Riassunto Inglese Handbook of Present Day English A 45 Pag Studocu

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Riassunto inglese - Handbook of present-day English (A)
Lingua Inglese (Università degli Studi di Torino)
StuDocu non è sponsorizzato o supportato da nessuna università o ateneo.

Scaricato da Diana Alexandroaie (diana.alexandra1203@gmail.com)
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LINGUA INGLESE (STUDENTI A-L)

PRIMA ANNUALITÀ
DOCENTE: CRISTIANO FURIASSI
VALENZA: 9 CREDITI
AN INTRODUCTION TO
PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH
DORIANA DI MARTINO
LINGUE E CULTURE PER IL TURISMO – anno accademico 2017/2018

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LANGUAGE CHANGE AND VARIATION IN ENGLISH
The history of language

There are two approaches to historical language change:
1. comparative linguistics or language reconstruction, which is based on the concepts of
“proto-language” and “language family” (e.g. English is a Germanic language, which
originated from Indo-European; Italian is a Romance/Neo-Latin language, which also
originated from Indo-European);
2. history of language, which is the study of the changes of a single language over the
centuries; literature on the history of language has usually distinguished between two
causes for change:
a. external causes which are extralinguistic or social factors such as technological
innovation (computer, smartphone, printing press, etc.), introduction of new
concepts (political correctness), military conquest and immigration;
b. internal causes such as analogy, hypercorrection and push chain processes.
Traditional History of the English Language (HEL) has mainly focused on the history of the
standard variety and its speakers and has conceived the HEL as divided in four main periods:
1) Old English or OE (the Anglo-Saxon period: 700 – 1150);
2) Middle English or ME (the Norman period: 1150 – 1500);
3) Modern English or ModE (the Modern period: 1500 – 1900);
4) Present-day English or PDE (20th century: 1900 – present).
Before OE: the Celts

Historically English is a Germanic language, it is however difficult to locate or give a date to
the origin of the Germanic languages and their speakers: according to the Roman historian
Tacitus, Germanic was the language of the populations who inhabited the continental European
area east of the River Elbe at the time of Caesar (50 B.C.). The progenitor of Germanic is the
Indo-European language, a reconstructed language, which is considered to be the ancestor of
classical languages like Latin, Greek, Slavic and Sanskrit and, as a consequence, of many modern
European languages such as Italian, French, Spanish and so on (the resemblance among these
languages is testified by sound correspondences in words like PDE three, Greek treis, Latin tres
and Italian tre).
The first inhabitants of the British Isles were the Celts, an Indo-European population who lived
in Europe before the Roman and the Anglo-Saxon invasions (2000 B.C. – 100 A.D.), speaking
Celtic dialects (no Germanic language nor English!) which are still spoken in some areas such as
Wales (Welsh), Scotland (Scots Gaelic, Breton) and Ireland (Irish Gaelic): the most important
names of Celtic origin are toponyms like London, Leeds, Avon, Thames, Kent and Cornwall.
History of the Anglo-Saxon period

The term “OE” refers to the Germanic dialects (i.e. Kentish, West-Saxon, Mercian and
Northumbrian) spoken at that time in England by Germanic populations called Jutes, Angles and
Saxons, who arrived in the British Isles in the 5th century A.D. from the North of Europe
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(Netherlands area): as a consequence, the Celts were assimilated or forced to move westward
and northward.
The event that mostly contributed to the shaping of the OE language was the Christianisation
of the Island, starting from the 6th century, which introduces the Latin alphabet bringing to the
progressive abandonment, by the Anglo-Saxons, of the Runic alphabet or Futhark.
During the period from the 9th to the 11th centuries, several manuscripts were translated from
Latin into West-Saxon dialect of OE (Latin and Greek gave Old English a wide range of words
from the Gospel, i.e. related to religion and spirituality). This dialect is associated to King Alfred,
who was at the head of the West-Saxon reign, at that time the most important political, religious
and cultural centre in Europe. West-Saxon is commonly considered the first standard written
language or the language associated with political, military and cultural power in society.
The most important historical episode that profoundly changed the history of English during
this period is the occupation of England by Scandinavian Vikings (8th century, in 793), which is
considered the dark ages of British history, recorded in the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” (a collection
of annals in Old English chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons):
➢ the first Scandinavian settlers (the Danes) were located in the North-East of England and
by the year 867 they had almost conquered the island, but King Alfred the Great raised
an army and defeated them pushing them out of his kingdom and re-conquering part of
the Scandinavian possessions in 887;
➢ King Alfred saved the English language and commissioned the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicles”,
encouraging the use of English in writing and in speech;
➢ Viking words still used nowadays are sky, skin, skirt, run, window, slalom and
ombudsman; Viking obsolete words are “thorpe” = PDE settlement, “beck” = PDE stream
and “by” = PDE farm.
Old English (700 – 1150)

The term OE refers to an inflectional/synthetic language (language functions, grammatical
categories and relations and verbal conjugations are expressed by the use of a system of case
markers or inflections; language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio). PDE is, by contrast, an
analytic language (grammatical and syntactic relations are expressed by word order and
grammatical words such as prepositions and auxiliaries).
An example of Old English can be taken from Ælfric’s “Colloquy” (circa 998), a hand-
book/manual that intended to help students learning how to speak Latin through conversations:
OE We cildra biddaþ þe, eala lareow, þæt þu tæce us [...]
Latin Nos pueri rogamus te, magister, ut doceas nos [...]
PDE We young men, master, would like you to teach us [...]
From this sentence we can see both Anglo-Saxon (þ is a letter from the Runic alphabet) both
Latin (æ) influence in morphology; a very similar syntactic structure between OE and Latin; same
pronouns because close-class words are very hard to change; the word “cildra” = PDE children.
The most important features of Old English are:
✓ Latin alphabet with some differences from PDE (e.g. the consonant thorn or þorn <þ>,
now <th>, inherited from the Runic alphabet and still surviving in Icelandic);

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✓ nouns, adjectives and pronouns are inflected for case (i.e. nominative, accusative,
genitive, dative), number (i.e. singular, plural) and gender (i.e. masculine, feminine,
neuter);
✓ two types of verbs, strong and weak (regular and irregular verbs in PDE);
✓ free word order;
✓ lexis is mainly Germanic, but includes also words of Celtic (names of places, e.g. London),
Latin (e.g. PDE school from “schola”) and Scandinavian origin (e.g. “landes mann” = PDE
native).
History of the Norman period

The most important historical episode that profoundly changed the history of English during
this period is the Norman conquest by William the Conqueror in 1066, which mainly contributed
to changing Anglo-Saxons England socially, politically and culturally (Normans will lose their
power in favour of English kings in 1204).
A new French-speaking ruling class (Normans didn’t know Germanic dialects!) substituted the
Anglo-Saxon court, noblemen and bishops (the re-organization of political power meant the
progressive marginalisation of the rich and flourishing Anglo-Saxon cultural and literary
tradition). However, Latin was still the language of Church, education and authority (“Magna
Carta Libertatum” of 1215, which was forced onto the king of England by his subjects, the feudal
barons, in an attempt to limit his powers by law and protect their rights), while English the one
of the majority of the population. Many Norman kings were often totally ignorant of their
country’s language, in fact government, law and administration were conducted in French and
so was the Church, together with Latin:
➢ some nowadays words with French origin deal mostly with administration (government,
treaty, royal, property, accuse, office, court, crown, marry, liberty) and religion
(confession, prayer, abbey, tempt), others are part of general vocabulary (people, age,
flower, large, lesson, poison, country which comes from Old French “cuntree”, from
medieval Latin “contrata” = “terra”/“(land) lying opposite” and from Latin “contra” =
“against”/“opposite”);
➢ coexistence of quasi-synonyms (used in different contexts) in PDE related to cuisine
(French taught English how to cook): pig – pork, calf – veal, cow – beef, deer – venison,
sheep – mutton, snail – escargot.
The Normans’ integration with English society took place through marriage: in the 12th and
13th century French/English bilingualism existed in the upper middle classes and nobility, till a
gradual shift to English.
The most representative literary figure of the 14th century is Geoffrey Chaucer, whose “The
Canterbury Tales” is the most authoritative example of written literary Middle English.
In 1476 there was the introduction of the printing press in England, which started setting out
a written standard, by the printer William Caxton (invented in Germany by Johannes Gutenberg
but already in use in China in 1040) who did more or less what he wanted and almost by chance
contributed to the standardisation of written English.

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Middle English (1150 – 1500)

An example of Middle English can be taken from Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”:
ME Thanne were ther yonge povre scolers two,
That dwelten in this halle, of which I seye.
PDE Then there were two young poor scholars,
Who dwelt in this hall, of which I tell.
From this sentence we can see both French (“povre”) both Latin (“scolers”) influence in lexis;
a very similar syntactic structure; same pronouns and prepositions.
The most important features of Middle English are:
✓ reduction of the case system, particularly in nouns and adjectives (from synthetic to
analytic language, less rich in morphology);
✓ no more Runic alphabet letters (<th> instead of <þ>);
✓ development of the future with shall/will, the present progressive and the passive voice;
✓ introduction of the 3rd person singular feminine pronoun she/shoe;
✓ increasingly fixed word order, with some variation.
History of the Modern period

During this period Britain was a united and powerful country of 7 million inhabitants,
characterised by the separation of the Church of England, composed of Protestants, (the first
authorized translation of the Bible, called the “King James Version”, was published in 1611) from
the Church of Rome, composed of Catholics.
Queen Elizabeth established the worldwide colonial power, also backing up pirates Sir Walter
Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake in the anti-Spanish campaign in the Caribbean: British colonialism
brought to a fragmentation of the English language in different geographical and socio-cultural
contexts. Several political, economic and social factors contributed to this process such as the
increasing activity of trading companies in India and the slave trade in Africa (starting from the
beginning of the 17th century), the establishment of stable colonies in America, Australia, New
Zealand, Canada, the Caribbean and South Africa and the institutionalisation of English within
colonies.
From 1642 to 1651 there was the English Civil War over the power of the Parliament versus
the power of the Monarchy, i.e. Parliamentarians versus Royalists.
In 1702 England and Scotland were united under the British Crown.
Modern English (1500 – 1900)

The main linguistic transformation of this period is the Great Vowel Shift (GVS, coined by the
Danish linguist Otto Jespersen at the beginning of the 20th century and responsible for the no
one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes), completed in roughly 1550
but lasted until the 17th century, which changed the English pronunciation.
An example of Modern English can be taken from Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour Lost” (this was
the period of the great flourishing of the theatre and literature):
I praise God for you sir, your reasons at dinner haue beene sharpe
and sententious: pleasant without scurrillity, witty without
ModE affection, audacious without impudency, learned without
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opinion, and strange without heresie: I did conuerse this

quondam day with a companion…
From this sentence we can see a Latin (“quondam” and the interchangeable use of the
graphemes <u> and <v>) influence in lexis and a strong affinity with PDE (<ie> for <y>).
The most important features of Modern English are:
✓ simplification of inflection and absence of the case system (the only remains were the
possessive s, the s in plural nouns and in the third person, the comparative and
superlative endings in adjectives), with the exception of pronouns;
✓ tendency towards a fixed word order.
The ModE was also the era of the debate between Neologisers (in favour of words of foreign
origin) and Purists (in favour of the preservation of native words) and of the standardisation of
English (development of a Standard English, SE), through long processes of selection (London
English is taken as the model) and codification thanks to grammars and dictionaries (Samuel
Johnson’s “A dictionary of the English Language”, the first English dictionary published in 1755).
Another significant aspect of the debate on language codification concerned the idea of a
correct pronunciation and of a spoken standard of British English accent with the development
of the so-called Received Pronunciation (RP, “received at court”), which was mainly a marker of
social class, a sort of weapon in the hands of the powerful in society representing a symbol of
social, cultural and economic prestige.
History of the 20th century

This is the period of British colonialism and American imperialism, with which the English
language spread and new varieties form worldwide: English becomes the global lingua franca
(the one that allows people who don’t share the same mother tongue to communicate) because
is the official, or main, language of many powerful countries, such as the UK, the USA, Australia,
Canada and New Zealand.
The importance of English is also linked to the fact that, despite being the language of the
oppressors, it has been retained as the co-official language (along with other native languages)
in more than seventy former British colonies after their political independence, e.g. India, the
Caribbean and several African countries, because in these countries there were many and
different languages so it was easier having just one.
Moreover, English has acquired growing importance worldwide in science, technology,
international organisations and business.
Present-day English (1900 – present)

The reasons for the present predominance of English in the world are not internal (myths, not
true: clarity, simplicity, size of its vocabulary, flexibility in creating new words, adaptability to
distant contexts), but external: the colonial and industrial power of Great Britain in the 18th and
19th centuries; the political, economic and technological power of the USA in the 20 th century;
the number of speakers, who are all over the world and not only in one country (like Chinese
are); the geographical spread; the cultural heritage and products (language identifies things).

