Pre-Proto-Germanic (Pre-PGmc)

This stage began with the separation of a distinct speech, perhaps while still forming part of the Proto-Indo-European dialect continuum. It contained many innovations that were shared with other Indo-European branches to various degrees, probably through areal contacts, and mutual intelligibility with other dialects would have remained for some time. It was nevertheless on its own path, whether dialect or language.

Methods of linguistic analysis.

· Any linguistic generalization is to be followed by the very fine process – the linguist is required to seek verification of the generalizations that are the result of his inquires . For these aims different methods & procedures are used . They are :

contrastive analyses , statistical methods of analyses , immediate constituents analyses , distributional analyses , transformational analyses , componental analyses & method of semantic differentiation .

Contrastive analysis .

Contrastive linguists attempt to find out similarities & differences in both related & non-related languages . Contrastive analysis grew as the result of the practical demands of a language-teaching methodology , where it was empirically shown that the errors which are made by foreign language students can be often traced back to the differences in structure between the target language & the language of the learner . This naturally implies the necessity of a detailed comparison of the structure of a native & a target language . This procedure has been named contrastive analysis . People proceed from the assumption that the categories , elements on the semantic as well as on the syntactic & other levels are valid for both languages .

Statistical analysis .

Statistical linguistics is nowadays generally recognized as the one of the major branches of linguistics . Statistical inquiries have considerable importance because of their relevance to certain problems of communication engineering & information theory . Statistical approach proved essential in the selection of vocabulary items of a foreign language for teaching purposes . Very few people know more than 10% of the words in their mother tongue . It follows that if we do not wish to waste time on committing to memorize vocabulary items which are never likely to be useful to the learner we have to select only lexical units that are commonly used by a native speaker .

Out of approximately 500 000 words listed in Oxford English dictionary the active vocabulary of an educated Englishman comprises no more than 30 000 words & of these 4 000 - 5 000 are presumed to be amplisufficient for the daily needs of an average member of the English speech community. Thus , it is evident that the problem of selection of teaching vocabulary is of vital importance . Statistical techniques have been successfully applied in the analysis of various linguistic phenomena

Immediate constituents analysis .

The theory of Immediate Constituents was originally elaborated as an attempt to determine the ways in which lexical units are relevantly related to one another . It was discovered that combinations of units are usually structured into hierarchial sets of binary constructions .

e. g. In the word-group “ a black dress in severe style “ we do not relate the indefinite article “a” to adjective “black” , “black” to “dress” , “dress” to “in” , “in” to “severe” , “severe” to “style” .We set up a structure which may be represented as “a black dress” & “in severe style”.

Distributional analysis .

Distributional analysis in its various forms is commonly used nowadays. By the term “distribution” we understand the occurrence of a lexical unit relative to another lexical units of the same levels : words to words , morpheme to morphemes . In other words , by this term we understand the position which lexical unit occupies or may occupy in the text or in the flow of speech . It is observed that a certain component of the word-meaning is described when the word is identified distributionally .

e. g. In the sentence

The boy__________ home .

the missing word is easily identified as a verb . It may be “came , ran , went , goes” , but not as an adverb or a noun , or an adjective .