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Causes and ways of borrowings. Criteria of B

B – the process and the result of adopting ws, w-groups, parts of ws. Ws can be borrowed in 2 ways - directly: oral speech, immediate contact #sky, call from Scand. Indirect: through books, writing. # 17-18c. restaurant. Oral borrowing took place chiefly in the early periods of history, whereas in recent times written borrowing gained importance. Words borrowed orally (e.g. L. inch, mill, street)are usually short and they undergo considerable changes in the act of adoption. Written borrowings (e.g. Fr. communiqué, belles-lettres)preserve their spelling and some peculiarities of their sound-form, their assimilation is a long process.

Borrowing words from other languages is characteristic of English throughout its history. More than two thirds of the English vocabulary are borrowings. Mostly they are words of Romanic origin (Latin, French, Italian, Spanish). Borrowed words are different from native ones by their phonetic structure, by their morphological structure and also by their grammatical forms. It is also characterisitic of borrowings to be non-motivated semantically. English history is very rich in different types of contacts with other countries, that is why it is very rich in borrowings. The Roman invasion, the adoption of Cristianity, Scandinavian and Norman conquests of the British Isles, the development of British colonialism and trade and cultural relations served to increase immensely the English vocabulary. The majority of these borrowings are fully assimilated in English in their pronunciation, grammar, spelling and can be hardly distinguished from native words.

REASONS:1) smth is not named, to fill in the semantic gap in the Voc, there is no w, very often together with the thing # sushi,potato tomato - Spanish 2) a new w gives another shade of mng, another emotional coloring=synonyms appear (love-like=adore, admire (Fr)) 3) historical, depends on the nature of the w, some L can be prestigious, ws of another L can be imposed 4) Blind borrowing. A slow process of b., we can’t control it. Extraling. Factors – what happens in the life of the community: crucial moments, wars, conflicts; trade – peaceful way, encouraging. Due to the great influence of the Roman civilisation Latin was for a long timå used in England as the language of learning and religion. Internal tendencies. English continues to take in foreign words , but now the quantity of borrowings is not so abundunt as it was before. All the more so, English now has become a «giving» language. A certain law – when the lang borrows too much, it begins to pervade drastically.

The number and character of borrowings do not only depend on the historical conditions, on the nature and length of the contacts, but also on the degree of the genetic and structural proximity of languages concerned. The closer the languages, the deeper and more versatile is the influence. This largely accounts for the well-marked contrast between the French and the Scand influence on the Eng lang. Thus under the influence of the Scand languages, which were closely related to Old Eng, some classes of words were borrowed that could not have been adopted from non-related or distantly related languages (the pronouns they, their, them,for instance); a number of Scandinavian borrowings were felt as derived from native words (they were of the same root and the connection between them was easily seen), e.g. drop (AS.) — drip(Scand.), true (AS.)-tryst(Scand.); the Scandinavian influence even accelerated to a certain degree the development of the grammatical structure of English.



Though borrowed words undergo changes in the adopting language they preserve some of their former peculiarities for a comparatively long period. This makes it possible to work out some criteria for determining whether the word belongs to the borrowed element.

In some cases the pronunciation of the word (strange sounds, sound combinations, position of stress, etc.), its spelling and the correlation between sounds and letters are an indication of the foreign origin of the word. This is the case with waltz (G.),. psychology(Gr.). The initial position of the sounds [v], [dç], [ç] or of the letters x, j, zis a sure sign that the word has been borrowed, e.g. vase(Fr.),jungle(Hindi), gesture (L.),zero(Fr.)

The morphological structure of the word and its grammatical forms - the word being adopted from another language. Thus the suffixes in the word violoncello (It.) betray the foreign origin of the words. The same is true of the irregular plural forms bacteria, (from bacterium, L.) and the like.

The lexical meaning of the word. Thus the concept denoted by the words ricksha(w), pa’goda(Chin.) make us suppose that we deal with borrowings.

These criteria are not always helpful. Some early borrowings have become so thoroughly assimilated that they are unrecognisable without a historical analysis, e.g. chalk, mile (L.), ill, ugly (Scand.), enemy, car (Fr.), etc. It must also be taken into consideration that the closer the relation between the languages, the more difficult it is to distinguish borrowings.

