modality
Modality refers to the attitudes
expressed by a speaker towards the statement or proposition being made:
Utterance→Modality+Sentence
Such attitudes (both conscious and
unconscious) may express ability, compulsion, desire, insistence, intention,
obligation, permission, possibility, willingness and uncertainty.
In English, modality can be signalled by:
1 Modals, nine verbs: can,
could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would, which form a subclass
because of the way they pattern and because of their meanings.
(a)
Modals occur in the first position in the VP:
He might be coming.
(b) They
are mutually exclusive:
*He might can go.
(c) They
trigger off the base form of the following verb:
I must go.
(d) They
take the negative not/n’t directly:
She may not come.
I can’t go through with it.
(e) They do
not occur in non-finite constructions:
*musting
*to might
*shall+ed
(f) They do not exhibit past/non-past contrasts
in the same way as other verbs. May and
might can appear in
structures where past/ non-past contrasts are not involved:
I may go to London tomorrow.
I might go to London tomorrow.
and
must has two different ‘pasts’
depending on its meaning:
Non-past Past
He must come here often. He must have come here often.
He had to come here often.
(g) They
can all refer to the future, but
with varying degrees of certainty:
He will come.
He may come.
He should come.
2 Quasi-modals of two kinds:
(a)
verbs like dare, need, ought to and used
to which share some of the syntactic characteristics of modals:
I daren’t move.
You needn’t bother.
He ought to have been practising.
She used to be bothered by such things.
(b) verbs
which share much of the meaning of modals. These include:
BE to — She is to try tomorrow.
BE able to — He isn’t able to work so hard now. BE about to — I’m not about to throw it all away. BE going to — They’re going to regret
this.
HAVE to — We have to change these reports.
HAVE got to — You’ve got to help.
HAD better — It’d better be good.
3 Intonation. By varying our intonation, we can modify meaning as in:
You’ll go all right!=
In the
written medium, modality is often signalled by verbs of attribution and their
modifiers:
She
hoped/insisted/pleaded/urged wistfully.
4
Word order. The clearest examples here
are the differences between statements, questions, orders and blessings/curses:
You are going away.
Are you going
away? Go away.
May you never know want!/May
you never know rest!
5
Modifiers such as:
Maybe he’ll come.
Perhaps he’ll come.
Modals are
among the most frequently-used verbs in the language and yet they are among the
most difficult to define. This may be because a certain amount of ‘bleaching’
(i.e. loss of meaning) is going on. We might, for example, ask if there are any
clear differences between the modals in:
May/can/might I have the
salt, please?
Will/would/can/could you pass the potatoes,
please?
In addition,
there is a tendency now to use some of the modals to describe facts rather than
possibilities:
You may be
big (i.e.
you are big) but that won’t save you.
You will remember (i.e. you are sure to
remember) that September 8 is an
important anniversary for us.
See: auxiliary,
mood, quasi-modal, verb phrase.
modifier
A modifier is a unit which is structurally
dependent and which qualifies the meaning of other units, usually nouns, verbs,
adjectives, adverbs and sentences.
The usual modifiers are adjectives, which qualify nouns:
big winnings
adverbs,
which qualify verbs, adjectives, other adverbs and sentences:
He ran quickly.
very big winnings
He ran very fast.
It is not, however, clear why he behaved in this
way.
and
preposition phrases:
the man in the moon
He was sitting
on my left.
Occasionally,
however, other sentence units such as determiners:
the army
auxiliaries:
It may not work.
and dependent clauses:
The man who introduced the subject is my uncle.
They left when the row started.
are also described as modifiers.
Frequently, especially in journalism, several modifiers co-occur as in
this extract from
The Times (18 September, 1984):
The
Paris-based, German-born, fan-collecting, fast-talking, computer- brained
designer makes a state appearance in London tomorrow…
In traditional grammars, adjectives were said to qualify nouns and adverbs to modify verbs, adjectives, sentences and
other adverbs. Today, the nouns modifier and
qualifier and the verbs modify and qualify are used interchangeably, with modifier/modify being the preferred terms.
