Plan of literary work analysis

1. Identify the extralinguistic characteristics/parameters of the literary work essential for the organisation of the text and its inter­preting such as the time and history of its creation, the author’s personality and creative activity, the social, cultural and intellectual delineations of the work, its particular personal, gen­der, racial, class and other perspectives and ideological aspects.

2. Define the functional style the literary work belongs to and specify its genre peculiarity.

3. Analyse the ideologic(al) content of the literary work that com­prises the theme, the problems, the message and the emo­tio­nal / emo­tive tone.

The theme is a subject or topic of artistic representation chosen by the author and treated or indicated in the literary work. “The themes of lite­rature have at once an infinite variety and an abiding constancy. They can be taken from myth, from history, or from contemporary occurrence, or they can be pure invention (but even if they are inven­ted, they are nonetheless constructed from the constant materials of real experience, no matter how fantastic the invention)” [Britannica 1997].

The problems of the literary work are the most essential issues, questions the author raises or focuses on.

The message of the literary work is an underlying idea, opinion, conviction, or a principle expressed or foregrounded by the author.

The emotional/emotive tone, or the author’s emotional attitude to the problems raised and the characters depicted, as it is revealed in the language of a literary work, can be heroic, tragic, dramatic, satirical, humorous, romantic, and sentimental.

The theme, the problems, the message and the emotional/emotive tone of the literary work can be defined with the help of the key words analysis: discover the bank of key words, point out the basic notion/concept, analyse the lexico-semantic nature of the key words and the way they contribute to the creation of the author’s world-view.

4. Analyse the setting of the literary work (the time and place of action including the historical period, social milieu of the characters, geographical location, descriptions of indoor and outdoor locales, etc.), its particular culturally coded significance and the textual means of its representation.

5. Dwell on the representation of reality: “A narrative might be very concrete and adhere closely to time and place, representing every-day events; on the other hand it may for instance represent psychological or moral or spiritual aspects through symbols, characters used representatively or symbolically, improbable events, and other devices” [Critical Reading: a Guide 1997].

6. Analyse the major word pictures/images: their functions (word images can accompany the action, intensify the emotional tone, create significance, extend or complicate the meaning, contribute to the depiction of the personages, or function as motifs rousing ideas or feelings, bringing people or events to the reader’s mind) and the linguistic means of their representation in the text.

7. Dwell on the personages/characters of the literary work.

Characters are persons who appear in the story; they may perform actions, speak to other characters, be described by the narrator, or be remembered (or even imagined) by other characters. Characters to notice in a story are the main character or protagonist/agonist, the antagonist, characters who are p arallel or f oils for each other, and sometimes m inor c haracters. The analysis of the characters should include the following issues:

· the role of the character in the literary work;

· the social status of the character, and the way it is reflected in the narration;

· a particular character type and the representation of a certain idea, credo, value, quality or attitude;

· the way the author creates the personages (characterisation): direct characterisation (through comment and description, with the help of the character’s prehistory or biography) or indirect characterisation (through the characters’ behaviour, speech, thought and mutual attitudes);

· the character’s appearance and the linguistic means employed by the author in description;

· the sensibility of the character: the character’s feelings, emotions and attitude to others (the person can be ironic, witty, alert to the good or attuned to evil in others, optimistic or pessimistic, romantic or not romantic, cynical, or realistic, etc.);

· discourse features: the tone or attitude the talk seems to have, the manner of the personage’s speaking (see if the speaker avoids saying things, deliberately or unconsciously withholds infor­mation, communicates by indirection, etc.), the language of the personage including lexicon and syntax (analyse the speaker’s choice of words, the use of rhetorical devices, the types, length and other features of the sentences and see if the sentences are logically joined or disjointed, rational or otherwise ordered, or disorderly);

· the author’s attitude to the character and the way this attitude is expressed (for example, the nomination of the characters, epithets, etc.).

