MINISTRY FOR EDUCATION AND SCIENCE
OF RUSSIAN FEDERATION
IRKUTSK STATE LINGUISTIC UNIVERSITY
ISSUES IN ENGLISH PHILOLOGY
Study Manual
For advanced university students, Teachers’ Training Colleges
of Foreign Languages and the general reader who wishes
to learn the problems of Modern English Philology
Third Revised Edition
«Рекомендовано Учебно-методическим объединением
по образованию в области лингвистики Министерства
образования и науки Российской Федерации
для студентов, обучающихся по специальности
«Теория и методика преподавания иностранных языков
и культур» и направлению подготовки
бакалавров и магистров «Лингвистика»
Irkutsk
2012
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УДК 81-114.2
ББК 81.432.1-923
Е 56
Published by Irkutsk State Linguistic University
First Edition 1998
Second Edition 2008
Third Edition 2012
Editor: Professor M.V. Malinovich
Reviewers: Ph. D. Professor M.Y. Ryabova,
Kemerovo State University;
Associate Professor N.I. Byalous,
Baikal National University of Economics and Law
Contributors:
O.K. Denisova, Yu.N. Karypkina,
T.A. Khromova, L.M. Kovalyova,
L.V. Kulgavova, M.V. Malinovich,
L.P. Poznyak, I.V. Shaposhnikova,
L.V. Topka, E.P. Tyukavkina, S.K. Voronova.
Е 56 Issues in English Philology: Study Manual. – 3rd
tion, revised. – Irkutsk, 2012. – 340 p.
EdiББК
81.432.1-923
ISBN 978-5-88267-318-4
© Irkutsk State Linguistic University, 2012
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CONTENTS
CONTENTS
PREFACE .........................................................................................5
PART ONE
SOME ASPECTS OF DIACHRONICAL CHANGES
IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE SYSTEM
1.1. THE TYPOLOGICAL STATUS OF ENGLISH .......................... 13
1.2. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SYNTAX
IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH ..............................................21
1.3. FOREIGN INFLUENCES ON ENGLISH VOCABULARY.
SYNTHETIC STRATUM VS. ANALYTICISED STRATUM ..... .35
1.4. THE EMERGENCE OF STANDARD ENGLISH ...................... 42
1.5. HISTORICAL SEMANTICS ..................................................... 47
PART TWO
PROBLEMS OF LEXICOLOGY
2.1. PROPERTIES OF THE LINGUISTIC SIGN .............................53
2.2. SOME ASPECTS OF NOMINATION IN THE ENGLISH
LANGUAGE. WORD-STRUCTURE ........................................67
2.3. WORD-FORMATION WAYS.
SOME DEBATABLE ISSUES OF WORD-FORMATION .........90
2.4. WORD MEANING ..................................................................126
2.5. POLYSEMY ............................................................................137
2.6. SEMANTIC CHANGE ............................................................148
2.7. PARADIGMATIC RELATIONS IN VOCABULARY ................165
2.8. ANTONYMY ..........................................................................170
2.9. ENGLISH VOCABULARY AS AN ADAPTIVE SYSTEM ......192
3
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4
PART THREE
PROBLEMS OF GRAMMAR
3.1. THE PROBLEM OF PARTS OF SPEECH
IN MODERN ENGLISH ..........................................................223
3.2. NOUN: NUMBER ................................................................... 230
3.3. THE ARTICLE ........................................................................ 239
3.4. PROBLEMS OF THE SIMPLE SENTENCE .......................... 247
3.5. PARADIGM OF ENGLISH SENTENCES ORGANIZED
BY ONE VERB (PREDICATE) ...............................................259
3.6. SOME PROBLEMS OF THE COMPOSITE SENTENCE ...... 264
3.7. NON-FINITE VERB CONSTRUCTIONS
IN ENGLISH SYNTAX ...........................................................273
3.8. FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVE THEORY AS
A METHOD IN STUDYING SENTENCE AND TEXT ........282
PART FOUR
PROBLEMS OF STYLISTICS AND TEXT INTERPRETATION
4.1. SOME ASPECTS OF LINGUISTIC STYLISTICS .................. 302
4.2. PROBLEMS OF DECODING STYLISTICS ........................... 309
4.3. PRINCIPLES OF FOREGROUNDING ................................... 317
4.4. PRINCIPLES OF POETIC STRUCTURAL COHESION ........ 328
4.5. TYPES OF NARRATION AND COMPOSITIONAL FORMS:
AUTHOR’S NARRATIVE. DIALOGUE. INTERIOR SPEECH.