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The geographical spread of PDE has been described in terms of three concentric circles (within
each category there is a continuum from an educated standard to a very limited form of
communication):
1. the inner circle, where English is the Native Language (ENL or L1) and is transmitted
through the family and institutional agencies such as the media and school (native
varieties of English);
2. the outer circle, where English is the Second Language (ESL or L2) and is used
internationally in former British colonies in the institutional, media and educational fields
(e.g. Indian English);
3. the expanding circle, where English can be a Foreign Language (EFL), the Lingua Franca
(ELF) or used for Special Purposes (ESP) (e.g. Airspeak, Policespeak, Business English (BE),
English for Academic Purposes (EAP)).
PDE has acquired the status of global language and the most relevant approach to describe
and explain this wide-ranging sociolinguistic phenomenon is the “world English paradigm”,
another three concentric circles model developed by the Indian sociolinguist Braj Kachru:
I. in the inner circle there are the so-called norm providing countries, in which English is
the ENL or L1 and where the number of speakers is 375 million (e.g. UK, USA, Australia);
II. in the outer circle there are the so-called norm developing countries, in which English is
the ESL or L2 and where the number of speakers is between 350 and 450 million (e.g.
India, Jamaica, Philippines, Nigeria);
III. in the expanding circle there are the so-called norm dependent countries, in which
English is the EFL and where the number of speakers is 750 million (e.g. Italy, Holland,
Japan, Brazil).

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Native varieties or “Colonial Englishes”

In the norm developing countries there is a set of different but related (mutually intelligent)
varieties which share a common core of grammar and vocabulary: the main difference is in
pronunciation and in lexis (e.g. in South Africa traffic lights are called “robots”).
The two main native varieties are British English (BrE) and American English (AmE), that
provide the norms for EFL learners.
Second language varieties or “New Englishes”

New Englishes are used in institutional or educational contexts in multilingual countries,
usually former British colonies (English was seen as a unifying medium of communication in
countries that already had several local languages).
Of course, they have gone through a process of language contact with native languages spoken
in these colonies, e.g. the sentence as honest as an elephant cannot come from BrE or AmE
simply because, excluding zoos, naturally there are no elephants in the UK nor in the USA, so it
must come from an Asian or an African variety of English.
As time passed by, they have been progressively acknowledged as local standards, e.g. Indian
English, Caribbean English, East-African English, sharing common features that are different
from native standard varieties.
The speech community of PDE

The speech community of PDE is a multicultural place where bilingualism or multiculturalism
is the norm. Languages play an important role in the construction of both individual and
collective identities.
The use of two or more varieties or languages within the same speech context, or code-
switching (e.g. Spanglish), is the most powerful marker of language identity. It signals that
sociolinguistic identities are not fixed constructs, but they are constantly changed and
challenged by phenomena (nativization means “making English more native”, adding typical
local features; hybridization) of language contact.
English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)

In the past the Lingua Franca par excellence was Latin that, as time passed by, fragmented into
mutually unintelligible languages and disappeared because they didn’t have the press or any
other tool able to set a standard.
Now, as we’ve already said, English is the Lingua Franca used in international scientific
conferences, business meetings or on the Internet: ELF is based on a core of norms drawing on
British and American English (the so-called “Mid-Atlantic version” of English) and intend to
guarantee mutual international intelligibility.
About the predominance of English there are both advantages and disadvantages: on the one
hand, world languages have always existed and now they are more necessary than ever to
communicate because we live in a globalised world, moreover a post-national language may be
useful to world democracy and citizenship (in many countries English is used as the language of
peace and institution); on the other hand, English may “kill” other languages and cultures being
the most picked by foreign students and causing native English speakers’ laziness in learning
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other languages, moreover English expresses a particular world view and favours its native
speakers (cultural imperialism).
Very often English is spoken by non-native speakers as a simplified lingua franca (the so-called
“Euro English”) that doesn’t take into account grammar rules.
Linguistic variability
Languages are subject to constant processes of change which can take place either suddenly,
as in the case of the introduction of new words, or slowly, as in the case of a different
pronunciation from one generation to another.
There are no static or uniform languages. All languages can be considered as open and
dynamic entities which adapt to the history and culture of the speech communities in which
they are in use.
Language change happens through the adoption and diffusion of a certain language form or
variant (e.g. a phoneme, a word or a syntactic construction); as a consequence, equivalent
variants may coexist within a speech community for either a long or short time, until one
predominates over the other.
All languages show a surprising level of variability concerning their phonological,
morphological, syntactic and lexical structures. The study of language variability deals with how
language varies among its speakers, when speakers use different variants, and what the social
and linguistic significance of such variation is.
In major modern languages we usually analyse language variability in relation to its standard
variety (the idealised language, the language par excellence, in terms of social prestige, language
functions and domains of use; e.g. the West-Saxon dialect in the OE period, London English used
by Caxton in the ME period and English used by educated speakers and the mass media all over
the world nowadays); by contrast non-standard varieties have been commonly regarded as
"irregularly patterned" and "unsystematic" with respect to standard.
Language in society
According to sociolinguistics (a branch of linguistics that studies the relation between language
and society), all the varieties of a language have the same status: in other words, the categories
of correctness and appropriateness should not be applied to languages. However, language
varieties suffer from social, ethnic and racial prejudice towards their speakers and their socio-
cultural, economic and political status and speakers develop positive or negative attitudes
towards them (some variants may be perceived as more or less prestigious).
Language behaviour and language variability are influenced by social factors such as social
class, social networks, sex/gender, ethnicity and age and, at a general level, by the context in
which the interaction takes place.
Labov, one of the most important sociolinguistics, made an analysis of the pronunciation of
the phoneme /r/ in New York City, according to social class and style, that emphases the fact
that the richer you are the more formal you want to sound (concept of the hypercorrection,
when speakers – from middle classes and women – tend to conform to the more prestigious
linguistic norms by the over-application of a perceived rule of grammar or usage, which is
actually wrong, e.g. he gave it to you and I instead of he gave it to you and me).
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Language attitude
Language behaviour is conditioned by factors like language attitude towards a specific
language or variety.
A positive attitude favours the adoption and diffusion of a variant, contributing language
changes. Some languages or varieties are perceived as more prestigious and useful than others,
as for example British English: in other words, the use of such a prestige variety represents a
mean which allows social mobility and access to cultural values perceived as prestigious.
Language change and variation do not emerge in relation to their social and structural status
at a given time (synchrony), but they take place along a chronological order of sequencing of
events (diachrony).
Types of language change

There are three types of language changes:
1) phonological change, which deals with any mutation within the sound system of a
language and can be both sporadic and regular;
2) morpho-syntactic change, which can be a grammaticalization (the phenomenon by
which a grammatical function is given to a previously lexical word), e.g. OE “wilan” (=
“want”, main verb) = PDE will (modal verb);
3) semantic change, which refers to any mutation in the meaning of individual lexical items
and can be influenced by external factors such as socio-cultural change, scientific
innovation and foreign language influence (e.g. the meanings of Italian words
“realizzare” and “evidenza” come from a mistake made by dubbers in order to keep the
actors’ synchronisation of lips); there are different kinds of semantic change:
a) widening (expanding a meaning), e.g. PDE dog from ME “dogue” = Great Dane, a
large dog breed;
b) narrowing (reducing a meaning), e.g. PDE meat from ME “mete” = “food”;
c) pejoration (the meaning acquires a bad connotation), e.g. PDE silly from ME “sely”
= “happy”;
d) amelioration (the meaning acquires a good connotation), e.g. PDE queen from OE
“cwen” = “woman”.

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THE PRONUNCIATION IN ENGLISH

Accents of English
By the term “accent” we mean the way in which a language is pronounced in the different
geographical areas where it is used; its variation is strongly connected to factors such as social
class, age, education and gender. Accents can be:
✓ native, when they are spoken in norm providing countries (inner circle, ENL or L1), e.g.
UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand;
✓ “nativized”, when they are spoken in norm developing countries (outer circle, ESL or L2),
e.g. India, Kenya, Nigeria, Singapore, Hong Kong;
✓ foreign, when they are spoken in norm dependent countries (EFL), e.g. Italy, Spain,
France, Germany, Japan.
The two main norm setting varieties of the English language, BrE and AmE, have of course their
own respective pronunciation standards: Received Pronunciation (RP) or BBC English, taught in
public schools and used by upper classes, and General American (GA).
Phonetics, phonology and the articulators

Phonetics is the science that studies the physical characteristics of sound, dealing with
production (articulatory), transmission (acoustic) and perception (auditory) aspects of sounds.
Consequently, phonology describes the organization of the sound system of a language.
The act of phonation consists in the contraction of the muscles in our chest and the production
of a flow of air which passes through the larynx, the glottis, the pharynx and then the oral cavity
or the nose:
➢ the larynx is situated in the neck and is made of cartilage, it contains the vocal cords;
➢ the vocal cords are two mucous membranes which are kept apart for normal breathing
and for the production of voiceless sounds or set into vibration for the production of
vowels and voiced consonants;
➢ the opening between the vocal cords is the glottis, which closure is the glottal stop;
➢ the pharynx is a passage leading from the top of the larynx to the back of the mouth;
➢ the velum or soft palate is the back part of the palate which can be raised or lowered so
that the air may escape through the mouth or the
nose;
➢ the hard palate can be touched with the tip of the
tongue;
➢ the alveolar ridge is between the hard palate and
the front teeth;
➢ the tongue is perhaps the most important
articulator because it’s the change of its position
inside the oral cavity which determines the type
of sound produced;
➢ lips are also important.
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Graphemes and phonemes

The term “grapheme” refers to a letter of the alphabet, a discrete mark in writing or printed,
that has to be written between angle brackets, e.g. <t>.
The term “phoneme” refers to a distinctive sound in a language capable of creating a
distinction in meaning between two words, that has to be written between slashes or square
brackets, e.g. /t/ or [t]. The phoneme is the smallest distinctive sound unit capable of creating a
distinction in meaning between words, e.g. sit [sɪt], set [set], sat [sæt] are minimal pairs, a pair
of words which differ only by one phoneme.
In many other cases the is no one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes,
e.g. the grapheme <c> can represent three different phonemes (/k/ in cut [kʌt]; /s/ in nice [naɪs];
/ʃ/ in ocean [ˈəʊʃən]) and the grapheme <o> can represent two different phonemes (/ʌ/ in come
[kʌm]; /əʊ/ in home [həʊm]).
It must also be remembered that many graphemes are silent, because in certain words they
are not pronounced, e.g. <t> in castle, Christmas, often (by some speakers), <k> in know, knock,
<l> in walk, talk, folk, <w> in write, wrong, <b> in debt, bomb, doubt.
Some pair of words are homophones (orthographically different but phonetically identical),
e.g. aloud and allowed [əˈlaʊd] because doubles are not pronounced.
Some pair of words are homographs (orthographically identical but phonetically different),
e.g. lead = condurre [liːd] and lead = piombo [led], tear = lacrima [tɪə] and tear = strappare [teə].
The use of phonetic transcription enables us to describe the standard pronunciation of words,
the most widely used phonemic (and phonetic) notation is the International Phonetic Alphabet
(IPA), a set of symbols used for representing the phonemes and sounds of all languages. The
phonetic transcription of words is provided by bilingual and monolingual dictionaries.
Segmental phonology is the study of the sounds which have a functional and distinctive role
in a language (phonemes) and of the way they combine. Suprasegmental phonology deals with
units larger than phonemes (syllables, rhythm groups and intonation phrases) and their related
phenomena (stress, rhythm and intonation).
Allophones
The different realisations of the same phonemes (which are idealisations) in different contexts
are called allophones and are represented in transcription by diacritic symbols added to the
phonemics ones; the allophonic variation is responsible for some differences in accents.
For example, the phoneme /t/ in top is accompanied by aspiration [thɒp] (also the phonemes
/p/ and /k/), in train is accompanied by affrication [tʃreɪn], in set is only partially released [set-];
the phoneme /l/ is clear and accompanied by front resonance in syllable initial position as in lip
[lɪp] and is dark and accompanied by back resonance in syllable final position as in hill [hɪɫ] or
before another consonant as in milk [mɪɫk].
Vowels
Phonetically vowels are oral, voiced and egressive sounds produced without any obstruction
to the airstream coming from the lungs.
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They are eleven (plus the schwa, not a proper phoneme because it only occurs as a reduced
vowel in unstressed and weak syllables but at the same time the most common vowel sound in
English): /ɪ, iː, e, æ, aː, ʌ, ɒ, ɔː, ʊ, uː, ɜː, (plus ə)/.
Depending on the vertical distance between the tongue and the palate, a vowel can be:
o open, /æ, ʌ, aː, ɒ/;
o half open, /e, ɜː, ɔː/;
o close, /iː, ɪ, ʊ, uː/.
Depending on which part of the tongue is raised, a vowel can be:
o front, /iː, ɪ, e, æ/;
o central, /ɜː, ʌ/;
o back, /uː, ʊ, ɔː, ɒ, aː/.
Depending on its duration or length, a vowel can be:
o long or tense, /iː, aː, ɜː, ɔː, uː/;
o short or lax, /æ, ɒ, ʌ, e, ɪ, ʊ/.
Vowels are traditionally illustrated in a phonetic diagram with front-back, close-open sides.
Diphthongs
Diphthongs are combination of two vowels or, better, oral, voiced, egressive glides from one
vowel to another uttered with the same emission of sound (the first element is normally more
audible than the second).
They are eight and, depending on their composition, they can be:
o closing, because their second element is a close vowel: /aɪ, eɪ, ɔɪ, aʊ, əʊ/;
o centring, because their second element is the central unstressed sound schwa: /ɪə, eə,
ʊə/.
Closing diphthongs may become triphthongs if a schwa is added: /aɪə, eɪə, ɔɪə, aʊə, əʊə/.
Consonants
Consonants are sounds produced with an egressive flow of air coming out of the mouth (oral
consonants) or the nose (nasal consonants) accompanied by obstruction or friction in the
articulators.
Whereas all vowels are voiced, consonants, which are twenty-four, can be voiced (/b, d, g, v,
ð, z, dʒ, m, n, ŋ, l, r, w, j/) or voiceless (/p, t, k, f, θ, s, ʃ, tʃ, h/) depending on the vibration or
otherwise of the vocal cords inside the larynx.
Other parameters according to which consonants can be classified are:
- manner of articulation:
o plosives (there is obstruction), /p, b, t, d, k, g/;
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o fricatives (there is friction), /f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ, h/;

