literature
Literature, deriving from Latin litteratura
(writing), is a term that has expanded in meaning. It can refer to any type
of written material:
Have you seen
that literature they sent me on gardening?
but it is most frequently applied to:
1 imaginative
works (written and spoken) that show elements of permanence 2 works noted for
their form or expression
3 works
exhibiting a particular physical form (e.g. a
sonnet)
4
works long or short, ancient or modern,
written or spoken, which evoke a profound response on the part of the listener
or reader
5
the distilled wisdom, customs, beliefs and
culture of a people
6
‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well
expressed’ (Alexander Pope)
The ‘definitions’ of literature given above are all partial, but most
critics would agree that a creator of literature uses language with power and
flexibility, producing a linguistic arrangement that perfectly unites form and
meaning.
See: literary genre, speech in literature, stylistics.
litotes
Litotes derives from Greek litos
(simple). It is a figure of speech involving
understatement:
I have some feeling for him.
(i.e. I
love him very much.)
and frequently occurs when an
affirmative is stressed by negating its opposite:
He wasn’t what
you might call poor. (i.e. He was very rich.)
Litotes often depends on
intonation for its full effect and so is frequently found in speech.
See: figurative language, meiosis, understatement.
little
The word little
can function as an adjective:
a little house
as an adverb:
He little knows the troubles that await
him.
as a noun:
She gave away
the little that she had.
and can have different
implications, depending on its context. With countable nouns it refers to size:
There was a little horse in the stable.
and with uncountable nouns to
quantity:
There was little news from Beirut.
1
As an adjective, little is usually attributive:
What a lovely little garden!
and often implies an attitude
such as affection or contempt:
It’s such a pretty little village.
You horrible little man!
In the UK, little is occasionally used to indicate
dislike (and social condescension) rather than size:
She has gone out with that
dreadful little man.
The predicative use of little is regional:
She’s only little.
2
Little is not normally gradable as
a modifier of countable nouns (small being preferred when comparatives
and superlatives are required):
the little/small horse the smaller horse the
smallest horse
Occasionally, however, children
use the forms littler and littlest and a number of television
programmes such as ‘The Littlest Hobo’ have adopted their usage.
The
comparative and superlative forms of little
as a modifier of uncountable nouns and as an adverb are less and least:
little news less news least news He
cared little about me.
He cared less about me than about the others. He
cared least about me.
3 The
formula ‘little+uncountable noun/clause’ has negative implications:
There was little reason to smile.
There is little joy in this world.
There is little we can do about it.
Similar implications apply when little is used as an adverb:
Tonight we shall talk about
a little-known hero.
4
The formula ‘article+little+singular
uncountable noun’ has positive or neutral implications:
There was a little sunshine.
And there is a similar implication when a little is used as a complement:
There is a little we can do to help.
See: adjective, adverb, complement,
countable, gradable, noun.
location
Some languages
can express the location of an action
by means of case endings. Thus in liturgical Latin:
Urbi et orbi (To the city and to the
world)
indicates
location by means of the -i endings.
English does not have case endings to
indicate location but uses such devices as prepositions:
at/in/near/under
the desk
locative
adverbs:
here/there
preposition
phrases:
on a hill
adverbial
clauses:
He hid it where he used to hide his money.
and the
choice of verb:
Bring it to me and then take it to
your father.
Come here at once and don’t go out
again.
See: bring,
case, GET, speaker orientation.
main
The adjective main is used in contrasts to identify
the most important unit in a group. A main
clause is the clause that is
most like a sentence in being able to occur in isolation, whereas a dependent or subordinate clause cannot stand alone:
Main clauses Subordinate clauses
You must come when you are free. We have succeeded in
annoying you.
Main verb is a synonym for headverb and distinguishes the
semantically full verb from
auxiliaries:
(I) may have been sleeping.
See: auxiliary,
clause, head.
MAKE
MAKE is a prime verb with two main functions:
1 as a semantic equivalent of
‘create’, ‘construct’:
God made the world.
She made all her own furniture.
2 as a causative:
You made me love you (you caused me to love you).
They always make us laugh (cause us to laugh).
Ambiguity can occur when both the
‘construct’ and the ‘causative’ meanings are possible:
She made that reel.
(a) She
constructed that spool/bobbin
(b) She
caused that to spin.
MAKE can be used in the following
patterns: 1 MAKE+object+base form of verb:
We made her
go.
