The Norman Conquest and its impact on the lang.situation

The Norman Conquest is the invasion and conquering of the Normans to England in 1066.It began when William of Normandy invaded England and seized its throne. The Norman Conquest of Britain has a number of linguistic effects on the language spoken in England at that time. Some of the results of these influences were the following: 1. Change in the conditions of dialects.The conquest placed all four Old English dialects more or less on a level. As such, West Saxon lost its supremacy and the center of culture and learning gradually shifted from Winchester to London. The Old Northumbrian dialect became divided into Scottish and Northern, although little is known of either of these divisions before the end of the 13th century. The Old Mercian dialect was split into East and West Midland. West Saxon became slightly diminished in area and was more appropriately named the South Western dialect. The Kentish dialect was considerably extended and was called South Eastern. All five Middle English dialects (Northern, West Midland, East Midland, South Western, and South Eastern) went their own ways and developed their own characteristics. 2. Change in the writing of English from the clear and easily readable in solar hand of Irish origin to the dialect Carolingian script then in use on the continent. 3. Change in spelling for the sake of clarity. Old English y becomes u, Ý as yi, u as ou (ow when final), u was often written o before and after m, n, u, w; and i was sometimes written y before and after m and n, ew was changed to qu; hw to wh; qu or quh to ch or tch; se to sh; cg to gg and ht to ght. Thus, for example, mycel(much) appeared as muchel; fyr(fire) as fuir; hus (house) as hous; hu(how) as how; snnu (son) as sone; him(him) as hym; cwen as queen; hwelet as what; quat (quart)as quhrt; dic as ditch; scip as ship, sccage (siege) as segge; and miht as might. 4. Change in verb infections in the Northern Midland and Southern dialect as it is shown in the next table: Verb infection Northern Midland Southern infinitive Sing Singe(n) singen Present singand singende singinde participle Present singular / / / 1 singe singe singe st person 2 singis singes singis nd person126 3 singis Singeth-es singeth rd person Present plural singis singen singeth Past participle sungen (y)sunge(n) (y)sunge The Northern infinitive was already one syllable, whereas the past participle – en inflection of Old English was strictly kept. Old English mutated –ended in the present participle had already become –inde in late Southern and it was this inflection that blended with the –ing suffix of nouns of action that had already become near-gerunds in such compound nouns as athswearing (oath swearing)and writing feather (writing feather pen) The Northern 2nd person singular singis was inherited unchanged from common Germanic. The final t sound in Midland –est. and Southern –st was excrescent comparable with the final t in modern (admist) and (amongst) from older amides and amonges. The Northern 3rd person singular singis had quite different origin. Like the singis of the plural, it resulted almost casually from an inadvertent retraction of the tongue in enunciation from an interdental –th sound to postendal –s. Today the form (singeth) services as a poetic archaism Shakespeare used both –eth and –s endings (It "mercy"blesseth him that gives and him that takes)

25.The etymological survey of English vocabulary From the point of view of etymology, English vocabulary can be divided into 2 parts: 70% of borrowings in English language, 30% of native words.

Words of native origin are divide into 3 groups: IE, common Germanic, English proper element.

IE: auxilaries, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, natural phenomena,animals family relations; parts of human body; numerous verbs: stand, sit; numerals.

common Germanic include words which have parallels in such languages as german, French, etc. 3 groups” common nouns: room; Common Adj:, common V: learn

English element proper.: bird, boy, girl, woman, lord, always, call, daisy.

ROMANIC BORROWINGS.

Latin borrowings: they are divided into 3 periods:

1) 5 century, words are connected with trade (pound, inch, kitchen, wall, port);

2) The time of Christianity, words are connected with religion (Latin words: alter, cross, dean; Greek words: church, angel, devil, anthem);

3) Time of renaissance, words were borrowed after great vowel shift (17 century) (item, superior, zoology, memorandum, vice versa, AM, PM).

