1st english faculty course paper the Peculiarities of the English language in the usa

Chapter 1. American English (Historical and Research Aspects)
1.1 History of the formation of American English
The first attempts to colonize North America were made already in the 16th century, but they did not lead to the emergence of permanent settlements. Only in 1606 was the colony of Dmeimstown established in southern North America (modern Virginia). This colony enjoyed the patronage and support of the English crown; already in 1619 a Dutch ship brought there African black slaves. This was the beginning of the slave trade in America. The Virginia colony was the first point in the New World to establish the English language; however, it did not play a significant role in the distribution process.

In 1620, the ship Mayflower departed from the coast of England, on which the British - men, women and children - belonged to the religious direction of the Puritans.

The inhabitants of these two settlements had different linguistic traditions. Jamestown's colonists came mainly from the western part of England, from counties such as Somerset and Gloucestershire, with their characteristic pronunciation (the sound of the [s] sound and the rolling [r] sound after the vowels). Plymouth colonists arrived from the eastern counties of England (Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Essex, Kent) and London, where dialects were of a slightly different kind - for example, the sound [r] after the vowels was absent there. These differences continued to persist in the future. The speakers of various dialects have never been clear due to the constant migration of the population from north to south and in the opposite direction and the influx of emigrants from various countries of the world. Thus, the history of the English language in America goes back three and a half centuries.

The early period (from the beginning of the 17th century to the end of the 18th century), which is characterized by the formation of American dialects of the English language, and the late (19th-20th centuries), which is characterized by the creation of the American version of the English language. These periods are approximately equal in time, but by no means equal in their significance.

At the beginning of the early period, English in America was largely in line with the norms that were adopted in England in the 17th century. English pronunciation of the 16th-17th centuries differs significantly from the pronunciation of the modern language. The changes either did not affect the English language in America at all, or affected it to a much lesser extent. Thus, by the end of the period under consideration in America, there were already significant deviations from the fraternal norms of literary pronunciation. The most significant differences are due to the expansion of the vocabulary of the English language in America.

The new living conditions of the first English colonists in America were reflected in various neologisms of the 17th-18th centuries. It should be noted here a general group of words denoting the natural conditions of the American continent, its flora and fauna, for example:

moose - moose,

gap - mountain pass,

backwoods - backwoods.
Another group is the vocabulary that refers to the life of the first settlers from England, to new ways of doing business, etc.
corndodger - corn tortilla

coleslaw - shredded cabbage

lot is a piece of land.
In the same period, the early period, a significant group of words used by the colonists appeared. The words characterized the life and life of the indigenous inhabitants of North America - the Indians.

For instance:

moccasin - moccasin,

squaw - Indian,

medicine-man - Indian tribe shaman,

warpath - a North American Indian campaign.

Replenishment of the vocabulary of the English language in America went in two ways:

1. due to the formation of new words and stable phrases and rethinking of old ones;

2. by borrowing from other languages.

The settlers borrowed words from Indian languages ​​to refer to plants they did not know:

- genus of hazel, - persimmon.
And also to designate animals:

- raccoon, - woodchuck.

The words are borrowed from the French language:

- a kind of stew, - prairie;

from Dutch:

- scow, skiff, - sleigh.

Among the new words formed in the American colonies of England in the 17th - 18th centuries, the majority are complex words created by substantivating phrases like "adjective + noun" and "noun + noun". These transformations arose on the basis of those words that were included in the vocabulary of the Early Modern English language.

For example: Bull-Frog - "a bull whose moo resembles a frog croak"

The coexistence of the old and the new meaning is noted, for example, in the noun frontier, which has acquired an additional meaning in America: a newly developed or sparsely populated area immediately adjacent to a desert or uninhabited area.

Based on this new meaning, a number of complex words and stable phrases have arisen, in which one of the elements is frontier in its American meaning. (For example frontierman, frontier country, frontier to).

