The groups of stylistically marked vocabulary

Stylistically marked words are subdivided into formal and informal. Formal

vocabulary includes special terms (morpheme, phoneme), learned words (initial, to

exclude), official words (to dispatch, to summon) and poetic words (woe, to

behold, lone). Informal vocabulary is subduvided into standard colloquial and

substandard: slang, argot, dialectal, familiar and vulgar words. Colloquial

vocabulary includes common polysemantic words (thing, get, really, nice), nouns

converted from verbs (give a scare, make-up), verbs with postpositives (think out,

come on), substantivized adjectives (woolies, daily), emotional units (a bit tired, by

God, oh), modal words and expressions (definitely, in a way, rather, by no means).

Slang words are fresh and shocking words for usual things: drunk – boozy, cocke-

eyed, soaked, tight.

19.The functional styles in the English literary standard. Functional styles (FS) are the subsystems of language, each subsystem having its own peculiar features in what concern vocabulary means, syntactical constructions, and even phonetics. The appearance and existence of FS is connected with the specific conditions of communication in different spheres of human life. FS differ not only by the possibility or impossibility of using some elements but also due to the frequency of their usage. For example, some terms can appear in the colloquial style but the possibility of its appearance is quite different form the possibility to meet it in an example of scientific style. The classification of FS is a very complicated problem, that is why we will consider ideas of I.V.Arnold and I.R. Galperin, bearing in mind that Galperin treats functional styles as patterns of the written variety of language thus excluding colloquial FS. Both scholars agree that each FS can be recognized by one or more leading features. But Galperin pays more attention to the coordination of language means and stylistic devices whereas Arnold connects the specific features of each FS with its peculiarities in the sphere of communication. According to I.R. Galperin, a functional style of language is a system of interrelated language means which serves a definite aim in communication. A functional style should be regarded as the product of a certain concrete task set by the sender of the message. Functional styles appear mainly in the literary standard of the language. These represent varieties of the abstract invariant and can deviate from the invariant, even breaking away with it. Each FS is a relatively stable system at the given stage in the development of the literary language, but it changes, and sometimes considerably, from one period to another. Therefore FS is a historical category. Thus, for example in the 17 th century it was considered that not all words can be used in poetry, and that a separate poetic style exists. Later, in the 19 th century romanticism rejected the norms of poetic style and introduced new vocabulary to poetry. The development of each style is predetermined by the changes in the norms of standard English. It is also greatly influenced by changing social conditions, the progress of science and the development of cultural life. Every functional style of language is marked by a specific use of language means, thus establishing its own norms which, however, are subordinated to the norm-invariant and which do not violate the general notion of the literary norm. The writers of the given period in the development of the literary language contribute greatly to establishing the system of norms of their period. It is worth noting that the investigations of language norms at a given period are to great extent maintained on works of men of letters. Selection, or deliberate choice of language, and the ways the chosen elements are treated are the main distinctive features of individual style

20.Germanic languages in the modern world. Germanic languages is a group of related languages including English, Dutch, German, the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish), and a number of derived languages (Yiddish from German, Afrikaans from Dutch) as well as the extinct Burgundian, Gothic, Norn and Vandal. Germanic languages is a subfamily of the IndoEuropean (IE) family of languages, spoken by about 470 million people in many parts of the world, but chiefly in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. The present-day Germanic languages spoken in northern and central Europe include the following Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Frisian, Dutch, Luxemburgish, German and English in Europe. It is possible to reconstruct a good deal of the history of the Germanic languages before they took written form. Their history leads back to a time, perhaps before c. 2000 BC, when different forms of Germanic were closely similar. There seems to have been a time of a single Germanic language. The linguists have given the name of ‘Proto-Germanic’ or, sometimes in the past, ‘Primitive Germanic’ to it. This Proto-Germanic language is itself recognized by linguists as an offshoot from a still earlier language system which comprises the ‘Indo-European’ group of languages. The Germanic languages fall into three groups: 1. East Germanic, represented only by Gothic, which ceased to be spoken in the 16 th c. 2. North Germanic, represented by Scandinavian languages 3. West Germanic, represented by modern German, Yiddish, Dutch, Frisian, Afrikaans, and English English is an official language of Belize, Canada, Falkland Islands, New Zealand, South Africa, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and former British colonies in Asia, Africa, and Oceania. Furthermore, it is the de facto language of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia.