8. Dwell on the story’s narrator, the one who tells the story. This voice might belong to a character in the story whom other characters can see, hear, interact with, etc.; the voice might appear to belong to the author but, like the persona, the narrator should not be confused with the author. “This person or persons will see things from a certain perspective, or point of view, in terms of their relation to the events and in terms of their attitude(s) towards the events and characters” [Critical Reading: a Guide 1997]. The narrator may fit into one or more of these categories.

· External Narrator, the narrator outside the story, or third-person narrator, not a character in the story referring to the story’s characters as “he” and “she” and telling it with an ostensibly objective and omniscient voice (can tell what any or all characters are thinking and feeling). “An omniscient, external narrator may achieve the narrative by telling or by showing, and she may keep the reader in a relation of suspense to the story (we know no more than the characters) or in a relation of irony (we know things the characters are unaware of). If a narration by an omniscient external narrator carries us into the thoughts of a character in the story, that character is known as a reflector character: such a character does not know he or she is a character, is unaware of the narration or the narrator” [Critical Reading: a Guide 1997]. On the other hand, there is a limited narrator that can only tell what one person is thinking or feeling. In this case it is crucial to understand why the author has chosen to show readers only this person’s thoughts.

· First- person narrator, the narrator within the story that stands out as a character (or characters) and refers to himself or herself, using “I”, and tells the story in the first person (either central characters or observer characters, bit players looking in on the scene). First-person characters may be reliable, telling the truth, knowing everything that is necessary to the story, seeing things right, or they may be unreliable, lacking in perspective or self-knowledge, not knowing all the relevant information, being intoxicated or mentally ill.

· Second- person narrator: addresses the reader and/or the main character as “you” (and may also use first-person narration, but not necessarily).

Key issues in the making of meaning in narrative therefore are: who it is who tells the story, from what perspective, with what sense of distance or closeness, with what possibilities of knowledge, and with what interest.

9. Study the plot and the peculiarities of the conflict structure. The plot is the arrangement of actions, events in a particular (usually narrative) work of literature, in the order the story gives them.A typical plot has five parts: exposition, rising action, crisis or climax, falling action, and resolution.

· Exposition: the first section of the typical plot, in which characters are introduced, the setting is described, and any necessary background information is given.

· Rising action: the second section of the typical plot, in which the main character begins to grapple with the story’s main conflict; the rising action contains several events which usually are arranged in an order of increasing importance. Not all the events of a long or com­plicated story are part of the rising action. Some events belong to sub­plots (smaller stories embedded in the main story and performing significant functions in the narration); or in the case of the mystery novel, may exist only to distract the reader from the really important rising action.

· Crisis or Climax: the moment or event in the plot in which the conflict is most directly addressed: the main character “wins” or “lo­ses”; the secret is revealed; the ending of the story becomes ine­vi­table, etc. In many stories, there are several points in the plot which are plausible crises. This is especially true when there are several almost-equal major characters. Finding the crucial, the most impor­tant moment and discuss why it deserves to be thought of as the crisis of the plot or explain why this particular story seems to have no crisis.

· Falling action: the part of the plot after the climax, containing events caused by the climax and contributing to the resolution. Depending on where the story’s crisis is, there may not appear to be much falling action. Point out what events are required to finish the conflict once and for all. Name the events of the falling action, or explain why the crisis and resolution do not require much (or any) falling action.

· Resolution / Dénouement: parallel to the exposition, this last part of the plot wraps up any loose ends, explains any remaining puzzles, or extends the story into the “future.” The final resolution or clarification of a dramatic or narrative plot. The events following the climax of a drama or novel in which such a resolution or clarification takes place. See if there is a resolution section in the story you are examining. If so, figure out what needs to be explained or re-evaluated. If not, why doesn’t the story need resolution – or why has the author chosen to leave certain matters in the story unresolved?

