can be part of other larger phrases. Let us take a
look at such an example below:

(7) The cats in this room are all harmless.

The underlined part the cats in this room is one phrase. We can see that there is another
phrase within this phrase. Can you guess? If you have identified in this room, then you are
right. It is, indeed, a phrase. Do you think, our test of substitution will work in the case of the
prepositional phrase, in this room? Of course, it will. Though we cannot substitute in this
room with a pronoun, we can substitute it with proforms like here or there.

(8) The cats here are all harmless.

Thus, we can say that the cats in this room is a noun phrase that has a prepositional phrase
within it. If you imagine the phrase the cats in this room to be a box, then you can say that
this box contains another box, namely the phrase in this room within it. As you can
straightaway see, what we are talking about is about the fact that there are different levels at
which phrases occur in a sentence. This gives rise to a hierarchical ordering of the
constituents of a sentence. Before we read further, let us work out Learning Activity 8.2

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 LEARNING ACTIVITY 8.2
(a) Find out whether the bracketed sequences of words in
the following sentences form a phrase or not and say how
you arrived at the answer:

1. The dog wagged [its tail].

2. I didn’t like your [new bicycle].
3. There is a mistake [in the third line of the fifth page of
the essay].
4. [The people who are standing over there] can come in.
5. She put [her things on the floor].

(b) Can you find out what category each of the phrases you
identified belongs to?

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor .

8.1.3 Hierarchical order

Having studied how the linear order plays an important role in the structure of a sentence in
Subsection 8.1.1, in what follows in Subsection 8.1.3, we will consider another important
aspect of the structure of a sentence, namely, the hierarchical order.

Labelled bracketing

In Subsection 8.1.2, we saw that phrases can contain other phrases within them just as a box
can contain other (smaller) boxes within it. Thus, the phrase the cats in this room contains a
smaller phrase in this room within it. We can represent this with the help of brackets.

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(9) [The cats [in this room]]

The bracketing in the above example conveys this: the word sequence the cat in this room is
one syntactic unit (i.e., a phrase). This phrase contains another phrase (in this room) within
it. The convention we follow is this: a bracket opens at the beginning of a phrase. Thus, the
first bracket opens before the, where the first phrase begins. The second bracket opens
before in, where the second phrase opens. Notice that both the brackets close after room,
which is where both the phrases end. This mode of representation is called the bracketing
convention. The bracketing convention is fairly simple and does not use up much space. We
can enrich the bracketing system by using labelled brackets.

That is to say, we write the categorical label of the phrase as a subscript immediately after the
bracket is opened. Since the phrase the cats in this room is a noun phrase, we can write NP
after the first bracket is opened. The phrase in this room is a prepositional phrase (PP). So
we can write PP after the second bracket is opened.

How our phrase is going to look like in the labelled bracketing convention is illustrated
below:

(10) [NP The cats [PP in this room]]

The problem with the bracketing convention is that brackets become too difficult to make
sense of especially if there are too many of them (See example 12 below).

Branching tree diagram

Here is yet another convention to represent the hierarchical structure of a phrase, namely
the branching tree diagram. In the branching tree convention, we start from an initial point,
from where the branches start. Unlike a conventional tree, a syntactic tree grows
downwards! A typical syntactic tree will look like this:

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(11) A

B C

D E

b d e

Syntactic representations like the one in (11) above are also referred to as phrase markers.
Let us try to read the information that is conveyed through the phrase marker in 11 above.

The phrase marker starts with an initial symbol. In our example here, we have chosen to
label it ‘A’. There are two branches emerging from ‘A’. A point from which a branch emerges
is referred to as a node. So, ‘A’ is the initial node. The branch on the left-hand side ends in ‘B’
and the branch on the right hand side ends in ‘C’. We can say that ‘A’ is the mother node of
‘B’ and ‘C’, who are sister nodes. ‘B’ doesn’t branch anymore, but ‘C’ branches into ‘D’ and ‘E’,
which do not branch anymore. So the non-branching nodes are ’B’, ‘D’ and ‘E’, to which we
have attached ‘b’, ‘d’ and ‘e’. (We have chosen to use lower case letters to indicate that they
are the terminal nodes. We can think of words as attaching directly to a terminal node.)

A look at the corresponding representation in the labelled bracketing system will make you
realize the advantage of the branching tree diagram:

(12) [A [B b ] [C [D d] [E e ]]]

I am sure it will take you more than a couple of minutes to figure out what 12 above means.
As you see, it is important that you learn how to represent the structure of a sentence/phrase
using branching tree diagrams. But in order to be able to do that, you need to know what the
constituents of a sentence/phrase are.

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8.2 BASIC DIVISION OF A SENTENCE

In this Section, we shall look at the constituents of a sentence. Let us take a look at a
sentence like:

(13) The naughty cat chased the little mouse.

With what you have learned so far, you might be able to identify the naughty cat and the
little mouse as two phrases. What about chased? There are three possibilities: (i) it can form
a unit with the naughty cat; (ii) it can form a unit with the little mouse or (iii) it can remain
on its own.

Let us try to represent these three possibilities using our branching trees. We shall label the
initial symbol S (for Sentence). We shall introduce some more conventions in our tree. We
shall use a triangle to represent a constituent whose internal structure we are not analyzing.
We shall use the label XP for a phrase whose category we are not sure of. (You might be
familiar with the use of the letter X as a variable in mathematics. Here, we are using X as a
variable for the name of a category.)

So a representation like 14 below will mean that the phrase XP consists of the terminal
symbols x, y and z, and that the phrase XP has some internal structure. But we have chosen
not to represent it, as it is beyond the scope of this Unit.