REPRESENTED SPEECH. NARRATION. DESCRIPTION.
ARGUMENTATION ................................................................335
CONTENTS
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5
PREFACE
The bulk of the material of this book first appeared in 1998. It
was devoted to a historical event – to the jubilee of Irkutsk State
Linguistic University.
The present edition is very different from the previous one –
as it ought to be after fifteen years!
The improved book perhaps calls for an explanation.
The reason is that the changes were needed because general
linguistics in the last few decades has been developing very
quickly and new research ideas have expanded enormously. A
new insight has been gained into such problems as 1) word-formation,
2) problems of the simple and composite sentence, 3)
the discourse analysis of the article, 4) decoding stylistics, information
theory, 5) historical pragmatics and other up-to-date topics.
Therefore, in the new edition of this book several changes
clarify some important issues discussed in the first publication.
The best features of the issues in the previous edition have
been retained, reviewed and improved for this one.
Theme and point of view are basically the same. The contributors
followed the same approach that contributed to the
success of the earlier edition and pursued the major goals which
remain unchanged:
− to teach the students to form their own point of view on
the relevant problems;
− to improve their linguistic competence through studying
the problems discussed in this study manual.
The present study manual is intended primarily for the advanced
university students, but it will also prove useful for Teachers’
Training Colleges of Foreign Languages. The contributors
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PREFACE
hope that the book will be of some interest to the general reader
who wishes to learn the problems of modern English Philology.
A special effort was made by the contributors to produce the
book the students would enjoy reading.
The students are expected to make their own observation on
the problems discussed in the book, make their own presentations
at seminars and scientific conferences.
The study manual comprises four parts.
Part One – “Some Aspects of Diachronical Changes in
the English Language System” – (written by Ph. D. Professor
I.V. Shaposhnikova) contains necessary information about the
character of the typological reconstruction of English in the
course of its development.
A new paragraph, compiled by Associate Professor
Yu.N. Karypkina, outlines the changes in the lexical subsystem
of the English language from the historical point of view. It also
includes the causes of semantic change such as linguistic, historical,
social and psychological. Semantic changes are viewed
in terms of register which refers to the degree of formality in the
language employed. The basic contrast in register between formal
and informal usage is transposed exactly into the historical
evolution of the language.
Part Two – “Problems of Lexicology” – is enormously expanded.
Associate Professor L.V. Kulgavova is the author of the
following new topics included into this part:
1) Properties of the Linguistic Sign;
2) Some Aspects of Nomination in the English Language.
Word-Structure;
3) Word-Formation Ways. Some Debatable Issues of WordFormation;
4)
Antonymy;
5) English Vocabulary as an Adaptive System.
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The article “Properties of the Linguistic Sign” deals with the
generally accepted treatment of arbitrariness, asymmetric duality,
motivation and iconicity, supplied with some fresh examples.
Here the author aimed at simplicity of presentation of the theoretical
material. Particular emphasis is laid on motivation and
its types, especially phonetic motivation. It is maintained that
a word can be onomatopoeic and sound-symbolic at the same
time.
“Some Aspects of Nomination in the English Language.
Word-Structure” includes two issues: the act of nomination and
the morphological structure of English words. In the first part of
the article, the axiomatic approach to the nominative function of
the language and the semantic triangle is presented. The theoretical
interpretation of the act of nomination, its structure and factors
influencing it is based on the works of Ye.S. Kubryakova.
The second part of the article covers a wide spectrum of the
issues concerning the morphological structure of the word. The
notions of morpheme and allomorph are given; the classifications
of morphemes (semantic and structural) are shown schematically
and exemplified; the aims of morphemic analysis and
derivational analysis are outlined. Here some essential difficulties
of morphemic analysis are discussed. Particular attention is
paid to the synonymity of the terms.
The article “Word-Formation Ways. Some Debatable Issues
of Word-Formation” is devoted to the following types of wordformation:
affixation, conversion, word-composition, shortening,
reversion. Their brief descriptions are based on the data
of the most authoritative textbooks on English lexicology and
some scientific publications of the homeland and foreign scholars.
Almost each section of this article deals with some disputable
points. The aim of this part of the present manual is to make
a survey of the types of word-building in a concise form, which
could serve just as a starting point for further reading.