10. Analyse the formal structure/framework/ordonnance/architec­to­nics of the text: the arrangement and interrelation of elements in a literary work. Define the structural-and- semantic centre of the text.

Determine and dwell on the forms of the author’s speech (description, narration, discourse, digression), on the representation of the personages’ speech (a polylogue, a dialogue, a monologue, the direct, indirect and represented speech, the stream of consciousness, the inner monologue).

Analyse the text coherence and how it is achieved (logical, semantic and grammatical means).

11. Define and describe the dominant ways of the meaning actua­lization:

· the peculiarity of the choice of words;

· the frequent use of certain syntactical structures;

· the peculiarities of the word order;

· the use of imagery and stylistic devices.

12. Draw a conclusion embracing the relevance of the literary work in the writer's creative activity and in the history of the national and world's literature, the distinction of the author’s style and your appreciation of the literary work.

1.5. Glossary of stylistic terms and clichés

Acromonogram – a lexico-compositional device, syllabic word or rhyme repetition at the junction of lines.

Allegory (Gr. Allegoria) – Aesopian language, the description of a phenomenon concealed in the description of another one, a device in fiction, a presentation of an abstract idea in the form of a concrete image, “a life picture”, an illustrative picture (e.g. a fable character).

Alliteration – repetition of consonants or vowels at the beginning of neighbouring words.

Allusion (L. Alludere, to mention, to hint) – a poetic reference, on the basis of mythology, literature.

Anaphora (Gr. Anaphora) – a stylistic device, repetition of word or phrases at the beginning of succeeding syntactical constructions.

Anadiplosis – lexical repetition at the juncture of lines in a stanza or sentences.

Antithesis (Gr. antithesis) – a stylistic figure of contrast, a compo­sitional device in text arrangement in belles-lettres non belles-lettres genres based on the opposition of meaning.

Antonomasia (Gr. Antonomasia) – a stylistic device, close to metonymy, based on the a) interchange of a proper name by periph­rasis or an epithet (e.g. the Great Admiral (about Nelson) or b) the use of a proper name for the sake of generalization (e.g. Napoleon of the criminal world).

Anticlimax – a stylistic device, contrastive to gradation, i.e. gradual decrease in emotional and compositional dynamics of the plot development in fiction.

Apokoinu construction – a blend of two sentences into one when the connecting element is omitted (e.g. I’m the first one saw her – the double syntactical function of the predicative of the first sentence “the first one”, performing also the function of the subject of the second sentence).

Apophasis (Gr.apophasis, negation) – a stylistic device, based on concealing the real cause of communication (e.g. I shan’t speak about your being rude but lying is quite out of the question).

Aposiopesis (Gr.aposiopan to keep silence) – a stylistic device of a sudden pause, break in speech.

Apostrophe (Gr. epi, above, strepho, to address) – a stylistic device of intentional deviation from the narration, with the purpose of address to a living being or a thing, for the sake of emphasis.

Assonance – repetition of stressed vowels within the word combi­nation or at its end as a type of incomplete rhyme because of impossibility or unwillingness of a speaker to go on speaking.

Asyndeton – omission of conjunctions and connecting elements in a complex syntactical structure.

Authology – the use of stylistically neutral words in their direct meanings.

Bathos (Gr. Bathos, depth) – a stylistic device of style denigration, a shift from elevated to low styles.

Burden (Fr. Refrain) – a phrase, poetic line or strophe, reiterating in different text positions of a work of art.

Caesura (L. caesura, division, stop) – cutting, rhythmical pause in the mid­­dle of verse line, often coinciding with poetic pause (e.g. I shot an arrow into the air).

Chiasmus (Gr. Chiasmos, reverse, cross composition) – reverse para­­llelism, astylistic figure of inversion in the second part of rhetorical period or syntactic construction.

Climax (Gr. climax) – the highest point in the dynamics of narration, a peak of emotional, artistic and esthetic tension.

