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50GRAMMATICAL AND LEXICAL-SEMANTIC FEATURES OF THE AMERICAN ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Umida Abdumutal qizi Abdullayeva
MA Department, UzSWLU umidaeshonova333@gmail.com
Sc. advisor: A. M. Bazarbayeva
ABSTRACT
English is nowadays the universally recognized language of international communication. It is used on all national airlines, it is spoken and written by hundreds of millions of people of different nationalities. It is the language of modern business, science, office management, information technology and, of course, communication. The American version of English turned out to be a more successful rival to the British language, and there were several reasons for this. One of them is that American English was linguistically especially pure and correct, since the settlers, people from different corners of Britain, finding themselves together in new and risky conditions, were forced to discard dialect differences and keep in speech only what was common to them all. Current paper studies and analyzes the features of American English in terms of its grammatical, lexical and semantic peculiarities.
Key words: grammar, morphology, syntax, lexical, semantic, comparison, British English, similarities, differences.
Introduction
Currently more than a billion people on earth speak and strive to speak English, English is the most studied language in the world, whose influence is so huge that it can affect not only the dictionary, but also the linguistic structure of other languages. The widespread use of English in the modern world provokes anglocentrism.
One of the possible reasons for the spread of the English language is the richness of the dictionary (about 600,000 words, according to the Oxford Dictionary, not counting special technical vocabulary) and a large percentage of international concepts (up to 200,000 words). Here we should add a wealth of synonymic series, which allows native English speakers to distinguish shades of meanings.
It is interesting that, being a modernized version of the English language, the language of Americans at the same time retains the obvious features of the English "Elizabethan" language of the 17th and even 16th centuries, which for modern Britons are quite archaic, disappeared in the 18th century. The discrepancy between the American and English versions was much more significant at the beginning of this century (in the early 20s, Sinclair Lewis' novel "Babbit" was published in England with
a dictionary), but later, thanks to the media, primarily television, this discrepancy was somewhat smoothed out.
In this work, grammatical features of the American version of English are studied basing on comparison with the British version of the English language.
Morphological features
The units of comparison at the morphological level are morphemes and allomorphs. The differences that are noted between BE and AE at the morphological level cover such pairs as got - gotten, struck - stricken, pleaded - pled, dived - dove. In fact, if we assume that a morpheme is a class of semantically similar allomorphs that are in relation to an additional distribution, then it should be noted that in both variants the verb paradigm is characterized by the same inflectional morphemes.
Moreover, there is no reason to talk about differences in the inventory of allomorphs. If we turn to the examples above, it is not difficult to make sure that allomorphs of morphemes are opposed to each other here, which are present in both variants and are not a distinctive element of AE or BE. By itself, the set of these allomorphs, as well as all others that characterize the verbal and nominal paradigms, does not reveal any variations when comparing AE and BE. It is easy to see this from at least the following examples of the use of these allomorphs in both variants: swollen, fed, wrapped, led, mended.
It follows from this that we can state the absence of any inventory differences between AE and BE at the morphological level. The differences between AE and BE in the field of morphology are of a sub systemic nature, and all units of the morphological system are part of a common core.
The situation is somewhat different with the morphologically determined distribution of allomorphs. A review of the materials indicates that here, in most cases, the distribution of allomorphs in AE and BE coincides. However, in some cases there are fluctuations in the distribution of allomorphs of inflectional morphemes. These fluctuations are caused by the morphological environment, i.e. the root morpheme with which this inflectional morpheme is combined. In order to find out the nature of these discrepancies, let's take a closer look at the examples above. It is generally assumed that the form got in BE corresponds to gotten in AE. See the following examples:
For if we had missed our trains and gotten home later (Dreiser).
His stuff had already been moved into Number Two for him, and the men in Number Two had gotten together and fixed it up for him (Jones).
You never would have gotten anything like this in Paris (Hemingway).
At the same time, however, it is often overlooked that the got word form is also used in America, although much less frequently. The following example from the play by the American playwright Edward Albee is indicative in this regard:
George (very cheerful): Well, now let me see. I've got the ice.
Martha: ... gotten...
George: Got, Martha. Got is perfectly correct... It's just a little archaic like you.
In this example, it is interesting that one of the characters perceives the more rarely used in the American version of the form got as archaism (although, in fact, the more archaic form gotten). At the same time, the form have got is regularly used in AE as a combination equivalent to the verb have:
What have you got to eat? (Hemingway).
I've got plenty of material if I can just handle it (Lardner).
The gotten form, alien to the British variant, is the only locally marked member of this opposition, which can thus be characterized as a one-sided local marked opposition. On the other hand, the got form can also occur in AE. At the same time, if it is mandatory in the above value, then in other values it freely varies with gotten.
A similar juxtaposition is struck-stricken, where stricken is also a locally labeled form of participle II. In England, stricken is found only in a relatively small number of stable phrases: stricken heart (dejected heart), stricken field (battlefield), stricken in years (old age). In these stable phrases, stricken has undergone complete adjectivation. Its separation from the verbal lexeme is confirmed by the fact that none of the meanings it finds in these phrases can be traced in the lexical meaning of the verb to strike.