German is an official language of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland and has regional status in Italy, Poland, and Denmark; though Germany has had some colonial possessions, it lost those after World War I and German did not remain an official language there after the end its colonial domination, only in Namibia did German remain of some importance, where it is used by educated people and in commerce. German also continues to be spoken as a minority language by immigrant communities in North and South America and Australia. A German dialect, Pennsylvanian Dutch, is still present amongst Anabaptist populations in Pennsylvania, USA.

Dutch is an official language of Aruba, Belgium, Curaçao, the Netherlands, Sint Maarten, and Suriname.^[23] Even though the Netherlands also colonized Indonesia, Dutch was scrapped as an official language after Indonesian independence.

In addition to in Sweden, Swedish is also an official language in Finland (where it is co-official with Finnish).

Afrikaans is one of 11 official languages in South Africa and is a lingua franca of Namibia.

Danish is an official language of Denmark and in its overseas territory of Faroe Islands and is a lingua franca and language of education in its other overseas territory of Greenland, where it was one of the official languages until 2009.

21.The mainstreams in the modern linguistics: structuralism, genetivism etc. Structuralism is fundamentally a way of thinking about the world which is predominantly concerned with the perception and description of structures. Among the most important names associated with the movement are Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and Louis Althusser. Some of the key principles of structuralism may actually date back to thinkers such as Leibniz, Marx and Engels, Humboldt, Herder, and so on. Structuralism is a mode of inquiry that consists in interpreting the phenomena it looks at as made up of relations among the various entities rather than as those entities per se. Any change in any one of the relationships will- automatically affect the entire set of relationships within the given structure. All structures constitute fully integrated- systems, in which the elements are fully dependent on one another and are sensitive to the most minute of alterations taking place in any part of any given system. Because each structure is fully and exhaustively defined by the relations among the elements, it makes little sense to speak of universal structures. Each structure is a law unto itself. This new concept, that the world is made up of relationships rather than things, constitutes the first principle of structuralism.

22.The problem of lang. acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Language acquisition is one of the quintessential human traits, because nonhuman does not communicate by using language. Language acquisition usually refers to firstlanguage acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language. This is distinguished from second-language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages. The capacity to successfully use language requires one to acquire a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an extensive vocabulary. The basic characteristics of language include phonemes and morphemes. Phonemes are the smallest units of sound recognizable as speech instead of random noises. They are different in the way they are produced by a speaker. Morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful units of language, are phonemes combined according to phonological rules to produce speech sounds. There are higher levels of language organization - next are morphological rules which indicate how one can combine morphemes to form words. Content morphemes refer to events and things whereas function morphemes are grammatical functions. Syntactical rules indicate how words can be combined to further form sentences and phrases. Language might be vocalized as speech or manual as in sign. The human language capacity is represented in the brain. Even though the human language capacity is finite, one can say and understand an infinite number of sentences, which is based on a syntactic principle called Recursion. The capacity to acquire and use language is a key aspect that distinguishes humans from other beings. Although it is difficult to pin down what aspects of language are uniquely human, there are a few design features that can be found in all known forms of human language, but that are missing from forms of animal communication. For example, many animals are able to communicate with each other by signaling to the things around them, but this kind of communication lacks the arbitrariness of human vernaculars (in that there is nothing about the sound of the word "dog" that would hint at its meaning). Other forms of animal communication may utilize arbitrary sounds, but are unable to combine those sounds in different ways to create completely novel messages that can then be automatically understood by another. Hockett called this design feature of human language "productivity". It is crucial to the understanding of human language acquisition that we are not limited to a finite set of words, but, rather, must be able to understand and utilize a complex system that allows for an infinite number of possible messages. A major question in understanding language acquisition is how these capacities are picked up by infants from the linguistic input. Input in the linguistic context is defined as "All words, contexts, and other forms of language to which a learner is exposed, relative to acquired proficiency in first or second languages". Nativists find it difficult to believe, considering the hugely complex nature of human languages, and the relatively limited cognitive abilities of an infant, that infants are able to acquire most aspects of language without being explicitly taught. At a very young age, children can already distinguish between different sounds but cannot produce them yet. However, during infancy, children do begin to babble. It is important to note that deaf babies babble in the same order when hearing sounds as non-deaf babies do. This is evident of the fact that babbling is not caused by babies simply imitating certain sounds, but is actually a natural part of the process of language development. However, it has been found that deaf babies do often babble less than non-deaf babies and they begin to babble later on in infancy (begin babbling at 11 months as compared to 6 months) when compared to non-deaf babies. Children, within a few years of birth, understand the grammatical rules of their native language without being explicitly taught, as one learns grammar in school. A range of theories of language acquisition have been proposed in order to explain this apparent problem. These theories, championed by the likes of Noam Chomsky and others, include innatism and Psychological nativism, in which a child is born prepared in some manner with these capacities, as opposed to other theories in which language is simply learned as other cognitive skills, including such mundane motor skills as learning to ride a bike. The conflict between the theories assuming humans are born with syntactic knowledge and those that claim all such knowledge is the product of learning from one's environment is often referred to as the "Nature vs. Nurture" debate. Some think that there are some qualities of language acquisition that the human brain is automatically wired for (a "nature" component) and some that are shaped by the particular language environment in which a person is raised (a "nurture" component). Others, especially evolutionary biologists, strongly object to assuming syntactic knowledge isgenetically encoded and provided by automatic wiring of the brain.

