Language Focus: Present-Day English

The period of Present-Day English starts from the beginning of the 19-th century. It was the time of revolutionary changes in the life of Great Britain and the whole world. The British Empire continued to expand till the second half of the 19-th century; new technologies rapidly developed and caused continuous waves of massive urban expansion.

The general spread of literacy leveled the dialects and slowed down linguistic change. At this period there have been few changes in phonology, morphology and syntax. Lots of changes have taken place in the lexical stock of English.

In morphology the original system of cases has been preserved only in the forms of the pronouns him, her, whom, them. The pronoun whom is more and more often used with prepositions. The other morphological development is greater use of periphrastic comparatives and superlatives rather than inflectional ones. Inflectional forms are often replaced by more + adjective and most + adjective. Sometimes more and most are used with comparative and superlative forms of adjectives.

The expanding use of the progressive passive is observed in syntax. The use of periphrastic do became common. Verb + particle constructions and phrasal verbs significantly increased in usage. Nominative constructions have become more and more frequently used in newspapers.

In lexicon borrowings have become less important source of lexical enrichment as before. Loan words from different languages of the peoples who settled the British Empire came into the English language. At the same time English developed a tendency to create neologisms in different ways: by combining the words or word stems that exist in the language; by conversion of nouns into verbs; by affixation; by using acronyms.