Often, the development of a new meaning of a word is determined by the similarity of the objects designated by this word. For example, the English word store, which in America has acquired the meaning of “shop, shop”. This rethinking was caused by the fact that at that time in the colonies any store, by necessity, was also a warehouse of goods. Hence the stable phrase keep the store - "to have a store" arose.

A special group includes words whose semantic meaning has undergone a complete rethinking. For example, the process of narrowing the meaning, the English noun corn in England means any crops, and in America the word corn began to mean corn, i.e. exactly the culture that the first settlers had to cultivate mainly.

This also includes cases of rethinking, as a result of which the connection with the original meaning was broken, and the very primary meaning of this word remained only in the British version, such a semantic shift took place in the word lumber, which in England means “junk, junk”. But already at the beginning of the 18th century, the noun lumber began to mean not only logs, boards and other objects that blocked the way to transport and pedestrians, but also timber.

Subsequently, the primary meaning was completely lost, and the word in its new meaning, to a certain extent, replaced the synonymous timber from American use.

One of the sources of vocabulary replenishment during this period was borrowing from other languages ​​and, first of all, from the languages ​​of the Indian tribes inhabiting North America. Here, mainly, the terms denoting the flora and fauna of the American continent prevail.
sauash - squash, pumpkin,

chinkapin is a dwarf chestnut tree .

The formation of the American variant of the English language most intensively proceeded in such cultural, political and economic centers of colonial America as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston and Richmond. One of the essential reasons for the divergent processes underlying the regional variability of the American version was the territorial disunity and cultural isolation of colonies and settlements from each other.

The War of Independence served as a powerful incentive to differentiate between the two variants of the English language in the sense that certain tendencies and aspirations of a nationalist character appeared, calling for independence from the metropolis in the language as well. However, as you know, a separate American language never took shape. According to some researchers, if the colonization of America had occurred several centuries earlier, we would now have a separate American language, and not a variant of English. But colonization took place after the invention of printing. It should also be noted that the English language developed in America in an era when the principle of universal education was already well established and most of the books that were read in America came from England and basically represented the British historical and philological tradition.

The description of the later period is closely related to the description of modern English in America.

For the late period, covering the 19th and 20th centuries, the most characteristic processes and changes that took place in the field of vocabulary.

Attention should be paid to the quantitative growth of Americanisms. It is to this period that the vast majority of the first examples of the use of words and stable phrases included in the historical dictionaries of Americanisms by Craigie and Matthews belong. Here, undoubtedly, the close connection between the history of language (and mainly vocabulary as its most mobile part) and the history of society found its manifestation. Education in the United States with its specific state and political system, with its new state institutions, political parties and public organizations - all this, first of all, was reflected in the emergence of political terminology.

The rapid growth of American industry, the development of agriculture, the transport system, various changes in the economic and social life of society. The new conditions required the creation of a special terminology. New technological terms were developed by private companies and, of course, there was no question of any unification or standardization of terminology between the United States and England. Therefore, it is no coincidence. That, originating in the United States in the 19th century, railway terminology was so dramatically different from English.

The expansion to the west and the so-called "gold rush" left a noticeable mark on the vocabulary and, especially, in the phraseology of the English language in the United States. The name of the words and stable phrases that arose during this period have survived only as historicisms (for example, forty-niner - a gold digger who arrived in California during the gold rush of 1849).

The processes that took place in the 19th century also affected other layers of American vocabulary. during this period, a number of lexical features of American colloquial speech developed. So, for example, in the speech of Americans, various stable combinations with the adverb right are widespread (for example, right along - always, continuously, constantly, right up - immediately, right smart - a lot).

Among the words of his stable phrases that came into use in the 19th century and lie outside the literary language, a significant part falls on the so-called "slang". This includes, in particular, a number of expressively colored words and phraseological units reflecting many dark sides of the "American way of life", slush money - money to bribe officials, bum - a vagrant.

In the XIX century. there are works devoted to the US language. In 1816, a dictionary by J. Pickering was published under the title “A Vocabulary, or Collection of Words and Phrases which have been supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America”. This work is the first to collect Americanisms. At the same time, Pickering's position was pro-British: Pickering sought to remove from circulation what did not coincide with the British norm. Pickering was opposed by Noah Webster, who defended the right of Americans to write their own words.