French: the largest group of borrowings is French borrowings. Most of them came into English during the Norman Conquest. Normans belong to the race of scand. origin but during their residence in Normandy they had given up the native language and adopted the French dialect. During 3 centuries after the Norman Conquest French was the language of the court, of the nobility. There are following semantic groups of French borrowings:

1) words relating to government (administer, empire, state); 2) ~military affairs (army, war, battle); 3) ~jurisprudence (advocate, petition, sentence); 4) ~fashion (luxury, coat, collar); 5)~jewelry (topaz, pearl); 6)~ food and cooking (lunch, cuisine, menu); 7)~literature and music (pirouette, ballet).

Italian: cultural and trade relations between England and Italy in the epoch of renaissance brought in many Italian words:

1) musical terms: concert, solo, opera, piano, trio; 2) political terms: manifesto; 3) geological terms: volcano, lava.

Among the 20th century Italian borrowings, we can mention: incognito, fiasco, and graffiti.

Spanish: a large number of such words was penetrated in English vocabulary in 1588 when Phillip 2 sent a fleet of armed ships against England (armada, ambuscade); trade terms: cargo, embargo; names of dances and musical instruments: tango, rumba, guitar; names of vegetables and fruits: tomato, tobacco, banana, ananas.

GERMANIC BORROWINGS:

Scandinavian: By the end of the Old English period English underwent a strong influence of Scandinavian due to the Scandinavian conquest of the British Isles. As a result of this conquest there are about 700 borrowings from Scandinavian into English (pronouns: they, them, their; verbs: to call, to want, to die; adj: flat, ill, happy; noun: cake, egg, knife, window. German: in the period of Second World War such words were borrowed as: luftwaffe (возд. авиация); bundeswehr (вооруженные силы ФРГ). After the Second World War the following words were borrowed: Volkswagen, berufsverbot (запрет на профессию (в ФРГ)), and some other words (cobalt, wolfram, iceberg, rucksack ). Dutch: Holland and England have had constant interrelations for many centuries and more then 2000 Dutch words were borrowed into English. Many of them are nautical terms and were mainly borrowed in the 14th century, such as: skipper, pump, keel, dock; and some words from everyday life: luck, brandy, and boss. Russian: Among early Russian borrowings there are mainly words connected with trade relations, such as: rubble, kopeck, sterlet, vodka, and words relating to nature: taiga, tundra, steppe. After the October revolution many new words appeared in Russia, connected with the new political system, new culture, and many of them were borrowed into English: collectivization, udarnik, Komsomol and also translation loans: five-year plan, collective farm. One more group of Russian borrowings is connected with perestroika, suck as: glasnost, nomenclature, and apparatchik.

26.The historical development of the grammatical system of English

27.The creative activity of the main representatives of contemporary English literature The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is difficult to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. Among postmodern writers are the Americans Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote and Thomas Pynchon.

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) was a crime writer of novels, short stories and plays, who is best remembered for her 80 detective novels as well as her successful plays for the West End theatre. Christie's works, particularly those featuring the detectives Hercule Poirotor Miss Marple, have given her the title the 'Queen of Crime' and she was one of the most important and innovative writers in this genre. Christie's novels include, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and And Then There Were None. Another popular writer during the Golden Age of detective fiction was Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957). Other recent noteworthy writers in this genre are Ruth Rendell, P. D. James and Scot Ian Rankin.

Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands 1903, is an early example of the spy novel. A noted writer in the spy novel genre was John le Carré, while in thriller writing, Ian Fleming created the character James Bond 007 in January 1952, while on holiday at his Jamaican estate, Goldeneye. Fleming chronicled Bond's adventures in twelve novels, including Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die (1954), Dr. No (1958), Goldfinger (1959), Thunderball (1961), and nine short story works.

Hungarian-born Baroness Emma Orczy's (1865–1947) original play, The Scarlet Pimpernel, opened in October 1903 at Nottingham’s Theatre Royal and was not a success. However, with a rewritten last act, it opened at the New Theatre in London in January 1905. The premier of the London production was enthusiastically received by the audience, running 122 performances and enjoying numerous revivals. The Scarlet Pimpernel became a favourite of London audiences, playing more than 2,000 performances and becoming one of the most popular shows staged in England to that date.^{[ citation needed ]} The novel The Scarlet Pimpernel was published soon after the play opened and was an immediate success. Orczy gained a following of readers in Britain and throughout the world. The popularity of the novel encouraged her to write a number of sequels for her "reckless daredevil" over the next 35 years. The play was performed to great acclaim in France, Italy, Germany and Spain, while the novel was translated into 16 languages. Subsequently, the story has been adapted for television, film, a musical and other media.