Collision (L. collision, a blow, a clash) – a conflict, a clash of actors in a work of art.

Consonance –coincidence of the repeated consonants.

Caricature (It. caricatura, a funny picture) – a comic description or a picture, breaking the proportions, characteristics of a portrayed object, event or phenomenon grotesquely.

Catharsis (Gr. katharsis, purification) – a strong emotional impact (fear, admiration, pathos… shared by the reader) which results in a certain psychological state of purification, elevation.

Detachment – a syntactical stylistic device, a certain degree of syntactical independence and consequently emphasis, acquired by a member of the sentence in positions, highlightened due to stress and intonation, as well as punctuation.

Dissonance – coincidence of unstressed vowels and consonants while the stressed vowels are different.

Ellipsis (Gr. ellipsis, omission) – omission of one of the main members of the sentence for the sake of emphasis (it should be differentiated from structural ellipsis of the conversational style, used for the sake of compression and to avoid repetition).

Emphasis – a particular (logic, emotional) significance of one or several elements, achieved by phonetic (intonation, stress), lexical (connotation, pragmatic lexical component, irregular semantics), syn­tactic (special constructions, inversion, parallelism) or compositional means (advancement).

Epigraph (Gr. epi, on, grapho, to write) – a small quotation pre­ceding a text or its part.

Epilogue – a concluding part of a literary work, usually cut off in time from the final events of the narration.

Epistolary genres – literary works written in a letter form.

Epithet – a stylistic device, a word or a phrase, expressing a property or characteristics of a thing, phenomenon, presented in an imaginative form and reflecting a subjective, emotional attitude.

Euphemism – a stylistic device, containing a substitute of an unpleasant, forbid-den by the etiquette, insulting, derogative word by a neutral or more pleasant word or expression.

Euphony (or instrumentation) – phonetic arrangement of the text creating a certain tonality; euphony as sound harmony (in its narrow sense).

Exposition – events preceding the dramatic collision and the climax, part of the literary composition of a work in fiction.

Framing – repetition of a word, a phrase or a sentence in the begin­ning and in the end of a semantic group, a sentence, a line, stanza, paragraph, a whole text.

Gradation –a compositional device based on the increase of emotional and compositional dynamics in a work of fiction.

Grotesque – a device of fantastic comic exaggeration which results in breaking the real form of existence for a certain object.

Hyperbole – a stylistic device based on deliberate exaggeration of a quality, quantity, size, dimension, etc. (e.g. Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old).

Imagery – a system of images in a work of art.

Inversion – a stylistic device of placing a word or a phrase into an unusual syntactical position, as a rule for the sake of expressiveness; emphatic inversion should be distinguished from grammatical inver­sion, i.e. a change of a traditional model of syntactical structure to reveal a change in grammatical meaning or function.

Irony – a stylistic device, based on an implicit contrastive change in the meaning of a word, a sentence, a part of text, while.

Litotes / understatement) – a stylistic device, based on the emphatic decrease or indication of a scarce amount of positive quality against the evidently negative background.

Metaphor – a stylistic device, a figurative stylistic nomination, a transfer of meaning based on similarity of two objects (i.e. a word or a phrase denoting a certain object is used as a name of another on the basis of their similarity); simple and sustained metaphors, genuine and trite metaphors (e.g. Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines).

Metre (metron, measure) – a certain rhythmic model, determined in poetry by the character and quantity of feet in a line and produced by the currency and interchange of syntactic structures in prose.

Metonymy – a stylistic device, a figurative stylistic nomination, transfer of meaning based on contiguity, when a word or a phrase denoting one object is used to denote another one on the basis of their contiguity (the relations of material and object, author and work, container and contents, sign and object of nomination, instrument and action, object and its function, part and whole – synecdoche as a type of metonymy) etc .(e.g. Sceptre and crown must tumble down / And in the dust be equal made / With the poor crooked scythe and spade).