2 MAKE+to+verb+object/preposition
phrase:
I was made to
take another test.
We were made
to wait for hours.
3
MAKE+object+object complement:
He made the garden
beautiful.
They made him
president for another term.
4
as an analytic
equivalent of synthetic sentences:
He made the
point clear(er).—He clarified the point.
He made a
complaint.—He complained.
MAKE also occurs in innumerable idioms including:
make a mountain out of a molehill (exaggerate)
make believe (pretend)
make (both) ends meet (manage on little)
make fun of (mock) make faces (grimace) make good (succeed)
make love (have sexual intercourse)
make out (pretend)
make time (progress) make waves (create a stir) make with the (produce)
Non-native
speakers of English occasionally have difficulty in distinguishing between MAKE
and DO, largely because many languages either only have one verb to fulfil the
functions of both DO and MAKE:
English French
I did my homework. J’ai fait mes
devoirs. I made a cake. J’ai fait un gâteau.
or
because the equivalent verbs are differently distributed:
English Afrikaans
What are you doing? Wat maak jy?
It doesn’t matter. Dit maak
nie saak nie.
The usual,
although by no means absolute, rule for distinguishing DO and MAKE is to use DO
for actions and work:
I’ll do the cleaning if you’ll do the cooking.
and to use
MAKE for the creation of some specific result, whether abstract or concrete:
We’ll make new plans.
I’ll make an apple pie.
See: idioms,
prime verbs.
malapropism
The term which
denotes the incorrect use of a word, usually a learned word, derives from the
name of a character Mrs Malaprop, in
R.B.Sheridan’s play The Rivals (1775).
Mrs Malaprop’s name is an anglicisation of mal
à propos (in an inappropriate manner). She confuses such words as:
allegory and alligator allusion and illusion
and yet is
appalled when her command of English is criticised:
An aspersion upon my parts of speech! Was ever such a brute! Sure, if I
reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue and a
nice derangement of epitaphs.
Act 3 Scene
3
In spite of
giving her name to the phenomenon of incorrectly-used words, Mrs Malaprop was
not the first literary character to use malapropisms.
Shakespeare’s common characters often delight in polysyllabic words which sound impressive but are inappropriate.
The gravediggers in Act 5 Scene 1 of Hamlet,
for example, use:
crowner’s quest for coroner’s
inquest
so offended for se
defendendo (justifiable homicide)
argal for ergo
modesty for moderation imperious for imperial
Malapropisms
occur frequently in the spoken medium:
He was shot ajaxing (highjacking) the lorry.
She was
beginning to feel better after her accident but now
compensations (complications) have set in.
and in written
work where the writer has not learned to distinguish between ‘eloquence’ and
supposed ‘elegance’.
See: elegant variation, folk etymology.
Malawian English
Malawi was formerly Nyasaland. It became
a British protectorate in 1891, joined Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now
Zambia and Zimbabwe) in a federation from 1953 to 1963, gained its independence
in 1964 and became a republic in 1966.
English is the official language of the 6.6 million inhabitants of
Malawi although it is the mother tongue of only a very small percentage. It
shares many characteristics with the English heard in East and South Africa and
is gradually establishing its own literature in English.
See: East African
English, South African English, Southern African English.
Malaysian English
The Federation
of Malaysia came into being in 1963.
It was composed of West Malaysia (the former Federation of Malaya), East
Malaysia (formerly the British colonies of Sabah and Sarawak) and Singapore.
Singapore seceded in 1965 to become an independent republic. Malaysia’s
estimated population of almost 15 million is multicultural and multi-ethnic,
with Malays making up approximately 44% of the population, Chinese 40%, and
with considerable numbers of Tamils and other Indians.
English was the main medium of instruction until 1970 when Bahasa
Malaysia (a modified version of Malay) was introduced. Since then, English has
gradually changed from being a second language for most young Malaysians to
being a foreign language. The recent deterioration in the quality of English in
Malaysia has been observed by educationists and employers and, because of the
value of English in international trade, steps are being taken to reverse the
slide in standards.
English is still regularly used in commerce, the law and the media in
Malaysia and is similar in form and function to the English used in Singapore.
See: Chinese
English, English in the Indian Sub-Continent, Singapore English.
maxim
A maxim is a pithy statement intended to
improve moral conduct:
People who
live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
They are still popular in speech
but are rarely found in modern literature, although their popularity in the
past is suggested by their frequent appearance in Shakespeare’s plays:
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice… Neither a borrower nor a
lender be… Hamlet Act 1 Scene 3
The term maxim
is often used more loosely to describe also aphorisms and proverbs.
