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Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Word Linguinstics in Present-Day English

1. entree\nFrom the morphological point of view, mavin of the main characteristics reflecting the English styles change in contrast to its Indo-European assembly line is the loss of nerve marking. Of in the first house s regular cases, that used to pull round in Proto-Indo-European, English has keep single three cases that atomic number 18 marked on the line up level. Besides the nominated and the possessive case cases, present-day English has bear only if the accusative case, which, however, is firmly limited to being distinctively marked only in a few pronouns. Among which only the interrogative/relative pronoun who with its genitive case inning whose and its objective form whom, respectively, is non a private pronoun.\nHowever, looking at the lingual reality we can retrieve that many speakers of English endlessly use the unmarked nominative form who in place of the form whom, i.e. in objective position or as prepositional complement. Overall, whom seems to have survived only in formal texts, as most contemporary descriptive grammarians attest (e. g. cf. quirk et al. 1985: 367). This circumstances have lure to Sapirs conclusion that, in the its development from a synthetic to an analytic language, depending increasingly on word order and other constraints rather than on inflectional case marking in order to convey grammatic relations, English will in conclusion lose further of its case marking. Thus, he hinted to this loss about a century past by stating that [i]t is safe to preach that within a twosome of hundred years from to-day not even the most learn jurist will be saying Whom did you see? (1970: 156). On the contrary, it has often been declared, that whom has survived and will persist, even if merely due to the square off of prescriptive grammarians who have propagated its consumption among educated speakers (cf. Aarts 1994: 74, Walsh/Walsh 1989: 284). Nevertheless, this prescriptive make for has contributed to a rela tively doubtful situation (...

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