Old English written records
Our knowledge of the OE language comes mainly from manuscripts written in Latin characters. The first English words to be written down with the help of Latin characters were personal names and place names inserted in Latin texts; then came glosses and longer textual insertions. Among the earliest insertions in Latin texts are pieces of OE poetry. Bede’s HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORUM (written in Latin in the 8th c.) contains and English fragment of five lines known as “Bede’s Death Song” and a religious poem of nine lines, “Cadmon’s Hymn”. It was translated into Kentish dialect. The greatest poem of that time was BEOWULF, an epic of the 7th or 8th c. It was originally composed in the Mercian or Northumbrian dialect, but has come down to us in a 10th c. West Saxon copy. It is valued both as a source of linguistic material and as a work of art; it is the oldest poem in Germanic literature. BEOWULF is built up of several songs arranged in three chapters. It is based on old legends about the tribal life of the ancient Teutons. The author is unknown. Religious poems paraphrase, more or less closely, the books of the Bible – GENESIS, EXODUS (written by Cadmon, probably in Northumbrian dialect). CHRIST, FATE OF THE APOSTLES tell the life-stories of apostles and saints or deal with various subjects associated with the Gospels. OE poetry is characterized by a specific system of versification and some peculiar stylistic devices. Practically all of it is written in the OG alliterative verse: the lines are not rhymed and the number of stressed syllables being fixed. The style of OE poetry is marked by the wide use of metaphorical phrases or compounds describing the qualities or functions of the thing. OE prose is a most valuable source of information for the history of the language. The earliest samples of continuous prose are the first pages of the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLES. It was written in West Saxon dialect. By the 10th c. the West Saxon dialect had firmly established itself as the written form of English.
10. Homonymy. The problem of polysemy is closely connected with the problem
of homonymy. Homonyms are words which have the same form but are different in meaning. "The same form" implies identity in sound form or spelling, i.e. all the three aspects are taken into account: sound-form, graphic form and meaning.
Both meanings of the form "liver'' are, for instance, intentionally present in the
following play upon words; "Is life worth living ? - It depends upon the liver". The
most widely accepted classification of homonyms is that recognising homonyms
proper, homophones and homographs.
Homonyms proper (or perfect, absolute) are words identical in pronunciation
аnd spelling but different in meaning, like back n. "part of the body" - back adv.
"away from the front" - back v. "go back"; bear n. "animal" - bear v, "carry, tolerate".
Homophones are words of the same sound but of different spelling and
meaning: air - heir, buy - by, him - hymn, steel - steal, storey - story.
Homographs are words different in sound and in meaning but accidentally
identical in spelling: bow [bou] - bow [bau], lead [li:d] - lead [led].
Homoforms- words identical in some of their grammatical forms. To bound
(jump, spring) - bound (past participle of the verb bind); found (establish) -found
(past participle of the verb find).
Paronyms are words that are alike in form, but different in meaning and usage.
They are liable to be mixed and sometimes mistakenly interchanged. The term
paronym comes from the Greek para "beside" and onoma "name". Examples are:
precede - proceed, preposition - proposition, popular - populous. Homonyms in
English are very numerous. Oxford English Dictionary registers 2540 homonyms, of which 89% are monosyllabic words and 9,1% are two-syllable words. So, most homonyms are monosyllabic words. The trend towards monosyllabism, greatly increased by the loss of inflections and shortening, must have contributed much toward increasing the number of homonyms in English . Among the other ways of creating homonyms the following processes must be mentioned:
conversion which serves the creating of grammatical homonyms, e.g. iron -to iron,
work - to work, etc.; polysemy - as soon as a derived meaning is no longer felt to be connected with the primary meaning at all (as in bar - балка; bar - бар; bar -
адвокатура) polysemy breaks up and separate words come into existence, quite
different in meaning from the basic word but identical in spelling. From the viewpoint of their origin homonyms are sometimes divided into historical and etymological.
Historical homonyms are those which result from the breaking up of polysemy;
then one polysemantic word will split up into two or more separate words, e.g. to bear/терпеть/ - to bear /родить/ pupil /ученик/ - pupil /зрачок/ plant /растение / - plant /завод/
Etymo1ogiсal homonyms are words of different origin which come to be alike
in sound or in spelling (and may be both written and pronounced alike).
Borrowed and native words can coincide in form, thus producing homonyms
(as in the above given examples).
In other cases homonyms are a result of borrowing when several different
words become identical in sound or spelling. E.g. the Latin vitim - "wrong", "an
immoral habit" has given the English vice - "evil conduct"; the Latin vitis -"spiral"
has given the English ''vice" - тиски "apparatus with strong jaws in which things can be hold tightly"; the Latin vice - "instead of", "in place of" will be found in vice -president. It should be noted that the most debatable problem in homonymy is the demarcation line between homonymy and polysemy, i.e. between different meanings of one word and the meanings of two or more homonymous words.