(14) XP

xyz

Now let us take a look at the three possible structures for a sentence:

(15) S

XP NP

The naughty cat chased the little mouse

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In the above representation, we have shown that the sentence ‘S’ consists of two phrases: the
naughty cat chased and the little mouse. We have labelled the second phrase NP. We have
labelled the first phrase XP, because we do not know the category to which it belongs. It
surely is not an NP. (Can you find a reason for not calling it an NP?)

Now let us consider the second option:

(16) S

NP V NP

The naughty cat chased the little mouse

In the above representation, we have shown that S has three constituents: two NPs and a V
(for verb).

Let us now see how the third option:

(17) S

NP XP

The naughty cat chased the little mouse

In 17 above, the sentence S has two constituents: the NP the naughty cat and the XP chased
the little mouse. The question in front of us is this: Which among the three structures above
is the correct representation?

If we have followed our discussion so far closely enough, you would have realized that we
always look for valid reasons for the choices we make. What would be a valid reason for
choosing one structure over the others in the case of the above three representations? We
have seen earlier that substitution is a tool to test whether or not a group of words forms a
constituent (i.e., a phrase).

Let us do this in the present case.

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(18) The naughty cat chased the little mouse, and so did its friends.

What do you think so did stands for in the above sentence? Your answer is right if you said it
stands for “chased the little mouse.” So our test of substitution has given us the result that
the structure in (17) is the right one. (Try to see whether you can find a reason for arguing for
the other two structures!)

If you take a look at (17) again, you will find that we have not given a label for the branch on
the right hand side. We have just called it XP, which, as we explained is just a category
variable. Now let us try to see what ‘X’ actually stands for in the present case. In other words,
what is the head of the phrase chased the little mouse? If we are able to answer this question,
we will be able find out what XP stands for, because it is the head of a phrase that gives the
category label to that phrase.
In order to do this, we can make use of the notion of substitution, which we discussed earlier
in Subsection 8.1.1. But this time, we are going to see what other category of words can occur
in the slot in which chased the little mouse can occur. Take a look at the following examples:

(19) a. The naughty cat slept.

b. *The naughty cat hunger.
c. *The naughty cat hungry.
d. *The naughty cat slowly.
e. The naughty cat with a long tail. (NOT a sentence)

In example-cluster 19 above, we have tried using a verb (slept), a noun (hunger), an adjective
(hungry), an adverb (slowly) and a preposition (with) in the place where chased the little
mouse occurred. Nothing other than the verb slept is capable of occurring in the same slot.
Though the preposition phrase with a long tail occurs after the noun cat, the result is not a
sentence.

From the above test, we must infer that only phrases headed by verbs are capable of
occurring in the slot after the NP, the little cat, to form a sentence. And, as we know, a phrase
headed by a verb is called a verb phrase (VP). So we can conclude that chased the little
mouse is a VP. We shall now include this piece of information and represent the structure of
the sentence The naughty cat chased the little mouse as shown below:

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(20) S

NP VP

The naughty cat chased the little mouse

What we have shown above is that a sentence is basically divided into a noun phrase (NP)
and a verb phrase (VP).
How would you represent the above structure using the labelled brackets? Take a look at the
example given below:

(21) [S [NP The naughty cat] [VP chased the little mouse]]

As you realize, it is difficult to make a sense of the above representation – at least not as easy
as the sense conveyed when we use the tree diagram.

Phrase structure rules

The division of a sentence into NP and VP is something very basic. As a school student, you
would have studied the division of a sentence into subject and predicate. The division of a
sentence into NP and VP is something very similar to that. There are actually rules about the
division of a sentence or a phrase. Such rules are called phrase structure rules. How the
phrase structure rule of a sentence looks like is illustrated below:

(22) S  NP – VP

The above rule is read as follows: S is rewritten as NP, VP. The expression phrase structure
rule indicates that these are rules about the structure of phrases. (If you are wondering
whether a sentence is also a phrase, the answer is “yes, it is.”) Phrase structure rules are also
called rewrite rules because you are rewriting the symbol on the left hand side of the arrow
with a string on the right hand side. In the rule in (22) above, we have the symbol ‘S’ on the
left hand side of the arrow and the string ‘NP – VP’ on the right hand side. What we have
seen in (22) above is the basic rule of sentence structure.

In Section 8.3, we will discus the internal structure of NP, VP and other phrases.

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 LEARNING ACTIVITY 8.3
Find out the basic NP – VP division in the following sentences
using both tree diagram and labelled bracket representation:
1. The exam was very easy.
2. My friends from Chennai left yesterday.

3. Inzamam and Dravid are great friends.

4. Tomorrow is a holiday.

5. The man who came here yesterday wore a red cap.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

8.3 PHRASES: INTERNAL STRUCTURE

In Subsections 8.3.1 to 8.3.5, we will discuss the internal structures of NP, VP, AdjP, AdvP
and PP.

8.3.1 Noun phrase (NP)

Earlier, we learned that NPs are headed by nouns. You may recall that we said that only the
head is an obligatory item in the noun phrase. Can other constituents occur in a noun
phrase? Let us look at some noun phrases:

(23) a. The cat

b. Your brother’s cat
c. The beautiful cat
d. Those two cats

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 e. All the cats
f. The cats in this room

In (23) above, we have listed some of the possible NP types. Can you say what constituents,
apart from the head noun, are present in them? In the cat, the is called a determiner. A
determiner is a word that introduces a noun, and determiners belong to any of the following
categories:

 Articles: a, an, the

 Demonstratives: this, that, those, those
 Possessive pronouns: my, our, your, his, her, their, its
 Interrogative words: which, what, whose
 Quantifying words: every, each,

All these classes of words are clubbed together under one category called determiner because
they share some properties. A singular noun in English (e.g., cat) cannot be used alone in a
sentence unless it has one word belonging to the above list before it. Thus, we have to say a
cat, this cat, my cat, which cat, or every cat when we use cat in a sentence. So we need a
common name for this group of words. (Note that a plural noun like cats can be used in a
sentence without a determiner.)