See: aphorism,
proverb.
maybe, perhaps
These two words are virtually
synonymous, but maybe tends to be
more widely used in informal, colloquial speech:
Maybe he’s sleeping.
whereas perhaps tends to occur in more formal contexts:
Perhaps he’s asleep.
This is perhaps his finest
work.
May and be are written as
two words when they occur in the relatively formal pattern:
‘It+may+be+(complement)+that’:
It may be true that he is ill.
and
when the modal may occurs with
auxiliary BE:
He may be arriving tomorrow.
See: modality.
meals
The terms for meals often provide information on one’s
social and regional origins. In middle- and upper-class society in Britain the
terms used are:
breakfast (first meal of the day)
lunch (usually light meal in
the middle of the day)
(tea) (optional light snack around 4 pm)
dinner (larger meal in the
evening) whereas in working-class communities the meals are:
breakfast
dinner (largest meal of the day)
tea (lighter meal eaten around 6)
(supper) (optional snack meal around 9–10 pm)
In other parts
of the world, different customs prevail. In Guyana, for example, tea is often the first meal of the day;
in Southern Africa it is often the equivalent of morning coffee; and in West Africa tea may refer to any snack involving a hot drink (tea, coffee,
cocoa, hot chocolate).
Nowadays, most people eat the sort of meals they prefer at the times
that are most convenient to them, but some ambiguities can occur since times
are often indicated by reference to meals:
I’ll be back before lunch.
I saw her
around tea time. They returned just after dinner.
See: food and drink.
measurements
Although most
English-speaking countries now use metric units of measurement, old imperial measurements have been retained,
especially in popular speech, for distances:
It’s about six
miles from here.
for length:
twelve yards
of linen and a nine-inch zip
and for a person’s height:
He’s six foot
three and she’s five foot five.
With regard to people’s weight,
many countries use pounds:
She’s 114
pounds.
whereas the UK still commonly
uses stones (fourteen pounds) and pounds:
She’s eight
stone two.
and liquids are measured in
gallons, quarts and pints as well as in litres. The equivalences are:
Imperial Metric
inch 2.54 centimetres/25.4 millimetres foot (12 in) .305 metres/30.5 centimetres
yard (3 ft) .914 metres/91.4 centimetres
mile (1760 yds) 1.626 kilometres
pint .568 litres
quart (2 pints)
1.136 litres
gallon (8 pints)
4.546 litres
ounce 28.35 grams
pound (16 oz) .454 kilos/454 grams
See: money, numbers.
meiosis
Meiosis comes from the Greek word meiosis (diminution). It is a figure of
speech closely related to litotes in
that it involves understatement.
Most stylisticians today only use the term litotes but a few preserve meiosis
for understatement which has the specific intention of raising our esteem for
the item apparently disparaged:
How can we help this poor little mite? He’s not much but he’s all I’ve
got.
See: litotes, understatement.
Mentalism
Mentalism is a branch of
psychology which contrasts sharply with Behaviourism.
Whereas the latter insists that the only objective evidence for psychological
research is behaviour, that is, actions and responses to stimuli, the former
values such subjective data as can be established through introspection.
Behaviourism and Mentalism have both influenced linguistics. Behaviourists have
argued that when a child is born its mind is blank and all language knowledge
is the result of conditioning, experience and stimulation; Mentalists claim
that children are born with a predisposition to acquire language and that the
speed of a child’s acquisition of
language can in part be accounted for by the child’s inherited linguistic
abilities.
See: acquisition of
language, Behaviourism.
metalanguage
Each subject
tends to have a vocabulary of its own. In a discussion of geography, for
example, we would expect to find words like continents,
contours, oceans and plate tectonics.
Metalanguage is the specific variety
of language used to describe language. Many of the descriptions in this book
involve metalanguage. The study of metalanguage is metalinguistics.
metaphor
The word metaphor derives ultimately from Greek metapherein (transfer). It is a figure
of speech in which A is covertly identified with B. In:
John bellowed.
for example,
John (A) is described as behaving like a bull (B) in that bellowing specifically refers to the noise made by bulls. The
figurative extension of meaning that characterises metaphor may occur with
nouns:
We lost touch with that branch of the family.
verbs:
She broke his heart.
adjectives:
He gave me a dirty look.
adverbs:
They applauded
warmly.
and phrases:
They took account of our views.
