Causes and ways of borrowings

In its 15 century long history recorded in written manuscripts the English language happened to come in long and close contact with several other languages, mainly Latin, French and Old Norse (or Scandinavian). The great influx of borrowings from these sources can be accounted for by a number of historical causes. Due to the great influence of the Roman civilisation Latin was for a long Уте used in England as the language of learning and religion. Old Norse was the language of the conquerors who were on the same level of social and cultural development and who merged rather easily with the local population in the 9th, 10th and the first half of the 11th century. French (to be more exact its Norman dialect) was the language of the other conquerors who brought with them a lot of new notions of a higher social system — developed feudalism, it was the language of upper classes, of official documents and school instruction from the middle of the 11th century to the end of the 14th century.

In the study of the borrowed element in English the main emphasis is as a rule placed on the Middle English period. Borrowings of later periods became the object of investigation only in recent years. These investigations have shown that the flow of borrowings has been steady and uninterrupted. The greatest number has come from French. They refer to various fields of social-political, scientific and cultural life. A large portion of borrowings (41%) is scientific and technical terms.

The number and character of borrowed words tell us of the relations between the peoples, the level of their culture, etc. It is for this reason that borrowings have often been called the milestones of history. Thus if we go through the lists of borrowings in English and arrange them in groups according to their meaning, we shall be able to obtain much valuable information with regard to England’s contacts with many nations. Some borrowings, however, cannot be explained by the direct influence of certain historical conditions, they do not come along with any new objects or ideas. Such were for instance the words air, place, brave, gay borrowed from French.

It must be pointed out that while the general historical causes of borrowing from different languages have been studied with a considerable degree of thoroughness the purely linguistic reasons for borrowing are still open to investigation.

 

The number and character of borrowings do not only depend on the historical conditions, on the nature and length of the contacts, but also on the degree of the genetic and structural proximity of languages concerned. The closer the languages, the deeper and more versatile is the influence. This largely accounts for the well-marked contrast between the French and the Scandinavian influence on the English language. Thus under the influence of the Scandinavian languages, which were closely related to Old English, some classes of words were borrowed that could not have been adopted from non-related or distantly related languages (the pronouns they, their, them, for instance); a number of Scandinavian borrowings were felt as derived from native words (they were of the same root and the connection between them was easily seen), e.g. drop (AS. ) — drip (Scand.), true (AS.)- tryst (Scand.); the Scandinavian influence even accelerated to a certain degree the development of the grammatical structure of English.

Borrowings enter the language in two ways: through oral speech (by immediate contact between the peoples) and through written speech (by indirect contact through books, etc.).

Oral borrowing took place chiefly in the early periods of history, whereas in recent times written borrowing gained importance. Words borrowed orally (e.g. L. inch, mill, street) are usually short and they undergo considerable changes in the act of adoption. Written borrowings (e.g. Fr. communiqué, belles-lettres, naïveté) preserve their spelling and some peculiarities of their sound-form, their assimilation is a long and laborious process.

Semasiology

Lexicology deals with words, word-forming morphemes (derivational affixes) and word-groups or phrases. All these linguistic units have meaning of some kind: they are all significant and therefore must be investigated both as to form and meaning. The branch of Lexicology that is devoted to the study of meaning is known as Semasiology.

Meaning is one of the most controversial terms in the theory of language. At first sight the understanding of this term seems to present no difficulty at all — it is freely used in teaching, interpreting and translation.

When we examine a word we see that its meaning though closely connected with the underlying concept or concepts is not identical with them. To begin with, concept is a category of human cognition. Concept is the thought of the object that singles out its essential features. Our concepts abstract and reflect the most common and typical features of the different objects and phenomena of the world. Being the result of abstraction and generalisation all “concepts are thus intrinsically almost the same for the whole of humanity in one and the same period of its historical development. The meanings of words however are different in different languages. That is to say, words expressing identical concepts may have different meanings and different semantic structures in different languages.