o nasals, /m, n, ŋ/;
o affricates (there is both obstruction and friction), /tʃ, dʒ/;
o liquids, /l, r/;
o semi-vowels or semi-consonants, /w, j/.
- place of articulation:
o bilabial, /p, b, m, w/;
o labiodental, /f, v/;
o dental, /θ, ð/;
o alveolar, /t, d, n, l, s, z/;
o palato-alveolar, /ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, dʒ, r/;
o palatal, /j/;
o velar, /k, g, ŋ/;
o glottal, /h/.
In English some consonants can be syllabic when they occur as the nucleus of syllables: the
common cases are with /l/ and /n/, e.g. couple [ˈkʌpl], middle [ˈmɪdl], able [ˈeɪbl], listen [ˈlɪsn],
rotten [ˈrɒtn], sudden [ˈsʌdn].
English and Italian phonemes in contrast

 Long/short opposition, or vowel length, that doesn’t exist in Italian (where vowels are just
seven), e.g. leave [liːv] and live [lɪv].
 Laxness, which is the pronunciation of the six short vowels (short English vowels are shorter
than short Italian vowels).
 Aspiration of plosive consonants /p, t, k/ in syllable initial position and of /h/ at the beginning
of stressed syllables, e.g. tea [thiː], hotel [həʊˈthel].
 Dental fricatives /θ, ð/, e.g. thriller [ˈθrɪlə].
 Non-voicing of syllable initial /s/ + consonant, e.g. small [smɔːl], slim [slɪm], snail [sneɪl], swim
[swɪm].
 For noun and verb inflections: if the word ends with a vowel or a voiced consonant, the <s> of
the ending will be also voiced, becoming /z/, e.g. trees [triːz], pens [penz], needs [niːdz]; if the
word ends with a voiceless consonant, the <s> of the ending will be also voiceless, remaining
/s/, e.g. books [bʊks], claps [klæps]; if the word ends with a fricative or affricate sound, the <es>
of the ending will be /ɪz/, e.g. buses [ˈbʌsɪz], washes [ˈwɒʃɪz].
 Regular past tense and past participle inflection <ed> can be /t/, /d/ or /ɪd/, e.g. liked [laɪkt],
lived [lɪvd], needed [ˈniːdɪd], wanted [ˈwɒntɪd].
Rhoticity and r-linking

GA is a rhotic variety of English because the phoneme /r/ is always pronounced, whereas in
RP only pre-vocalic /r/ is pronounced because post-vocalic /r/ is silent, e.g. red [red], arrive
[əˈraɪv], car [kaː], hard [haːd].
Although, if a word ending with silent /r/ is followed by another word beginning with a vowel,
the /r/ is pronounced to link the two words in the so-called connected speech, this phenomenon
is the r-linking, e.g. the car is parked in the street [ðə kaː r ɪz ˈpaːkt ɪn ðə striːt].
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The syllable
A syllable is a phonological unit made up of one or more phonemes; it can be composed of:
▪ vowel, e.g. are [aː];
▪ consonant + vowel, e.g. tea [tiː];
▪ vowel + consonant, e.g. arm [aːm];
▪ consonant + vowel + consonant, e.g. did [dɪd].
Syllables can be closed, when they end in a consonant, or open, when they end in a vowel.
The stress
Stress is the relative prominence given to a syllable, which is the result of four acoustic
components: pitch; loudness; duration; quality. In phonetic transcription stress is indicated by
the stress mark, a vertical line preceding the stressed syllable (ˈ) which is always the strong one
(weak ones can be identified because they contain ɪ or ə).
The main stress patterns in English words are:
a. type   (strong + weak): 2-syllable words with primary stress on the first syllable, e.g.
money [ˈmʌnɪ], river [ˈrɪvə], breakfast [ˈbrekfəst];
b. type   (strong + strong): 2-syllable words with primary stress on the first syllable and
a full vowel on the second syllable, e.g. background [ˈbækɡraʊnd], phoneme [ˈfəʊniːm],
pillow [ˈpɪləʊ];
c. type   (weak + strong): 2-syllable words with primary stress on the second syllable, e.g.
result [rɪˈzʌlt], report [rɪˈpɔːt], believe [bɪˈliːv];
d. type   (strong + strong): 2-syllable words with a full vowel on the first syllable and
primary stress on the second syllable, e.g. although [ɔːlˈðəʊ], myself [maɪˈself], tycoon
[taɪˈkuːn];
e. type    (strong + weak + weak): 3-syllable words with primary stress on the first
syllable, e.g. family [ˈfæməlɪ], manager [ˈmænədʒə], dangerous [ˈdeɪndʒərəs];
f. type    (strong + weak + strong): 3-syllable words with primary stress on the first
syllable and a full vowel on the third syllable, e.g. telephone [ˈtelɪfəʊn], summertime
[ˈsʌmətaɪm];
g. type    (strong + strong + weak): 3-syllable words with primary stress on the first
syllable and a full vowel on the second syllable, e.g. newspaper [ˈnjuːzˌpeɪpə],
grandmother [ˈɡrændˌmʌðə];
h. type    (weak + strong + weak): 3-syllable words with primary stress on the second
syllable, e.g. remember [rɪˈmembə], agreement [əˈɡriːmənt];
i. type    (strong + strong + weak): 3-syllable words with full vowel on the first syllable
and primary stress on the second syllable, e.g. sensation [senˈseɪʃn], unhealthy [ʌnˈhelθɪ];
j. type    (strong + weak + strong): 3-syllable words with a full vowel on the first syllable
and primary stress on third syllable, e.g. afternoon [aːftəˈnuːn], understand [ʌndəˈstænd].
Stress shift
Words from type   (strong + strong) can have secondary stress on the first syllable
depending on the speed and the rhythm of the sentence. For example, stress can be shifted to
the first syllable when an adjective is used in attributive position whereas in predicative position
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it maintains its regular stress pattern, e.g. my son is fourteen (predicative position) [maɪ sʌn ɪz
fɔːˈtiːn] and I lost fourteen pounds (attributive position) [aɪ lɒst ˈfɔːtiːn paʊndz].
Some homographs change stress depending on whether they are nouns or verbs becoming, in
this way, non-homophones, e.g. digest [ˈdaɪdʒest] and to digest [tə daɪˈdʒest], export [ˈekspɔːt]
and to export [tu ɪksˈpɔːt], desert [ˈdezət] and to desert [tə dɪˈzɜːt].
Stress and suffixes

In words from type    (strong + weak + strong), the suffix -ate is always strong in verbs but
weak in adjectives and nouns, e.g. to operate [tu ˈɒpəreɪt], to hesitate [tu ˈhezɪteɪt], fortunate
[ˈfɔːtʃənət], chocolate [ˈtʃɒklət].
English language is Germanic in its origin but a large part of its vocabulary derives from
Romance and Latin sources: we therefore find both stress on the first syllable (Germanic), e.g.
answer [ˈaːnsə], both stress on the penultimate syllable (Romance: Norman-French), e.g. reply
[rɪˈplaɪ].
Suffixes that carry stress are:
o -ageous, e.g. outrageous [aʊtˈreɪdʒəs];
o -agious, e.g. contagious [kənˈteɪdʒəs];
o -ation, e.g. celebration [seləˈbreɪʃn];
o -ee, e.g. addressee [ædresˈiː];
o -ician, e.g. politician [pɒləˈtɪʃn].
Suffixes that are not stressed (stress is left on the root word) are:
o -able, e.g. reliable [rɪˈlaɪəbl];
o -ful, e.g. wonderful [ˈwʌndəfl];
o -less, e.g. meaningless [ˈmiːnɪŋləs];
o -ness, e.g. happiness [ˈhæpɪnəs];
o -ment, e.g. development [dɪˈveləpmənt].
Suffixes that assign stress to the penultimate syllable are:
o -ic, e.g. economic [iːkəˈnɒmɪk];
o -ics, e.g. linguistics [lɪŋˈɡwɪstɪks];
o -ion, e.g. occasion [əˈkeɪʒn].
Connected speech
Connected speech impinges upon our ears as a continuous stream of sound, characterised by
articulatory accommodations and sound variability.
Phonetic variability in connected speech is caused by three main factors: the influence of the
phonetic environment in which each phoneme occurs; the rhythmic pattern of the syllable in
which each phoneme occurs; the speed of the utterance.
As a consequence, we change the pronunciation of words that otherwise we would
pronounce differently in isolation.
The main five types of phonetic variation, caused by the phonetic environment, are similitude,
linking, assimilation, elision and the so-called weak forms.
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Similitude
It involves accommodation in the articulation of a sound segment to an adjacent segment, so
that they become similar in some of their characteristics.
Similitude can occur in tongue position, e.g. in eight [eɪtθ] /t/ is dental because of its proximity
to dental /θ/, or in nasality (position of the soft palate), e.g. in BrE can’t [kaːnt]/AmE can’t [kænt]
the vowels are nasalized because of its proximity to nasal /n/.
Linking
As we mentioned before, with the phenomenon of r-linking the /r/ sound works as a bridge
between two words.
In connected speech, linking is also realised between vowels and semi-vowels: the linking
sounds /w/ and /j/ are added to obtain a smooth transition across word boundaries, e.g. how
about [haʊ w əˈbaʊt], Friday evening [ˈfraɪdeɪ j ˈiːvnɪŋ].
Assimilation
It involves the actual replacement of a sound with another, owing to the influence of an
adjacent one.
Historical assimilation occurs in the course of the centuries and explains changes in
pronunciation, e.g. raspberry [ˈraːspberɪ → ˈraːzberɪ], sugar [ˈsʃʊɡə → ˈʃʊɡə], handkerchief
[ˈhændkɜːtʃɪf → ˈhæŋkətʃɪf].
Contextual assimilation occurs when utterances are spoken at normal speed, e.g. this shop
[ðɪs ʃɒp → ðɪʃ ʃɒp], bad boys [bæd bɔɪz → bæb bɔɪz], shut your eyes [ʃʌt jɔː r aɪz → ʃʌtʃə r aɪz].
Elision
It consists in the dropping of a sound which once existed (historical elision, responsible for the
loss of the so-called silent graphemes) or which exists in slow speech (contextual elision); like
similitude and assimilation, elision is determined by economy in the articulatory effort.
A very common case is the loss of /t/ and /d/ in certain syllable-final clusters like <st>, <ft>,
<nd>, <ld> and <n’t>, e.g. first class [fɜːst klaːs → fɜːs klaːs], didn’t think [ˈdɪdnt θɪŋk → ˈdɪdn
θɪŋk], I’m going to buy some that becomes I’m gonna buy some [aɪm ɡəʊɪŋ tə baɪ sʌm →
aɪŋɡənə baɪ sʌm].
Vowel reduction and weak forms