He tore up the road.
Metaphor is,
in the words of I.A.Richards, ‘the omnipresent principle of language’, a claim
that is easy to accept when we try to find a passage or sentence without
metaphor. It occurs in the figurative use of body parts, including:
the arm of a chair
the back of a house
the foot of
the hill/foothills the last leg of a journey the nose of a plane
the spine of a book
in the teeth of a storm
Many such
metaphors are ‘dead’, that is, we are no longer conscious of their figurative
nature when we use them, although certain regional metaphors, using identical
techniques, strike us as non-literal:
the eye of a bottle—Papua New Guinea
the heel of the hand—Ireland
Metaphors may
be subdivided into a number of categories:
1 animistic metaphors, giving animate qualities to inanimate nouns:
Darkness brooded over the
land. This river runs through the
city.
2
concretive metaphors, giving physical
substance to abstractions:
a fully-developed idea a pincer movement
3
dehumanising metaphors, applying
non-human attributes to people:
She’s pot-bellied.
The children crowed with delight.
4 deifying metaphors, attributing divine qualities to
people:
an omnipotent ruler
Mona Lisa’s eternal smile
5 humanising metaphors, which give human qualities to
non-human nouns:
the inconstant moon a brave attempt
6 synaesthetic metaphors, in which the
qualities associated with one sense are applied to another:
a loud colour
She sang sweetly.
In all successful metaphors, the
objects compared must have certain similarities and yet be sufficiently
different for their juxtaposition to arouse a sense of novelty.
See: figurative language, idioms, imagery, simile, synaesthesia.
metathesis
Metathesis, which comes from Greek metatithenai
(transpose), involves the transposition of sounds in a word, usually to
break up a consonant cluster and on analogy with other words. Many
contemporary commentators use:
nucular for nuclear
to avoid the unusual combination
of ‘nucl-’ but also, no doubt, under the influence of such words as circular, insular, particular and singular.
Metathesis may be historical and now fully accepted:
crud>curd gars>grass
or
contemporary and stigmatised:
dirndl>drindle (skirt)
pretty>purty
See: consonant cluster.
metonymy
Metonymy comes from Greek meta+onyma
(change+name) and is a figure of speech in which someone or something is
referred to by an associated item:
The pen [a writer] is mightier than the sword [a soldier].
Many such usages are
conventionalised:
the crown represents the monarchy
the press represents the newspaper industry
the turf represents horse-racing
and:
address the
bench means
‘speak to the judge(s)’
a silk means ‘a
Queen’s Counsel’ (in the UK a higher-level barrister) See: figurative language, synecdoche.
metre
Metre is regulated rhythm.
All utterances are to some extent rhythmic, involving an indeterminate number
of stressed and unstressed syllables:
/ x x /
What did you say?
x / x x / x / x / x
I can’t hear a
single word you’re saying.
In English poetry, we regulate
the number of stressed syllables:
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear x/x/x/, x/
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun x x//x x/
And I will
luve thee still, my dear, x/x/x/, x/
While the sand o’ life shall
run. x x/x/x
/
Often, as in
the ballad stanza from Burns, we find a pattern of four strong stresses in
lines one and three and three strong stresses in lines two and four. The metre
of a poem is the rhythmic melody, divorced from the words. Often, when we
forget the words of a verse, we remember the metre and by repeating the metre
we can gradually recall the words.
Just as English grammar was forced into a latinate mould, so too was
English verse. Latin verse could be subdivided into feet and so four types of
poetic foot were used in a description of English verse:
anapest x
x/—two unstressed+one stressed syllable dactyl /x x—one stressed+two unstressed
iamb x/—one unstressed+one
stressed trochee /x—one stressed+one unstressed
With some
verse, especially children’s rhymes, the foot works reasonably well:
Mary had a little lamb /x/x/x/
Its fleece as white as snow x/x/x/
Little Miss Muffet /x x/x
Sat on a tuffet /x x/x
but
irregularities are often found in less trivial verse. In Milton’s sonnet ‘On
the Late Massacre in Piedmont’:
Avenge, O
Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Ev’n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers
worshipped stocks and stones
we find the pattern:
x/x/, x/x/, x/
/ /xxx/x/x/;
xx/x/x/x/x/, x/x/x/x/x/.