11. Text and discourse
The text is a structural and semantic unit used in language communication.
The text has a minimal border line - it always contains no less than two components – complete utterances, simple or composite, as a text always presupposes the existence of a certain cohesion between its components-utterances. But a text has no maximum (upper) border line that can be grammatically defined. The maximum (upper) border line is given by the extra linguistic situation which is reflected in the text.
Besides complete utterances the text may also contain special connections, mainly conjunctions, which help to organize utterances into a text. A very important role in the text is played by parenthesis. Parenthetically matter may be expressed by: a word, a phrase, a clause. Words, (phrases, clauses) used parenthetically are not grammatically linked with the rest of utterance into which they are imbedded, nor do they perform in it any grammatical function.
There are two principal types of texts: the monologue (mainly written speech) and the dialogue (mainly oral speech). In the monologue the interrelated utterances are grouped into superphrasal units, or paragraphs.
Discourse is very closely connected with the text. As the definition of the discourse the following is accepted among the linguists: “Discourse is a speech interrelation of two or more communicants in the oral or written form, taking part in a certain communicative situation, resulting in a text or a combination of texts”. The main difference between text and discourse is an extralinguistic context (a communication situation, participants, their relations, time, place etc).
12. The noun is a part of speech which unites words with the general
categorical meaning of substance, or thingness. Substance is a very wide notion.
Any concept starting with the most concrete and ending with the most abstract
may be verbalized in a substantive form. Therefore the semantic space of
substance, or thingness is very heterogeneous and the class of nouns unites
names of objects and persons that make up the center of the class as well as the
names of qualities (generosity, viability etc), processes (conversation, debate),
states (illness, oblivion), abstract notions (freedom, love), manner of action
(way, manner) which make up the periphery of the class and by means of which
the noun interacts with the other parts of speech. This is the most numerous
class of words (in English nouns make up about 42% of all words) and it is also
the most frequently used part of speech. According to statistics, every fourth
word used in our speech belongs to the class of nouns (Johabson, Hofland 1989,
15). It is also a very open and hospitable part of speech which constantly draws
into its sphere units of other classes of words, phrases and even sentences that
may derive occasional nouns.
2. Turning to the analysis of the ways of expressing gender in English
nouns we find a number of means for expressing gender distinctions: suffixes (a
waiter - a waitress, a steward- a stewardess, a bachelor- a bachelorette, a
widow - a widower), oppositions of lexemes ( a boy- a girl, a niece - a nephew,
a bull- a cow, a stallion - a mare, a monk - a nun, components of compound
words used as gender indicators (a boy-friend- a girl-friend, a he-bear - a she-
bear, a Tom-cat - a Tabby-cat, a landlord - a landlady, a writer - a lady-writer,
a male nurse - a female nurse etc.).
All these are lexical means of expressing gender distinctions. The grammatical
expression of gender distinctions is manifested in the fact that there exists a
certain gender correlation between nouns denoting animate things and personal
pronouns replacing them.
3. The grammatical category of number in the English noun is conceptual
in its nature and presents a specific linguistic reflection of quantitative relations
between homogenous objects of reality conceptualized by the human mind. It is
constituted by the binary privative opposition of singular and plural forms.
Semantically the forms of the plural are not homogenous either. The
paradigmatic meaning of plurality is represented by a number of syntagmatic
variants, such as: discrete plurality (books, houses), indiscrete plurality (hours,
miles), partitive plurality
4. In modern linguistics case is understood as a semantic category which
presents the underlying set of relations between the action and its participants.
This understanding of case as a semantic category, a category of deep syntax
was first introduced by Charles Fillmore in his “Case for Case” and later in
“Case for Case Reopened” [Филлмор 1981]. Due to its valency the verb
predetermines the number and the character of other parts of the sentence and
first and foremost the semantic role of the nouns that accompany the verb in the
sentence. So case appears to be a nominal category which is closely related to
the syntactic and semantic valency of the verb.
The general paradigmatic meaning of possessivity is represented by a number of
syntagmatic meanings which appear as the result of the interaction between the
semantics of the noun in the Possessive case and the semantics of the head-noun.
The most common syntagmatic meanings of the Possessive case are the
following:
1. pure possessivity (my sister’s money);
2. agent, or subject of the action (my brother’s arrival);
3. object of the action ( the criminal’s arrest);
4. authorship ( Shakespeare’s sonnets);
5. destination ( a sailor’s uniform);
6. measure ( a day’s wait);
7. location ( at the dean’s);
8. description, or comparison ( a lion’s courage).