It’s responsible for remarkable differences between the pronunciation of words in isolation
and in connected speech and consists in the reduction of strong longer vowels and diphthongs
to weak vowels (in general to the schwa sound /ə/ but also to the short vowels /ɪ i ʊ u/) when
they are in weak unstressed position, e.g. irony [ˈaɪrənɪ] and ironic [aɪˈrɒnɪk], legal [ˈliːɡəl] and
legality [lɪˈɡælətɪ].
Vowel reduction is characteristic of grammatical words such as auxiliaries (are, have), modals
(can, must), articles (a, an, the), conjunctions (and, but), personal pronouns (you, he) and
prepositions (to, from, of): e.g. she must try harder [ʃiː mʌst ˈtʃraɪ haːdə → ʃiː məs ˈtʃraɪ haːdə],
he comes from Boston [hiː kʌmz frɒm ˈbɒstən → hiː kʌmz frəm ˈbɒstən], wait and see [weɪt ænd
siː → weɪt n siː].
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The pronunciation of American English

American English has become more and more important as a variety of the English language
because of its massive impact on world business and commerce and on the mass media.
Linguistics agree that British and American English are becoming more similar because of
continuous contacts and exchanges of material and cultural goods.
Concerning vowels:
▪ BrE /ɒ/ → AmE /aː/, e.g. not can be BrE [nɒt] and AmE [naːt], spot can be BrE [sɒpt] and
AmE [spaːt], clock can be BrE [klɒk] and AmE [klaːk];
▪ BrE /aː/ → AmE /æ/ in the so-called bath-words (vowel followed by a fricative sound),
e.g. bath can be BrE [baːθ] and AmE [bæθ], class can be BrE [klaːs] and AmE [klæs].
Concerning diphthongs:
▪ BrE /ɪə, eə, ʊə/ → AmE /ɪr, er, ʊr/, e.g. severe can be BrE [sɪˈvɪə] and AmE [sɪˈvɪr];
▪ BrE /ʌ/ + /r/ → AmE /ɝ/, e.g. courage can be BrE [ˈkʌrɪdʒ] and AmE [ˈkɝrɪdʒ].
Concerning consonants:
▪ BrE /r/ → AmE /ɻ/ is retroflex;
▪ BrE /l/ → AmE /ɫ/ is dark;
▪ the yod-dropping phenomenon consists in the omission of the sound /j/ after dental and
alveolar consonants and followed by the phoneme /uː/, e.g. tune can be BrE [tjuːn] and
AmE [tuːn], news can be BrE [njuːz] and AmE [nuːz];
▪ the t-tapping phenomenon consists in the tapping and voicing of intervocalic /t/, e.g. in
AmE letter has the same pronunciation of ladder [ˈlædər];
▪ BrE post-nasal /t/ is pronounced → AmE post-nasal /t/ is elided, e.g. twenty can be BrE
[ˈtwentɪ] and AmE [ˈtwenɪ]
▪ the assimilation phenomenon of some plosives and fricatives followed by /j/, e.g.
education can be BrE [edjuˈkeɪʃn] and AmE [edjʊˈkeɪʃn], issue can be BrE [ˈɪsjuː] and AmE
[ˈɪʃu].
Concerning pronunciation differences:
▪ Latin-derived words ending in -ile are pronounced differently in the two varieties, e.g.
missile can be BrE [ˈmɪsaɪl] and AmE [ˈmɪsl];
▪ some pronunciation variants are associated with one or the other variety:
 either: BrE [ˈaɪðə], AmE [ˈiːðər];
 ate: BrE [et], AmE [eɪt];
 Muslim: BrE [ˈmʊslɪm], AmE [ˈmʌzlɪm];
 schedule: BrE [ˈʃedjuːl], AmE [ˈskedʒʊl];
 advertisement: BrE [ədˈvɜːtɪsmənt], AmE [ædvərˈtaɪzmənt];
 leisure: BrE [ˈlɛʒə], AmE [ˈliːʒər];
 dynasty: BrE [ˈdɪnəstɪ], AmE [ˈdaɪnəstɪ];
 directory: BrE [dɪˈrektərɪ], AmE [daɪˈrektərɪ].
▪ some differences regard stress placement, e.g. address can be BrE [əˈdres] and AmE
[ˈædres], cigarette can be BrE [sɪɡəˈret] and AmE [ˈsɪɡəret];
▪ BrE endings -ary, -ery and -ory are compressed → AmE endings -ary, -ery and -ory have
a full vowel, e.g. library can be BrE [ˈlaɪbrərɪ] and AmE [ˈlaɪbrerɪ], laboratory can be BrE
[ləˈbɒrətrɪ] and AmE [ˈlæbərətɔːrɪ].
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The rhythm in connected speech

Rhythm is given by the alternation of weak and strong beats in connected speech. English
rhythm is stress-timed (stressed syllables are said at approximately regular intervals), whereas
Italian rhythm is syllable-timed (syllables take approximately equal amounts of time to
pronounce).
The assignment of rhythmic prominence (usually the last word) is tonicity.
Intonation
Intonation is the variation of voice pitch in connected speech; together with other verbal and
non-verbal signals such as gestures and facial expressions, it helps the listener to understand
what the speaker says.
The segmentation of long stretches of connected speech into shorter units called intonation
phrases is tonality. An intonation phrase is an utterance having its own intonation pattern or
tone and containing a nucleus, usually a simple sentence (clause). The nucleus is usually the last
prominent lexical word in an intonation phrase.
The term “tone” refers to the way pitch is modulated in language; it can be rising or falling or
a combination of the two:
- the rising tone (↗) is felt to convey a sense of non-finality and is generally associated with
questions or incomplete causes, e.g. would you like a cup of ↗tea?, I phoned her several
↗times;
- the falling tone (↘) is felt to convey a sense of finality and is generally associated with
statements, e.g. our English friends are coming round to ↘dinner;
- the fall-rise tone () is felt to convey uncertainty and doubt, e.g. are you sure you won’t 
mind?;
- the rise-fall tone () is felt to convey surprise and admiration or strong emotional feelings,
even contempt and disgust, e.g. that was a marvellous  idea!, what a  terrible thing to
say!.
The grammatical function of intonation is related to the segmentation of speech into
meaningful units; intonation can modify the syntactic structure of utterances, e.g. I ↘fed her
| ↗dog biscuits (= I gave her biscuits for dogs) and I fed her ↗dog | ↘biscuits (= I gave her dog
some biscuits), the houses which were destroyed | were of great historical ↘interest (= only
the destroyed houses were of great historical interest – defining relative clause) and the 
houses | which were destroyed | were of great historical ↘interest (= all the houses were of
great historical interest – non-defining relative clause).
Intonation is also very useful to emphasize or to highlight a certain element in the utterance:
with the foregrounding, the nucleus is not placed on the last lexical item of an intonation phrase
but elsewhere, e.g. are you ↘flying to Rome? (= I want to know the means of transport, not the
destination).
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THE GRAMMAR IN ENGLISH

Definitions
Grammar is a set of rules which allow the production of well-formed sentences and
utterances. Educated native speakers intuitively and implicitly follow the rules of grammar,
whereas foreign learners study grammar in an explicit way in textbooks.
Non-native speakers may develop new rules which deviate from standard rules, e.g. *I never
did nothing to upset her (wrong because multiple negation is not permitted in English, but used
in African-American varieties) → I never did anything to upset her, *She came yesterday, isn’t
it? (wrong because the tag question must contain an auxiliary in accordance with the type of
verb used in the main clause) → She came yesterday, didn’t she?.
Descriptive and theoretical grammar

Descriptive grammar describes how a language works, drawing on a long tradition of
grammatical studies, using both traditional and new terminology (e.g. subject, embedding).
Theoretical grammars are new analytical models developed by linguists to describe a language
(e.g. Systemic-functional Grammar): these models introduce new metalanguage, i.e. terms and
concepts proper to these new theories.
Morphology and syntax

The main fields in which grammar is divided are:
1. Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words (grammar within words), that
can be divided in:
a. derivational, which deals with the process of word formation through affixation
that changes meaning or word class, e.g. happy → happi-ness, un-happy;
b. inflectional, which deals with changes in the form of words according to the
grammatical context in which they occur, e.g. small → small-est.
2. Syntax is the study of the way in which words combine to form larger units such as
phrases, clauses and sentences (grammar between words).
Grammar units
Grammar units can be ordered according to a hierarchy of units, or a rank scale, and be
analysed from the largest to the smallest (top-down description) or from the smallest to the
largest (bottom-up description):
TOP-DOWN 
Text
Sentence
Clause
Phrase
Word
Morpheme
BOTTOM-UP 
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➢ Morpheme: the smallest linguistic unit of meaning or grammatical function, e.g. un-,
-less, and, glad, -s;
➢ Word: linguistic unit of single meaning phonologically preceded and followed by pauses
and orthographically preceded and followed by spaces or punctuation marks, e.g. dogs,
run;
➢ Phrase: linguistic unit made up of a word or a group of words that can be:
o Noun Phrases (NP), e.g. the boy;
o Verb Phrases (VP), e.g. has given;
o Adjective Phrases (AdjP), e.g. extremely interesting;
o Adverb Phrases (AdvP), e.g. very fast;
o Prepositional Phrases (PP), e.g. in front of the cinema;
➢ Clause: linguistic unit made up of one or more phrases, containing at least one verb
phrase (a main clause is semantically independent and can stand alone), e.g. a golden
sun (NP) filled (VP) the air (NP), run! (independent VP);
➢ Sentence: the largest linguistic unit made up of one or more clauses (if the sentence is
uttered by a speaker it becomes an utterance), e.g. a golden sun filled the air with light
and the green sea lapped the sand;
➢ Text: a sequence of sentences which is coherent and cohesive.
Orthographic criteria
A word is a linguistic unit (sequence of uninterrupted letters) which, in the written form, has
a space on either side or a punctuation mark, e.g. car, jump.
This definition may pose some problems in the case of hyphenation, apostrophes, different
spellings of certain words or compounds which have a unified referent, e.g. weekend may also
be spelt with a hyphen → week-end or as two separate words → week end, should brother-in-
law and identity card be considered as one or more words?
These examples show how defining the word using only orthographic criteria may not always
correspond to reality.
Phonological criteria
A word is a linguistic unit which, in the spoken form, is surrounded by pauses and has only one
main stress, e.g. blackbird = merlo has only one stress in fact it’s considered as a single word
whereas black bird = uccello nero is considered as two different words.
This definition allows to consider as one word the possessive s after its noun, e.g. Mary’s;
however, function words as articles or prepositions, which tend to be unstressed, are not
considered as words.
Internal stability criteria

A word is an indivisible unit which cannot be interrupted by inserting other elements in it, in
fact insertions can only be made at the end of words, e.g. the plural of elephant is elephants and
not *elesphant.
However there are exceptions, e.g. the plural of brother-in-law is brothers-in-law and not
*brother-in-laws.
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Meaning criteria
A word is a linguistic unit that expresses a single concept, e.g. brother-in-law is considered as
a single word because it refers to a specific person.
However, this definition is imperfect because there are linguistic items as the, to, by, and which
do not really carry referential meaning to a specific content-concept but which are nevertheless
considered as words.
Lexemes and word-forms

A lexeme is an abstract (an idealisation) unit of vocabulary which includes different realisations
called word-forms, e.g. list is a lexeme whereas list, lists, listing and listed are word-forms, teach
is a lexeme whereas teach, teaches, taught and teaching are word-forms.
In lexicography, the part of linguistics that compiles dictionaries, the technical terms used to
refer to abstract dictionary units are entry, headword and lemma.
Dictionaries distinguish between entries, headwords and lemmas onto functions and
meanings, e.g. walk can be noun or verb so it has two lexemes (different function), bank is a
noun which can be referred to money or to rivers so it has two lexemes (different meaning).
Word classes (parts of speech)

Words are traditionally grouped into different categories according to their meaning, their
structure and their position in a sentence.
We distinguish:
- nine major word classes:
▪ nouns;
▪ lexical verbs;
▪ adjectives;
▪ adverbs;
▪ conjunctions;
▪ prepositions;
▪ determiners;
▪ pronouns;
▪ auxiliary verbs.
- three minor word classes:
▪ inserts or interjections;
▪ wh-words;
▪ numerals.
Some word-forms may belong to more than one class because they are zero-derivational: they
don’t add any new item in their structure but, depending on the context, their meaning is
different, e.g. round can be a noun, an adjective, a verb or a preposition (this phenomenon is
linked to the fact that English is a morphologically poor language). Only the co-text (language
context), i.e. the surroundings of the word, allows the reader/listener to understand the
difference; in same cases also the word stress helps disambiguation, e.g. record can be a noun
[ˈrekɔːd] or a verb [reˈkɔːd].
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Open and closed classes