John Buchan (1875–1940) published the adventure novel The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1915.

The novelist Georgette Heyer created the historical romance genre.

The Kailyard school of Scottish writers, notably J. M. Barrie (1869–1937), creator of Peter Pan (1904), presented an idealised version of society and brought of fantasy and folklore back into fashion. In 1908, Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932) wrote the children's classic The Wind in the Willows. An informal literary discussion group associated with the English faculty at the University of Oxford, were the "Inklings". Its leading members were the major fantasy novelists;C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis is especially known for The Chronicles of Narnia, while Tolkien is best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Another significant writer is Alan Garner author of Elidor (1965), while Terry Pratchett is a more recent fantasy writer. Roald Dahl rose to prominence with his children's fantasy novels, such as James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, often inspired by experiences from his childhood, which are notable for their often unexpected endings, and unsentimental, dark humour. J. K. Rowling author of the highly successful Harry Potter series and Philip Pullman famous for his His Dark Materials trilogy are other significant authors of fantasy novels for younger readers.

Noted writers in the field of comic books are Neil Gaiman, and Alan Moore; Gaiman also produces graphic novels.

In the later decades of the 20th century, the genre of science fiction began to be taken more seriously because of the work of writers such as Arthur C. Clarke's (2001: A Space Odyssey), Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Moorcock and Kim Stanley Robinson. Another prominent writer in this genre, Douglas Adams, is particularly associated with the comic science fiction work, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which began life as a radio series in 1978. Mainstream novelists such Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood also wrote works in this genre, while Scottish novelist Ian M. Banks has also achieved a reputation as both a writer of traditional and science fiction novels.

28. The creative activity of the main representatives of contemporary American literature Though its exact parameters remain debatable, from the early 1970s to the present day the most salient literary movement has been postmodernism. Thomas Pynchon, a seminal practitioner of the form, drew in his work on modernist fixtures such as temporal distortion, unreliable narrators, and internal monologue and coupled them with distinctly postmodern techniques such as metafiction, ideogrammatic characterization, unrealistic names (Oedipa Maas, Benny Profane, etc.), absurdist plot elements and hyperbolic humor, deliberate use of anachronisms and archaisms, a strong focus on postcolonial themes, and a subversive commingling of high and low culture. In 1973, he published Gravity's Rainbow, a leading work in this genre, which won the National Book Award and was unanimously nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that year. His other major works include his debut, V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day (2006).

Toni Morrison, the most recent American recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, writing in a distinctive lyrical prose style, published her controversial debut novel, The Bluest Eye, to widespread critical acclaim in 1970. Coming on the heels of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, the novel, widely studied in American schools, includes an elaborate description of incestuous rape and explores the conventions of beauty established by a historically racist society, painting a portrait of a self-immolating black family in search of beauty in whiteness. Since then, Morrison has experimented with lyric fantasy, as in her two best-known later works, Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; along these lines, critic Harold Bloom has drawn favorable comparisons to Virginia Woolf,^[21] and the Nobel committee to "Faulkner and to the Latin American tradition [of magical realism]."^[22] Beloved was chosen in a 2006 survey conducted by the New York Times as the most important work of fiction of the last 25 years.^[23]

Writing in a lyrical, flowing style that eschews excessive use of the comma and semicolon, recalling William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway in equal measure, Cormac McCarthy's body of work seizes on the literary traditions of several regions of the United States and spans multiple genres. He writes in the Southern Gothic aesthetic in his distinctly Faulknerian 1965 debut, The Orchard Keeper, and Suttree (1979); in the Epic Western tradition, with grotesquely drawn characters and symbolic narrative turns reminiscent of Melville, in Blood Meridian (1985), which Harold Bloom styled "the greatest single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying," calling the character of Judge Holden "short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature";^[24] in a much more pastoral tone in his celebrated Border Trilogy (1992–98) of bildungsromans, including All the Pretty Horses (1992), winner of the National Book Award; and in the post-apocalyptic genre in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road (2007). His novels are noted for achieving both commercial and critical success, several of his works having been adapted to film.