Onomatopoeia – sound-imitation, a phonetic stylistic device, nomi­na­tion(e.g. kou-kou, rustle, bah) basedon imitation of some quality of an object.

Oxymoron – a stylistic device, stylistic nomination assigning a non-compatible property to an object (e.g. elloquent silence, terribly beautiful).

Outcome (Fr. denouement) – events in the works of art, immediately following culmination, slump of tension.

Paradox – a statement containing a contradiction, its interpretation results in ambiguity or or polysemantic interpretation (e.g. Wine costs money, blood does not cost anything).

Parallelism – a syntactical stylistic device, based on similarity of constructions, in the neighboring or correlated context, bringing in a combination of words and sentences, equivalent, complimentary or opposed in sense / as a rule, the term ”syntactical parallelism” is used; a compositional device based on topical repetition or dubbing a plot development line in a work of art / the story by O` Henry “The Roads We Take”.

Paronomasia – similarity in sounding of contextually connected words (e.g. raven – raving – ravin’ – never).

Parenthesis – an inserted word, sentence, explanatory or charac­terizing, a syntactical insertion.

Parcellation – a syntactical expressive stylistic device, graphic and syntactic separation due to which a syntactical construction becomes formally independent.

Periphrasis – a phrase or a sentence, substituting one word; logical, euphemistic and figurative periphrases.

Personification – a stylistic device, nomination, when a name of an animate thing is given to an inanimate object for the sake of expressiveness, figurativeness, intensification, emotions (e.g. Love is not Time’s fool).

Plot – a narrative development of the text.

Polysyndeton – repetition of conjunctions and connecting elements in a complex syntactical structure.

Prologue – an introductory part of a literary work.

Prosody – a system of the phonetic language means, including into­nation, stress, timbre, rhythm, tempo, pauses, also metre, rhyme in the poetic works.

Pun – a comic playful use of a word or a phrase based on semantic ambiguousness, polysemy (e.g. There isn’t a single man in the hotel).

Represented Speech – a style of narration presenting words and thoughts of a character in the name of the author; in contrast to direct or indirect speech characteristics of grammatical or formal diffe­rentiation no identification of a change of communicative roles of an author or a character is given.

Rhythm – recurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables as well as repetition of images, notions, connotations; phonetic repetitions as the basis of rhythm in poetry, syntax as the basis of rhythm in prose.

Rhetorical question – a stylisticsyntactic device, a question in form, not demanding an answer, a statement in contents.

Rhyme – a sound repetition (full or partial) in the ultimate positions of a poetic line.

Rhyming – a stylistic device of sound or word repetition in the end of poetic lines or their relatively complete rhythmical parts.

Semantically false chain – a semantically alien element in a chain of elements, imposing a second contextual meaning on the central word.

Simile – an imaginative comparison, introduced by the conjunctions as...as, like, as if, as though, and disguised metaphors by the verbs “to seem”, “to recollect”, “ to resemble”, “to remind”.

Summary – a brief presentation of the contents of a literary or publicist text, concise in form, language compression as a basic com­po­sitional principle.

Suspense (the effect of deceived expectancy) – the effect of tense anticipation created by the quality of predictability created by different devices, e.g. separation of the subject and the predicate, introduction of a parenthesis, etc., the device contrary to the effect of replenished expectancy.

Transposition – the use of a certain language form in the function of some other language form. Syntactic transposition (e.g. the use of one communicative type of the sentence in the function of another).

Tropes – stylistic devices, as a rule composed on the specific language models (allegory, allusion, antonomasia, epithet, hyperbole, irony, litotes, metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, periphrasis, personi­fi­cation, simile, synecdoche, zeugma).

Violation (decomposition) of phraseological units – an intentional decomposition of the formal characteristics or idiomaticity of phraseological units (e.g. Little Jon was born with a silver spoon in his mouth which was rather curly and large).