Another important property of words belonging to the class of determiners is that you can
only use any one of them before a noun. Thus, you cannot say *a this cat, *this my cat, *your
which cat, or *whose every cat in English. So we can say that a noun phrase can have only
one determiner in it.

If the in the cat is a determiner, what is your brother’s in your brother’s cat? We can see that
it is like a possessive, say like his in his cat. We have listed possessive pronouns among
determiners. Is your brother’s a determiner? Yes, if we go by our test of substitution as we
can substitute it with a determiner like his. We also saw that there can only be one
determiner in a noun phrase. Can we have another determiner along with your brother’s?
No, we cannot say *that your brother’s cat or your brother’s which cat. So we can conclude
that your brother’s is also a determiner. That is to say, determiners can be complex phrases.

What are the other constituents that occur in a noun phrase? In the beautiful cat, we have an
adjective. Since we have assumed that even a single word is a phrase when it occurs in a
sentence, we shall assume that a noun phrase can have an Adjective Phrase. We shall look at
the structure of the adjective phrase in Subsection 8.3.3.

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Words like all and two in all the cats and the two cats are quantifying words. But you may
have noticed that there is a difference in the position in which they can occur. For instance,
all can occur before the determiner the, but not after it, while two can occur after the
determiner, but not before it. The word that occurs before a determiner is called pre-
determiner (Predet) and the word that occurs after the determiner post-determiner
(Postdet). Words like all, both, half and such can occur as predet. Quantifying words like
many and several; cardinal numbers like one and two; and ordinals like first, second, next
and last can occur as postdet.

An important point to remember is that terms like pre- and post-determiner are used only
when there is a determiner. Some of the pre- and post- determiners can introduce the noun
(even when there is no other determiner:

(24) All cats

Such cats
Many cats

In such cases, we treat words like all, such and many as determiner.

Yet another constituent that can occur in the NP is the prepositional phrase. You may recall
the example the cats in this room, where in this room is a prepositional phrase. We shall
look at the structure of the prepositional phrases in Subsection 8.3.5.

Let us now represent the structure of some of the noun phrases that we saw in (23) above
with the help of tree diagrams:

(25) a. the cat

NP

Det N

the cat

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b. your brother’s cat
NP

Det N

Your brother’s cat

c. the beautiful cat

NP

Det AdjP N

the beautiful cat

d. the two cats

NP

Det Postdet N

the two cats

e. all the cats

NP

Predet Det N

all the cats

f. the cats in this room

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 NP

Det N PP

the cats in this room

Note that in (25b) above, we have not shown the internal structure of the complex
determiner your brother’s. Another point is that we have shown the determiner, i.e., the
head noun and the PP as branching directly from the NP node. This is actually a
simplification. If you happen to do an advanced course in linguistics, you will learn that there
are categories that are smaller than the phrase, but larger than the word.

A question you might ask is about the structure of a phrase that contains just a word. A case
in point is the structure of the NP cats in a sentence like cats are very secretive. We can
draw a tree which does not branch as under:

(26) NP

cats

We have seen that a noun phrase can have a pre-determiner, determiner, post-determiner,
adjective phrase, noun and a prepositional phrase. But among these constituents, only the
noun is obligatory. We can represent this piece of information in a phrase structure rule. We
shall enclose all the optional elements in a noun phrase in brackets:

(27) NP  (Predet) – (Det) – (Postdet) – (AdjP) – N – (PP)

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 LEARNING ACTIVITY 8.4
Draw tree diagrams to represent the structure of the following NPs:
1. Those new books

2. Trees in the forest

3. My first essay

4. Both the boys

5. All the new boys in the class

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

8.3.2 Verb phrase (VP)

The verb phrase is the most complex type of phrase in English because it exhibits the widest
variety in terms of the constituents it can have. We shall introduce you to only a small range
of the possible VP types in English.

You might probably have heard that verbs are classified into intransitive and transitive. A
transitive verb has to be followed by an object, while an intransitive verb cannot take an
object. For example, arrive is an intransitive verb while receive is a transitive verb as shown
by the examples below:

(28) a. The guests arrived.

b. We received the guests.

The guests is the object of receive, while arrive has no object. We can represent the structure
of these two VPs as follows:

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(29) a. arrive
VP

arrived

b. received the guests

VP

V NP

Det N

received the guests

We can formulate the following phrase structure rules for these two verb phrases:

(30) a. VP  V
b. VP  V – NP

Here are some more examples with different types of verb phrases:

(31) a. She became angry.

b. She is in the room.
c. They gave her a prize.
d. She kept the book on the table.
e. We consider her intelligent.
f. She said she is coming.