In 1828, Webster published his famous An American Dictionary of the English Language. This dictionary is entirely based on the vocabulary, forms, pronunciation characteristic of the English language in the United States, and was of great importance in establishing the American writing standard. It has been reprinted many times with corrections and changes, and its latest edition, 1902, is one of the largest modern dictionaries of the English language.
1.2 Studying English in the USA
The differences between English in America (AE) and English in Great Britain (BE) have been discussed for a long time. The debate about whether AE should be considered an independent language, completely isolated from BE, continues in our time.

Perhaps the most hypertrophied depiction of the specific features of A.E. took place at G.L. Mencken, author of the famous book American Language. His work is of renowned interest as a collection of extensive factual material. However, the value of the facts he collected is greatly reduced by their clearly biased selection, subordinate to his earlier goal - to prove the existence of a special American language. In addition, the integration of linguistic facts in Mencken's book in a number of cases seems to be extremely doubtful (for example, attributing such forms as won't, ain't double negation, etc. to the specific features of A.E.)

In fact, all Mencken's arguments in favor of A.E. independent language boil down to the fact that between A.E. and V.E. there is no complete identity. However, the absence of complete identity characterizes not only different languages, but also different dialects and even idialects (individual dialects) of the same language.

For the sake of fairness, it must be pointed out that Mencken himself did not at all pretend to be scientific in his judgments. Menkin's critics clearly overestimate his role, ascribing to him the creation of the "Theory of the American Language" in fact, he did not create any theory and, strictly speaking, used the words "language" and "dialect" in relation to A.E. not at all as linguistic terms and without making any distinction between them [Schweitzer, 1971: 8].

A similar approach to this problem is followed by J.F. Krapp, whose comprehensive monograph, The English Language in America explores the characteristics of American English and their origins. The two-volume monograph by J. F. Krapp was the first serious work devoted to the study of the characteristics of the American version and their origins. The sections of the book devoted to the study of American pronunciation on a historical basis are extremely interesting. Krapp was one of the first to establish and document the historical connection between modern American pronunciation and early English pronunciation. He demonstrated a number of direct parallels of the independent specific features of A.E. in modern territorial dialects of England and correctly noted the tendency to erase dialectal traits in AE, linking this fact with the constant migration of the American population and the destruction of the original speech communities. The specifics of the linguistic situation during the formation of the English-speaking community in North America in the XVII-XVIII centuries. it was that by that time in England itself a nationwide literary standard had already formed, which served as a supra-dialectal communication system. An important factor that contributed to the expansion of the social base of the literary English language in America was the high prestige of education and a certain conservatism of the American education system, which for a long time was guided by British norms.

According to A.D. Schweitzer, there is every reason to believe that the degree of variability of the literary language at one level or another of its structure is associated with the model of its formation. As an example, the author refers to the history of the formation of the literary English language in England and the United States. In England, the formation of a national literary standard took place around a single center - London, the language of which had a decisive influence on the formation and stabilization of the national linguistic norm. Such a model of the literary norm of A.D. Schweitzer calls it monocentric. The situation is different in North America, where, as noted above, at the earliest stage, the language of London continued to be the standard of the literary norm, i.e. an extracentric model operated with a center outside the given area. Then this model was superimposed on another, associated with the formation in colonial America of such centers as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, where the formation of the literary norm was intensively going on. The author defines this model as polycentric.

This polycentrism of the American version manifested itself in different ways at different levels of the linguistic structure, most noticeably affecting the phonetic level.

The fact that Standard American English was formed under the influence of complex and contradictory factors in conditions of high geographical and social mobility of the population, focusing on the norm of the British variant, and on the regional norms of the colonial centers, and on the most widespread variant, left a certain imprint on its status and structure. Its distinctive features are ambiguity and blurring of boundaries and significant variability.