Zeugma – the use of a word in the position of grammatical dependence on two elements, due to which different meanings of the word are revealed (e.g. Everything was common here: opinions, the table and tennis rackets).

Words & word combinations suggested
for the analysis of the text

1. Rendering the context:

In the story (novel, extract, etc.) the author explains, (introduced, characterizes, portrays, comments on, touches upon, dwells on, describes (a scene), depicts (smb's role), pictures (smth), expresses his views on...).

In the beginning (middle, etc.) he points out, criticizes, makes an excursus into, accuses, gives a review of, reveals, exposes, makes a wide use of...)

The author begins with...the description of, the analyses of, a review of…

The story opens with an account of…, some critical remarks about…

Then (after that, further on, next) the author passes on to (goes on from...to.., goes on to say that, gives a detailed analyses (portrayal, etc)

On the whole the author manages to describe (portray, etc)...

The author brings to light the idea of...

The end of the story is in keeping with the title.

The author raises the most urgent problems of his time.

The book is written with profound intuition & understanding to be in the focus of the writer's attention

The except presents...

The work is tinged with sentimentality

The story is crowned with happy ending

The author has a firm grip on the reader's interest

We can feel the subtle undercurrent of the author's irony

originality of style

forcefulness of presentation

to draw one's subjects (characters) from everyday life (from one's own environment, etc) to turn to everyday life for one's subjects, characters

2. Speaking about the books:

it is a very powerful story (novel, etc.)

to hold the reader's attention (interest)

to keep the reader in suspense

the merit of the book lies in its...

the satire is not sustained

to have great merits

to have some defects (limitations)

the book is chiefly concerned with (chiefly deals with)

a lively narrative

the literary & artistic values (merits)

the spirit of optimism permeates the novel

the subject of the novel is drawn from life

the strong and weak points of the novel

a powerful book / a weak book

bitter satire on...

a vivid example of

a illustration of

subtle (profound, deep) analysis

the plot unfolds dynamically / slowly

the plots develops around / centers around

the novel is heavy with satire

the main idea is conveyed to the reader directly / indirectly.

3. Analyzing the text:

a) the selection (extract) given below presents a piece of narration, a description, character-drawing, a piece of dramatic prose, a psy­cho­logical portrayal of personages intercepted with dialogues, a vividly drawn picture of...

b) the general slant of the text is humorous (satirical, sentimen­tal, elevated, unemotional, pathetic), a matter-of-fact tone

… helps the author to achieve a humorous effect

the satirical effect is heightened by

it served to create...

to give the description an emotional colouring and to intensify the feeling of horror the author uses...

the mood prevalent in the extract is...

to create the atmosphere of...the author uses...

to form a background for (these events)

to use epithets in reference to weather

to achieve an effect

to produce a comic effect

the story is written in dramatic (lyrical, pathetic, ironical) key

to fill the scene with vitality and dramatic tension

c) the extract (except) may be divided into... logically complete parts the extract clearly falls into...parts

the sentence serves as a turning point

to involve the reader into the events of the book

the sentence reveals the main idea of the text

the lines are suggestive of...

the main point the author is trying to make is...

to carry a deep social message (psychological, etc)

to expose the evils of the society

the novel is penetrated throughout with these ideals

to bring out the idea (a point, mood, feelings) more clearly...

to abandon (reject) the traditional form of narrative

the story is set in (the scene is land in...)

the action takes place, begins, ends, etc

not to claim to be a masterpiece (a comprehensive study of smth)

distinctive traits (features)

the novels is (a little) lacking in action

as the plot goes on, as the story unfolds

an interesting (bold, original) treatment of the subject

the story is a first-person narration

a clear (lively, swift, free-flowing, exciting) narrative

a conflict

the climax

the outcome (solution, denouement)

the plot

subject-matter, content

the beginning of the plot

the development of the plot

the subplot

the action develops, the events unfolds

d) Characters (positive, negative); men characters, woman charac­ters

the author shows the development of the character

the leading (main) characters

the central figures

to be vivid, life-like, realistic, well-defined

to depict smth in vivid (rich) colours

the author's skill in describing...

