Конспект лекций по дисциплине «История языка (англ.)» для студентов специальности «Иностранная филология»

The transition of the English language from a synthetic to an analytical grammatical type has given rise to many theories.

In the 19^th century the simplification of English morphology was attributed to the effect of phonetic changes as weakening and loss of unaccented final syllables caused by the Germanic word stress. The stress was fixed on the first syllable or on the root syllable, the final endings were reduced and dropped. As the result many forms fell together and it became difficult to distinguish between cases, genders, numbers and persons. That is why new means began to develop for showing grammatical relations and for connecting words in a sentence (preposition, fixed word order). This theory is called “phonetic”. But this theory has many disadvantages: 1^st it disregards grammatical trends of evolution and the development of the language at different levels; 2^nd the prepositional phrases were used a long time before the inflections had been dropped and the position of words in the sentence in relation to other words was not free.

The second popular theory called “functional” attributed the loss of inflectional endings and the growth of analytical means to functional causes: the endings lost their grammatical role and were dropped as unnecessary as other means began to fulfill their functions. The grammatical inflections of nouns became unnecessary after their functions were taken over by prepositions; the endings of adjectives for showing gender became meaningless when the Category of Gender in nouns had been lost, etc. These theories take no account of the specific conditions of the development of English at different historical periods.

Many scholars ascribe the simplification of the English morphology and the general transformation of the grammatical type to contacts with other languages. The age of great grammatical changes (between the 10^th- 13^th c) was the time of Scandinavian settlement and the Norman conquest (1066). In the areas of Scandinavian settlement OE and Old Scandinavian intermixed. They had a large common vocabulary with differences in pronunciation and inflectional endings. The dialects show the high degree of leveling and simplification. But this theory leaves out of consideration the phonetic and syntactic development, which began a long time before the Scandinavian invasions.

Another theory ascribes the simplification of the noun and adjective morphology to the mixture of English with Old French. According to this view the French language could play a more important role in the grammatical changes than Old Scandinavian as it had a greater effect on the development of English as a whole. Mixture with Old French could favour the tendency to greater analytical forms because at that time French had a more analytical grammatical structure than English. This theory is not confirmed by the chronology of the changes as in the 13^th – 14^th c. English had already lost most of its inflections and had acquired many of its analytical features.

The so-called “theory of progress” advanced by Jespersen. He protested against the interpretation of the history of all IE languages as grammatical degeneration. He presented the history of English as the only way to progress and a superior kind of language. An ideal grammatical structure of English had reached a more advanced stage than other languages which testifies to a superior level of thinking of English-speaking nations.

We can say that all the views (except the theory of progress) are correct as each factor played a certain role in grammatical changes.

The simplification of the nominal paradigms and the replacement of synthetic means by analytical ones took place mainly in the Early ME period. In OE the nominal system was inconsistent and contradictory: there was little regularity in form-building.

The phonetic reduction of final unaccented syllables, originally caused by the Germanic word stress, made the grammatical endings less distinct, in Early ME many inflections were weakened and some of them were lost. The main trend in the morphological system was to preserve formal markers for the most essential grammatical distinctions (the distinction of number in nouns). The lexical and syntactic levels furnished diverse means, which could make the meanings and the use of forms more precise- such as prepositions which accompanied the forms of cases and different types of word order.

The linguistic situation in Early ME speeded up the grammatical changes. The increased dialectal divergence of the feudal age, the 2 foreign influences: Scandinavian and the French and the break of the written tradition made for a wider use of variation, greater grammatical instability and more intensive realization of internal tendencies. New syntactic patterns were selected and adopted by the language system and by the literary dialect – the dialect of London. The selection was determined by the same internal tendencies and by the changed linguistic situation: the dialects had intermixed and their relations and inter-influence reflected the economic, social and demographic events of the time.

The growth of analytical forms in the verb system and the formation of new grammatical categories were also to a certain extent determined by the state of the verb system in OE: the system of verbs was poor, the language made wide use of verb phrases and verb-prefixes to express a variety of meanings connected with the main meanings of the verb forms. The main changes of the period consisted in the enrichment of the verb system which came to include nw forms and to develop new oppositions and categories. The development in the verb system were not confined to Early ME; they extended over many hundred years and were associated with different kinds of external conditions and the growth of culture and the written forms of the language, the formation of the national literary language with its functional and stylistic differentiation.

The changes at the syntactic level can be attributed to the same factors which operated in the evolution of English morphology. The predominance of syntactic ways of word connection, the strict word order, the wide use of prepositional phrases were a part of a general transition of English from synthetic to the analytical type. Syntactic changes were linked up with simplifying changes in morphology and made a part of a single historical process. The other trend of syntactic changes can be defined as growing complexity of the word phrase and of the sentence. The extension of word phrases, the growth of predicative constructions and the development of the complex and compound sentences made apart of the formation of the literary English language, its Written Standard and multiple functional styles.