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• The Old English (450-1100)
– The history of the English language begins with the conquest and settlement of what is now England by the Angles, Saxons, and the Jutes from about 450 AD. The language they spoke was Anglo-Saxon, which replaced the Celtic spoken by the former inhabitants Celts. – The vocabulary of the Old English consisted mainly of Anglo-Saxon words, 85% of which was no longer in use now. – Old English was rather different from Modern English in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.
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• Neologisms (after World War II) • newly coined words or words that are given new meaning to fit new situation because of social, economic, political, cultural, scientific and technological changes in human society. • The main reasons (sources) for the frequent appearance of neologisms are three: – Marked progress of science and technology – Socio-economic, political and cultural changes – The influence of other cultures and languages
1.1 An overview of English vocabulary
• What is a word?
– The minimal free form of a language, which has a given sound, meaning and syntactic function. • Words are formed by morphemes
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1.2.2 The growth of present-day English vocabulary
• The 19th and 20th centuries saw an unprecedented growth in scientific vocabulary as a consequence of the industrial revolution and the scientific exploration and discovery. • American English began to make their way to the British Isles about 1820.
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1.2 Development of English vocabulary
• The World Languages
– It is estimated that there are about 5000 languages all over the world, which can be grouped into about 300 language families, such as Sino-Tibetan Family, IndoEuropean Family, Altaic Family, and so on. – Chinese is a member in the Sino-Tibetan Family, while English is a member in the Indo-European Family.
• The history of the English language is divided into three periods. – Old English (449-1100) – Middle English (1100-1500) – Modern English (1500-present)
2012-12-16
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• The Middle English (1100-1500)
– Middle English is characterized by the strong influence of French following the Norman Conquest in 1066. – A great number of French words (about 9,000) were introduced into English. The Norman Conquest virtually introduced French-English bilingualism into England. (The Norman dialect of French became the language of the upper
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Lexicology
the study of the lexis in human language
(Howard Jackson & Etienne Zė 2001, 陆国强 1999， et.al)
general lexicology & special lexicology
study the universal principles
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• In fact English has adopted words from almost every known language in the course of its historical development.
• As summed up in The Encyclopedia Americana: “…The English language has vast debts. In any dictionary some 80% of the entries are borrowed” English is supposed to have the most copious vocabulary of all the language in the world, estimated at more than a million words.
• the criteria to divide language families ?
– 1. the basis of similarities in their basic word stock – 2. grammar
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1.2.1 Historical development of English vocabulary
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• Modern English (1500-Now)
– Modern English began with the establishment of printing in England by William Caxton. – Early Modern English (1500 – 1700, the period of the Renaissance, which began in Italy, spread in Europe and reached English in 16th century). In this period the influence of Latin and Greek on English was great. Scholars translated literature from Latin and Greek into English. – In this period, the study of classics were stressed and the result was the wholesale borrowing from Latin. The Latin loan words were mostly connected with science and abstract ideas.
study the lexis in a special language
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Notes: lexis
• “词汇学” 可以定义为 “对某一种语言的词汇 (lexis)的研究” 。 • “词汇” 在英语里可以用vocabulary、 lexis和 lexicon来表示 ,三个术语大致上是同义的 ,但 是 ,vocabulary比较口语化、lexicon比较学术化、 而lexis界乎两者之间tage of each source of new English words
14%
30%
56%
science and technology terms life-style terms social and economic terms
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1.2.3 Modes of English vocabulary development
– Bloomfield distinguishes between two types of linguistic forms: free form and bound form ( 自由形位 和粘附形位）
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• The term word refers to the fundamental unit of a given language, with sound and meaning( lexical and grammatical) , capable of performing a given syntactic function(句法功 能)(a word acts as a structural unit of a sentence).