ABSTRACT
The elements of the hierarchy are different depending on whether we are dealing with spoken language or written language. The development of English into an analytic as opposed to synthetic language involved change at the sentence level; that is, a change in the syntactic structure of the language. The rich vocabulary of English is a result of the extent to which it has borrowed from other languages during the course of its history. In the early part of the Old English period, borrowing was uncommon though some of the vocabulary of Old English was Latin in origin, having originally been borrowed into Germanic dialects before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in England. In linguistics, being prescriptive involves telling people how they should use language – e.g. telling them that they should always use a capital letter at the start of a new sentence.
