Conversion as the productive way of word building
Простоскопировалаинфуиз 13 билета
Conversion consists in making a new word from some existing word by changing the category of a part of speech, the morphemic shape of the original word remaining unchanged. The new word has a meaning which differs from that of the original one though it can more or less be easily associated with it. It has also a new paradigm peculiar to its new category as a part of speech.
The question of conversion has, for a long time, been a controversial one in several aspects. The very essence of this process has been treated by a number of scholars (e. g. H. Sweet), not as a word-building act, but as a mere functional change. From this point of view the word hand in Hand me that book is not a verb, but a noun used in a verbal syntactical function, that is, hand (me) and hands (in She has small hands) are not two different words but one. According to this functional approach, conversion may be regarded as a specific feature of the English categories of parts of speech, which are supposed to be able to break through the rigid borderlines dividing one category from another thus enriching the process of communication not by the creation of new words but through the sheer flexibility of the syntactic structures.
Nowadays this theory finds increasingly fewer supporters, and conversion is universally accepted as one of the major ways of enriching English vocabulary with new words. One of the major arguments for this approach to conversion is the semantic change that regularly accompanies each instance of conversion. Normally, a word changes its syntactic function without any shift in lexical meaning. E. g. both in yellow leaves and in The leaves were turning yellow the adjective denotes colour. Yet, in The leaves yellowed the converted unit no longer denotes colour, but the process of changing colour, so that there is an essential change in meaning.
The change of meaning is even more obvious in such pairs as hand > to hand, face > to face, to go > a go, to make > a make, etc.
The other argument is the regularity and completeness with which converted units develop a paradigm of their new category of part of speech. As soon as it has crossed the category borderline, the new word automatically acquires all the properties of the new category, so that if it has entered the verb category, it is now regularly used in all the forms of tense and it also develops the forms of the participle and the gerund. Such regularity can hardly be regarded as indicating a mere functional change which might be expected to bear more occasional characteristics. The completeness of the paradigms in new conversion formations seems to be a decisive argument proving that here we are dealing with new words and not with mere functional variants. The data of the more reputable modern English dictionaries confirm this point of view: they all present converted pairs as homonyms, i. e. as two words, thus supporting the thesis that conversion is a word-building process.
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Conversion is not only a highly productive but also a particularly English way of word-building. Its immense productivity is considerably encouraged by certain features of the English language in its modern stage of development. The analytical structure of Modern English greatly facilitates processes of making words of one category of parts of speech from words of another. So does the simplicity of paradigms of English parts of speech. A great number of one-syllable words is another factor in favour of conversion, for such words are naturally more mobile and flexible than polysyllables.
Conversion is a convenient and "easy" way of enriching the vocabulary with new words. It is certainly an advantage to have two (or more) words where there was one, all of them fixed on the same structural and semantic base.
The high productivity of conversion finds its reflection in speech where numerous occasional cases of conversion can be found, which are not registered by dictionaries and which occur momentarily, through the immediate need of the situation.
"If anybody oranges me again tonight, I'll knock his face off”, says the annoyed hero of a story by O'Henry when a shop-assistant offers him oranges (for the tenth time in one night) instead of peaches for which he is looking ("Little Speck in Garnered Fruit"). One is not likely to find the verb to orange in any dictionary, but in this situation it answers the need for brevity, expressiveness and humour.
The two categories of parts of speech especially affected by conversion are nouns and verbs. Verbs made from nouns are the most numerous amongst the words produced by conversion: e. g. to hand(вести за руку; помогать, протягивать руку), to back, to face, to eye, to mouth, to nose, to dog(выслеживать), to wolf(пожирать с жадностью), to monkey, to can, to coal, to stage, to screen, to room, to floor, to blackmail, to blacklist, to honeymoon, and very many others.
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Nouns are frequently made from verbs: do (e. g. This is the queerest do I've ever come across. Do — event, incident), go (e. g. He has still plenty of go at his age. Go — energy), make, run, find, catch, cut, walk, worry, show, move, etc.
Verbs can also be made from adjectives: to pale, to yellow, to cool, to grey, to rough (e. g. We decided to rough it in the tents as the weather was warm), etc.
Other parts of speech are not entirely unsusceptible to conversion as the following examples show: to down, to out(раскрыться), the ups and downs, the ins and outs(ходыивыходы), like(подобный человек), n, (as in the like of me and the like of you).
Language security.
Инфа –отгруппыА-37
Language policy in the EU.
The cornerstone is multilingualism.
Multilingualism policy’s two facets:
q striving to protect Europe's rich linguistic diversity
q promoting language learning.
24 official languages:
The support of all 24 languages:
q The right to use any of EU’s official languages in correspondence with the EU institutions. (which reply in the same language)
q Regulations, legislative texts are published in all official languages (except for Irish)
q Representatives can speak in any of all the official languages
q General information about the EU policies – in all the official languages.
Regional and minority languages:
q The EU is home to over 60 minority languages
q The European Commission maintains an open dialogue with all of them
q Erasmus+ as a potential aid for promoting teaching and learning of minority languages.
