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103
CHAPTER 14
History of English: Modern and Future English
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
It would have been superfluous to catalogue all the features of Modern
English in this chapter: the rest of the book is about the forms and
functions of Modern English, with frequent commentary on its history and
usage interspersed. Here we try to fill in some gaps: first, by discussing
the social motivations of development and change in American English
since 1776; and second, by identifying those features (phonological,
morphological, syntactic, and discourse) peculiar to the period. It is meant
as an opportunity to synthesize the whole course at its end.
The chapter’s second emphasis, the future of English, is of course
primarily a matter of speculation. We imagine that you will want to spend
some time considering World Englishes, which integrates well with
Chapters 2, 10, 11, and 12. You and your students will undoubtedly enjoy
a discussion of the Internet’s ongoing influence on the language, though
we hope that you will also consider the political future of English in the
United States—both are controversial issues, and both are areas in which
informed speakers of English and American citizens can bring their
knowledge to use in the world beyond classrooms and textbooks.
By the time you use this book with students, there will already have been
future English for which we can’t account! Technically, what you know
about, even if we couldn’t anticipate it, isn’t the future. But the point is
this: development and change are ongoing, debates over usage will not be
resolved, and having studied English with this book as a companion,
students should be able to observe, study, evaluate, and, yes, participate in
that change from a position of understanding and authority.
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LEARNING OBJECTIVES
By the end of this chapter, students should be able to:
• Identify primary social and political influences on change in Modern
English.
• Identify significant developments in Modern English phonology,
morphology, syntax, and vocabulary.
• Participate in informed debate about the status of English as an official
or national language in the United States.
• Describe the status of English as a global language.
• Speculate intelligently about the role of the Internet and other forms of
automated communication in the future of English at all linguistic
levels, from phonology to discourse, and in different registers.
NEW VOCABULARY TERMS
emoticon
grammaticalization
interposing
lingua franca
retronymy
WHERE STUDENTS ARE
• Students who have been working hard to master the technical material
throughout the term will find this a relatively easy chapter to handle.
There’s relatively little new technical material here—extensions of
earlier material and argument make up much of the chapter. What is
new is well within student experience and you will find they will have
plenty to say about that, given the opportunity.
• Few students are well informed about current political affairs, and
many may not know that some states have “English Only” or “Official
English” laws. Conversely, some students may believe that English is
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an officially sanctioned national language. Once they realize what the
facts and issues are, however, they are quick to engage with them.
IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES
This chapter’s material is very conducive to debate, whether structured
formally or as a discussion, especially with regard to the status of English
in the United States (“Should English be the official language of the
United States?”), authority over English as a global language, the power of
the Internet to drive language change in particular directions, and whether
its influence is “good” or “bad.” The book’s previous chapters provide
students with enough historical context to ensure thoughtful approaches to
all of these subjects.
Media Influence
Ask students to collect examples of innovative word forms or grammatical
structures in advertising and then discuss these in class. Students can also
bring in newspaper headlines that exemplify compression. (See Exercise
14.1.)
Internet Influence
Students are an excellent source of information about the ways in which
Internet/IM language is infiltrating their speech and writing in other
contexts. Ask them to collect examples of new acronyms or alphabetisms
that they hear spoken or that they have seen in non-Web/IM-related
written contexts.
INTEGRATING THE HOMEWORK
Homework Progression
Any or all of the exercises can be assigned in any sequence. Instructors
and students alike usually rush through the final chapter on any syllabus:
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the important thing is that students leave the course with a question that
only future experience can answer.
In-Class Activities Based on Homework
Any of the exercises, if assigned as homework first, can frame subsequent
class discussion. Even 14.2 can be useful in this regard: once students
have completed it, the class can discuss the future of punctuation, given
new media with which they may be more familiar than you.
Exercise 14.3, #1 usefully draws on material from Chapter 8 and asks
students to consider how the medium of Instant Messenger alters
conversational structure. Exercise 14.3, #2 helps students see that IM is far
from chaos. It can work well to ask students to bring their ten IM etiquette
rules to class and then compile a class list of etiquette rules together;
students are surprised by how many rules they share, as well as how many
they know but forgot to write down themselves.
Exercise 14.3, #4 can be an effective way for students to learn more about
a minority language that interests them. Exercise 14.4 is designed to
prompt vigorous classroom debate.
EXTRA RESOURCES
As we wrote in the chapter overview, the extra resources for the future are
all around you, and your students often bring knowledge of these
resources to class. As for the development of Modern English, the
suggested reading at the end of each chapter, and the bibliography
included at the end of the book, indicate many resources instructors will
find useful in preparing and supplementing material in How English
Works. We have provided a few more resources below.
Students can hear different varieties of World English at Evaluating
English Accents Worldwide: http://www.otago.ac.nz/anthropology/
Linguistic/Accents.html.
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Students can hear different accents of English from speakers with different
language backgrounds at The Speech Accent Archive: http://classweb.
gmu.edu/accent/.
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ANSWER KEY
Chapter 1: A Language Like English
EXERCISE 1.4
1. The pronunciation of nuclear as “noo-kyuh-luhr” is arguably a case of
2. Analogy is likely the cause of the “new” pronunciation “heighth,”
although this pronunciation has a long history in English. The word we
3. In English spelling, <ut> is almost always pronounced to rhyme with
4. The word mouse used to refer to the computer clicker is an example of
mice; it scurries about the mousepad; and it has a tail (the cord).