There is a definite difference in the use of verb tenses. So, instead of Present Perfect, an American can use Past Simple. The rejection of Perfect Tenses in the spoken language has become so commonplace that it is time to introduce it into grammar; the phrase: "Did you go see "Redheat" with Arnold?" seems to many Americans to be completely natural and true, although situationally, according to all norms, including those described in American grammar, Perfect is required: "Have you seen ...?" Or at least colloquially: "Seen "Redheat" yet?"
Usually, the main contribution to ignoring the tenses of the Perfect group is attributed to immigrants from those countries whose language lacks perfect tenses.
However, any English-speaking American will use Perfect if another choice makes the statement ambiguous or incomprehensible.
Instead of the auxiliary verb shall in America, will is used, which, in turn, is replaced by the form gonna - the colloquial version of going to.
Syntactic differences
The subject of comparison at the syntactic level are grammatical models of phrases and sentences. At this level, only distribution differences are distinguished. Consider the following examples:
I have a Rolls that was in dead storage during the war which I have ordered put back in running order (O'Naga).
Last year an American hotel manager ordered his guests evacuated after an anonymous bomb threat.
He also had ordered his luggage to be labelled for Crew (Bronte).
The first two examples are borrowed from American sources, the last one is from British. Both syntactic models (complex complement and participle II and complex complement with passive infinitive form) exist in both the British and American versions.
In this case, we are talking about the lexically conditioned distribution of this combination, i.e. the possibility of using it in contexts with the verb to order. At the same time, only one member of the opposition is locally marked - to order something done, since the construction with a passive infinitive is also used in AE, although much less often.
The lexical material also determines the variations that are observed in both variants in connection with the functional use of two models of interrogative sentences -with and without the auxiliary verb do. As you know, both models are used in both AE and BE. At the same time, the model with inverted word order and without auxiliary do covers sentences with modal verbs, verbs tobe and have. In the American version, there are no contextual restrictions that determine the compatibility of do and have:
Do you have the qualifications? And what did she have with her when she left? (Dreiser).
Does he have any children? (Quin).
Does America have a language of its own?
In BE, a different model is used much more often in similar contexts:
Have you a gun? (Green).
In BE, the auxiliary verb do is combined with have only when the context indicates that the action indicated by the verb is of a multiple or regular nature.
"Have you any sardines? " "No, madam, I am afraid, we have not." "Do you have them? " - "Yes, we do have them but at the moment we are sold out"
However, the design without do is sometimes found in the American version:
Or haven't you any children? (Lardner).
Have you enough covers on? (Steinbeck).
'Have you a Communist card?' the Senator asked P. Robeson.
Have you blue serge pants that won't shine?
If in the American version the design with do is used without restrictions, then the range of use of the design without do is relatively narrow. A construction without a do is considered "grammatically incorrect" (unmarked) in cases where a pronoun is used as a complement. In addition, there are morphological limitations that further narrow the possibility of using this construction, in particular, the interrogative construction with the verb have in the past tense turns out to be very unusual for the American version. If
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sentences like "Have you the money?" If they occur relatively regularly, then sentences like "Had you the money?" are a rarity.
Lexical-semantic differences
First of all, it is necessary to specify those cases when in British and American usage, not different words and not differences in the system of lexical meanings are opposed to each other, but those varieties that Professor A. I. Smirnitsky called structural variants of the same word. Among these variants, there are, first of all, lexical-morphological, or word-formation, i.e. differing only in word-formation affixes, but identical in their lexical meaning.
British version American version
Acclimatize Acclimate
Centre Center
Up to the time On time
Anticlockwise Counterclockwise
Analyse Analyze
A special group should include those lexical units that, are called non-equivalent vocabulary, i.e. those words and stable phrases that are used in the United States and essentially have no dictionary equivalents in the British version of the English language.
American version Meaning
Be from Missouri To be skeptical
Chew the fat To gossip
Do a land-office business To have many clients
Drop the ball To make a stupid mistake
Lately-come-lately Novice
Conclusion
The language analysis showed that the differences between the American and British versions of English are quite noticeable. However, the opinion about the significant differences between the American and British versions of English is just a myth. In fact, there are not so many of them. It is quite difficult sometimes to understand whether a particular book was written by an American or British author. "... Individual vocabulary features in the speech of residents of various English dominions are not so great that it is possible to speak at least about individual dialects characteristic of a particular area: their grammatical structure and basic vocabulary completely coincide with the same basic components of the English national language in the metropolis" [Arakin 2001].
REFERENCES
[1] Francis, W., McDavid, R. and Green, D., 1966. The structure of American English. New York: Ronald Press Co.
[2] Kerr, E. and Aderman, R., 1963. Aspects of American English. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
[3] Heughs, A., 1962. Studies in American English. Austin: University of Texas.
[4] Fries, C., 1981. American English grammar. Tokyo: Maruzen.
[5] Canfield, T., n.d. A new American English grammar. New York: Publishing House.
