There are some synthetic forms in Modern English. Why do we say that the Modern English language is an analytical language?

In Modern English you can not find a lot of inflections. Can you enumerate them? Why didn’t the inflections of the Old English and Middle English language reach the Modern English language?

In English most nouns are inflected for number with the inflectional plural affix -s (as in "dog" → "dog- s "), and most English verbs are inflected for tense with the inflectional past tense affix -ed (as in "call" → "call- ed "). English also inflects verbs by affixation to mark the third person singular in the present tense (with -s), and the present participle (with -ing). English short adjectives are inflected to mark comparative and superlative forms (with -er and -est respectively). In addition, English also shows inflection by ablaut (sound change, mostly in verbs) and umlaut (a particular type of sound change, mostly in nouns), as well as long-short vowel alternation. For example:

· Write, wrote, written (marking by ablaut variation, and also suffixing in the participle)

· Sing, sang, sung (ablaut)

· Foot, feet (marking by umlaut variation)

· Mouse, mice (umlaut)

· Child, children (ablaut, and also suffixing in the plural)

When a given word class is subject to inflection in a particular language, there are generally one or more standard patterns of inflection (the paradigms described below) that words in that class may follow. Words which follow such a standard pattern are said to be regular; those that inflect differently are called irregular.

For instance, many languages that feature verb inflection have both regular verbs and irregular verbs. In English, regular verbs form their past tense and past participle with the ending -[e]d; thus verbs like play, arrive and enter are regular. However, there are a few hundred verbs which follow different patterns, such as sing–sang–sung and keep–kept–kept; these are described as irregular. Irregular verbs often preserve patterns which were regular in past forms of the language, but which have now become anomalous. (For more details see English verbs and English irregular verbs.)

2 Every word in Old English had an inflection. What inflections reach the Modern English language? Why?

Inflection – is a change in the form of a word (typically the ending) to express a grammatical function or attribute such as tense, mood, person, number, case, and gender.

"There are inflexions for number and tense, the vocabulary is Latin or Germanic for the most part, with all the baggage those words bring with them.

There are some synthetic forms in Modern English. Why do we say that the Modern English language is an analytical language?

Synthetic (Slovak, Czech, Polish) forms are inflectional – various morphological categories are represented by suffixes,here the grammatical categories make an internal part of the word, word order is less important.

English is analytical language because it is isolated  It isolates morphemes expressing grammatical categories (tense of the verb, case of the noun, number of noun…) OKNÁM – 2 grammatical categories, TO WINDOWS – morpheme is isolated from expressing word

Word order expresses grammatical categories  If you change word order, you change the meaning ^ PETER SEES PAUL, PAUL SEES PETER

4 Every nominal part of speech was declinable; verbs were conjugable, for example: the adjective had the plural form OE зod (singular), зode (plural). Why didn’t the plural ending reach the Modern English language?

English nouns are inflected for grammatical number, meaning that if they are of the countable type, they generally have different forms for singular and plural. This article discusses the variety of ways in which English plural nouns are formed from the corresponding singular forms, as well as various issues concerning the usage of singulars and plurals in English. For plurals of pronouns, see English personal pronouns.

Phonological transcriptions provided in this article are for Received Pronunciation and General American. For more information, see English phonology.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14