Linguistic Sign
Ferdninand de Saussure
[tri¦] expression signifiant sound pattern
Bild meaning signifié concept
Baum
there is no internal link between the sound shape and the meaning of the linguistic sign.
Noam Chamsky
Competence- Performance
Competence: the knowledge we have of the language we grow up with
Performance: the speech we actually produce
Me Tarzan, You Jane
Opposition pairs
like competence and performance
descriptive-prescriptive: factual language use/ binding rules for correct use of the language
synchronic-diachronic: language at a specific point of time/ language changes over time
Non-constrastive-constrastive: monolingual-one language in focus/ languages are compared and contrasted
Main periods of history of English
Old English 450(700)-1100
Middle English 1100-1500
Early Modern English 500-1700
Modern English ab 1700
Old English
Germanic tribes arrive from the middle of the fifth century
-mostly Germanic word-stock
-fully inflected
-inflections begin to be levelled
Early Modern English
introducing of printing into England by William Canxton in 1476
spread of English around the world starts (Colonisation)
-Great Vowel Shift
-Standarisation and regularisation
-large-sclae borrowing from Latin, Greek, French and other European languages
Middle English
Norman Conquest in 1066 --> start Renaissance--> End
-enormous influx of French vocabulary
-levelld inflections
-Great Vowel Shift starts
Modern English
English as a global language
-almost no inflections
-borrowing from many languages world-wide