The difference between meaning and concept can also be observed by comparing synonymous words and word-groups expressing essentially the same concepts but possessing linguistic meaning which is felt as different in each of the units under consideration, e.g. big, large; to, die, to pass away, to kick the bucket, to join the majority; child, baby, babe, infant.

 

What is meaning?

 

The branch of Lexicology that is devoted to the study of meaning is known as Semasiology.

Meaning is one of the most controversial terms in the theory of language. At first sight the understanding of this term seems to present no difficulty at all — it is freely used in teaching, interpreting and translation.

When we examine a word we see that its meaning though closely connected with the underlying concept or concepts is not identical with them. To begin with, concept is a category of human cognition. Concept is the thought of the object that singles out its essential features. Our concepts abstract and reflect the most common and typical features of the different objects and phenomena of the world. Being the result of abstraction and generalisation all “concepts are thus intrinsically almost the same for the whole of humanity in one and the same period of its historical development. The meanings of words however are different in different languages. That is to say, words expressing identical concepts may have different meanings and different semantic structures in different languages.

The difference between meaning and concept can also be observed by comparing synonymous words and word-groups expressing essentially the same concepts but possessing linguistic meaning which is felt as different in each of the units under consideration, e.g. big, large; to, die, to pass away, to kick the bucket, to join the majority; child, baby, babe, infant.

 

Grammatical meaning.

We notice, e.g., that word-forms, such as girls, winters, joys, tables, etc. though denoting widely different objects of reality have something in common. This common element is the grammatical meaning of plurality which can be found in all of them.

Thus grammatical meaning may be defined,as the component of meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words, as, e.g., the tense meaning in the word-forms of verbs (asked, thought, walked, etc.) or the case meaning in the word-forms of various nouns (girl’s, boy’s, night’s, etc.).

In a broad sense it may be argued that linguists who make a distinction between lexical and grammatical meaning are, in fact, making a distinction between the functional (linguistic) meaning which operates at various levels as the interrelation of various linguistic units and referential (conceptual) meaning as the interrelation of linguistic units and referents (or concepts).

In modern linguistic science it is commonly held that some elements of grammatical meaning can be identified by the position of the linguistic unit in relation to other linguistic units, i.e. by its distribution. Word-forms speaks, reads, writes have one and the same grammatical meaning as they can all be found in identical distribution, e.g. only after the pronouns he, she, it and before adverbs like well, badly, to-day, etc.

It follows that a certain component of the meaning of a word is described when you identify it as a part of speech, since different parts of speech are distributionally different (cf. my work and I work).¹

 

Lexical meaning.

Comparing word-forms of one and the same word we observe that besides grammatical meaning, there is another component of meaning to be found in them. Unlike the grammatical meaning this component is identical in all the forms of the word. Thus, e.g. the word-forms go, goes, went, going, gone possess different grammatical meanings of tense, person and so on, but in each of these forms we find one and the same semantic component denoting the process of movement. This is the lexical meaning of the word which may be described as the component of meaning proper to the word as a linguistic unit, i.e. recurrent in all the forms of this word.

The difference between the lexical and the grammatical components of meaning is not to be sought in the difference of the concepts underlying the two types of meaning, but rather in the way they are conveyed. The concept of plurality, e.g., may be expressed by the lexical meaning of the world plurality; it may also be expressed in the forms of various words irrespective of their lexical meaning, e.g. boys, girls, joys, etc. The concept of relation may be expressed by the lexical meaning of the word relation and also by any of the prepositions, e.g. in, on, behind, etc. (cf. the book is in/on, behind the table). “

It follows that by lexical meaning we designate the meaning proper to the given linguistic unit in all its forms and distributions, while by grammatical meaning we designate the meaning proper to sets of word-forms common to all words of a certain class. Both the lexical and the grammatical meaning make up the word-meaning as neither can exist without the other. That can be also observed in the semantic analysis of correlated words in different languages. E.g. the Russian word сведения is not semantically identical with the English equivalent information because unlike the Russian сведения the English word does not possess the grammatical meaning of plurality which is part of the semantic structure of the Russian word.