Let us see how the tree diagrams of the VPs in the above set of sentences will look like:

(32) a. became angry

VP

V AdjP

became angry

b. is in the room

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 VP

V PP

is in the room

c. gave her a prize

VP

V NP NP

N Det N

gave her a prize

d. kept the book on the table

VP
V NP PP
Det N
kept the book on the table

e. consider her intelligent

VP

V NP AdjP
N

consider her intelligent

f. said she is coming

VP

V S

said she is coming

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If we look at the examples given above, you will realize that we have left out quite a lot of
types of verb phrases. We also do not intend to formulate phrase structure rules for all the
verbs phrases that we have introduced. As we said right at the beginning, in this Course we
only intend to initiate you into analyzing sentences. You will have to do an advanced course
in Linguistics to learn more about the structure of sentences.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 8.5

Draw tree diagrams to represent the structure of the following VPs:
1. is responsible
2. spoke a few words
3. showed me his photos
4. put the book on the table
5. thought I was rich

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

8.3.3 Adjective phrase (AdjP)

The AdjP is headed by an adjective. Apart from the adjective, an AdjP can contain an
intensifier as in very warm. Let us assign the following structure to an AdjP:

(33) AdjP

Intens. Adj

very warm

An AdjP can be a part of the NP, in which case, it follows the post-determiner. Unlike words
belonging to the determiner class, there can be any number of adjective phrases in an NP. As

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in a nice warm sunny day, where there are three adjective phrases. If there is no other
constituent within an AdjP, we can represent its structure using non-branching nodes as
follows:

(34) AdjP

Adj

warm

We can formulate the phrase structure rule for the adjective phrase as follows:

(35) AdjP  (Intens.) – Adj

8.3.4 Adverb phrase (AdvP)

An Adverbial phrase is headed by an adverb. It may sometimes contain an intensifier as in

very quietly. Its structure is very much similar to that of the Adjective Phrase. Consider the
following in this context:

(36) AdvP

Intens. Adj

very quietly

(37) AdvP

Adv

quietly
We can formulate the phrase structure rule for the adverb phrase as follows:

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(38) AdvP  (Intens.) – Adv

8.3.5 Prepositional phrase (PP)

A PP consists of a preposition and an NP. So a prepositional phrase like in this room has the
following structure:

(39) PP

P NP

Det N

in the room

We can formulate the phrase structure rule for the preposition phrase as follows:

(40) PP  P – NP

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 LEARNING ACTIVITY 8.6
Draw tree diagrams to represent the structure of the
following sentences:
1. Senthil ate a banana.

2. They became very angry.

3. She bought me an ice cream.

4. All the guests left.

5. They knew I was afraid.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

SUMMARY

In this Unit, we explained that a sentence has a linear and a hierarchical structure and said
that the phrase is the basic unit of a sentence. We then introduced the concept of phrase and
in that context explained substitution as a test for phrasehood. We also explained that each
phrase consists of a single word or a group of words and that each has a word that is the head
of that phrase. We also said that the head of the phrase determines the category to which the
phrase belongs. We then illustrated the means of labelled bracketing and branching tree
diagram to capture the hierarchical structure of a sentence and explained that the former is a
cumbersome process. We also took up the basic division of an English sentence, i.e., noun
phrase and verb phrase. At the end, we looked into the internal structures of NP, VP, AdjP,
AdvP and PP.

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Unit 9
Semantics and Pragmatics

STRUCTURE

Overview
Learning Objectives

9.1 Semantics: Properties of Meaning

9.1.1 Levels of meaning
9.1.2 Anomaly, redundancy, contradiction and
synonymy
9.1.3 Ambiguity
9.1.4 Presupposition
9.1.5 Entailment
9.2 Pragmatics
9.2.1 Conventional implicature
9.2.2 Conversational implicature

Summary

OVERVIEW

We introduced you to the concept of the meaning of a word in Unit 7. In the present Unit,
Unit 8, we introduce you to certain concepts related to the meaning of units larger than the
word, i.e., the two levels of meaning other than at the level of word, namely, semantics (the
branch that deals with sentence meaning) and pragmatics (the branch that deals with
speaker meaning). We will then look at certain properties relating to meaning and their
relationships. In this context, we will explain such concepts as anomaly, redundancy,
contradiction, synonymy, ambiguity, presupposition and entailment. In closing the Unit, we
will discuss pragmatics with particular reference to conventional and conversational
implicatures and touch upon speech act theory.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES

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After completing this Unit, you should be able to:
 explain semantics and pragmatics as they pertain to the discipline of Linguistics;
 discuss the properties of meaning (meaningfulness, anomaly, redundancy,
contradiction, synonymy, ambiguity, presupposition and entailment);
 explain pragmatics with reference to conventional and conversational implicatures and
describe speech act theory.

9.1 SEMANTICS: PROPRERTIES OF MEANING

Before we look into the properties relating to meaning, let us introduce the different levels of
meaning and explain the notions of semantics and pragmatics.

9.1.1 Levels of meaning

Meaning can be structured at the following three levels:

i) Word meaning
ii) Sentence meaning (semantics)
iii) Speaker meaning (pragmatics)

We have already discussed the meaning of words in Unit 8. Our focus in the present Unit,
therefore, is to look at the two other levels at which we can study meaning, namely, the
meaning of a sentence and the meaning intended by the speaker of a sentence.

Semantics/Sentence meaning

The branch of linguistics that studies meaning is called semantics. In current usage, the term
semantics is often used to denote the branch of semantics that deals with the meaning of
sentence. The study of word meaning comes under lexical semantics (see Unit 8). Following
this trend, we have chosen to look at questions related to the meaning of the sentence in this
Unit.
At the outset, note that the study of the meaning of a sentence does not have a long history.
Most of the earlier approaches to the study of meaning concentrated on the meaning of the
word. The fact that words have meaning is fairly obvious. If we don’t know the meaning of a
word, we look it up in a dictionary. But, what do we do if we don’t know the meaning of a
sentence? The question itself might strike you as strange. If you don’t understand the

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meaning of a sentence, you might think it is because you do not understand the meaning of
some of the words. Take a look at the following sentence:

(1) It is important to recognize that many sophismata involve syncategorematic terms

that are responsible for their odd, ambiguous or puzzling character.