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PREFACE
In the article “Antonymy”, the author attempted to characterize
some aspects of this phenomenon: a general notion of antonymy
in English, distribution of antonyms among the parts of
speech, the criteria for antonymy after V.N. Komissarov, occasional
antonyms, etc. Antonyms appear as one of the most important
expressive means of the English language. On the basis
of study of various scientific and methodological publications
on the semantic types of antonyms, the author gives a systematic
treatment of gradable, contradictory, conversive and directional
antonyms and discusses some ambiguous and borderline cases
of this classification. The final part of this article tells the reader
about enantiosemy in English, which is usually neglected in the
textbooks on lexicology.
In “English Vocabulary as an Adaptive System”, the flexible,
dynamic character of the English vocabulary is revealed through
the following linguistic phenomena: neologisms, nonce words,
transnomination and politically correct vocabulary, changes in
word-structure, obsolete words, semantic development, borrowing,
fluctuations in spelling and pronunciation. Each phenomenon
is illustrated by the lexical units which appeared in
the last 1-4 decades. The examples are borrowed from the dictionaries
of new words, on-line encyclopedias, works of fiction,
newspapers and magazines, recent scientific and methodological
publications. It is stressed that borrowing, shifts in word
meaning and spelling may have an occasional character.
Associate Professor S.K. Voronova contributed to the following
topics:
1) Word Meaning;
2) Polysemy;
3) Semantic Change;
4) Paradigmatic Relations in Vocabulary.
The new topics “Word Meaning” and “Semantic Change”
seek to direct the students to understanding of the fundamental
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questions about 1) the nature of word meaning, and 2) the way
it changes, including the description of the semantic, pragmatic
and systemic aspects of word meaning, the procedure of componential
analysis, and, also, some essential information about the
causes, nature and results of semantic change. They provide discussion
of resent theoretical developments as well as numerous
examples illustrating linguistic phenomena under consideration.
The topic on polysemy is considerably recast.
Part Three – “Problems of Grammar” – is expanded by new
issues:
1) The Problems of Parts of Speech;
2) Noun: Number (written by Associate Professor L.V. Topka).
In
this part the progressive character of the development of
the problem of parts of speech in Modern English is pointed out.
It reflects different periods of the research of parts of speech as a
language phenomenon as well as the different viewpoints of understanding
about their (periods) essence by the representatives
of different linguistic schools, both foreign and homeland ones.
The problem of the category of number and several ways of its
formation, as well as the approach to its analysis are described;
the noun’s distribution, which can be called lexico-grammatical
one, is given. The presence of the lexical constituent is caused
by semantic differences in the plural forms of English nouns.
These differences spring up from the interaction between the
categorial meaning of English noun and the lexical meaning of
concrete English noun.
The problem of the article (written by Professor E.P. Tyukavkina
and Associate Professor T.A. Khromova) is revised.
The authors stress, that the article is one of the most disputable
issues of the Modern English grammar. It has been a long
established tradition to regard the article only in connection with
the noun as a category of noun determination. In recent years,
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PREFACE
though, the article is associated with 1) the categories of deixis;
2) the actual division of the sentence and 3) the categories of the
text. The article is now proclaimed to be a category of “message
representation”. Its usage is explained not only by morphological
and semantic characteristics of separate words, but also by
extra-linguistic, pragmatic factors of the whole linguistic context,
by the so-called “human factor”.
“Problems of the Simple Sentence” and “Non-Finite Verb
Constructions in English Syntax” are written by Ph. D. Professor
L.M. Kovalyova.
“Paradigm of English Sentences Organized by One Verb
(Predicate)” and “Some Problems of the Composite Sentence”
are written by Associate Professor L.V. Kulgavova.
“Paradigm of English Sentences Organized by One Verb
(Predicate)” is dedicated to the problem of classification of syntactic
structures as it is viewed by L.M. Kovalyova, who worked
out a manifold classification with four paradigmatic sets in which
the constructions are united according to some common feature
but at the same time opposed to each other according to some
homogeneous features.
“Some Problems of the Composite Sentence” offers the traditional
classifications of complex sentences, the types of polypredicative
sentences. It is underlined that, according to some
scholars, a complex sentence is not always a transform of a simple
sentence. In the concluding section of the article, compound
sentences are compared to sentences with homogeneous members:
modern linguists (for instance, L.M. Kovalyova) argue that
sentences with a plural subject and object correlate semantically
with a compound sentence.
Professor M.V. Malinovich contributed to “Functional Perspective
Theory as a Method in Studying Sentence and Text”.
This topic is revised and illustrated by new examples.
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