Denotational meaning.

Proceeding with the semantic analysis we observe that lexical meaning is not homogenous either and may be analysed as including denotational and connotational components.

As was mentioned above one of the functions of words is to denote things, concepts and so on. Users of a language cannot have any knowledge or thought of the objects or phenomena of the real world around them unless this knowledge is ultimately embodied in words which have essentially the same meaning for all speakers of that language. This is the denotational meaning, i.e. that component of the lexical meaning which makes communication possible. There is no doubt that a physicist knows more about the atom than a singer does, or that an arctic explorer possesses a much deeper knowledge of what arctic ice is like than a man who has never been in the North. Nevertheless they use the words atom, Arctic, etc. and understand each other.

Connotational meaning.

The second component of the lexical meaning is the connotational component, i.e. the emotive charge and the stylistic value of the word.

Classification of word

Traditional classification of words (dating back to ancient times) – 8 parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections.

 

Objections:

• The definitions are largely notional and often extremely quite vague; e.g. A pronoun is a word used instead of a noun (John came this morning – a man, someone, you-know-who, the aforementioned).
• The number of parts of speech in the traditional grammars seems to be arbitrary. Why 8? Prof. Ilyish – 12 (+ numerals, statives, modal words and particles), prof. Khaimovich and Rogovskaya – 14 (+ articles and response words).

Thus, meaning can’t be the only criterion for classifying words. Compare:

1. The last train was at 7.
2. When did you last get a letter from her
3. She was faithful to the last.
4. How long will the fine weather last?

That’s why to classify words we must take into consideration morphological characteristics of words. For instance, H.Sweet: declinables (nouns, adjectives, verbs) and indeclinables (adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections). One more classification (based on syntactic functions of word classes): noun-words (nouns, noun-numerals, noun-pronouns, Infinitives, Gerunds), adjective-words (adjectives, adjective-pronouns, adjective-numerals, Participles), verb-words (verbs, verbals). O.Jespersen (his theory is between syntax and morphology):

1. substantives (including proper nouns)
2. adjectives (In some respect (1) and (2) may be classed together as nouns)
3. pronouns (including numerals and pronominal adverbs)
4. verbs (with doubts as to the inclusion of verbals)
5. particles (adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections) characterized negatively as made up of all those that cannot find any place in any of the first 4 classes.

J.Sledd: inflexional classes (nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives – based on inflexion, adverbs – based on derivation) and positional classes (4 main positional classes – nominals, verbals, adjectivals, adverbials – and 8 smaller positional classes – determiners, prepositions, conjunctions, relatives, interrogatives, intensive-reflexives, auxiliaries and adverbials of degree). He uses the method of substitution:

• e.g. Cash/money/the money/the big money talks.

 

An adjective is usually an adjectival but it may be a nominal, etc.:

• The poor boy became president. The poor can afford no vacations.

The strong points: 1) emphasis on inflexions as indicators of parts of speech 2) the idea of heterogeneity of word-classes.

Function. Ch.Fries: All the instances of one part of speech are the ‘same’ only in the sense that in the structural patterns of English each has the same functional significance. He classifies words using 3 typical sentences which he calls frames:

• Frame A – The concert was good (always).
• Frame B – The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly).
• Frame C – The team went there.

Fries establishes 4 classes (class 1, 2, 3 4) and 15 groups of structural words (group A, B, C, D, E, etc.) – e.g. group A comprises all the words which may occupy the position of the: no, your, their, both, few, much, John’s, our, four, twenty, etc.

Main drawbacks:

• morphological characteristics are ignored completely;
• syntactical characteristics are not always taken into consideration (e.g. modal verbs are isolated from Class 2);
• the classes are heterogeneous (one and the same word may happen to be in different classes and groups).

