American English [antikvár]

PREFACE Anyone who has the temerity to come forward with a treatment of American English at this particular time necessarily incurs both a responsibility and a debt. The responsibility is that of saying something that has not been said before. The debt, obviously, is to all of the painstaking and careful scholarship of those who have previously worked in the field. Whatever claim to originality the present work may have should be sufiiciently clear in the pages which follow so as not to require a restatement here. The only point which might be profitably called to the attention of the reader is that the principal aim has been to present a synthesis of the growth and development of the English language in America. If American linguistic scholarship has had one fault in the past, it has been primarily that of collecting isolated facts by the scores and hundreds, and often neglecting to put them together in a consistent and ordered whole. In the main the present study has been content to employ the excellent collections of factual data turned up by the many excellent scholars who have concerned themselves with this subject. It has, however, attempted to see and to present these in the light of a consistent interpretation centering about the fundamental relationship between language and culture. There is an equal obligation to set forth here the limitations of this study. Though the work is broad in scope, it makes no claim to completeness. To deal in full detail with all the minutiae vu