Major word classes can be divided into:
- open classes (generally polysyllabic; from Latin, Greek, French and Germanic origin; less
frequent), also called lexical or content words, which can admit new members and have
a referent in real life:
o nouns;
o lexical verbs;
o adjectives;
o adverbs.
- closed classes (generally monosyllabic or disyllabic; from Germanic origin; more
frequent), also called function or grammatical words, which don’t admit new words and
don’t have a referent in real life:
o conjunctions;
o prepositions;
o determiners;
o pronouns;
o auxiliary verbs.
Nouns (N)
Lexical words which refer to concrete objects or entities, i.e. people or things, places, events
in the real world (e.g. house, cat, mother, Mary, London, festival) or abstract notions and things,
states or qualities (e.g. happiness, love, hatred, politics).
Moreover, they can be:
o common, e.g. horse, bus
 countable, e.g. book, skirt, friend;
 uncountable, e.g. milk, sugar, honey, furniture.
o proper, e.g. Gerald, New York, Ryanair.
Nouns who are referred to animated beings can take the possessive s.
Lexical Verbs
Lexical words that carry a meaning and that are also called main or full verbs.
They can be:
o dynamic, denoting actions referring to physical processes (they allow the progressive
form), e.g. play, drink, walk;
o stative, referring to states and conditions (they don’t allow the progressive form), e.g.
know, love, believe.
Adjectives (Adj)
Lexical words which describe qualities and properties of things or people and states of affairs,
providing information about nouns or pronouns.
They can have two functions:
❖ attributive function, when they are placed before a noun, e.g. the extraordinary boy;
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❖ predicative function, when they are placed after copular verbs (e.g. be, seem, appear),
e.g. John is tall.
Some adjectives are only used in either attributive or predicative function, e.g. the child is
afraid (predicative) and not *the afraid child, the main task (attributive) and not *the task is
main.
Moreover, they can be:
o gradable because their meaning can be modified in terms of a scale, e.g. large, very large,
extremely large, the largest, not large at all;
o ungradable because their meaning cannot be modified in terms of a scale, e.g. one is
either dead or alive.
Adverbs (Adv)
Lexical words which can carry out several functions:
❖ comment on an adjective by expressing degree, e.g. very interesting, totally wrong;
❖ accompany another adverb, e.g. quite strangely;
❖ give information about the circumstances (i.e. place, time, manner, degree, frequency,
duration) of an action, an event, a process or a state, e.g. yesterday, inside, there, happily,
soon; for this reason, they are also called circumstance adverbs or adjuncts;
❖ express, usually at the beginning of a clause, the speaker/writer’s attitude, feelings or
point of view towards what it is being said, e.g. luckily, probably; for this reason, they are
also called stance adverbs or disjuncts;
❖ provide a link between one sentence, or part of a sentence, to another, e.g. however,
finally, besides; for this reason, they are also called linking adverbs or conjuncts.
Conjunctions (Conj)
Function words which link linguistic items such as words, phrases, clauses and sentences.
There are two types of conjunctions:
o coordinating conjunctions or coordinators which join elements that have equal
grammatical status and syntactic role, e.g. and, but, or, for, yet, nor;
o subordinating conjunctions or subordinators which join clauses where one is
subordinated to the other and introduce dependent/subordinate clauses; they can
express time (e.g. when), place (e.g. where), condition (e.g. if), concession (e.g.
although), purpose (e.g. so that) or reason (e.g. since).
Prepositions (Prep)
Function words which link words or syntactic elements and express the relationship between
them.
They can show a relation in time, space or of another kind between two events, people or
things and are typically followed by a noun phrase, with which they form a Prepositional Phrase
(PP), e.g. the dog ran under the table.
Most common prepositions consist of one word and are therefore called simple prepositions,
e.g. in, at, on, under, by, but there are also complex prepositions which are made up of two or
more words, e.g. according to, on behalf of, with regard to.
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Determiners (Det)
Function words that are used before a noun to indicate definiteness or indefiniteness, quantity
and possession.
The main determiners are:
o indefinite and definite articles;
o demonstrative adjectives;
o possessive adjectives;
o quantifiers, e.g. all, few, many, several, some, every, each, any;
o cardinal and ordinal numbers, that can also function as nouns, e.g. The Magnificent Seven
Pronouns (Pron)
Function words that are used to replace nouns, when we want to refer to a person, an object,
an event or a place which has been already mentioned or whose referent can be deduced from
the context of the situation or the surrounding text, to avoid repetitions.
They can be:
o personal pronouns, e.g. I, she, they;
o possessive pronouns, e.g. my, mine, yours;
o demonstrative pronouns, e.g. this, that;
o reflexive pronouns, e.g. himself, themselves;
o reciprocal pronouns, e.g. one another, each other;
o indefinite pronouns, e.g. some, everything, all;
o relative pronouns, e.g. which, who, that;
o interrogative pronouns, e.g. who?, what?.
Auxiliary Verbs
Function words which accompany lexical verbs and cannot usually occur alone.
There are two types of auxiliaries:
o primary auxiliaries (i.e. be, have, do) that can also function as main lexical verbs
depending on the context and whether they stand alone, e.g. his father was learning
Arabic (auxiliary function), his father was a journalist (lexical function);
o modal auxiliaries (e.g. can, could, may, might, will, would, shall, should, must), frequently
used in English and belonging to the Germanic core of the language, that are used to
express degrees of certainty and necessity, such as obligation, suggestion, possibility and
probability, e.g. I think you should apologise.
Wh-words
Functional words which begin with “wh-” (with the exception of how) and introduce
interrogative, relative, exclamative or nominal clauses.
They can have several functions:
❖ as determiners specifying the referent of the noun, e.g. which book did you choose?;
❖ as adverbs referring to the circumstance of an event, e.g. when did you call her?;
❖ as pronouns replacing nouns, e.g. whose car is that?.
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Morphemes and morphs

A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit of meaning or grammatical function that by
definition cannot be further divided into smaller units.
Morphemes are the minimal, indivisible elements of words that are capable of carrying
semantic content (e.g. “un-” before an adjective implies the meaning of not) or grammatical
function (e.g. “-s” in girls tells us that the word is in the plural).
Like lexemes and phonemes, morphemes are abstract entities (an idealisation) which include
different concrete realisations called morphs, e.g. played → play-ed = {PLAY} + {past}, unhelpful
→ un-help-ful = {negative} + {HELP} + {adjective}, impolitely → im-polite-ly = {negative} +
{POLITE} + {adverb} (from these examples, we can see that for the same morpheme that
expresses negation, there is more than one morph).
There are two types of morphemes:
o free, when they can stand alone as words
 lexical, that carry semantic content, e.g. pen, book;
 functional, that don’t carry semantic content, e.g. if, the.
o bound, when they cannot stand alone but must be linked to another morpheme called
base or root:
 derivational, e.g. -ness, -able;
 inflectional, e.g. -s, -ing.
Roots and bases

A root is the core of the word, the morpheme which determines its meaning, e.g. happy is the
root of happiness. Roots tend to be free morphemes because they can stand alone.
However there are some roots which, despite having a meaning, cannot occur on their own as
independent words but need to be attached to another morpheme, for this reason they are
called bound roots, e.g. in dentist, dental, dentistry the root “dent-” from Latin can’t stand alone
as a free morpheme.
A base is the part of the word to which any affixes (inflectional or derivational) are attached,
e.g. happy is (also) the base of happiness.
Allomorphs
An allomorph is one of the different phonetic or graphic realisations of a morpheme.
There are cases in which there is no one-to-one correspondence between morpheme and
morph, but they are distinct, alternative realisations or variants of the same morpheme, e.g. the
“ed-” morph that indicates past tense can be realised phonetically in different ways depending
on the phonological context: in raised is [d], in looked is [t], in decided is [ɪd].
Affixes
Generally speaking, bound morphemes that are attached to others are called affixes:
o those which precede another morpheme are called prefixes, e.g. “re-” in reprint;
o those which follow another morpheme are called suffixes, e.g. “ness-” in sadness.
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On the whole, inflectional morphemes are only suffixes whereas derivational morphemes can
be both prefixes (that mostly change the meaning) and suffixes (that mostly change the word
class).
Inflectional morphology
It deals with inflections that carry grammatical meaning and allow us to form plurals, past
tenses or the comparative degree. Therefore it has a syntactic function: words change their form
if they need to express specific grammatical categories such as gender, number, tense and
superlative.
PDE regular inflections are:
❖ nouns
 -s (plural)
 -‘s (possessive/genitive case)
❖ verbs
 -s (3rd pers. sing. of the present tense)
 -ed (past tense and past participle)
 -ing (gerund)
❖ adjectives
 -er (comparative)
 -est (superlative)
Number in English nouns

Most nouns add -s, e.g. girls, toys, cars; some nouns add -es, e.g. tomatoes, branches.
The pronunciation of the inflectional ending -s/-es depends on the phonetic context: there are
three allomorphs of the plural morpheme, e.g. cakes is [keɪks] because <s> is preceded by the
voiceless consonant /k/, beans is [biːnz] because <s> is preceded by the voiced consonant /n/,
judges is [dʒʌdʒɪz] because <s> is preceded by the affricate sound.
Some nouns have irregular plural endings, e.g. child → children, foot → feet, tooth → teeth,
mouse → mice, ox → oxen, phenomenon → phenomena, medium → media, man → men,
woman → women, wife → wives, sheep → sheep, fish → fish.
Some nouns have two plurals, e.g. focus → focuses/foci, locus → locuses/loci, corpus →
corpuses/corpora.
Uncountable nouns don’t have plurals, e.g. evidence, advice, equipment, information,
furniture.
Verb inflections
Most lexical verbs are regular and have a paradigm of five word-forms and four verb
inflections, e.g. love (base form with no inflectional endings) / loves (3rd pers. sing. of the present
tense) / loved (past tense) / loved (past participle) / loving (present participle and gerund).
However there is a smaller number of very frequently used irregular verbs, e.g. take / took /
taken, put / put / put /, speak / spoke / spoken, lose / lost / lost, go / went / gone.
Auxiliaries are very irregular, e.g. the verb to be has forms that differ from one another in the
present tense, e.g. am, are, is, was, were, been, being (process of suppletion).
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Most modal verbs do not inflect and have only two forms, e.g. may → might, can → could,
shall → should, will → would.
Gradability of adjectives and adverbs

The comparative degree of adjectives is formed by adding the suffix -er, e.g. shorter, whereas
the superlative degree by adding the suffix -est, e.g. shortest (synthetic comparison).
Not all gradable adjectives add inflectional suffixes, some adopt periphrastic forms with more
and most (analytic comparison), e.g. more nervous and most nervous.
The irregular adjectives good and bad and adverbs like well, much, little have irregular forms
for the comparative and superlative degree (process of suppletion): better / best, worse / worst,
better / best, more / most, less / least.
Pronoun inflection
Pronouns, personal pronouns in particular, express person, number, gender and case often
through suppletive forms: I – me, we – us, you – you, he – him, she – her, it – it, they – them.
Phrases
Word combine with other words and are arranged into larger constituents or phrases: a phrase
is a meaningful syntactic unit which is made up of one or more words (its minimal form consists
of a single word, but it can also be much longer).
A phrase is constructed around a head word, called the head of the phrase, the most important
element which can be accompanied by optional modifiers (pre-modifiers, if they precede the
head and post-modifiers, if they follow the head), e.g. the black labrador (NP) was chewing (VP)
a juicy bone (NP) very noisily (AdvP) on the grass (PP).
Except for prepositional phrases (preposition + noun phrase), phrases can be constituted by a
single lexical item.
Noun phrase (NP)

A noun phrase is a syntactic unit consisting of a noun head, either alone or accompanied by
other words before or after it.
NPs can be extremely long and complex, since a noun can take several pre-modifiers belonging
to different word classes, as well as post-modifiers.
The role of the determiner (Det) can be filled by:
✓ articles, e.g. the book;
✓ demonstratives, e.g. that house;
✓ possessives, e.g. our luggage;
✓ quantifiers, e.g. some oranges;
✓ numerals, e.g. two brothers;
The role of the pre-modifier (Pre-Mod) can be filled by:
✓ adjectives or adjective phrases, e.g. a new car, a large old pink handbag, an extremely
important issue;
✓ nouns or noun phrases, e.g. summer clothes, third-year university students, my father’s
birthday, a cute little collie dog, design and technology A-level students;
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The role of the post-modifier (Post-Mod) can be filled by:

✓ prepositional phrases, e.g. a luxury apartment in the heart of Oxford, that old man with
a hat and a stick;
✓ relative clauses, e.g. mature students who attend full or part-time diploma courses, the
man who came to dinner;
✓ non-finite clauses, e.g. a solitary man walking with his faithful dogs, the most outstanding
architecture designed and built throughout the world, a new traffic report published
today, the dress for you to try, many things to do before Christmas;
✓ some types of adverb phrases, e.g. your holiday abroad, the car outside;
✓ appositive noun phrases, e.g. Chris Green, managing director of InterCity, Barack Obama,
the President of the USA.
Examples of NPs are:
DETERMINER PRE-MODIFIER HEAD POST-MODIFIER
- - John -
My leather suitcase -
A large, old, blue suitcase -
The London experience -
- London’s churches -
The - London I know (CLAUSE)
The ugly, tabby cat on Paul’s computer desktop (PP)
A nice, Australian man with a red Ferrari (PP)
The tall, modern building in the centre of town
The internal structure of phrases, i.e. the way in which their constituents combine, can be
illustrated by using tree diagrams which order and label the constituents, showing the
relationship between them.
Sometimes the meaning of NPs can be unclear, since the link between phrase constituents
might be ambiguous, e.g. the French history teacher can be interpreted in two ways (to which
correspond two different tree diagrams): the teacher of history is French or the teacher teaches
French history.
English and Italian NPs

English and Italian NPs have a different word order and different modification patterns which
may cause interpretation and translation problems.
A typical feature of English is the use of NPs as pre-modifiers (English is a left-branching
language), whereas in Italian nouns are mainly post-modifiers (Italian is a right-branching
language), e.g. a newspaper article = un articolo di giornale, the Los Angeles Police Department
= il Dipartimento di Polizia di Los Angeles, air pollution = l’inquinamento dell’aria, the
Birmingham train = il treno per/da/di Birmingham, Stansted airport = l’aeroporto di Stansted,
the country’s leading expert on youth culture = il maggior esperto del paese sulla cultura
giovanile.
The relationship between head noun and modifying noun is rendered explicit (and longer) in
Italian through the use of a preposition, while in English it’s implicit (and shorter).
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Generally speaking, in English pre-modification is more common than post-modification in all

registers, whereas complex pre- and post-modification is typical of some registers such as
written academic prose and newspaper headlines.
Verb phrase (VP)

A verb phrase is a syntactic unit consisting of a head verb, either alone or accompanied by one
or more other verbs.
If the VP contains only one verb, then it is a lexical verb, e.g. went; if the VP contains more
verbs, one is a lexical verb and the others are pre-modifying primary auxiliaries or modals, e.g.
is arriving, has arrived, may arrive, might have been done.
VPs can be:
o finite, when they contain a verb in its finite form (marked by tense), e.g. John plays the
guitar, I enjoyed the concert;
o non-finite, when they contain a verb in its non-finite form (not marked by tense, person
or number), e.g. to arrive on time was their objective, she travelled accompanied by her
father, she broke her leg while skiing.
The three main features of verbs are:
❖ tense, which is the property allowing the verb to differentiate between present and past
(unlike in Italian, there is no morphologically marked form to express the future in English
but a range of forms such as will/shall/be going to + infinitive, simple present and present
progressive), e.g. Jane likes/liked music;
❖ aspect, which is the property allowing the verb to give information about the state or the
action:
 progressive or continuous, which indicates that the action is in progress and
unfinished at the time of utterance, e.g. Sarah is/was helping her sister;
 perfect, which indicates that the action is complete, or that occurred at an earlier
time, and continues to the time of utterance or is relevant to it, e.g. Sarah has/had
helped her sister to take her degree;
 perfect + progressive (often called duration form), which stresses continuity in
the past and includes the time of utterance, e.g. Sarah has/had been helping her
sister since she was 12.
❖ voice, which is the property allowing transitive verbs to discriminate between active (NP1
+ VP + NP2) and passive (NP2 + be + VPed + by + NP1), e.g. the singer performed the song /
the song was performed by the singer; the passive voice is employed in specific registers
(e.g. scientific writing and press), when the agent is unknown or irrelevant (e.g. Mr.
Constable has been murdered), when the focus is on the process to convey objectivity,
especially in academic prose (e.g. the results of the tests have been checked several
times) and to disclaim responsibility (e.g. he is said to be a womanizer).
Auxiliaries are used to express grammatical categories such as aspect, voice and modality:
• the primary auxiliary be is used to form the passive voice (e.g. the man was hit by a car)
and the progressive aspect (e.g. I am working);
• the primary auxiliary have is used to form the perfect aspect (e.g. I have worked);
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• the primary auxiliary do is used to form the negative and interrogative forms (e.g. I don’t
know, do you know?) and to express emphasis (e.g. I do love you).
Modality can be of two main kinds:
a) deontic, referring to actions or events that can be controlled by humans:
 permission, e.g. can I ask you a question?, could I borrow your notes?, am I
allowed to ask a question?;
 ability, e.g. I can ski, she was able to drive very well;
 obligation, e.g. you must stop talking;
 advice, e.g. you should stop smoking;
 volition, e.g. I’ll do it for you.
b) epistemic, referring to the levels of certainty of an event:
 possibility, e.g. she may/might be ill;
 logical necessity (probability), e.g. she must be ill, this must be good, it can’t be
true;
 prediction, e.g. we’ll see you tomorrow.
Adjective phrase (AdjP)

An adjective phrase is a syntactic unit consisting of an adjective head, either alone or
accompanied by other words, phrases or clauses before or after it.
The role of the pre-modifier (Pre-Mod) can be filled by:
✓ adverbs, e.g. extremely important, very unhappy;
✓ noun phrases, e.g. fourteen years old;
The role of the post-modifier (Post-Mod) can be filled by:
✓ adverbs, e.g. not good enough;
✓ prepositional phrases, e.g. unhappy with your decision, hopeless at basketball, very rude
to the customer;
✓ prepositions followed by verb phrases, e.g. bad at cooking, tired of studying grammar;
✓ that-clauses, e.g. sure that I locked the door last night, glad that you’re here;
✓ to-infinitive clauses, e.g. happy to see me, difficult to understand what she says, very easy
to drive;
✓ -ing clauses after a preposition, e.g. unhappy about being sacked, not interested in
breaking records at the moment.
Adverb phrase (AdvP)

An adverb phrase is a syntactic unit consisting of an adverb head, either alone or accompanied
by other adverbs before or after it.
Frequent Pre-Mods are degree adverbs, e.g. very, rather, quite, extremely, fairly.
Frequent Post-Mods are the adverbs enough and indeed.
Prepositional phrase (PP)

A prepositional phrase is a syntactic unit consisting of a prepositional head always followed by
another element, called the complement of the preposition (C).
The role of the complement can be filled by:
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✓ noun phrases, e.g. with a beautiful dress, in the afternoon;

✓ relative clauses, e.g. the company for which I work;
✓ -ing clauses, e.g. it’s a question of finding love;
✓ wh-clauses, e.g. unsure of what to say.
Clauses and word order

Phrases work as clause elements; each clause element has a specific grammatical function in
relation to the linguistic system.
There are five major clause elements:
o Subject (S), which is one of the main functional elements, also called immediate
constituent;
o Verb (V) or Predicator (P), the other main functional element, also called immediate
constituent;
o Object (O), that can be direct (Od) or indirect (Oi);
o Complement (C), that can be subject (Cs) or object (Co);
o Adverbial (A), that can be optional or obligatory.
Because of the fact that PDE is a morphologically poor language, grammatical relations and
meanings are expressed to a greater extent by syntax and word order than by inflectional
morphology: the order of constituents specifies and signals their syntactic function. Changing
the order of constituents changes also the meaning of a clause, since the function of the noun
phrases varies according to their position within the clause.
In general, in both English and Italian clauses the subject is placed before the verb while the
object goes after the verb (SVO is, in fact, the unmarked order of constituents).
One difference between the two languages is that in PDE word order is pretty rigid and fixed,
whereas in Italian it can be more flexible, e.g. seguiranno alcuni esempi = some examples will
follow and not *will follow some examples.
The internal structure of clauses, i.e. the way in which their constituents combine, can be
illustrated by using tree diagrams which order and label the constituents, showing the
relationship between them (it can be divided into two parts: the subject and the predicate,
which consists of the verb elements and its verb complementation, i.e. VP + optional or
obligatory elements).
Examples of clauses are:
S V O C A
The black has bitten Mr. Allington in the garden
labrador (NP) (VP) (NP) (PP) [optional A]
He (NP) put (VP) the keys (NP) in his bag (PP)
[obligatory A]
Sue (NP) is feeling very sleepy (AdjP)
(VP) [subject C]
Armstrong became the first man on the
(NP) (VP) moon (NP) [subject C]
Chris (NP) made (VP) Sara (NP) really angry (AdjP) yesterday (AdvP)
[object C] [optional A]
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Subject (S)
The subject element in a clause is its topic, what the clause is about. It is obligatory and its
position is typically before the verb element, except in interrogative clauses where it’s placed
after the auxiliary verb or the operator, i.e. the verb used to form interrogative clauses.
It determines the number of the verb element, i.e. whether the verb should be in the singular
or plural form.
In terms of form, the S is most typically a NP or a pronoun (in the nominative case), but it can
also be a subordinate clause.
If the clause doesn’t have a subject, a “dummy” subject will be used, e.g. it, there.
Verb (V) or Predicator (P)

The verb element is a VP and it is the central part of the clause since it controls the other
elements, because it determines whether and which other clause elements should occur. This
means that the lexical verb in the VP dictates what type of clause element, if any, can follow the
verb.
The close relationship between the lexical verb and the other elements preceding or following
the verb in the clause is called verb complementation: the verb determines the type of
obligatory elements that can be added to it to make the clause grammatically complete.
Lexical verbs are classified according to the number and type of clause elements that they
require and the patterns they can create, i.e. their combinatory potential: this is known as the
valency pattern of the verb. Verbs can thus be:
o one-place verbs if they combine only with a S, e.g. she was laughing;
o two-place verbs if they combine with a S and another element, e.g. she was playing the
piano (S + Od), she was very beautiful (S + Cs);
o three-place verbs, is they combine with a S and two other elements, e.g. she gave him a
kiss (S + Oi + Od), she made him happy (S + Od + Co).
Depending on the verb complementation or valency pattern they allow, lexical verbs can be
classified as:
o intransitive (S + V): the verb only requires a subject, e.g. it’s raining;
o monotransitive (S + V + Od): the verb requires a direct object, e.g. I love beer;
o ditransitive (S + V + Oi + Od): the verb requires two objects, an indirect object and a direct
object, e.g. she bought him a present; the most frequent ditransitive verbs are give, tell,
buy, bring, show;
o complex transitive (S + V + Od + Co or S + V + Od + A): the verb requires a direct object
followed by either an object complement or an obligatory adverbial, e.g. his friends call
him Jimmy, she put the car keys in her bag; the most frequent complex transitive verbs
of the first type are make, elect, vote, consider, declare, name, find, regard (as), call, see,
get and of the second type put, place, last, live, learn, go, be, drive, take, keep.
o copular (S + V + Cs or S + V + A): the verb requires a subject complement or an obligatory
adverbial, e.g. Mary seemed very happy, Mary is staying at my place; the most frequent
copular verbs are be, feel, seem, appear, look, remain, stay, become, sound, turn, taste
(state and perception verbs).
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Object (O)
The object element follows the verb and is affected by it (only transitive verbs can have
objects).
There are two types of objects:
o the direct object (Od) refers to the entity which is directly affected by the process or
action denoted by the verb, e.g. I’m reading an interesting book, he painted the walls,
she can speak German; it is typically a NP or a pronoun (in the accusative case), but it can
also be a subordinate clause;
o the indirect object (Oi) is the entity which receives something or benefits from the action
or process expressed by the verb, e.g. she gave him the book; it is usually placed between
the verb and the direct object and immediately follows the verb (it can be paraphrased
using the prepositions to or for: in this case it is placed after the direct object, e.g. she
gave the book to him); it is typically a NP or a pronoun (in the accusative case), but it can
also be a PP or a subordinate nominal clause.
Complement (C)
The complement element characterises or describes the S or the O, providing information
about them.
There are, in fact, two types of complements:
o the subject complement (Cs) follows a copular verb, e.g. I feel tired, she became a nurse,
Mary appeared in good health; it is typically an AdjP, a NP or a PP, but it can also be a
subordinate nominal clause;
o the object complement (Co) follows the direct object it characterises and occurs with
complex transitive verbs, e.g. this hot coffee will keep you awake, they consider him a
liar, I don’t consider myself at risk; it is typically an AdjP or a NP, but it can also be a PP
or a subordinate clause.
Adverbial (A)
The adverbial element is usually an optional element (in fact they are also called adjuncts)
added to the main ones but is can also be obligatory, it all depends on the verb (in the tree
diagram: if the A is obligatory, because the verb would be structurally incomplete without it,
only two arrows – S and P – will originate from the CLAUSE, whereas if the A is optional, because
the verb doesn’t need it to complete its meaning, the arrows will be three – S, P and A).
There are three types of adverbials:
o circumstance adverbials add information about the circumstances of the event, situation
or state described by the clause and answer the questions where?, when?, how?, how
much?, why? and how long?, in fact they can be of:
 place, e.g. to London, out there;
 time, e.g. now, in two days;
 manner, e.g. happily, in a hurry;
 process, e.g. by plane, with a blue pen;
 reason, purpose, condition, e.g. because I don’t like it, to improve your English, if
you knew the truth;
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 degree, e.g. completely, a little bit.