How many of you understood the above sentence? Many of you may not have made a
complete sense of it. For instance, you might have found words like sophismata and
syncategorematic difficult to understand. So the difficulty in understanding the sentence is
due to the difficulty in understanding the meaning of certain words. Once you understand
the meaning of these words, you will be able to understand the meaning of the sentence as
well. Consider the following question in this context: Is there something more to the
meaning of a sentence than the meaning of its words?

Pragmatics/Speaker meaning

The branch of linguistics that concerns itself more with speaker meaning than the actual
meaning of the sentence is called pragmatics. When we look at sentence meaning alone, the
context of use is not usually taken into consideration. But when we consider speaker
meaning, the notion of context becomes very important. We can see that context plays an
important role in conveying meaning. We may understand the same sentence as meaning
different things in different contexts.

For example, if you say, “it is getting late” when you are visiting your friend, it might indicate
that you want to leave. But if you say the same thing while you are on your way to attend a
function, it might mean that you have to hurry. In Section 9.3, we shall look at the factors
relating to the context that affect the meaning of what we say.

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 LEARNING ACTIVITY 9.1
Outline briefly what is meant by word meaning, sentence meaning
and speaker meaning with relevant examples.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

Having given you a brief overview of the levels of meaning, let us now consider the properties
relating to meaning.

Properties relating to meaning

The properties relating to meaning include the following:

 Meaningfulness
 Semantic anomaly
 Redundancy of meaning
 Contradiction
 Synonymy
 Ambiguity
 Presupposition
 Entailment
Let us explain these properties next.

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9.1.2 Anomaly, redundancy, contradiction and synonymy

One of the very first facts that we can say about a sentence is whether it is meaningful or not.
Most of us find not many meaningless sentences in our day-to-day lives. But, when you study
language, you sometimes come across meaningless sentences under such categories as the
following:

 Semantic anomaly: When a sentence doesn’t make sense, we see that it is

semantically anomalous. Consider the sentence given below:

(2) Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

Were you able to make sense of the above sentence? This is a famous sentence coined by
the famous Linguist, Noam Chomsky to prove that a sentence can be perfectly
grammatical but utterly nonsensical. So the problem with the sentence in (2) is that it is
semantically anomalous, in spite of being grammatically well-formed.

 Redundancy: Look at the following sentence:

(3) The absentees are not present.

Here, the subject absentees makes it clear that we are talking about a group of people
who are not present. The predicate are not present does not add anything to the
meaning, and, hence, it is redundant.

 Contradiction: When there is an opposition of meaning in a sentence, we say that the

sentence is a contradiction an illustration of which is given below:

(4) All those who are absent are present.

Here the subject all those who are absent indicates that we are talking about people who
are not present. But the predicate says that they are present. This leads to a
contradiction.

 Synonymy: The sameness of meaning of two linguistic expressions is called synonymy.

We obtain synonymy in the case of words as well as sentences. For example, compare the
following sentences:

(5) a. The President invited the Chief Ministers.

b. The Chief Ministers were invited by the President.

If we restrict ourselves to the study of meaning at the sentence level, we can say that the
above two sentences are synonymous. However, when it comes to using the above

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 sentences in contexts, we can see that they cannot be used interchangeably in all contexts.
For instance, if someone asked you “What did the President do?” You would answer it
with (5a) rather than (5b). Please bear in mind that a sentence in passive voice is not
always synonymous with its active voice counterpart.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 9.2

Identify the property of meaning (anomaly, redundancy, or contradiction) exhibited by the
following sentences:
1. My new toothbrush ran away.
2. My new toothbrush is new.
3. My new toothbrush is old.

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

9.1.3 Ambiguity

Just as two sentences can have the same meaning, sometimes you will find that a sentence
lends itself to more than one interpretation. This multiplicity of meaning is referred to as
ambiguity. Take a look at the following example:

(6) The chicken is ready to eat.

Can you point out the ambiguity in the above sentence? In one sense, the chicken is going to
have the fortunate experience of having food served to it, and, in the other sense, the
unfortunate chicken is going to be served as food for someone. We say that the above
sentence is ambiguous because we can describe both the scenarios (that of the chicken going
to eat and that of the chicken going to be eaten) using the above sentence.

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One important point that you should note is that ambiguity is different from vagueness in
meaning. When we use language, we are not always precise in giving all the relevant
information because the communicative situation doesn’t demand that kind of accuracy.
Sometimes the details might be totally irrelevant, some other times the context might supply
some of the details that we leave out. And, at yet another time, we might not even know all
the details.

Now, consider the following sentence:

(7) Selvin talked to his brother.

The above sentence does not precisely express whether Selvin talked to his elder brother or
younger brother. This, however, does not mean that the English word brother is ambiguous;
it is just vague as to its meaning. (Note that in most Indian languages, there are distinct
words for elder brother and younger brother.)

If you come across an ambiguous sentence, you can ask the speaker of the sentence to resolve
the ambiguity. For instance, if somebody makes an announcement like the sentence in (6)
above about the chicken being ready to eat, you can ask the speaker whether she means that
you can eat the chicken or that you should feed the chicken. The speaker will be able to give
you a precise answer.

In the case of a sentence that is vague, you cannot be sure that the speaker will be able to
provide more information. So, if you ask the speaker of (7) above whether Selvin talked to his
younger or elder brother, you cannot be sure that she will be able to give you a precise
answer. It is very well possible that you may get a reply like “I don’t know.” You are not likely
get an answer like “I don’t know” from the speaker of (6).

