Історичні аспекти розвитку архаїзмів у англійскій мові

Abstract

Language, like everything around us, is constantly evolving and changing. Its development is influenced not only by historical events, but also by the development of the economy, medicine and new technologies. Some words lose their relevance and go into the past, new ones appear instead. Some words and expressions remain in the language and gradually acquire additional meanings, while others are used for a very short time and quickly disappear from their use. There are words that denote objects that are no longer relevant in our life, but without them we will not be able to communicate normally and understand each other. Thus, the language of each historical era is unique and has its own characteristics. Today, the English language is of significant importance in the international arena, therefore, an in-depth study of specific points at different levels: grammatical, semantic, phonetic, is being actively carried out. Language modification occurs regularly and, accordingly, arouses an increased interest of linguists in the study of vocabulary, which is becoming obsolete and disappearing from the sphere of use. This article discusses archaisms which are considered to be like obsolete words, word-combinations of speech or lexical-semantic variants of words, units of obsolete vocabulary replaced by a synonym from among units of neutral vocabulary. There are a number of classifications of archaisms based on lexical, semantic, grammatical or other features. According to the semantic classification, archaisms are divided into lexical, words that are completely outdated and semantic, words that have outdated meaning. Grammatical archaisms are words that have changed their grammatical form in modern language. Based on the classification data, the article presents an analysis of archaisms in the work of W. Shakespeare "Hamlet". The role of archaisms is emphasized and it is noted that many linguists agree that these lexical units are used to recreate the historical flavor of the era; to give speech a touch of solemnity, for example, in poetry, in an oratory speech; to create a comic effect, irony, satire, parody; for the speech characteristics of the character.