RATE Issues

by Anca Florina Lipan, Colegiul National “Gh. M. Murgoci” Brăila

Abstract: Being spoken worldwide, English evolves more than any other language at a much faster speed and this evolution alters both lexis and grammar and many new forms coexist with the old ones. This fact leads to eventually enhancing language expressivity and hence the existence of two or more ways of expressing the same thing. This article mainly aims at highlighting the changes produced by language evolutionary processes and language variation as a main source of synonymy at the level of both grammar and lexis and thus explaining the reason why some structures are rephrased by other ones, structurally different but semantically similar.

 1.      Introduction

What we teach and study nowadays in class is a widely spoken language whose variation is almost limitless due to the huge number of people speaking it and consequently to the wide variety of purposes attached to it. Besides the two Standard English varieties, the British English and the American English, there are many more varieties according to region and dialect as well as idiolect which are all characterized by phonological, grammatical and lexical changes. This article will make some general considerations on the main similarities and differences between language variations, registers, dialects as well as the consequences of different evolutionary processes that affect English. Since this is aimed at analyzing language variation as a source of grammatical synonymy, the focus will be on those variations and differences that constitute themselves into independent language chunks coexisting and having similar or almost similar meaning. Out of all these possible variations verb complementation, mandative subjunctive, the use of bare infinitives, non- finite clauses and verbless clauses will be given special attention and space.

 2.       Language variations

Starting from the assumption that all languages possess synonymous grammatical structures, grammar books (Leech & Svartvik, [1975], Quirk et all, [1985:381], Thompson&Martinet, [1986], Broughton, [1990], Biber et all, [1999], Carther & McCarthy [2002], Side, Wellman, [2002], Swan, [2012], Foley, [2012], Fitikides, [2014]) include references to these, mainly under the form of rephrasing exercises. However, they do not give reasons for the existence of such rephrasing structures (regional, stylistic, linguistic, register variations). This avoidance of giving details on variation studies is due to a tendency towards oversimplifying the rules. On the other hand, such rephrasing structures are not unanimously accepted by some linguists who do not believe in the existence of grammatical synonymy considering it irrelevant and unnecessary. But, studies (Ryden, [1979], Jacobson [1980], [1982], [1983], [1986], Quirk, [1995]) show that language variation may be ‘the root of all evil’, so to speak.

At his stage we should distinguish between user – related varieties of language and use-related ones. While the first refer to dialects which differ from person to person mainly in as far as the phonic characteristics are concerned, the second ones point to registers which involve differences in language forms (grammatical and lexical differences) (Hatim,B., Mason, I., 1990:39). Therefore examples such as “I see it”, “I saw it”, “I seen it”, “I seed it” would refer to the same thing but they can be heard or seen in different locations such as Australia, Pennsylvania, New England or Virginia or coming from different social class representatives. However, all these forms would be replaced by “I saw” which is recognisable as belonging to Standard English due to the prescriptive laws imposed by the official language institutions. While register is a reflection of the social situations and implies the most variation in grammar and vocabulary, dialect concentrates on the speaker himself/herself, implies geographical, social or temporal variation and these are mostly reflected in phonological, lexical and grammatical changes. Therefore, “while dialects are essentially saying the same thing in different ways, registers are saying different things.” (Ulrych,1992:102)  

Further on, distinction applies to Geographical, Temporal, Social, Standard dialects and Idiolect. Each of these presupposes different linguistic characteristics according to geographical, political and cultural variation, generation, community and social stratification, education and mass media. Idiolect differences point to individual characteristics of the language used by one individual and it includes favorite expressions, different pronunciation, and tendency to use specific syntactic structures. (Hatim, B, Mason, L., 1990:43-44)

            Use - related variation refers to the fact that only certain linguistic expression is appropriate to a certain use. Each type of text has certain linguistic characteristic which match certain situational conventions. If the relation between these two dimensions – linguistic and situational – is altered, problems may appear. 

            Moreover linguists such as Holliday et all (1964) argue that the identity of a register lies in the use of collocations rather than in the use of individual items/words. However, grammatical and lexical features are not to be given less importance in this aspect. Compare the following two meaning equivalent utterances:

(1)    I am sending you……                                        (2) Please, find enclosed……

It is obvious that they can be used interchangeably, but only in formal registers. Let’s imagine how inappropriate they would look in an informal note. However, mention should be made of a further less formal semantic equivalent such as (3) used in such an informal note:

            (3)Take a look at what I sent you here...