Types of ambiguity

Now, let us look at certain factors that give rise to ambiguity. A sentence may become
ambiguous because of certain words or phrases. If someone says:

(8) We sat near the bank.

The person could be referring to either the bank of a river or a financial institution.
(However, the person who says this sentence will know exactly what she means. You don’t
expect an answer like “I don’t know” as in the case of sentences that are vague in their
meaning.) The ambiguity in this case is the result of the multiple meaning of the word bank.

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The ambiguity caused by words is called lexical ambiguity. So we can say that the example
in (8) above is a case of lexical ambiguity.

Yet another type of ambiguity is structural ambiguity. Structural ambiguity is caused when a
particular sentence can be interpreted in two different ways depending on the structure.
Take a look at the following sentence:

(9) We saw the man with binoculars.

Who had the binoculars – the man or the speakers? Some of you might say “the man” while
some of you might say “the speakers.” Actually, the sentence can be interpreted in both ways.

This kind of ambiguity is not the result of the meaning of any particular word or phrase. This
ambiguity arises because we can either understand the phrase with binoculars as modifying
the object NP the man, or as modifying the VP saw the man. In the former case, the man had
the binoculars and, in the latter case, the seeing was made possible with the help of
binoculars, which means that the speakers had the binoculars. We can assign two different
structures to the sentence in question in order to explain how both these interpretations are
possible. The tree diagram of Example (9) above will look as below:

(10) S

NP VP

N V NP

Det N PP

P NP
N
We saw the man with binoculars

In the above representation, the PP with binoculars is part of the NP the man with
binoculars. So we get the reading in which it modifies the noun man. Another argument to
prove that the man with binoculars is one constituent in the above reading is the fact that
you can answer a question like “Who did you see?” by saying “the man with the binoculars.”

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If you give such an answer, the only reading possible is that the man had the binoculars. Let
us see how the other structure looks like:

(11) S

NP VP

N VP PP

V NP P NP

Det N N
We saw the man with binoculars

Here, we see that the PP with binoculars is attached to the VP saw the man, and this
indicates that it modifies the VP. Note that with binoculars is not related to the man in terms
of phrase structure, the answer to the question “Who did you see?” will be just “the man.”

Thus, we see that structural ambiguity can be explained using syntax. Structural ambiguity is
obtained also in phrases. Take the phrase young men and women. Here you can understand
young either as just modifying men or as modifying both men and women. In the former
case, it means men who are young and women of any age, and in the latter case, it means
men who are young and women who are young. This ambiguity can be explained in terms
two different structures.

(12)

NP

AdjP NP

Adj NP NP

N N

young men and women

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 (13) NP

NP NP

AdjP N N
Adj
young men and women

In the structure 0, the adjective modifies both men and women. In the structure in 0 young
modifies only men. However, not all ambiguities can be explained in terms of structure.
Consider our sentence in (6) above – repeated below for ready reference:

The chicken is ready to eat.

In this situation, we cannot give two structural representations to explain the ambiguity. The
ambiguity is due to the fact that in one sense we understand the chicken as the subject of eat
(in which case the chicken is going to eat) and in the other as the object of eat (in which case
the chicken is going to be eaten). This ambiguity can only be explained if we enrich our
syntactic representation, but that is beyond our scope. Suffice it to introduce you to another
famous sentence whose ambiguity cannot be explained with the kind of structural
representation that we have:

(14) Flying planes can be dangerous.

Can you find out the two meanings? In one meaning, it is dangerous to fly planes; in the
other, planes that fly are dangerous. These two readings are clearly brought out in the
following pair:

(15) a. Flying planes is dangerous.

b. Flying planes are dangerous.

The first sentence can only be understood as talking about the act of flying, while the second
sentence means that planes which fly are dangerous.

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 LEARNING ACTIVITY 9.3
Explain the ambiguity in the following phrases/sentences
by paraphrasing the different meanings:
1. A South Indian music teacher.
2. They hit the man with a cane.
3. We can fish.
4. I hate annoying relatives.
5. Teaching machines can be tedious.
Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

9.1.4 Presupposition

Suppose I tell you “I haven’t stopped exercising,” you will assume that I have been exercising.
How did you come to that conclusion? I didn’t tell you that I have been exercising. But when
I said I didn’t stop, you just took it to mean that I am still exercising. In other words, the fact
that I have been exercising is the background information or belief that is conveyed by the
sentence “I haven’t stopped exercising.” The set of background beliefs that a sentence has is
called its presupposition. Each sentence that we utter presupposes lots of other sentences.
We are able to communicate smoothly with others because they also understand the
presuppositions. The presuppositions of a sentence are only assumed to be true; they needn’t
be true. So when I say “I didn’t stop exercising”, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I have been
exercising.

Are you not convinced of this? Imagine the following scenario: You are falsely implicated in a
crime of stealing bicycles. The clever police officer asks you “Have you stopped stealing

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bicycles?” How will you answer? If you say “Yes,” you are admitting that you have indeed
done the crime, which gives the officer ample reason to put you in prison. If you say “No,” it
means that you still commit the crime. How can you get around this problem? One way is to
say, “I haven’t stopped stealing bicycles because I never stole them in the first place.” (You
might get out of the police station unhurt if the police officer lets you complete the sentence!)

When you say you didn’t stop stealing bicycles because you never stole them, you are not
only giving a negative answer to the question that has been asked, you are also negating the
presupposition of the question. That is to say, a question like “Have you stopped stealing
bicycles?” presupposes that the addressee has been stealing bicycles. The fact that you can
negate the presupposition shows that what is presupposed is not necessarily true.