o stance adverbials add extra information (they are always optional) about the
speaker’s/writer’s feelings, attitude and opinion towards what is being said by the clause,
e.g. to be honest, luckily, definitely, perhaps, frankly, surprisingly, to be more precise, in
fact, probably, in my view.
o linking adverbials connect clauses or parts of clauses not adding any information, e.g.
nevertheless, however, in conclusion, yet, first.
Their role can be filled by an adverb, an AdvP, a PP, a NP or a subordinate clause.
Unlike S, O and C elements, which have a rather fixed position within the clause, A
elements can occur in different positions (the possibility of moving them around helps us to
understand if, in the tree diagram, they are linked to the P – obligatory adverbials – or to the
CLAUSE – optional adverbials).
The role of Cs and obligatory As can be confusing. Cs are those obligatory elements which
provide information about, describe and characterise the S or the O, whereas obligatory As are
those which provide information about the circumstances of an event (place, manner, time,
etc.), whose presence is needed in order to complete the meaning of specific verbs: e.g. John
was very quiet (C) and John was in bed (A), they are in danger (C) and they are in the garden (A),
you should stay sober (C) and you should stay here (A).
Types of clauses
There are different types of clauses according to their structure or their function:
❖ finite and non-finite clauses: whether the VP is finite (i.e. it shows tense) or non-finite
(i.e. it doesn’t show tense and can thus be infinitive, gerund or participle);
❖ main and subordinate clauses: whether the clause can stand on its own (i.e. it is
independent; a main clause always contains a finite verb and an overt subject) or not (i.e.
it is dependent upon another clause; a non-finite clause is always subordinate);
❖ simple, compound and complex clauses: whether the clause consists of just the main
clause, of coordinate clauses (on same level, in fact they have equal status and could
stand alone as main clauses) or of a main clause and a subordinate clause.
Main clauses
A main or independent clause is not part of a larger structure and can therefore stand alone
as a sentence.
According to its structure, a main clause can be:
➢ declarative, which has an SV structure and usually expresses statements and conveys
information, e.g. you’re wearing a new dress;
➢ interrogative, which has a VS structure and is used to ask questions, to make requests,
suggestions and offers or to give orders, e.g. are you wearing a new dress?; a particular
kind of interrogative clause is the question tag, that consists of an auxiliary followed by
a personal pronoun and it is a yes/no question which is added to a statement when the
speaker is unsure of what he/she’s saying, e.g. she’s Australian, isn’t she? (the auxiliary
is the one used for the clause to which it’s attached, while the pronoun coincides with
the S of that clause; if the clause is positive, the question tag is negative and vice versa);
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➢ imperative, which has a V structure and expresses directives (e.g. orders, instructions or
commands) but it can also be used to make invitations, requests or suggestions, e.g. buy
yourself a new dress!;
➢ exclamative, which can have various structures but typically consists of what/how
followed by an SV structure (the verb may be omitted) and expresses exclamations (e.g.
reaction of surprise or shock), e.g. what a lovely dress you’re wearing!
Marked structures
Within the clause, variations can be made changing the order of constituents: these are
marked structures since they are less frequent and have the function of highlighting specific
elements.
One example is clefting, which divides a clause into two parts, i.e. two clauses each with a
verb, and places focus on a single element.
There are two types of cleft structures:
o it-clefts are made up of the pronoun it (dummy subject) followed by the verb be, which
is in turn followed by the element that needs to be brought into focus and a relative
clause, e.g. Terry plays jazz piano for fun can become it is Terry who plays jazz piano for
fun, it’s jazz piano that Terry plays for fun or it’s for fun that Terry plays jazz piano;
o wh-clefts are made up of a wh-word followed by SV and the verb be, which is in turn
followed by the element that needs to be brought into focus, e.g. I want a book for
Christmas becomes what I want for Christmas is a book.
Finite subordinate clauses

Finite subordinate clauses contain a VP which is marked for tense. They can be divided into
four categories according to their meaning or function and their relationship with the main
clause:
➢ nominal clauses can function as Ss, Os or Cs in a main clause, e.g. I just hope (that) they
will understand;
➢ relative clauses expand the meaning of the head noun by defining or adding information
about it and are introduced by wh-words; they can be:
 defining or restrictive, when they simply define the antecedent, e.g. the tourists
who got up early could see the dawn on the Nile (no commas);
 non-defining or non-restrictive, when they provide extra information about the
antecedent whose identity is already defined, e.g. the tourists, who got up early,
could see the dawn on the Nile.
➢ adverbial clauses function as adverbial clause elements in a main clause and usually
describe circumstances such as manner, place, time, condition, cause, concession,
degree and frequency, e.g. call me as soon as you get home (time), because I have to talk
to you (reason), the boy stood on the box so that he could see better (purpose), even
though I am tired (concession) I’ll do it;
➢ comparative clauses post-modify an Adj or an AdvP where there is a gradable adjective
or adverb in its comparative form, e.g. this hotel is not as nice as I expected.
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Conditional sentences
A particular type of finite subordinate clause is the one that expresses a condition relating to
the main clause that expresses the consequence, with which forms a conditional sentence.
There are four types of conditional sentences:
0. Zero conditional (the consequence is obvious): if-clause verb in simple present and main
clause verb in simple present, e.g. if you don’t water plants, they die;
1. First conditional (condition and consequence are an open possibility): if-clause verb in
simple present and main clause verb in will, e.g. if the weather is nice, tomorrow we will
go to the seaside;
2. Second conditional (condition and consequence are unlikely to happen): if-clause verb in
simple past and main clause verb in present conditional, e.g. if the weather was nice, we
would go to the seaside;
3. Third conditional (the condition is impossible because is in the past): if-clause verb in
past perfect and main clause verb in perfect/past conditional, e.g. if the weather had
been nice, we would have gone to the seaside.
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THE ENGLISH LEXICON: FROM WORDS TO PHRASEOLOGY

Lexicology and lexicography
Within linguistics, lexicology deals with the description of the nature, meaning, history and use
of the vocabulary of a language, also referred to as its lexis or lexicon (these three terms can be
used as synonyms).
Lexicography covers the principles and the practices which are applied to the writing of
different types of dictionaries and vocabulary reference works.
The dynamic nature of lexis

Lexis is the most dynamic level of language, the most easily and deeply affected by social,
historical and cultural change (the meaning of words can be culturally conditioned).
The lexicon of a language can form and develop through three different processes of lexical
innovation:
o creation of completely new words (coinage), e.g. to google means to search through
Google engine;
o borrowing of words from other languages (loanwords), e.g. spam in Italian and spaghetti
in English;
o word-formation processes internal to the language (derivational morphology):
 addition of prefixes and suffixes to a base, e.g. a-moral, moral-ity;
 compounding, which deals with the combination of two or more existing lexemes
to form a new one, e.g. jet lag, screen saver;
 semantic shift, which deals with the change of meaning of an existing lexeme, e.g.
to zap from “move quickly” to “keep changing TV programs with a remote
control”.
Complexity of meaning
The term “meaning” is often used in a general way to refer to semantics, which is the scientific
study of the meaning of words which shows the relationship between things and words (some
imitate sounds – onomatopoeic – but most words have an arbitrary connection with things).
An important concept to start from is that of reference, which is the entity in the real world
that a word refers to or denotes.
The concept of reference is less straightforward than expected when we refer to abstract
nouns, non-existing entities or a whole category, e.g. birds: in this case no specific real bird is
referred to, rather we conceive a general image in our minds, the concept of “bird” based on
our experience and containing a sufficient number of distinctive characteristics, such as
animal/body covered in feathers/with a beak and two wings/able to fly/lays eggs. These so-
called prototypes embody all the constituent features and are surrounded by a fuzzy area of
less central example, for example birds that cannot fly like penguins, hens and ostriches.
Most words do not merely refer to or denote objects and concepts (denotation) but they also
have emotional or stylistic associations (connotation) since they can be used in a figurative and
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metaphorical sense, e.g. lion is an African wild animal but it also suggests an image of courage,
force and power.
Different types of lexemes

Monoreferential terms are words that have only one referent or meaning, e.g. computer is “an
electronic machine which is used for storing, organizing and finding different types of
information”.
Homonymic terms are words that have different unrelated referents or meanings (it is by
chance that they have the same form and pronunciation), e.g. host can be referred to the holy
bread or to the house owner (homonyms are both homophones and homographs).
Polysemous terms are words that have several related referents or meanings, e.g. mouse can
be referred to the animal or to the electronic device.
Words related
Words are related to one another through three main types of sense relations or paradigmatic
relations:
▪ synonyms have the same referent and meaning (real synonyms don’t exist, because
there are different shades of meaning linked to different contexts; in fact we talk about
near-synonyms or pseudo-synonyms), e.g. sport and activity, freedom and liberty;
▪ antonyms express opposite or complementary meanings, e.g. black and white, fast and
slow, brother and sister, married and single;
▪ hyperonyms or superordinates are a category of words that are more general in meaning
and subsume others that are subordinates or hyponyms, e.g. flowers is the hyperonym
or superordinate that includes the subordinates or hyponyms roses, daffodils, violets,
tulips, daisies.
It is possible to go beyond the limited semantic relations to cover more extended portions of
lexis, in fact there are more extended and open structures called semantic fields which aim at
presenting the lexis of an area of reality or knowledge in a systematic way, e.g. cook, roast,
simmer, fry, bake, boil and barbecue belong to the semantic field of cooking.
Collocations and phraseology

Lexicology also deals with units larger than the single word that have one meaning, e.g. to do
research and not *to make research (there are no syntactic reasons for this, simply these chains
of preferred lexical collocations have been gradually acquired and mastered in the language).
The field of phraseology has traditionally studied the well-known expressions of folk culture
such as proverbs, commonplaces, quotations and slogans. However, it has recently extended to
include a vast range of multi-word lexical patterns, e.g. how do you do? = piacere di conoscerla
(very formal), the ups and downs, to kill two birds with one stone. These can be considered single
lexemes as they express a unified meaning.
“Words keep company with other words” and tend to co-occur in preferred or fixed collocations.
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What does knowing a word mean?