Don DeLillo, who rose to literary prominence with the publication of his 1985 novel, White Noise, a work broaching the subjects of death and consumerism and doubling as a piece of comic social criticism, began his writing career in 1971 with Americana. He is listed by Harold Bloom as being among the preeminent contemporary American writers, in the company of such figures as Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Thomas Pynchon.^[25] His 1997 novel Underworld, a gargantuan work chronicling American life through and immediately after the Cold War and examining with equal depth subjects as various as baseball and nuclear weapons, is generally agreed upon to be his masterpiece and was the runner-up in a survey asking writers to identify the most important work of fiction of the last 25 years.^[23] Among his other important novels are Libra (1988), Mao II (1991) and Falling Man (2007).

Seizing on the distinctly postmodern techniques of digression, narrative fragmentation and elaborate symbolism, and strongly influenced by the works of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace began his writing career with The Broom of the System, published to moderate acclaim in 1987. His second novel, Infinite Jest (1997), a futuristic portrait of America and a playful critique of the media-saturated nature of American life, has been consistently ranked among the most important works of the 20th century,^[26] and his final novel, unfinished at the time of his death, The Pale King (2011), has garnered much praise and attention. In addition to his novels, he also authored three acclaimed short story collections: Girl with Curious Hair (1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) and Oblivion: Stories (2004).

Jonathan Franzen, Wallace's friend and contemporary, rose to prominence after the 2001 publication of his National Book Award-winning third novel, The Corrections. He began his writing career in 1988 with the well-received The Twenty-Seventh City, a novel centering on his native St. Louis, but did not gain national attention until the publication of his essay, "Perchance to Dream," in Harper's Magazine, discussing the cultural role of the writer in the new millennium through the prism of his own frustrations. The Corrections, a tragicomedy about the disintegrating Lambert family, has been called "the literary phenomenon of [its] decade"^[27] and was ranked as one of the greatest novels of the past century.^[26] In 2010, he published Freedom to great critical acclaim.^[27][28][29]

Other notable writers at the turn of the century include Michael Chabon, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) tells the story of two friends, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, as they rise through the ranks of the comics industry in its heyday; Denis Johnson, whose 2007 novel Tree of Smoke about falsified intelligence during Vietnam both won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was called by critic Michiko Kakutani "one of the classic works of literature produced by [the Vietnam War]";^[30] and Louise Erdrich, whose 2008 novel The Plague of Doves, a distinctly Faulknerian, polyphonic examination of the tribal experience set against the backdrop of murder in the fictional town of Pluto, North Dakota, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and her 2012 novel The Round House, which builds on the same themes, was awarded the 2012 National Book Award.^[31]

29.The English intonation and its components in speech English intonation is a complicated and varied phenomenon. There are dialectal and regional differences in intonation; for example, there are quite a few differences between British and American intonation. Intonation may sound differently depending on whether the speakers have high or low voices, speak fast or slowly, loudly or quietly, energetically, emotionally, neutrally, or listlessly. Men and women may have their own differences and preferences in intonation. For the purpose of studying, this variety may be described in several intonation patterns characteristic of English speech. Intonation can be defined as a unity of speech melody, timbre, utterance stress, temporal characteristics (duration, pausation, tempo) and rhythm.

ü Rhythm is a periodic recurrence of rhythmic units of different size and level.

ü Speech melody may be defined as the variations in the pitch of the voice in the connected speech.

ü Timbre (or voice quality) can be defined as a tonal colouring of the speaker’s voice which helps to convey some meaning.

ü Utterance stress is the relative degree of prominence given to various words in an utterance.

ü Tempo can be defined as the speed of speaking.

ü Pause is a break between phonation pieces.