Ривлина А.А. Сравнительная типология английского и русского языков

TYPOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS

OF THE ENGLISH LANGAUGE

Typological characteristics of the English language present a serious linguistic problem. Some linguists, for example, Vladimir Dmitrievich Arakin, describe it as basically an inflecting language, while others, for example, Vladimir Skalichka, as basically an isolating language.

These disagreements reflect the fact, that the typological system of the English language underwent a drastic typological reconstruction in its history, so the diachronic typological description of English should be distinguished from its synchronic description. Old English, like all the other Indo-European languages, was of the inflecting type. It had a developed system of noun declension and verbal subjugation, and there was obligatory concord between the noun and other words in the sentence. During the Middle English period due to the reduction of the unstressed inflections most of the morphological synthetic forms were lost, the morphological paradigms were reduced and only a few productive grammatical patterns have remained. They are: the plural form of the nouns, e.g., cat – cats, the genitive case of the noun, e.g., cat –cat’s, the 3d person singular form of the verb in the present tense, e.g., work – works, the past tense forms of the verbs, e.g., work – worked. These grammatical suffixes have lost their inflectional properties and have become essentially agglutinative: they no longer combine different grammatical functions and are no longer fused with the roots (or stems) like in Russian; the borderlines between the morphemes are clear and transparent. The direction of the assimilation between the stem and the affixes has changed from predominantly regressive (like in other inflecting languages) to progressive, resembling the agglutinative phenomenon of vowel and consonant harmony: the morphemes –(e)s and –(e)d are phonetically adjusted to the final consonant of the stem; they are syntagmatically realized in three allomorphs, cf.: cats, dogs, roses; worked, lived, lasted. To compensate for the extinct synthetic morphological forms, the English language has developed a number of analytical grammatical forms, including the article determination of the noun, the time, aspect, voice and mood forms of the verb.

The reduction of the morphological formal features has lead to an almost complete loss of essentially inflectional ways of syntactic linking - agreement (or concord) and government; agreement can be traced in Modern English only as a recessive typological feature in the combinations of the noun with the demonstrative pronouns, e.g.: this book – these books, and in the predicative combinations of the noun with the third person singular form of the verb in the present tense, e.g.: they say – he says; government can be traced in the combination of the verb with objective pronouns, e.g.: to see him. Semantic concord in Modern English prevails over the formal concord, which is evident in predicative variants like the following: the family is gathered around the table (the subject referent is presented as an indivisible whole) – the family are gathered around the table (the subject referent is presented as potentially divisible). Formal agreement and government have been replaced by purely syntactic (or analytical) ways of word linking: adjunction (adjoining, or mere juxtaposition of words) and the use of connectors. This resulted in a greater importance of word order as a means of semantics rendering, cf.: silk blouse – blouse silk (the change of word order influences the meaning of the whole phrase).

In the sphere of the sentence structures the typological reconstruction of the English language has led to fixed word order with the predicate separating the subject and the object positionally. To adjust to the fixed word order the Modern English syntax has developed an analytical type of the predicate, which enables it to preserve the fixed subject-predicate-object word order in interrogative and negative constructions, cf.: Did you take my pen? I did not take your pen. Among the other consequences of the analytical reconstruction in the sphere of syntax is a greater degree of syntactic completeness in English: since there are no special morphological forms of the predicate to distinguish personal, impersonal, and indefinite-personal grammatical constructions, all of them obligatorily include both principal members of the sentence – the subject and the predicate, cf.: Говорят, что… - They say…, Холодно – It is cold. In general, there are fewer elliptical and one-axis sentences in English than in inflectional languages, for example, in Russian. In polypredicative constructions Modern English like all the other analytical languages is characterized by a greater degree of semantic condensation: it abounds in semi-complex sentences with Complex Subject, Complex Object, Absolute constructions and so on.

The analytical trend has also deeply affected the English vocabulary and its mechanisms of lexical derivation. The morphological structure of the typical modern English word has become predominantly monosyllabic, stable, equivalent to the root and the stem like in agglutinating languages, cf.: work – worker, working, works. The possibilities of affixation have been limited: actually, most of the derivational affixes in Modern English have been borrowed from either Latin or French. According to professor Plotkin, two typologically different layers of the lexis are distinct in Modern English: first, the native Anglo-Saxon monosyllabic vocabulary, which participated in the typological reconstruction of the English language system; monosyllabic vocabulary is stylistically neutral (or colloquial) and highly frequent in speech, e.g.: star, moon, sit, stand, foot, hand, old, good, etc.; the second layer includes the predominantly borrowed typologically unassimilated polysyllabic vocabulary, most of which is stylistically marked as formal, e.g.: opinion, session, relation, appreciate, contribute, arrogance, consequence, appointment, marriage, actress, curious, etc. Polysyllabic words possess the formal marks of a particular part of speech and are subject to morphological derivation; monosyllabic words distinguish no formal features of any particular part of speech, they are polyfunctional and their part of speech status is determined positionally, which is a typologically relevant feature of the isolating languages. The majority of English words are subject to widespread cross-class conversion and analytical derivation, e.g.: to stand - a stand, to stand up, to sit down, etc. Equally widespread are composite and compound words which are often hard to distinguish from regular word combinations, including “noun+noun” word combinations, the most productive phrase model in Modern English, e.g.: waterfall, see breeze, jack-of-all-trades, baby-sitting. This is seen as a typological feature of the incorporating languages. Typologically relevant are numerous functional and semi-functional words in English, such as auxiliary words and wide-range meaning substitutional words, e.g.: thing, matter, way; do, make, get, have, take, give, etc.

Phonetically, predominantly monosyllable vocabulary has led to a specific pattern of word stress: in addition to typologically recessive, but still highly relevant first-syllable stress pattern (like in family, relevance, black-board, etc.), polysyllabic words in English have acquired the so-called secondary (and sometimes tertiary) stress, e.g.: competition, secretary; this stress-pattern imitates rhythmically the syntagmatic alternation of stressed notional and unstressed functional monosyllabic words. Some linguists, professor Plotkin among them, also attribute a developed vowel system in English with its numerous subtle articulation distinctions (such as stability of articulation, length, tenseness, checkedness, etc.) to the needs of typologically dominant monovocalic stem shapes, which have to be diverse enough to render various meanings.

To sum it up, the present typological status of the English language is determined by drastic reconstruction of originally inflectional-synthetic system into an analytical type system. The more detailed typological description of English with the consideration of its diachronic aspect, according to professor Arakin, is as follows: it’s a slightly inflecting language with a predominance of agglutinative features and adjunction, and with no fusion between the morphemes. Synchronically, English is characterized, according to Vladimir Skalichka, as basically an isolating type language with some agglutinative features.