Free English Language Dissertations - Additional Influences Were Associated With The Arrival Of The French In 1066
Additional influences were associated with the arrival of the French in 1066 and became absorbed into the English language over the next few hundred years and continued to evolve through trade with other nations from the 16th Century onwards, incorporating innumerable new words from countries such as Africa, India, Australia and the Americas through the development of the Commonwealth.
Lexical Diffusion
Some linguists argue that the Old English inflectional system was inefficient and was, therefore, as the linguist Roger Lass has argued, ‘ripe for re-modelling’. Speakers themselves start to regularise the paradigmsdeleting endings (Leith, David, 1996, Page 118).
From the end of the 12th Century Guilds came to be formed as trade flourished with the result that the styles of both lexis and orthography changed to meet the need, together with punctuation which developed in accordance with particular requirements for business documents and, as a result, Old English began to give way to a new form of language, the Middle English which was characterised, amongst other things by differences in intonation and stress on the language’s phonology leading to the Great Vowel Shift which occurred over a period of time from around 1400 to 1700, pronunciation becoming almost comparable with the vowels of today. The changes in pronunciation coincide with the growth in towns and cities and the gradual change in focus from the countryside, with an influx of different dialects from places such as Norfolk and the North towards London, with a corresponding unification of pronunciation, described as lexical diffusion (Chambers and Trudghill, 1991, Chapter 7).
Significantly, the introduction of the printing press coincided with this influx, a situation described as destined to revolutionise the availability of information in civilised society. The political and educational consequences of this new technology will be profound (Harris and Taylor, 1996, pp. 1 69). This perception, perhaps was related to the need to provide a standardised dialect in order to print books and Caxton chose the dialect prevalent in London near the location of his printing press, coinciding with the cultural and sociological moves towards a more secular society.
Most of the hobgoblins of contemporary prescriptive grammar (don’t split infinitives, don’t end a sentence with a preposition) can be traced back to these eighteenth-century fads (Pinker, 1994, p. 374).
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