The teaching issue here is related to the way we explain the difference between the first two examples (1) and (2). We agree that they are in a relationship of synonymy but is that really necessary? We could justify the existence of such possible rephrasing structures by the different degree of impersonality implied by each of them, accounting for the much more formal aspect attached to example (2). Attitudinal variety of English is explained in the scholarly papers as depending on the attitude of the speaker to the hearer or to the topic or to the purpose of the discourse. In other words it ranges from very official to very informal with different intermediary degrees and as seen in the above examples, imply lexical and grammatical changes. Quirk et all (1985:27) distinguishes between very formal, formal, neutral, informal and very informal varieties of English, each displaying particular lexical and grammatical characteristics. To illustrate the five formality degrees, we could consider the following examples:

(4) Students should go down the ground floor by way of the staircase.

(5) Students should go down to the ground floor.

(6) Would you mind going downstairs?

(7) Time you went downstairs.

(8) Down you go, chaps!

A more artistic description of the degrees of formality illustrated above would be frozen for example (4), formal for example (5), consultative in (6), casual for (7) and intimate for (8). In this way we managed to mention the proper situations in which they would be suitable, too.

Another language variety worth mentioning is that within the field of discourse. Language is used according to the situation, or the activity it is engaged in, to the profession, interest and training of the speaker. Consequently, the choice of lexical items and grammatical correlates depend on the field of discourse. In addition to the above examples, mention should be made of the inappropriacy of a choice like (9) or (10) instead of the imperative structure in (11), usually found in cooking books, for example.

(9)   You should stir the mixture into a bowl.

(10) You might care to stir the mixture into a bowl

(11) Stir the mixture into a bowl!

Inappropriate would be the active structure or the verbal patterns used in a technical or scientific description such as (12) instead of the passive and nominalised clauses specific to such a discourse in (13) below:

(12)You can adjust the temperature if you set up the initial codes.

(13)Adjustment of temperature can be achieved by setting up the initial codes.

Nevertheless, such variables do not depend on the national standard or dialect; here is matter of educated English, as Quirk et all (1985:24) puts it. 

Although the usefulness of two synonymous structures is questioned by some scholars, there are arguments to support that their existence is always justified by some differences whatsoever at the inner structure (Bolinger, 1977:5). Langacker (1987:39) argues that any two grammatical synonyms are different in as far the perspective or the foci of the utterance are concerned. Even within regional variation that is prone to lead to different structures with similar meanings, the difference in between is due to certain subtle meanings perceived differently by people in accordance with different communication purposes.

Some of the syntactic variations account for regional variation as imposed by American English and British English as these are seen as standard variations in reference grammars such as Quirk et all (1985), where, however, only little variation in grammatical forms is mentioned. Verb complementation, mandative subjunctive, use of bare infinitives, plural agreement with collective nouns, the use of definite article seem to be only few of them which have been thoroughly studied in the specialized scholarly papers. (Johansson, [1980], Overgaard [1995], Hundt, [1998], Levin [2001], Tottie, [2002]). The already mentioned resource claims that language change determines language variations and all the possible existing alternatives coexisted at the beginning as a stylistic expression of a more neutral form.  Thus, mention is made of the grammaticalisation process undergone by those linguistic items that change from lexical to grammatical or from less to more grammatical. (Estling Vannestål 2004:34)

Even though stable due to its prescriptive rules, grammar may experience some changes at first in as far as the degree of formality and the stylistic implication of an utterance are concerned. At a deeper level, any stylistic change will trigger a grammar change in the long run. Thus any term that may be less used in a certain register or another will eventually either disappear or co-exist as an old fashioned alternative. So is the case of some relative pronouns such as who and whom or it’s I and it’s me, or the use of will instead of shall for the first person. However what was known to be less likely prone to change, grammar, proved to be as changeable as other linguistic domains such as phonology or lexis but at a slower pace which makes it hardly recognizable (Leech&Hundt, 2009:7-8). An illustrative example to this extent is the status of following, which looks like a participle in (14), but which can be part of non finite adverbial clauses and it can be replaced by after such as in (15) below:

(14) Following the target, they reached a strange location.  

(15) Following the signing of the contract, they toasted for the future collaboration.

Such changes are instances of the grammaticalisation process. Not to mention the coexistence of both inflectional and analytical comparison of adjectives such as more smart and smarter or commoner vs. more common, the more frequent use of who instead of whom, or the almost normal usage of less with countable nouns (e.g. less people) and following the same line, the transformation of notion verbs such as want to, be going to, have got to into new future auxiliaries -  wanna, gonna, gotta  or the “extention of the progressive to new constructions (especially modal, present perfect and past perfect passive progressives of the type: the road would not be being built / has not been being built / had not been being built)”(Leech and Hundt, 2009:18).

