University of Panama

Faculty of Humanities
English Department

Humanities Bachelor degree with emphasis on English

Teacher’s signature: William Shakespeare

Professor: Placida Victoria, MA

Students:
William Fernandez 2-739-766
Rafael De Gracia 2-740-1706

IV level

Date: August 26

2019
 Structural linguistics in semantics

Traditionally, the main focus of linguistic semantics has been on

word meaning, or lexical semantics. Since classical times
writers have commented on the fact, noticed surely by most
reflecting individuals, that the meaning of words changes over
time. Such observations are the seeds of etymology, the study
of the history of words. Over longer stretches of time, such
changes become very obvious, especially in literate societies.
Words seem to shift around: some narrow in meaning such as
English queen which earlier mean ‘woman, wife’ but now
means ‘wife of a king.’ Others become more general, while still
others shift to take on new meaning or disappear altogether.
Words are borrowed from language to language. The study of
such processes is now part of historical semantics (Allan and
Robinson, 2011). Another motivation for the study of
word meaning comes from dictionary writers as they try to
establish meaning correspondences between words in different
languages, or in monolingual dictionaries, seek to provide
definitions for all the words of a language in terms of a simple
core vocabulary. In lexicology, similarities and differences in
word meaning are a central concern.
Transformational-generative grammar

The most significant development in linguistic theory and research in

the 20th century was the rise of generative grammar, and, more
especially, of transformational-generative grammar, or
transformational grammar, as it came to be known. Two versions of
transformational grammar were put forward in the mid-1950s, the
first by Zellig S. Harris and the second by Noam Chomsky, his pupil.
It was Chomsky’s system that attracted the most attention. As first
presented by Chomsky in Syntactic Structures (1957),
transformational grammar can be seen partly as a reaction against
post-Bloomfieldian structuralism and partly as a continuation of it.
What Chomsky reacted against most strongly was the post-
Bloomfieldian concern with discovery procedures. In his opinion,
linguistics should set itself the more modest and more realistic goal
of formulating criteria for evaluating alternative descriptions of
a language without regard to the question of how these descriptions
had been arrived at. The statements made by linguists in describing
a language should, however, be cast within the framework of a far
more precise theory of grammar than had hitherto been the case,
and this theory should be formalized in terms of modern
mathematical notions. Within a few years, Chomsky had broken with
the post-Bloomfieldians on a number of other points also. He had
adopted what he called a “mentalistic” theory of language, by which
term he implied that the linguist should be concerned with the
speaker’s creative linguistic competence and not his performance,
the actual utterances produced. He had challenged the post-
Bloomfieldian concept of the phoneme (see below), which many
scholars regarded as the most solid and enduring result of the
previous generation’s work. And he had challenged the
structuralists’ insistence upon the uniqueness of every language,
claiming instead that all languages were, to a considerable degree,
cut to the same pattern—they shared a certain number of formal
and substantive universals.
Great Vowel Shift

A major factor separating Middle English from Modern English is

known as the Great Vowel Shift, a radical change in pronunciation
during the 15th, 16th and 17th Century, as a result of which long
vowel sounds began to be made higher and further forward in the
mouth (short vowel sounds were largely unchanged). In fact, the
shift probably started very gradually some centuries before 1400,
and continued long after 1700 (some subtle changes arguably
continue even to this day). Many languages have undergone vowel
shifts, but the major changes of the English vowel shift occurred
within the relatively short space of a century or two, quite a sudden
and dramatic shift in linguistic terms. It was largely during this short
period of time that English lost the purer vowel sounds of most
European languages, as well as the phonetic pairing between long
and short vowel sounds.

The Great Vowel Shift gave rise to many of the oddities of English
pronunciation, and now obscures the relationships between many
English words and their foreign counterparts. The spellings of some
words changed to reflect the change in pronunciation (e.g. stone
from stan, rope from rap, dark from derk, barn from bern, heart from
herte, etc), but most did not. In some cases, two separate forms with
different meaning continued (e.g. parson, which is the old
pronunciation of person). The effects of the vowel shift generally
occurred earlier, and were more pronounced, in the south, and
some northern words like uncouth and dour still retain their pre-
vowel shift pronunciation (“uncooth” and “door” rather than
“uncowth” and “dowr”). Busy has kept its old West Midlands spelling,
but an East Midlands/London pronunciation; bury has a West
Midlands spelling but a Kentish pronunciation. It is also due to
irregularities and regional variations in the vowel shift that we have
ended up with inconsistencies in pronunciation such as food (as
compared to good, stood, blood, etc) and roof (which still has
variable pronunciation), and the different pronunciations of the “o” in
shove, move, hove, etc.