the narrator

the author endows the character with the following traits

to bring in (to introduce) a lot of (very few) characters

to draw character with convincing strokes

to represent the character truthfully, convincingly (to present, depict, portray)

insight into character, penetration into character

the character is merely sketched in

to describe a character through his action (feelings, attitude towards other people)

the following sides of his characters are revealed through his...

to characterize the personages through their behavior, speech, thoughts & mutual attitude

to arouse one's sympathy / to repulse, to draw, to depict, to portray, to delineate) a character

to use direct (indirect) charac­terization amply (sparingly)

e) the author is at his best in the description of nature, etc.

his skill (mastery) in describing...

the writing (language) is vivid

with infinite skill, with subtle irony, stock (hackneyed) phrases, expressions, metaphors, words, etc.

the author employs such artistic means as...

the sentence (text, etc) is rich in epithets digression

to digress

this device is resorted to emphasize the idea expressed in a sentence (passage)

an allusion to...

to make the sentence empathic the author...

key-word, key-sentence

the author selects his words with great precision

4. Additional phrases:

As the title indicates

As it is known

It is widely known that

As to the first part

In the first place

Before giving an appraisal of...

To begin with

First of all I'd like to remark

There is something else that should be mentioned

Moreover

As it has been mentioned above

As far as smth is concerned

It must be added

Nevertheless

On the whole, to sum up, in short, finally, generally speaking, taking all into account, thus.

Part II. commentary on linguistic phenomena

History of English

When analyzing a word from the historical point of view students can try different approaches to the problem:

1. The origin of the word.

Intrigue

This word belongs to the group of later French borrowings of 17^th‑18^th centuries. As many words of this group it has retained a foreign appearance to the present day. The stress remains on the last syllable as in French. The word is pronounced with long [ i: ] indicated by the letter i like French words. It has a French spelling (the final letters – ue which are silent). All these facts prove that the word intrigue has not been completely assimilated in English.

2. Phonetic changes.

Child

The affricate [t∫] goes back to O.E. velar (plosive voiceless) [k] which was palatalised before a front vowel [i] to [k’].Toward the end of the O.E. period the palatal consonant developed to the affricate. In M.E. it was indicated by means of a special digraph ch which was introduced by French scribes.

The vowel [i] used to be a long vowel in O.E. (it was lengthened before the cluster ld in the 9^th century). In Early N.E. it became a diphthong [ai] due to the Great Vowel Shift.

The plural form of the word, children, has a short vowel in the root. The lengthening of [i] did not take place because the cluster ld was followed by another consonant.

3. Grammar phenomena.

Children

The plural form of the noun child has a non-standard ending - en. In O.E. the noun child (an s -stem, weak declension) took the ending – ru: cild – cildru. The ending of n -stems – en was added to the old forms of the plural in M.E. and later was preserved in N.E. As the ending - en was especially active in the southern dialects we can suppose that the form children might have come from this source.

4. Complex analyses.

In this type of the analyses students have to take into consideration various aspects of one and the same word (the origin of the word and its spelling, the origin of the word and phonetic changes, grammar phenomena and spelling etc). For example, the complex (and full) analyses of the word child comprises points 2 and 3 and also the information about the origin of this word (a native English word).

Here is the example of the complex analyses of the verb to give:

In O.E. this verb belonged to the group of strong verbs and formed its stems by means of vowel gradation (ablaut). Judging by the marker which followed the root vowel (a single consonant), the verb was included in class 5. The system of gradation of class 5 can be described as quantitative ablaut. The remains of it still can be clearly traced in the three forms of the verb: g i ve – g a ve – g i ven, which represent accordingly the infinitive and the present forms (i), the 3d person singular, past indicative (a) and the 2d participle (i), the former fourth form. At present the verb belongs to the group of irregular verbs.

