The typological status of English

SOME ASPECTS OF DIACHRONIC CHANGES

IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE SYSTEM

THE TYPOLOGICAL STATUS OF ENGLISH

Structural typology divides languages into types with referen­ce to two criteria. The first criterion is word structure, proposed at the beginning of the 19th century. According to this criterion, most of the world languages are agglutinating, some are inflecting, others — isolating, and the rest — polysynthetic (or incorporating) [for details about the concept of a linguistic type, see, for instance Croft 1993: 27-43; Melnikov 2003; Rodionov 1987; 1989; Shaposhnikova 1997: 4-15; Katsnelson 1989]. The structural core features (i.e. features responsible for productive models*) of each type are different from those of other types. Strictly speaking, there are no pure types: linguists usually consider various combinations of structural characteristics, which permit us to state that a language is approximating a certain model type. Such characteristics are linked to one another by reciprocal implication. The presence of one of these features usually implies the emergence of the other(s).

It is a well-known fact that Old English was inflectional (like Latin or Modern Russian). Words in such languages consist of stems and inflexions. Stems in their turn can consist of roots (expressing lexical meanings) and word-form­ing affixes (prefixes, or suffixes, or both, modifying the root-meaning). Thus, words are often polysyllabic. Roots are often unstable because of regressive assimi­lation between the roots and affix, consequently, it is hard to establish a clear-cut borderline between morphemes. Old English roots were also un­stable in their sound-shapes and very often could not stand alone as root-words without the attachment of other morphemes, i.e. they were bound morphemes:

Cf.: O.E. writon 'they wrote'. Writ- is a bound morpheme.

Rus. пишут – пиш- is also bound

Inflexions are usually polysemantic. Several grammatical meanings are conjoined in one inflexion.

Cf.: камн я - stan es (O.E.). Both forms contain inflecting markers.

These inflexions are complex markers of the Genitive singular in masculine nouns.

Old English words (lexemes) belonged to different parts of speech. As a rule, their part-of speech affiliation could be identified from special markers in their word-forms. One part of speech could be distinguished from another systematically by its own word-changing paradigm (nouns had different types of declension; verbs — conjugation). Each part of speech in old English was characterized by its own word-building affixes, different from the affixes of the other parts of speech as in the following paradigm:

modig nes (noun); mod ig, mod iglic (adjectives); modig ian (verb); modig li ce (adverb).

Word order in Old English was quite free, which is another feature of the inflecting type (for details about word order, see § 2 below).

Modern English combines agglutinative and isolating proper­ties in its structure. In agglutinating languages, words are composed of unchangeable roots and several affixes whose number usually de­pends on the number of grammatical meanings of the word-form (on the collectable nature of affixes in agglutinative word-forms, see, for instance, Melnikov 2003, p.337-341). Each affix is usually associated with only one meaning: polysemy is not typical. Stability of the root is supported by progressive assimilation between the root and affix. Thus, W. Y. Plotkin (1989) noticed that the sound forms of the modern English affixes ‘(e) s’ and ‘ed’ fully depend on the final sound of the root:

works [s] worked [t]. mixes [iz]

plays [z] played [d] wanted [id]

Words cannot be easily classified into parts of speech as lexico-morphological categories* by their affixes since one and the same affix can be added to the roots of different categorial classes of words. The English -(e) s represents number in verbs (singular) and nouns (plural). The girl smil es and The girl s smile. There is a great num­ber of non-finite forms and various predicative constructions with them in agglutinating languages. Linguists speak about the noticeable tendency towards accumulation of agglutinative features in modern English affixation [Ilyina 2004]. The tendency becomes evident in such phenomena as functional widening of an affix as in I-ness, everydayness, and functioning of affixational derivatives as parts of speech whose meanings are not associated with their affixes, as in:

Moorlach, the treasurer, tried to broker a compromise… [the example is taken from Ilyina 2004: 56].

In isolating languages root-words are prevailing (in that they have a great functional load as linguistic units). Root-words are predominantly monosyllabic and there are no affixes in them. They are also called morphosyllables when the morphophonological aspect of the problem is enhanced. Words are of­ten semantically vague and dependent on the context, their meanings being determined by syntactic constructions. The language freely uses form words and word order is fixed to convey grammatical meanings that are not explicit in word-forms. Mono- and some disyllabic root-words comprise the core of the English lexical subsystem and they do not contain reliable affixational part-of-speech markers.

Round, bed, back, fuss, love, smile, walk, etc.

Their meanings are syntactically determined: at least one neighbouring word is needed to make up a phrase and specify what is meant. Because of this, the rules of juxtaposition (placing semantically linked words as close to each other as possible) are very important in English.

Cf.:

a new round (noun) круг

a round plate (adjective) круглый

he can round his lips (verb) округлить

to go round the shops (preposition) вокруг

he turned round (adverb) кругом

As can be gathered from the paradigm of the words related to ‘круг’, Russian words (like the O.E. words we have mentioned above) are easily identified as lexico-morphological classes without being placed in a sentence structure because they have special affixational markers. By contrast, En­glish root words like 'round' can be classified as syntactic (posi­tional) classes, no morphological criterion is applicable here. That is why word order is fixed in Modern English, which is another implicational feature of the isolating type.

The second criterion, which is generally taken into account by typologists, is technique. Technique suggests methods of linking meaningful units when using a particular language. These include methods of expressing the relationship among meaningful units (word-forms, clauses) in the sentence, on the one hand, and methods of combining lexical and grammatical meanings within word-forms, on the other hand.

There exist two types of technique: analysis and synthesis.

Most languages employ both techniques, one of them being more significant than the other.

Synthetic technique implies that grammatical and lexical meanings are conjoined within one word-form. Looking at the Russian word 'стола', one might under­stand its lexical meaning from the root 'стол-'. The gram­matical meanings of the Genitive singular, masculine gender become clear from the inflexion '-a'. Old English words had similar characteristics because synthesis was the prevailing technique in that period. Cf.: stan es

By contrast Modern English prefers analysis. Gradually prepositional phrases came to be used in place of Old English case forms. Cf.:

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