The answer is not easy. A first rather simplified distinction should be made between words
that we recognise when we hear or read them and words that we currently use: receptive or
passive lexical competence is always broader than productive or active one.
To master a word fully, we should be able to:
✓ pronounce it and to spell it correctly;
✓ identify the parts it may be composed of and their grammatical function;
✓ understand the referents or conceptual meaning(s) it refers to or the connotative
meanings it has acquired;
✓ be aware of the network of sense relations it is part of;
✓ know grammatical pattern(s) it occurs in and what other words it can or must collocate
with;
✓ be aware where, when and how often it is used in communication.
Lexicon of PDE
Measuring the size of the lexicon of a language is not easy; there are three ways of counting
words:
➢ dictionaries refer to the number of entries (they show the potential of words);
➢ corpora (electronic bodies of texts which data can be studied by means of specific
software programmes) refer to the number of spaces between one word and the other
(they show the practical usage of words);
➢ lexical competence of native speakers, which depends on many cultural and social
factors.
English dictionaries
The long tradition of lexicographic studies in Anglo-Saxon countries has produced a very high
number of dictionaries:
• the most authoritative unabridged dictionary of English is the “Oxford English Dictionary
on Historical Principles” (OED), which consists of 20 volumes + 4 additions and contains
about 616500 headwords, derived words and phrases; the project of this historical
dictionary started in the second half of the 19th century and now covers English since the
14th century; it has an online version and it’s regularly revised and updated with
particular attention to non-British varieties and specialised terminology;
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• the American counterpart is the “Merriam-Webster’s Third New International

Dictionary”, which is less extensive as it covers American English since the 18th century;
it’s regularly updated and has an online version.
All the most important varieties of English such as those of Australia, Canada, New Zealand,
India and South Africa have developed national dictionaries to account for the peculiarities of
their lexicon.
Types of dictionaries
Dictionaries vary in relation to a number of features:
❖ the number of languages they cover, i.e. monolingual, bilingual or multilingual;
❖ the number of lemmas they include, from the so-called unabridged to the middle-size
college and desk dictionaries to the pocket ones;
❖ whether they approach is diachronic (providing information on the history and the
etymology) or synchronic (focusing mainly on the language of a specific period);
❖ the areas of language covered, such as general language, specialised areas of knowledge
(e.g. business, science, technology and medicine) or specific linguistic area (e.g.
pronunciation, abbreviations, neologisms, collocations, idioms and proverbs);
❖ the addressees that is either native speakers or foreign learners (e.g. learners’
dictionaries);
❖ the more or less tolerant attitude towards new words, foreign words, slang expressions
and taboo forms like swearwords and insults (descriptive vs prescriptive);
❖ the focus on “words” rather than “things” (dictionaries vs encyclopaedias);
❖ the organisation according to either alphabetical order or semantic fields (the so-called
thesauri).
Monolingual learner’s dictionaries

They provide various type of information that are relevant to EFL learners rather than to native
speakers.
A typical entry will contain:
- spelling variants, if present;
- IPA phonetic transcription (if the two varieties differ, both BrE and AmE version are
given);
- grammatical and syntactic information (e.g. word class, irregular inflection, countable or
uncountable for nouns, transitive or intransitive for verbs, predicative or attributive for
adjectives);
- definitions of various senses;
- examples of usage;
- sense relations (e.g. antonyms or synonyms);
- register labels (e.g. archaic, old-fashioned, formal, colloquial, slang, humorous, offensive,
vulgar or referring to specialised area);
- frequent lexical collocations and phraseological phenomena (e.g. idioms and proverbs);
- usage notes and typical learners’ errors
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These dictionaries claim to select those lexical items which are considered to be the most
common and frequently used and therefore relevant to foreign learners. Many of them in fact
provide frequency information by using some visual conventions such as colours, symbols,
numbers and figures.
Electronic corpora
All dictionaries, since they must be based on usage, have their own corpora from which they
take data (scientific approach, based on percentages and statistics).
A corpus is a collection of naturally-occurring texts available in machine-readable form and
assumed to be representative of a given language or a particular register of it.
There are several corpora available for English that can be analysed through specific software
in terms of frequency and use of words in context (they look also words before and after the
chosen one to understand the context; this is very useful with polysemous words).
Some interesting quantitative data can be drawn from the “British National Corpus” (BNC),
that aims at representing the written and spoken British variety of English from the 1970s to the
1990s. It is composed of about 100 million words:
 the 20 most frequently used words are grammatical words (the first lexical words appear
after the number 50): the, of, and, a, in, to, it, is, to, was, I, for, that, you, he, be, with,
on, at, by;
 the 10 most frequent nouns are time, year, people, way, man, day, thing, child, Mr,
government;
 the most commonly mentioned animal is horse, followed by dog;
 the 10 most frequent adjectives are other, good, new, old, great, high, small, different,
large, local;
 the most frequently mentioned colours are black, white, red and green;
 the most 10 frequency adverbs are never, always, often, ever, sometimes, usually, once,
generally, hardly, no longer;
 rarer nouns are fax, ribbon, ant, colitis, wheat, spelling, holly, monarch, voltage, morale;
 rarer adjectives are rude, faithful, ministerial, innovative, controlled, conceptual,
unwilling, civic, meaningful, disturbing.
Another important corpus is the “Corpus of Contemporary American English” (COCA), which is
updated every year.
Lexical competence of native speakers

Not even native speakers know all the words of their language, as there are specialised
terminologies that are mastered only by experts in that sector. Besides, native lexical
competence varies considerably according to age, education, sex and other social variables.
According to a research, an educated adult may master 50000 lexemes and an English
university student 20000 lexemes.
To sum up, it’s impossible to define the size of English lexis in a precise way. Dictionaries,
corpora and the evaluation of native speakers’ competence contribute to throwing some light
on the quantitative dimension of such a dynamic phenomenon as lexis.
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Mixed nature of English lexis

PDE is the result of many centuries of historical, social and cultural events; it is composed of
two main components:
• a core (about 40%) of high-frequency Germanic words which are usually short
(monosyllabic) and refer to common actions and concepts, e.g. man, woman, day, child,
bread, to go, to get, phrasal verbs;
• a wider part (about 60%) of less frequently used words of classical or Romance origin
which are usually longer (polysyllabic) and used in specialised or formal contexts, e.g.
encyclopaedia, tonsillectomy, parliament, infrastructure.
For this reason, it’s easy to find doublets, or even triplets, of near-synonyms of Germanic or
Romance origin respectively, e.g. to find out and to discover, to go on (more informal) and to
continue (more formal), to come back and to return, pig (living animal) and pork (meal), cow
(living animal) and beef (meat), royal (family) and regal (powers) and kingly (manner) (different
collocations).
True and false friends between Italian and English

For Romance languages speakers the mixed nature of English lexis offers both advantages and
disadvantages.
On the one hand, they may be helped by some words that are similar in form and meaning
and constitute true friends, e.g. problem, result, company, million, community, member, to
include, to participate, to consider.
On the other hand, false friends may be misleading correspondences between two languages
(they look like something, but they actually mean something different), e.g. actually, eventually,
argument, factory, educated, lecture, library, magazine, to pretend.
English: from “borrowing language” to “donor language”

In English the phenomenon of borrowing words from other languages, which was particularly
strong from the Norman conquest in the 12th century to the 18th century, has been gradually
replaced by the phenomenon of donating words, owing to its role as a powerful world language.
In Italy the popularity of Anglicisms has evolved to the widespread present-day usage, both in
everyday communication and specialised fields such as computing and economics. The
identification and description of English loan words in Italian has become an important area of
study as well as a matter of controversy among Italian native speakers: some people approve
the use of English words in name of language freedom and efficiency in international
communication, whereas other see the phenomenon as a sign of Anglo-American imperialism
and would favour the more mother-tongue oriented policies, which have been adopted by
France and Spain.
However, in Italian English words are commonly used whether there is an Italian counterpart
or not, mainly for prestige reasons, e.g. film, mission, management, welfare, governance,
briefing, week-end, pub, mouse, computer, talk-show, report, devolution, boom, impeachment,
ghost writer.
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Variation in the use of English lexis

English lexis varies in accordance with a wide range of communicative dimensions. Several
approaches have been developed by linguistics who are interested in looking at language as a
social phenomenon.
A useful distinction is between:
a. user-related variation: lexical usage varies according to users, that is, as a consequence
of some permanent or personal characteristics, such as geographical area, education,
gender and age;
b. use-related variation or register model: lexical usage varies according to users’ use of the
language, that is what they are talking about (field or topic), who they are addressing
(personal tenor, e.g. formal or informal) and whether they are speaking or writing
(medium).
Even though there is a considerable lexis interchange between geographical varieties of
English, there are some fairly stable peculiarities which characterise BrE and AmE, e.g.
flat/apartment, lift/elevator, petrol/gasoline, autumn/fall, rubbish/garbage, tube or
underground/subway, lorry/truck, biscuit/cookie, taxi/cab, trousers/pants, sofa/couch,
sweet/candy, film/movie, car park/parking lot, motorway/freeway, aubergine/eggplant, ground
floor/first floor, nappy/diaper, crisps/chips.
Word-formation processes
There are several processes involved in the formation of words:
➢ Compounding: two or more free lexemes (multi-word compounds, e.g. sell-by-date,
mother-in-law, made in Italy) are joined (e.g. noun + noun, adjective + noun, noun +
adjective, adjective + adjective, verb + noun, verb + verb, verb + participle; compounds
can be made of just one word – solid compounds –, by two different words – spaced
compounds – or separated by an hyphen – hyphenated compounds) to form a new word
that has a new meaning and a fixed structure (difference from simple noun phrases), e.g.
blackbird is not simply a bird which is black but a type of bird common in Europe and
North America; there are two types of compounds:
- endocentric compounds have a meaning referred to the central element of the
compound, e.g. in bedroom bed modifies room (a bedroom is a type of room: the
meaning is within the compound);
- exocentric compounds don’t have a meaning referred to the central element of
the compound, e.g. in paperback neither element modifies the other (a
paperback is a type of book that has a paper cover rather than a hard one: the
meaning is external the compound);
➢ Affixation/Derivation: one or more bound derivational lexemes are added to a free
morpheme either at the beginning or at the end, e.g. e-mail, childish, childhood,
kingdom; there are two types of affixes:
- prefixes are usually class-maintaining and affect meaning in many ways
(pejorative, degree or size, attitude, spatial relations, time and order, numerical
values), e.g. happy and unhappy;
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- suffixes are usually class-changing, e.g. play and player (from verb to noun),
polluted and pollution (from adjective to noun), kind and kindness (from adjective
to noun), honest and honestly (from adjective to adverb);
➢ Conversion/Zero derivation: a change of word class (noun to verb, verb to noun,
adjective to verb, adverb to verb) without any change in form, e.g. bottle can be both a
noun and a verb, download can be both a noun and a verb; round can be adjective,
preposition, adverb, noun or verb;
➢ Initialisms/Alphabetisms/Acronyms: the initial letters of a complex noun phrase, e.g.
AIDS for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, SCUBA for Self-Contained Underwater
Breathing Apparatus;
➢ Clipping/Shortening: cutting the beginning and/or the end of a longer word, e.g. flu from
influenza, phone from telephone;
➢ Blending: merging of two words into one with a corresponding fusion of their meanings,
e.g. smog = smoke + fog, brunch = breakfast + lunch, glocal = global + local, motel = motor
+ hotel;
➢ Semantic shift/Semantic change: the change of meaning of existing lexemes, e.g. to zap
from “move quickly” to “keep changing TV programmes with a remote control”.
Phraseological phenomena
According to the linguist John Sinclair, there are two different principles in language:
• the open-choice principle refers to the part of language that functions according to
predictable grammatical rules;
• the idiom principle refers to the existence in language of multi-word lexical patterns that
are units of meaning (they are fixed or semi-fixed expressions, socially shared and
conventionalised).
We talk about phraseology when we have units larger than the word or the compound that
constitute the so called prefabricated language:
✓ social routines or pragmatic idioms, e.g. see you later, I’m looking forward to hearing
from you, have a good day, can I help you?;
✓ discourse organisers, e.g. in other words, to sum up, first of all, for example;
✓ idioms, e.g. to beat about the bush, to kill two birds with one stone;
✓ binomials, e.g. back and forth, pros and cons, bed and breakfast;
✓ proverbs, e.g. a friend in need is a friend indeed, too many cooks spoil the broth, the more
the merrier;
✓ simile, e.g. as ugly as sin;
✓ slogans and famous quotations, e.g. Ask not what your country can do for you but what
you can do for your country (J. F. Kennedy), Yes, we can (B. Obama).
44

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Riassunto inglese - Handbook of present-day English (A)

Lingua Inglese (Università degli Studi di Torino)

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LINGUA INGLESE (STUDENTI A-L)

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LANGUAGE CHANGE AND VARIATION IN ENGLISH

The history of language

Before OE: the Celts

History of the Anglo-Saxon period

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Old English (700 – 1150)

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History of the Norman period

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Middle English (1150 – 1500)

History of the Modern period

Modern English (1500 – 1900)

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opinion, and strange without heresie: I did conuerse this

History of the 20th century

Present-day English (1900 – present)

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Native varieties or “Colonial Englishes”

Second language varieties or “New Englishes”

The speech community of PDE

English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)

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Types of language change

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THE PRONUNCIATION IN ENGLISH

Phonetics, phonology and the articulators

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Graphemes and phonemes

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o fricatives (there is friction), /f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ, h/;

English and Italian phonemes in contrast

Rhoticity and r-linking

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Stress and suffixes

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Vowel reduction and weak forms

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The pronunciation of American English

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The rhythm in connected speech

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THE GRAMMAR IN ENGLISH

Descriptive and theoretical grammar

Morphology and syntax

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Internal stability criteria

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Lexemes and word-forms

Word classes (parts of speech)

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Open and closed classes

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