This book presents the history of English from its obscure Indo-European roots to its twenty-first century position as the world's first language. It shows how English evolved in the British Isles and how it spread to the United States and through the old British empire to every corner of the world. It examines the different versions and roles of the language in every part of the globe and shows how English rose to international pre-eminence.
With approachable but impeccable scholarship fourteen experts chart the history of written and spoken English in all its rich and protean variety. Their accounts are made vivid with examples drawn from an immense range of documentary evidence including letters, diaries, and private records. They explore and explain the mixture of gradual and rapid change in the words, meanings, grammar, or pronunciation of English at different times and in different places. They examine the three-century rise of standard English and received pronunciation and consider their current status and wellbeing.
This book will appeal to everyone with a keen interest in the English language and its development.
Jean-Louis Dessalles explores the co-evolutionary paths of biology, culture, and the great human edifice of language, linking the evolution of the language to the general evolutionary history of humankind. He provides searchingly original answers to such fundamental paradoxes as to whether we acquired our greatest gift in order to talk or so as to be able to think, and as to why human beings should, as experience constantly confirms, contribute information for the well-being of others at their own expense and for no apparent gain: which if this is one of language's main functions appears to make its possession, in Darwinian terms, a disadvantage.
Origins of the English Language В книге «Происхождение английского языка: социальная и лингвистическая история» ( Origins of the English Language: A Social & Linguistic History) он прослеживает историю английского языка от происхождения человека до сегодняшних дней.
A social and linguistic history of the English language is presented in this book. Part 1, "History and Language," discusses such topics as the aims of language history, the beginning of language, grammars, and language meaning. Part 2, "Words and Meanings," explores Old English, Middle English, the establishment of modern English, creating new words, semantic change, and semantic change and its social context. Part 3, "Grammar and Sound," discusses grammatical structure, grammatical change and noun and verb phrases, grammar and phonology, phonological change, and Black English. An index of Modern English words is also included. (TS)
Written by an international assembly of leading philosophers, this volume provides a survey of contemporary philosophy of language. Each essay provides a synoptic view of the key issues, figures, concepts and debates, and makes new and original contributions to ongoing debate. Taken together, this volume is a key text and indispensable reference for philosophy of language, philosophical logic, metaphysics and epistemology.
Discovering Language: The Structure of Modern English This book introduces the levels model of language, which enables students to learn about the smallest linguistic items (sounds) and work through the subsequent levels (morphology and syntax) until the sentence is reached. Many introductory books address the structural issues considered here, but they also usually include contextual and theoretical discussions that are dealt with in the other volumes in this series. As a result there is enough room to include a chapter on the basic lexical semantics without which the rest of the levels of language would not work.