23.The periodization of history of English. The historical development of a language is a continuous uninterrupted process without sudden breaks or rapid transformations. The commonly accepted, traditional Periodisation divides English history into three periods: Old English (OE), Middle English (ME) and New English (NE). the following Periodisation of English history is based on the conventional three periods; it subdivides the history of the English language into seven periods differing in linguistic situation and the nature of linguistic changes.

The first period, which may be termed Early Old English, lasts from the West Germanic invasion of Britain till the beginning of writing, that is from the 5th to the close of the 7th c. It is the stage of the tribal dialects of the West Germanic invaders, which were gradually losing contacts with the related continental tongues. The tribal dialects were used for oral communication, there being no written form of English.

The second historical period extends from the 8th c. till the end of the 11th. The English language of that time is referred to as Old English. The tribal dialects gradually changed into local or regional dialects. Towards the end of the period the differences between the dialects grew and their relative position altered. They were probably equal as a medium of oral communication, while in the sphere of writing one of the dialects, West Saxon, had gained supremacy over the other dialects. The language of this period is usually described synchronically and is treated as a more or less stable system.

The third period, known as Early Middle English, starts after 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest, and covers the 12th, 13th and half of the 14th c. It was the stage of the greatest dialectal divergence caused by the feudal system and by foreign influences – Scandinavian and French. The dialectal division of present-day English owes its origin to this period of history. Under Norman rule the official language in England was French, or rather its variety called Anglo-French or Anglo-Norman; it was also the dominant language of literature.

The fourth period – from the later 14th c. till the end of the 15th – embraces the age of Chaucer, the greatest English medieval writer and forerunner of the English Renaissance. We may call it Late or Classical Middle English. It was the time of the restoration of English to the position of the state and literary language and the time of literary flourishing. The main dialect used in writing and literature was the mixed dialect of London. The literary authority of other dialects was gradually overshadowed by the prestige of the London written language.

The fifth period is called Early New English, lasted from the introduction of printing to the age of Shakespeare. The first printed book in English was published by William Caxton in 1475. It was a time of great historical consequence: under the growing capitalist system the country became economically and politically unified. Caxton’s English of the printed books was a sort of bridge between the London literary English of the ME period and the language of the Literary Renaissance. This period was also a time of sweeping changes at all levels, in the first place lexical and phonetic. The growth of the vocabulary was a natural reflection of the progress of culture in the new, bourgeois society.

The sixth period extends from the mid-17th c. to the close of the 18th c. In the history of the language it is often called “the age of normalization and correctness”, in the history of literature – the “neoclassical” age. It is essential that during the 18th c. literary English differentiated into distinct styles, which is a property of a mature literary language. The 18th c. has been called the period of “fixing the pronunciation”. The great sound shifts were over and pronunciation was being stabilized. Word usage and grammatical construction were subjected to restriction and normalization.

The English language of the 19th and 20th c. represents the seventh period in the history of English. It is called Late New English or Modern English. The classical language of literature was strictly distinguished from the local dialects and the dialects of lower social rank. The dialects were used in oral communication and, as a rule, had no literary tradition. The 20th c. witnessed considerable intermixture of dialects. The local dialects were retreated and displaced by Standard English. The English vocabulary has grown on an unprecedented scale reflecting the rapid progress of technology, science and culture and other multiple changes in all spheres of man’s activity.