著者

松瀬 憲司

出版者

熊本大学

雑誌

熊本大学教育学部紀要 (ISSN:21881871)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.65, pp.65-72, 2016-12-19

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In English there are pairs of semantically related words in which the one has gone through both palatalization and assibilation (Palatal Softening), while the other has not: for example, speech vs. speak, Old English giefan vs. give, etc. Among the conditions that trigger both sound changes, the existence of front vowel(s) before or/and after the /k/ or /ɡ/ sound involved and what we call i-Umlaut are very crucial. In addition, the reason why the palatalized and assibilated /ɡ/ in Old English giefan has been replaced by the original /ɡ/ in Present-Day English give cannot be accounted for by a sound change theory, but by a sociolinguistic point of view; give, a word borrowed from Old Norse, has been adopted into the standard variety of English instead of the native word giefan.And we also find tush, which has changed the original /sk/ sound of Proto-Germanic tunþskaz, as a dialectal variant in tandem with tusk, which has not and was taken into the standard English. This fact suggests that it just happened in the history of English that the former is regarded as a vernacular form and the latter a standard one; it just depends upon our selection whether they become a standard variety or not.

著者

松瀬 憲司

出版者

熊本大学

雑誌

熊本大学教育学部紀要 = Bulletin of the Faculty of Education, Kumamoto University (ISSN:21881871)

巻号頁・発行日

no.66, pp.83-90, 2017

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In Present-day Standard English (PSE) there are some lexical verbs which also have a peculiar negative construction, namely do-less negation, such as They know not what they do, in spite the fact that do negation is normally the rule for them, like They don't know what do. Diachronically speaking, these two negative constructions belong to what we call "Jespersen's cycle," the former of which is its stage III beginning in the early Modern English period and the latter, its stage I' (= IV and V in the original) which we are on now. The reality is, however, stranger: we have a verb that seems not to have completely been in the stage I' even in PSE, too. It is the verb hope, for we usually cannot use don't as the negative marker for its declarative sentences: *I don't hope it rains. This is a typical example of lexical diffusion seen in do negation as a syntactic change. Since the verb hope has a rather strong semantic content, i.e., "desire," it is semantically hard to negate in its declarative sentences, especially when they have I hope. Its negative side, then, seems to be propitiously taken by I'm afraid instead, so that I hope and I'm afraid can be complementarily distributed.