The support of language learning:
One of the EU’s goals – for every European to speak 2 additional languages. Reasons:
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q Improving people's job prospects
q Cultures can understand one another
q Effective trading, business across Europe
q The language industry is growing
The 2012 Eurobatometer revealed highly positive attitudes to multilingualism.
Language politics and globalization
Language politics is the way language and linguistic differences between peoples are dealt with in the political arena. This could manifest as government recognition, as well as how language is treated in official capacities.
Since politics is concerned with power to make decisions, to control resources/other’s people behavior, politicians choose their words carefully (using metaphors, euphemisms, generalizations, etc.).
The pointis that politicians have to control their language because they are always afraid of some documents going public which may affect their careers ultimately.
Most vivid and unpleasant examples can be found in one of «The Daily Mail»’s articles revealing most cutting insults penned by U.S diplomats. For instance, French President Nicolas Sarkozy was described as «emperor with no clothes» with a «thin-skinned and authoritarian personal style». Or Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev «played Robin to Putin’s Batman» meaning that Vladimir Putin held most of the cards in the tandem relationship.
Globalization
Globalized economics and media are changing the face of culture around the globe, reducing the number of languages.
Linguists distinguish English, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish as the dominant languages. The realities of commerce and the seductive power of world pop culture are placing pressure on speakers of minority languages to learn the majority ones. Otherwise, they will suffer the consequences: greater difficulty in doing business or less access to information.
Unfortunately, these pressures have a huge impact of minority languages. They’ve been disappearing steadily, with 3000 of the world’s languages predicted to disappear in the next 100 years. More than 2500 languages are already in danger of extinction.
However, the fact that globalization is the wave of the future is undeniable. It means that more and more languages and cultures will simply cease to exist and people will instead choose dominating cultures and languages that will transcend boundaries.
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Borrowings
Borrowing – resorting to the word-stock of other languages for words to express new concepts, name new objects, phenomena, etc.
Borrowing is a consequence of cultural contact between two language communities.
A borrowing can also be called a loanword.
Loanwords are adopted by the speakers of one language from a different language (the source language).
Borrowing of words can go in both directions between the two languages in contact, but often there is an asymmetry, such that more words go from one side to the other.
In this case the source language community has some advantage of power, prestige and/or wealth that makes the objects and ideas it brings desirable and useful to the borrowing language community.
English has gone through many periods in which large numbers of words from a particular language were borrowed. These periods coincide with times of major cultural contact between English speakers and those speaking other languages. The waves of borrowing during periods of especially strong cultural contacts are not sharply delimited, and can overlap.
Latin borrowings
Latin, as the language of learning in Europe for many centuries, had an impact during the Renaissance. From the 14th century, Latin, and to a lesser degree, Greek, have been a continuous source of loanwords. The most obvious places to see Latin borrowings used in English are the terminologies used in biology, botany, and chemistry ( for example chromium, bacteria).
Most of the world's scientific community uses Latin as the universal language (or at least terminology) of science.
Borrowings from other languages
As English traders spread across the globe during the seafaring centuries, thousands of words from world languages were borrowed and became part of the English lexicon.
The list below is only suggestive of the paths followed by much of English vocabulary.
Arabic: alcohol, algebra, algorithm
Chinese: ginseng (/ˈdʒɪnseŋ/, женьшень), japan (“varnish”, лак), ketchup
German: carouse (/kəˈraʊz/, пировать), cobalt (/ˈkəʊbɔːlt/), frankfurter (/ˈfræŋkfɜːtə(r)/, сосиска)
Italian: balcony, bandit, casino
Japanese: banzai, geisha
Russian Slavic: czar, intelligentsia, mammoth
Spanish: albino, alligator, armada (/ɑːˈmɑːdə/)
Vocabulary borrowings from other languages take many forms, one of which is the loan translation or calque.
The English word calque derives from French calquer "to trace." It refers to a word or a phrase that has been translated word-for-word from its foreign origin.
Because English is a Germanic language, it's not surprising that English has numerous calques that originated as German expressions.
Here are a few: superman from Übermensch; Hang-glider from Hängegleiter (дельтаплан); loanword from Lehnwort; Rainforest from Regenwald; Watershed from Wasserscheide (водораздел);World war from Weltkrieg
Latin calques:
Milky Way(the galaxy that contains Earth's solar system) from via lactea
"Rest in Peace" from requiescat in pace
"in nutshell" from in nuce
There are a lot of words which have been borrowed from English into Russian. This phenomenon can be illustrated by the following examples:
House and everyday life: mixer; shaker; toaster; jumper; second-hand; hand-made; jeans; cracker; baby; weekend; hair; shoes; lunch
Electronics: printer; browser; scanner; notebook; Internet; computer; user
Sport: diving; bowling; biker; sprinter; match; football; snowboard; skateboard; time-out; drive
There are some features, that help to identify borrowings from the English language:
дж< j/g
инг< ing
мeн(т) < men(t)
ep< er
тч< (t)ch
ция< tion
Summing up, it is ought to be noted that language policy does a lot to prevent unhealthy tendencies in language, but high speed of life, typing instead of writing, not high quality of education, produce these incorrect words. The easiest way to prevent the damage is to start using pure correct language ourselves.
Language policy in Russia
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