Regional varieties of the English language. Lexical differences

The Eng. lg exists in the form of its varieties. It is the national lg of England proper, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and some part of Canada.

Standard English — the official lg of Great Britain taught at schools and universities, used by the press, the radio and the television and spoken by educated people. British English (BrE) is the form of E used in the UK. It includes all E dialects used within the UK. Dialects: Southern E, Midlands E, Northern E, Welsh E, Scottish E.

Received pronunciation (RP) – is the form of E, spoken mostly by educated speakers. It derives from a mixture of the Midland and Southern dialects which were spoken in London during the Middle Ages and is used as a model for teaching E to foreign learners.

One of the best known Southern dialects is Cockney, the regional dialect of London. It exists in 2 levels:

spoken by the educated lower middle classes;

spoken by the uneducated; differ from Southern E in pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology and syntax.

AmE is the form of E used in the USA. AmE cannot be called a dialect as it is a regional variety. Because it has a literary normalized form called Standard American (a dialect has no literary form). But it not a separate lg because it has neither grammar nor vocabulary of its own.

A number of E idioms that have essentially the same meaning show lexical differences between the Br and Am version of E. For ex: Br ---- Am:

storm in a teacup – tempest in a tea pot;

a cinema – a movies

one room – apartment

The first Am dictionary was published by Noah Webster in 1806. Americans tended to simplify the spelling.

Ex: ce → se: defense, offense;

re → er: center, theater;

our → or: honor, favor.

The main lexical differences between the variants are caused by the lack of equivalent lexical units in one of them, divergences in the semantic structures of polysemantic words and peculiarities of usage of some words on different territories. Local variations in the USA are relatively small. What is called by tradition American dialects is closer in nature to regional variants of the national literary language.

18.Ways of enriching & expanding the English lexicon.

Factors:

1. Extra-linguistic:

• scientific progress of mankind

• peculiarities of culture & of way of life of the speech community

• political correctness: gender-neutral words, female suffixes, correlated female terminology

2. Linguistic:

• well-developed system of WF tools(affixes, WF patterns)

• linguistic analogy(lie-in from sit-in).

Ways of enriching

I. WF:

• affixation (-ship- friendship, -ness - foolishness).

• compounding (teletext, lap-top)

• conversion (to box, to cowboy)

• shortening: abbrev., clipping, blending, back-formation.

II. borrowings (aikido, guru karaoke, sushi).

III. semantic derivation: comp. technology (mouse, virus, zombie), other spheres (SPA, farmer).

IV. lexicalization, set-expressions (elephant in the room).

19. British & American lexicography. Main types of English dictionaries.

Lexicography is the science and practice of compiling dict-ries and describing them.

All dict-ries are traditionally divided into encyclopedic (are thing book, the deal with concept reflecting different objects and phenomena, their relationships and so on) and linguistic (are word-books. They list word of the language and give other linguistic facts) dict-ries.

Besides these two types now there exists the so-called cultural dictionaries (combine their information of two types both encyclopedic and linguistic dict-ries)

Linguistic dict-ries can be uni-lingual or explanatory and by-lingual or translation.

In the first one explanations are given in one lg and the second one in a different/other lg.

Dict-ries are also divided diachronic (shows the history of the word and reflects its development up to the present moment) and synchronic (are disrupted dictionary).

They show either the present day meaning and usage of words or those meaning which the words had at a certain historical period.

There are general (represent the vocabulary as a whole) and special (cover a specific part of the vocabulary) dictionaries. There are synonyms and antonyms, dictionaries of neologism and slang, pronouncing and so on.

There are glossaries ( explain term or difficult words, may be archaism, different branches of knowledge)and concordances (record the complete vocabulary of some author. EG: there are concordances to the works of W. Shakespeare)

And finally there are ideographic dictionaries and thesaurus. These dictionary group words according to the concepts expressed. They supply a word or words by which a given idea may be expressed.

Task of lexicology: systematization of the lexicon. Lexicology and lexicography are different in the degree of systematization of the lexicon.

American lexicology There are 3 main dict.: Webster’s 3^rd new intonation dict. Of the English lg., Webster’s college dict., American heritage dict.

Dictionary typology

1. Encyclopedic dict.(Britanic, Word Encyclopidia)

2. Linguistic dict. – general dict. (the word list is not restricted)- restricted dict./ specialized dict.

Monolingual (mainly explanatory)/ bilingual (translation dict., but cont. explonation)/multiling.

Synchronic dict / diachronic dict

Difference bet. Br and Am lexicography

Br dictionaries used to be more linguistic (do not include names, extralinguistic inform.)

Am. – more encyclopedic,

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