Presupposition is a relation not just between two sentences. The presupposition of a

sentence remains with it even if the sentence is negated. The affirmative sentence (16a) a and
the negative sentence (16b) below presuppose (16c):

(16) a. My sister is coming tomorrow.

b. My sister is not coming tomorrow.
c. I have a sister.

The presupposition of a statement remains when we turn the statement into a question. So
the question “Is my sister coming tomorrow?” also presupposes that I have a sister.

9.1.5 Entailment

Another kind of meaning relationship between sentences is that of entailment. If we find a

relationship between two sentences in such a way that the truth of one makes it impossible
for the other to be false, we say that the first sentence entails the other. Consider the
following pair of sentences:

(17) a. Sunathi stopped exercising.

b. Sunathi was exercising.

For anyone to stop doing something, that person has to be doing it before. (Note that the
negative of this does not hold. In other words, for you not to stop doing something, you need
not have been doing it!) So, how is entailment different from presupposition?

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Differences between presupposition and entailment

Both presupposition and entailment are properties relating to the truth of sentences.
However, the properties of entailment are different from that of presupposition. Let us now
look at some differences between them.

If a sentence presupposes another sentence, it does not necessarily follow that the
presupposed sentence is true; it is just assumed to be true. In example (16) above, we found
that the sentence My sister is not coming tomorrow presupposes that “I have a sister.” But if
you don’t have a sister (which means that if the presupposition is not true), you can say My
sister is not coming tomorrow because I don’t have a sister. Here you are negating the
presupposition of a sentence, and the sentence makes perfect sense.

If you concede the truth of a sentence and negate the truth of the entailed sentence, it leads
to a contradiction. See the following example:

(18) #Sunathi stopped exercising, but she was not exercising.

Here we have a contradiction. If Sunathi stopped exercising, then it can’t be true that she was
not exercising. (We have indicated the contradiction by prefixing the crosshatch ‘#’ before
the sentence.) But in the case of presupposition, there is no such contradiction as we saw
above.

We showed that the presupposition of a sentence does not change when it is negated. As we
found in example (16) above, both the positive and negative sentences entail that “I have a
sister.” But an affirmative sentence and negative sentence do not have the same entailment
property. For instance, we found that Sumathi stopped exercising entails that she was
exercising. But the sentence Sumathi didn’t stop exercising does not entail that she was
exercising.

The fact that presupposition and entailment can exist, independent of each other, proves it
beyond doubt that they are different. You can have a relationship of entailment between two
sentences without having a relationship of presupposition between them. Similarly, you may
find that a sentence presupposes another sentence, but does not entail. There are also cases
where you can see that both or neither the relationships hold between two given sentences.
Let us revisit the following set of sentences again:

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(16) a. My sister is coming tomorrow.
b. My sister is not coming tomorrow.
c. I have a sister.

We said that both (16a) and (16b) presuppose (16c). What about entailment? Do they also
entail (16c)? Example (16a) has to entail (16c) because you cannot say “my sister is coming
tomorrow, but I have no sister.” If you said so, it will lead to contradiction. The sentence at
(16b), on the other hand, does not entail (16c) because it is possible to say “my sister is not
coming tomorrow, because I have no sister.” So we can say that while (16a) both entails and
presupposes (16c), (16b) only presupposes, but does not entail (16c).

Where do we find entailment without presupposition?

(19) a. Muthu slept after he finished his work.

b. Muthu slept.

It is fairly easy to see that the first sentence entails the second one. If Muthu slept after he
finished his work, it has to be indeed true that he slept. But does the first sentence also
presuppose the second one? As we have explained, to see whether there is presupposition,
we will have to consider also the negation of a sentence. Consider the following pair:

(20) a. Muthu did not sleep after he finished his work.

b. Muthu slept.
Is there a presupposition relationship between the first and the second sentences? The
answer should be obvious. The fact that Muthu slept cannot be background information of
the sentence “Muthu did not sleep.” Thus, we see that entailment and presupposition are
indeed two different phenomena.

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 LEARNING ACTIVITY 9.4
In the following pairs of sentences, say whether the first sentence
entails, presupposes, both entails and presupposes, or neither
entails nor presupposes the second, and say how you arrived at
the answer:
1. a. Stella fell down from the terrace.
b. Stella was badly injured.
2. a. They killed the snake.
b. The snake died.
3. a. When did the accused reach the scene of the crime?
b. The accused reached the scene of the crime.
4. a. I ate all the cookies in the jar.
b. There were some cookies in the jar.
Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

9.2 PRAGMATICS

When sentences are used in contexts, we understand much more than their literal meaning.
In order to understand this, we have to look beyond the meaning of a sentence. For instance,
we may have to look at the context in which the sentence is used. As we saw earlier in the
Unit, a sentence like “it is getting late” can be understood to have different meanings in
different contexts because the speaker may be implying different things, according to the
context in which it is used.

The term implicature is used to denote the implied meanings of a sentence. This is a term
used by the philosopher, Grice. Grice, mainly talks about two types of implicatures,
conventional implicature and conversational implicature. Let us touch upon both these
types.

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9.2.1 Conventional implicature

Conventional implicature is the meaning implied because of the “conventional meaning of

the words used.” An example will make this clear:

(21) a. Guna is a politician and he is very honest.

b. Guna is a politician, but he is very honest.

Both the above sentences tell you two facts about Guna: one, he is a politician and two, he is
very honest. But, do both these sentences mean the same? Sentence (b) says something more
than the Sentence (a). Sentence (b) implies that politicians are not usually very honest. How
did you get this meaning? This is the implied meaning that the conventional meaning of but
brings about. The use of and does not have any such implied meaning.