Strong points:

• special accent is laid on distribution of words and their syntactic valency (another name for the classification is syntactico-distributional);
• his materials comprise 250 000 word entries which provide information on frequency of occurrence.

Russian linguistic tradition: meaning, form and function. e.g. table – a noun because 1) it is the name of a thing (specific meaning), 2) it has forms of number and case and 3) it can function as a subject or an object in a sentence.

Not all the 3 principles work at the same time. There are, for example, unchangeable words.

By meaning we do not understand the individual meaning of a word (its lexical meaning) but the meaning common to all the words of a given class.

By form we mean the morphological characteristics of a type of word. Verbs are characterized by the categories of tense, mood, aspect, voice, etc. The form is not just stem-building elements.

By function we mean the syntactical properties of a type of words, i.e. its distribution (combinability and arrangement in a sentence) and its function in a sentence.

 

Problem classes of words:

• response words
  1. meaning – response statement
  2. negative combinability
  3. functioning as sentence-words (Are you coming? – Yes.)
• modal words
  1. meaning – modality: certainty, probability, i.e. speaker’s evaluation
  2. form – invariable
  3. function – do not enter any phrases, stay outside Happily they arrived. They arrived happily.
• statives
  1. meaning – state
  2. form – prefix a-, no degrees of comparison
  3. function of a predicative (He is afraid of difficulties)
• postpositions (to bring up:: to bring)
• particles (He is simply mad. He speaks simply.)
• word-substitutes (Prof.Vorontsova: He speaks English better than I do).

Field theory. Prof.Admoni: there are linguistic units in every part of speech which possess all the properties of the given class. This is the nucleus of this part of speech. But there are also units which possess not all the properties of it though they belong to this part of speech. The field then includes both the central part and periphery, it is not homogeneous. The task of the linguist is to reveal all the central and all the peripheral elements.

Hyponymic structures

Another approach to the classification of vocabulary items into lexico-semantic groups is the study of hyponymic relations between words. By hyponymy is meant a semantic relationship of inclusion. Thus, e.g., vehicle includes car, bus, taxi and so on; oak implies tree;

horse entails animal; table entails furniture. Thus the hyponymic relationship may be viewed as the hierarchical relationship between the meaning of the general and the individual terms.

The general term (vehicle, tree, animal, etc.) is sometimes referred to as the classifier and serves to describe the lexico-semantic groups, e.g. Lexico-semantic groups (LSG) of vehicles, movement, emotions, etc.

The individual terms can be said to contain (or entail) the meaning of the general term in addition to their individual meanings which distinguish them from each other (cf. the classifier move and the members of the group walk, run, saunter, etc.).

It is of importance to note that in such hierarchical structures certain words may be both classifiers and members of the groups. This may be illustrated by the hyponymic structure represented below.

Another way to describe hyponymy is in terms of genus and differentia.

The more specific term is called the hyponym of the more general, and the more general is called the hyperonym or the classifier.

It is noteworthy that the principle of such hierarchical classification is widely used by scientists in various fields of research: botany, geology, etc. Hyponymic classification may be viewed as objectively reflecting the structure of vocabulary and is considered by many linguists as one of the most important principles for the description of meaning.

A general problem with this principle of classification (just as with lexico-semantic group criterion) is that there often exist overlapping classifications. For example, persons may be divided into adults (man, woman, husband, etc.) and children (boy, girl, lad, etc.) but also into national groups (American, Russian, Chinese, etc.), professional groups (teacher, butcher, baker, etc.), social and economic groups, and so on.

Another problem of great importance for linguists is the dependence of the hierarchical structures of lexical units not only on the structure of the corresponding group of referents in real world but also on the structure of vocabulary in this or that language.

This can be easily observed when we compare analogous groups in different languages. Thus, e.g., in English we may speak of the lexico-semantic group of meals which includes: breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper, snack, etc. The word meal is the classifier whereas in Russian we have no word for meals in general and consequently no classifier though we have several words for different kinds of meals.