The number of
stressed syllables per line is regularly five, whereas the unstressed syllables
vary from five to six and the positioning of the unstressed syllables is
regular only in lines one and four.
English verse does not fit easily into Romance patterns because English
is a stress- timed language whereas the Romance languages are syllable-timed.
In stress-timed languages, stressed syllables are produced at regular intervals
of time and the number of unstressed syllables may vary; in syllable-timed languages,
however, the syllables are
produced at
equal intervals of time with the number of stresses being random. It is the
occurrence of a regular pattern of stressed syllables, often with an irregular
pattern of unstressed syllables, which gives English poetry its characteristic
rhythm.
See: parallelism, rhythm, stress, syllable.
Middle English
Middle English refers to the variety of
English spoken and written mainly in England from the twelfth to the fifteenth
century. During this period, English changed from an inflected Germanic
language, virtually inaccessible to any modern speaker, to a relatively uninflected
language with extensive Romance borrowings.
The differences between Old English and
Middle English are perhaps clearest when we contrast passages which deal with
the coming of Spring:
Holm storme weol,
won wið winde: wynter yþe beleac
is-gebinde, oþðæt oþer com
gear in geardas, swa nu gyt doð,
þa ðe syngales sele bewitiað, wuldor-torhtan weder.
Beowulf, 1131–36
Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote,
The droghte of Marche hath
perced to the rote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the
flour;
Chaucer, Prologue
to the Canterbury Tales, 1–4
The Beowulf passage contains words that we recognise: storm, wind, winter, come, now, was and weather, but the meaning of the passage
is lost to most speakers of contemporary English. Chaucer’s passage, on the
other hand, is relatively easy to understand when we master the spelling
conventions and relate shoures to showers, droghte to drought, rote to root, veyne to
vein and swich to such.
A comparison of the two passages will also show the increase in Romance
vocabulary (from 0% in Beowulf to 23%
in Chaucer), a swing from alliterative patterning to rhymed verse and a
movement away from inflections to
fixed word order and prepositions.
See: Old English.
mixed language
The term mixed language has frequently been
applied to pidgins and creoles, which
are mixed in the sense that they
often show influences from more than one language. Thus, in the Cameroon Pidgin
sentences:
Dat pikin
sabi 
gari. (That child loves eating gari.)
Ma haus big pas 
. (My house is biggest.)
Baiam giv mi. (Buy it for me.)
English has
provided ten of the thirteen words; Portuguese has provided two (pikin ‘child’ and sabi ‘know, be able to’), Igbo has provided one (gari ‘grated cassava’) and African
languages have provided the structure of the comparison and the imperative. (In
Lamnso, for example, the sentence would be rendered:
Lav yem kuh
shaah sidzem.
House my big pass all.
and the
Yoruba equivalent of the third sentence is:
Ra a fun mi. (literally ‘Buy it give
me.’)
Mixing is not,
however, limited to pidgins and creoles. It is found in all communities where
two or more languages are in use. The following example of English cum French
cum Latin was recorded in Guernsey in 1631:
The prisoner ject un brickbat a le dit Justice que narrowly mist, et
pur ceo immediately fuit Indictment drawn pur Noy envers le prisoner, and son
dexter manus ampute and fix al Gibbet sur que luy mesme immediatement hange in
presence de Court.
Puerto Rican
teachers often condemn ‘Spanglish’, the blending of Spanish and English by bilinguals:
Yo quiero improve mi vocabulary. (I want to…)
Mi papa es muy protective. (My father is very…)
and children
growing up in bilingual homes often produce mixed utterances:
C’est a me! My pomme! (It’s mine!
My apple!) and advertisers often blend languages:
Les meilleurs
blue-jeans du monde! (The best jeans in the world!)
Haar-do a la mode. (Fashionable hair-do.)
English itself is a mixed
language, a fact that becomes clear if we examine almost any sentence. Of the
seventeen words in the previous sentence, six (mixed, language, fact, clear, examine, sentence) are from French.
Many fixed phrases such as attorney general
or mission impossible show the
influence of Latin and French in having the adjective after the noun; others
such as alter ego, infra dig, qui vive,
savoir faire have been adopted without change; and the possessive structure
‘the daughter of my first wife’ as opposed to ‘my first wife’s daughter’
reflects the influence of the French equivalent ‘la fille de ma première femme’.