Sometimes the form of the word and its meaning in Modern English enable us to tell the immediate source of borrowing. Thus if the digraph ch is sounded as [∫], the word is a late French borrowing (chef); if it stands for [k], it came through Greek (archaic, architect, chronology); if it is pronounced as [t∫], it is either an early-borrowing (chase, OFr.; cherry, L.), or a word of Anglo-Saxon origin (choose, child, chin).

16) Unpatterned means of w-building. + p. 41,60

Sound interchange is the way of word-building when some sounds are changed to form a new word. It is non-productive in Modern English, it was productive in Old English and can be met in other Indo-European languages. E.g. bath - to bathe, life - to live, breath - to breathe, man - men etc. Stress interchange can be mostly met in verbs and nouns of Romanic origin : nouns have the stress on the first syllable and verbs on the last syllable, e.g. `accent - to ac`cent. to af`fix -`affix, to con`flict- `conflict, to ex`port -`export, to ex`tract - `extract etc. As a result of stress interchange we have also vowel interchange in such words because vowels are pronounced differently in stressed and unstressed positions. Also a hist-l means of w-formation.

Sound imitationIt is the way of word-building when a word is formed by imitating different sounds. There are some semantic groups of words formed by means of sound imitation a) sounds produced by human beings, such as : to whisper, to giggle, to mumble, to sneeze, to whistle etc. b) sounds produced by animals, birds, insects, such as : to hiss, to buzz, to bark, to moo, to twitter etc. c) sounds produced by nature and objects, such as : to splash, to rustle, to clatter, to bubble, to ding-dong, to tinkle etc. The corresponding nouns are formed by means of conversion, e.g. clang (of a bell), chatter (of children) etc.

BlendsBlends are words formed from a word-group or two synonyms. In blends two ways of word-building are combined : abbreviation and composition. To form a blend we clip the end of the first component (apocope) and the beginning of the second component (apheresis) . As a result we have a compound- shortened word. One of the first blends in English was the word «smog» from two synonyms : smoke and fog which means smoke mixed with fog; acromania (acronym mania), cinemadict (cinema adict), chunnel (channel, canal), dramedy (drama comedy), detectifiction (detective fiction), faction (fact fiction) (fiction based on real facts), informecial (information commercial) , Medicare ( medical care) , magalog ( magazine catalogue) slimnastics (slimming gymnastics), sociolite (social elite), slanguist ( slang linguist) etc.

Back formationis the way of word-building when a word is formed (against the lang. dev-t rules) by dropping the final morpheme to form a new word. It is opposite to suffixation, that is why it is called back formation. To form nouns denoting the agent of the action by adding the suffix -er to a verb stem (speak- speaker). to accreditate (from accreditation), to collocate (from collocation), to enthuse (from enthusiasm), to compute (from computer), to televise (from television) etc. As we can notice in cases of back formation the part-of-speech meaning of the primary word is changed, verbs are formed from nouns.

Semantic changes:The meaning of a word can change in the course of time. Changes of lexical meanings can be proved by comparing contexts of different times. Transfer of the meaning is called lexico-semantic word-building. In such cases the outer aspect of a word does not change.a)SpecialisationIt is a gradual process when a word passes from a general sphere to some special sphere of communication, e.g. «case» has a general meaning «circumstances in which a person or a thing is». It is specialized in its meaning when used in law (a law suit), in grammar (a form in the paradigm of a noun), in medicine (a patient, an illness). The difference between these meanings is revealed in the context)GeneralizationIt is a process contrary to specialization, in such cases the meaning of a word becomes more general in the course of time.

The transfer from a concrete meaning to an abstract one is most frequent, e.g. «ready» (a derivative from the verb «ridan» - «ride») meant «prepared for a ride», now its meaning is «prepared for anything». «Journey» was borrowed from French with the meaning «one day trip», now it means «a trip of any duration». ElevationIt is a transfer of the meaning when it becomes better in the course of time, e.g. «knight» originally meant «a boy», then «a young servant», then «a military servant», then «a noble man». Now it is a title of nobility given to outstanding people; «marshal» originally meant «a horse man» now it is the highest military rank etc.DegradationIt is a transfer of the meaning when it becomes worse in the course of time. It is usually connected with nouns denoting common people, e.g. «villain» originally meant «working on a villa» now it means «a scoundrel».Abbreviation (demonstration-DEMO; fridge-refrigerator; bus-omnibus)1)letter abbr: pronounced letter for letter-CIA. MTV; 2)acronyms-pronounced as a word: NATO, AIDS 3) Abomb-anatomic bomb, Vday)


Date: 2016-01-03; view: 2425


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