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5. Taboo meanings of a word can make other meanings of the word
6. The phrase a nædre was eventually reanalyzed as an adder. If you say
7. It appears that the word another, originating from an + other, has been
8. Given its original meaning of a point that was open to debate or
9. Because moot is not a familiar word for many speakers of English,
10. The process of creating a new verb such as burgle from an existing
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11. Due to France’s unwillingness to support the United States’ war in
12. Syllabi represents the Latin plural form of syllabus, which is a Latin
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Chapter 3: English Phonology
EXERCISE 3.1: TRANSCRIPTION OF ENGLISH WORDS
1. Rewrite the following sentences into standard spelling.
a. Once upon a time there was a cat in a hat who escaped from the world
2. Identify each of the following works of fiction.
a. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
b. A Tale of Two Cities
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3. Provide phonemic transcriptions for the following words.
a. One-syllable words
/tɪk/ /kɑɪt/ /pæt/
/ki/ /mæn/ /tin/
b. Two-syllable words
/tælɛnt/ /dʒɛloʊ/ or /dʒɛlo/
/wɪndoʊ/ or /wɪndo/ /swɛtər/ or /swɛtr ֽ ◌ /
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/tuzdeɪ/ or /tjuzdeɪ/ /hʌsəl/ or /hʌsl ֽ ◌ /
/propoz/ or /prəpoʊz/ /sæmwɪtʃ/ or /sændwɪtʃ/
c. Longer multisyllabic words
/jɛstərdeɪ/ or /jɛstr ֽ ◌ deɪ/ /sɛrəmoʊni/ or /sɛrəmoni/
/kælɪbreɪt/ or /kæləbreɪt/ /rɛvoluʃən/ or /rɛvoluʃn ֽ ◌ /
EXERCISE 3.2: NATURAL CLASSES
a. high vowels
EXERCISE 3.3: PHONEMES AND ALLOPHONES
1. The allophone [ŋ] appears before the velar consonants /k, g/, and the
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Copyright © 2012, 2009, 2006, Pearson Education, Inc.
assimilation: the nasal becomes velar before another velar consonant.
The rule can be written as follows:
/n/ ! [ŋ] / __ [+velar].
In the history of English, when the final /g/ was eventually lost, many
words retained the velar nasal.
2. For all three fricatives, the voiced allophone [v, z, ð] appears between
voiced sounds, and the voiceless allophone [f, s, θ] appears elsewhere.
3. Minimal pairs that demonstrate particular distinctive features:
EXERCISE 3.4: PHONOLOGICAL RULES
1. This is a case of insertion. The /p/, which is bilabial and voiceless,
2. The deletion is probably the result of having two /r/s in such close
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3. Here are the words transcribed:
/tɪkt/
Assume that the basic past tense ending is /d/. Then the three rules,
ordered most efficiently, are as follows:
• If the verb ends in an alveolar stop (/t, d/), insert a vowel to create
4. Here are the words transcribed:
/triz/
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Assume the basic plural ending is /z/. Then the three rules, ordered
most efficiently, are as follows:
• If the noun ends with a sibilant, insert a vowel to create the ending
EXERCISE 3.5: PHONOTACTIC CONSTRAINTS
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Copyright © 2012, 2009, 2006, Pearson Education, Inc.
Chapter 4: English Morphology
EXERCISE 4.1: INFLECTIONAL VS. DERIVATIONAL ENDINGS
You may have noticed I that some English speakers I intone
their declarative sentences I as though they were questions, so that “I
EXERCISE 4.2: MORPHOLOGY TREES
1. For reformer, the tree needs to reflect that reform is the root verb, with
2. Develop morphology trees for the following words.
ADV
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ADJ N
V ADJ
ADJ N
ADV N
1 The word retrovirus can also be interpreted as one word, an alteration of retravirus.
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N
N
3. Create two morphology trees to demonstrate the ambiguity of
undoable.
EXERCISE 4.4: BORROWINGS
Here are the borrowed forms (in the order they appear in the paragraph)
that need to be replaced:
incorporate
return
action
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Copyright © 2012, 2009, 2006, Pearson Education, Inc.
argue
term
imply
question
exist
course
argument
apply
simply
polite
imagine
community
EXERCISE 4.5: WORDS OF THE YEAR
Word
Word-Formation Process
Bailout
compounding
recombobulation area
back-formation, affixation, compounding
moofing
acronymy, affixation
subprime
affixation
green-
functional shifting
googlegänger
combining form (-gänger)
to pluto/be plutoed
functional shifting
climate canary
compounding
waterboarding
compounding (and affixation)
truthiness
affixation
podcast
blending
whale-tail
compounding
crotchfruit
compounding
Sudoku
borrowing
red/blue/purple states
compounding
phish
respelling
badly sourced
compounding and affixation
stalkette
affixation
metrosexual
blending
flexitarian
blending
freegan
blending
SARS
acronymy
WMD
alphabetism
google
coining
dataveillance
blending
Iraqnophobia
blending
dialarhoea
blending
Saddameter
blending or affixation
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Chapter 5: English Syntax: The Grammar of Words
EXERCISE 5.1 : NOUNS
1. Many of these nouns can be both countable and uncountable, especially
in particular contexts.
water Usually uncountable, but countable in reference to
bottles of water (e.g., “I’ll pick up a couple of waters”).