The use of and, in certain contexts, gives rise to other kinds of implications. Let us consider
an example:

(22) She fell down and she broke her arm.

If I ask you how she broke her arm, I am sure most of you would say, “Because she fell
down.” How do you know that? If you look at the sentence again, you will realise that there is
no explicit cause - effect connection made between her falling down and her breaking her
arm in the sentence. How did you then make this connection? You were reading the implied
meaning of the sentence, and not just the literal meaning.

Literally, and does not have anything to do with cause - effect. In our example (21) above
about Guna being a politician and being honest, I am sure none of you thought that the
reason for his honesty is that he is a politician. You didn’t make a cause - effect relationship
in that case because you don’t see any relationship between the fact that somebody is honest
and the fact that that person is a politician. (If at all, you find a relationship, it is an ‘in spite
of’ relationship and not a cause - effect relationship, as shown in the discussion following
Sentence (21b).

I hope you must be convinced by now that the cause - effect relationship that you attributed
in example (22) is part of the implication rather than the literal meaning of and. In fact, you
might be surprised to learn that Sentence (22) above does not even explicitly say which event
happened first.

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That is to say, it is not mentioned, “she fell down and then she broke her arm.” (Note that
even when this temporal relation is made explicit, the cause - effect relationship does not
follow from it. She could have fallen in the morning and then broken her arm in the evening
because somebody hit her!) If you think that since the event of falling down is mentioned
first and the event of breaking arm is only mentioned after that, it logically follows that the
first event should have happened before the second one, I would like you to take a look at the
following sentence:

(23) We played cricket in summer and enjoyed every bit of it.

Here, two events are described one after the other: the first one is that of playing cricket and
the other one that of the speakers’ enjoying it. Do you think that there is a temporal
sequencing in the above case? That is to say, does it make sense to say that the speakers
played cricket and then they enjoyed it? I am sure you will agree with me, if I say that there is
no temporal sequencing here. The enjoyment comes along with the playing. So, even though
the events are described one after the other, they happen almost simultaneously.

Thus, we have proved that the temporal sequencing of events is also a matter of implication
rather than the literal meaning of and.

9.2.2 Conversational implicature

While conventional implicatures are part of the conventional meaning of a word or a phrase,
conversational implicatures are derived from the maxims of conversation that people
generally seem to respect when they are engaged in an act of communication. According to
Grice, people are able to communicate with each other because they obey the cooperative
principle, which is the most important maxim of conversation.

Grice observed that when people are engaged in conversations with each other, they speak in
a manner in which it helps the purpose of conversation to be fulfilled. Violating the
cooperative principle leads to a breakdown in the conversation. The cooperative principle
states that you should make your conversational contribution in such a way that fits with the
requirement, accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.
Your contribution should also be appropriate to the stage at which it occurs. The
conversation principle is, of course, only descriptive in nature. It is not meant to be a
prescriptive principle.

The cooperative principle is broken down to the following four maxims:

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 i) Maxim of quality: Maxim of quality has to do with quality of the information
conveyed in what you say. It states that you should not say what you believe to be
false. For meaningful conversation to take place, you should tell the truth when you
speak, and also assume that what the other person says is true.

ii) Maxim of quantity: Maxim of quantity has to do with the quantity of information
conveyed in your conversation. It states that you should make your contribution to
the conversation as informative as is required for the current purpose, but not more
informative than is required.

iii) Maxim of relation: Maxim of relation has to do with the relevance of the
information conveyed in your conversation. It states that what you say should be
relevant to the context.

iv) Maxim of manner: Maxim of manner has to do with the clarity in the presentation
of information. Generally, one tries to avoid obscurity and ambiguity. Similarly, we
generally try to avoid roundabout ways of presenting our ideas, and try to present
them in as much orderly manner as possible.

Grice also said that people follow a principle like “Be Polite” when they talk to each other.

It should be remembered that the maxims of conversations are general principles that we
assume people follow when they speak. Violating a principle of conversation might result in a
breakdown of conversation, or sometimes might give rise to a hilarious situation. But one
might also deliberately violate a maxim in order convey some implied meaning (i.e.,
implicature).

Consider the following exchange in this context:

(24) Speaker 1: “Is Japan in Europe?”

Speaker 2: “Yes, and India is in Africa.”

Here, the second speaker says something that is obviously false (flouting the maxim of
quality) in order to imply that what the first speaker said was false. However, such
implicatures arise only when the speaker makes it obvious that she is violating a
conversational maxim. If you wilfully give false information, there will be no implicature in

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that. For instance, if I tell you that I am in Chennai at the moment of writing this (when I am
actually not), I violate the maxim of quality, but I do not convey any implied meaning.

LEARNING ACTIVITY 9.5

1. Try to explain conventional and conversational
implicature in your own words.
2. Can you think of examples where maxims of conversation
are violated?

Note:
a) Write your answer in the space given below.
b) Check the answer with your academic counsellor.

SUMMARY

In this Unit, we introduced you to certain concepts related to the meaning of units larger
than the word, i.e., the two levels of meaning other than at the level of word, namely,
semantics (the branch that deals with sentence meaning) and pragmatics (the branch that
deals with speaker meaning). We then looked at certain properties relating to meaning and
their relationships. In that context, we explained such concepts as anomaly, redundancy,
contradiction, synonymy, ambiguity, presupposition and entailment. We closed the Unit by
discussing pragmatics with particular reference to conventional and conversational
implicatures.

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