As for syntactic changes, they rely greatly on stylistic change as the overall perspective of the syntactic changes accounts for statistic movements of structures from more or less common in either general or particular register.(Leech&Hundt, 2009:8) Some of these changes were attributed to the main differences between AmE and BrE, which although, acknowledged to be sharing an identical basic grammatical system, still display some variation in as far as the choices of regional contrasts are concerned. (Leech&Hundt, 2009:11).

The conclusion drawn by the above mentioned linguists is that grammatical change is not as obvious as social and lexical change due to their indirect character.

The tendency of the written register of becoming more similar to spoken register has been acknowledged in the specialized literature. The differences between the written and spoken registers reside in the careful consideration of writers in as far as the final written product is concerned due to its being subject to possible criticism versus the evanescent nature of spoken discourse. Secondly the orthography is limited as compared with the wide variety of devices that can transmit language by speech. For example the utterance (16) would have as a written paraphrase the sentence in (17) below:

(16) Jane didn’t say it.

(17) In fact it was not Jane who said it.

On the other hand, written discourse displays paragraphs, italics, quotation marks, etc which have no correspondent in spoken discourse. Irrespective of regional or educational varieties, these language varieties still imply some linguistic education on the part of the language producers.

            Non-finite clauses have been extensively approached by Leech and Hundt (2009:181) with a view to show that they have undergone changes along the time. He argues that unlike any other language, present-day English displays a complex system of non-finite clauses including infinitival, gerundial and participial clauses. Therefore, a finite sentence such as (18) can be rephrased by the infinitival non-finite structure in (19)

(18) They told us what we should wear at the party

(19) They told us what to wear at the party.

And this latter (19) is said to be normal for present day English. However, the conclusion drawn from recent research reveals the preference towards infinitival clauses at the expense of the finite clauses, whereas gerundial clauses are more frequently used as replacements for infinitival or finite clauses. (Leech and Hundt, 2009:204).

Counting among the non-finite clauses, verbless clauses can either be related to finite clauses with be or they can form formulaic expressions. Compare the following:

A more specific case is the double complementation of the verb help which has been explained as being restricted to negation patterns which seemed to favor the long infinitive. However, usage proves that the bare infinitive is an informal mark whereas the long infinitive is preferred in formal contexts. Moreover, besides these stylistic restrictions, they seem to make a semantic difference as put by Leech and Hundt (2009:187), in that indirect causation seems to be expressed by means of the long infinitive (23), whereas the bare infinitive (24) implies direct involvement in the action.

To this difference, specialists add the AmE preference for bare infinitives while the BrE displays a frequent use of long infinitives.

All language variations mentioned so far are independent of each other, but at the same time there is a relationship between them based on the continuum nature of the factors influencing those varieties (register, education, attitude, etc.). Language learning cannot be restricted to one language variety only due to permanent exposure to a continuously changing language. This fact may result in the incapacity of choosing one linguistic form at all times, which lead to the existence of a specific language variety that does not fall in any of the mentioned categories. Such examples as the following are labeled as free variation:

(25) I wonder whether you can come.

(26) I wonder if you can come.

(27) I consider him my best friend.

(28) I consider him as my best friend.

1. 3.      Conclusions

In conclusion, the more a language is spoken, the greater varieties of it appear. Language variation explains the equivalence of meaning between utterances belonging to different registers or language varieties. American and British English, the two standard varieties of English influence each other to the extent where the frequency of different forms of expression lead to being adopted by the other language thus resulting in the coexistence of different structures with similar meaning. The grammaticalisation process as part of the language evolution also gave birth to grammatical synonyms whose differences contribute to the expressivity of the language.

 Bibliography

Biodata

Anca Florina Lipan has been teaching English for 15 years and she has got rich experience in teaching all levels. She had been interested in professional development and therefore she took different courses organized by the Romanian Ministry of Education, British Council as well as other similar organizations. She also participated in numerous conferences such as The National Conference of English Teachers (2015, 2016, 2017); The International Conference “Professional Communication and Translation Studies”, Timisoara (2017), The Annual International Conference of the English Department of the University of Bucharest (2017).

She has also participated in an International Erasmus Project, P.R.I.M.E. in the school year 2014-2015, while running the Foreign Languages Department (English, French, German and Russian) in the County Inspectorate of Braila.