Dr Robert Kiełtyka - strona 2

SAMUEL JOHNSON AND HIS DICTIONARIES I. The origins of lexicography are relatively recent. A. The increases in vocabulary during the 16 and 17c provoked the rise of handbooks of words. B. The early dictionaries offered lists of so-called “hard words: 1) Bullokar's Expositor (1616): words from logic,...

THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN ENGLISH Where does American English begin? Early settlements were points of linguistic entry: New England: 1. Boston, Massachusetts, Bay Colony (early 17c) 2. New London (early 18c) Middle Atlantic 1. New York (founded as New Amsterdam; seized by the English from the Du...

The Beginnings of English language English emerges out of a mix of Germanic languages and dialects in the period roughly around the 6th and 7th centuries. Our earliest recorded documents in the British Isles are from the late 7th and early 8th...

The loss of Inflections The term that describes the falling together of the old system of case endings is syncretism During the period from about 1000 to 1200, the following things were happening to English: Noun case endings were simplified o...

THE SCOPE OF MODERN ENGLISH: CHANGES IN SYNTAX AND GRAMMAR The shape and texture of our speech can be found in various developments of the 16 and 17c. One such example is the verb “do”. In ModE “do” has 4 uses dating from this period: 1. As a full verb, meaning to perform an action - I DID this. It...

Two broad periods of word-borrowing in Old English: Continental: These are words borrowed before OE split off from the parent Germanic languages during the first centuries A.D. They were words from the old Roman Latin vocabulary, e.g., architectural and civic phenomena. For example, the word str...

SEMANTICS AND SEMANTIC CHANGE Basic concepts -word - the smallest (unlike phrase) significant (unlike phoneme) unit of a given language that is internally stable (unlike sentence) and potentially mobile (unlike morpheme). -It is usually separated by spaces in writing and by pauses in speech (or a...

SEMANTICS -Semantics is generally defined as the science of meaning (from GK. Semantikos “significant”) -Semantics was primarily viewed as the science of word meaning and according to Breal semantics was not primarily concerned with the historical change of meaning. -Before the advent of linguist...

SENSE AND REFERENCE Words other than proper names both have a meaning and can be used to refer to objects, and so can larger units such as phrases and sentences. The German philosopher Bottlob Frege proposed that the meaning of and expression be called sense (Sinn), and if the expression refers to...

Words can also undergo specialization, when there is a narrowing of meaning. In the 1611 Bible (Authorized version or King James Bible) we are told that God `formed every beast of the field, and every foule of the aire! (Genesis) There the word foule (modern spelling fowl) means `bird'. Today, we...