Modern spelling and pronunciation of the verb can be traced back to ME. The letter v was introduced by the French scribes to denote the fricative voiced consonant [v] which in M.E. became a separate phoneme. The letter g which replaced O.E. з was introduced to denote the sound [g]. But here it should be mentioned that in O.E. the initial з was palatalised before a front vowel and later changed into [j] as in yard, young etc. The velar [g] of N.E. give could not result from phonetic development of palatal з. Its only source could be the Scandinavian variant. We may suppose that the word give was borrowed from the Northen dialect where O.E. and Scandinavian variants might blend. According to the textbooks the form give is found in late M.E., in the 15^th century.

The original ending of the infinitive was weakened in M.E. to [ə] which was lost in Late M.E. though it continued to be spelt as – e. This mute – e still can be seen at the end of the verb.

The word give belongs to the Germanic layer of the vocabulary and can be compared to the German verb geben. It is a native English word the phonetics of which was slightly influenced by the corresponding Scandinavian word.

Glossary

Old English, Middle English, New English, Early New English

Pre-written / prehistorical period

Loan-word (a French loan-word)

Borrowing (a borrowing from Latin)

To borrow a word

To adopt a word

To penetrate into English

International word

Productive

Conversion

Native root and borrowed affix

The prefix dis - with a negative meaning

The suffix - ess used to derive names of female beings

This word is characterised as a late borrowing by some peculiarities of pronunciation

A digraph

Double letters

To be respelt

To introduce sh to indicate the new sibilant

The two-fold use of c which has survived today owes its origin to French: this letter usually stood for [s] before front vowels and for [k] before back vowels

The spelling of the word changed under Scandinavian influence.

The spelling of the word was brought closer to its Latin source.

The sound [u:], which was represented by the letter u in O.E., came to be spelt ou, the way it was spelt in French.

Mute e

The letter e was preserved in words having a long root vowel

An -e appeared in words which had not had it in ME

Strong verbs

Vowel gradation / ablaut

Quantitative ablaut

Qualitative ablaut

Weak verbs

Dental suffix

Preterite-present verbs / past-present verbs

Anomalous verbs

Strong declension

Weak declension

Vocalic stems (a-stems)

Consonantal stems (n-stems)

Root stems

Gender

Number

Case

Pronouns (personal, demonstrative, possessive)

Consonants

Plosive voiceless [k]

Voiced [g’]

Fricative voiceless dental [f]

Fricative voiced dental [v]

Fricative mediolingual palatal [x’], [γ ’]

Fricative back lingual velar [x], [γ ’]

Affricate [t]

Palatalization

To be / become palatalized

The consonant is voiced intervocally and voiceless finally or initially

A positional variant of the phoneme

To become a separate phoneme

Consonant cluster / consonant sequence

[x] before t is lost and the preceding short vowel is lengthened

the digraph gh came to denote the consonant [f]

thus the word came to be pronounced [to:k]

in Early New English the clusters [sj, zj, tj, dj] changed into [∫], [з], [t∫], [dз] (sibilants changed into affricates)

to be simplified

the consonant [r] was vocalised finally and before consonants / vocalisation of r

sonorants

nasal sonorants were regularly lost before fricative consonants

West Germanic lengthening of consonants

The First Consonant Shift

Verner’ Law

Vowels

Levelling of the unstressed vowels

To be weakened and reduced to a neural vowel something like [ə]

To be lengthened

To be shortened

Open syllables

Closed syllables

Monophthong

Diphthong

Diphthongization

To develop into a diphthong

The Great Vowel Shift

Short vowels became long in open syllables

The vowel [ə] of unstressed endings was lost

[I:] has remained unchanged

[I:] took part in the vowel shift

The root-vowel interchange

I-umlaut/ palatal mutation/I-mutation

The vowel was fronted and made narrower

Grammar