See: adjective, adjunct, adverb, parts of speech.
money
A precise sum
of money is given in figures and
symbols:
25c—twenty-five cents
50p—fifty pence
£5.75—five pounds
seventy-five pence
$10.95—ten dollars ninety-five cents
£2,500—two thousand five hundred pounds
$50,000—fifty thousand dollars
Less
commonly, round figures are spelt out.
For sums
involving larger amounts, the usual conventions are:
$2bn—two billion (i.e. two
thousand million) dollars
£25m—twenty-five million pounds
£65K—sixty-five thousand pounds
The UK
originally used billion to mean ‘one
million million’ but the term is now used with its US meaning.
In contexts, sums of money are treated as
singular:
$2m is being
spent on repairs.
Often, when a
sum is used as a modifier, it is spelt out:
a two million dollar repair
bill
although there
is a growing tendency to use figures here too:
a $2m repair bill
See: billion, numbers.
monologue
A monologue (derived from mono+logue
on analogy with dialogue) or
soliloquy is a speech made by one person. The dramatic monologue is a literary
convention which allows a character to communicate his thoughts directly to an
audience. Shakespeare’s plays contain a large number of monologues, delivered
mainly by the hero. A dramatic monologue differs from a speech in that a speech
has an overt addressee (as well as the audience) whereas a monologue is the
equivalent of a character speaking his thoughts aloud.
As well as dramatic soliloquies, the term monologue covers poems which are addressed to, but never involve
replies from, another person. Robert Browning uses this poetic technique in
such poems as ‘Andrea del Sarto’.
Colloquially,
the word monologue is often applied
to the speech of a person who talks
at rather
than with a listener.
mood
Mood is closely related to modality in linguistic discussions.
Traditionally, mood was applied to verbs to distinguish between the forms used
in making statements (i.e. Indicative Mood):
I am (not)
tired.
in giving orders (i.e. Imperative Mood):
Be quiet.
and in marking verbs in subordinate
clauses or in making wishes (i.e. Subjunctive
Mood):
I insist that you be in at ten.
Things would
be different if I were in charge. Long live the Queen!
See: imperative, indicative, modality,
subjunctive.
morpheme
The word morpheme derives ultimately from Greek morphe meaning ‘form’. A morpheme is
composed of one or more phonemes (the
smallest units of sound in a language) and is the smallest unit of syntax.
There are two types of morphemes:
1 free morphemes, which can occur as
separate words:
help
2 bound
morphemes, which cannot occur independently. The -s which can mark plurality is
a bound morpheme (or ‘bound form’):
tree trees
Affixes, too, are bound morphemes:
un-+help+-ful
but
occasionally, a bound morpheme may be used as a free form:
Are you pro or anti?
He’s my ex.
See: affix,
morphology, word formation.
morphology
Morphology is the study of the structure
of words, which are regarded as free
morphemes or combinations of
morphemes. Morphology comprehends two main areas of study:
1 inflection, which is concerned with the
various forms in which a word may exist:
cat cats
do does did
doing done early earlier earliest
2 word formation:
amazingly<amaze+ing+ly bookcase<book+case
brunch<breakfast+lunch globetrot<globetrotter kleenex<clean+X
See: affix, derivation, word formation.
morphophonemics
Morphophonemics
comprehends
two main areas of study:
1 the
phonological factors that may affect the form of morphemes. For example, the negative morpheme in- varies according to context:
illegal
immoral irreparable
2 the factors that may affect the
form of phonemes. For example, the
‘p’ sound is slightly different in each of the following words:
pit
spit sip
multifunctionality
Many words in English are multifunctional in the sense that they
can function in a variety of roles:
I bought a square
table. (adjective)
They used to meet in the square. (noun)
I can’t square that with my conscience. (verb)
Multifunctionality is a feature of uninflected
languages and of pidgins and creoles:
no bi sik.—‘Smallness’ is not an illness.
Wi bin pulam 
.—We pulled it gently.
See: functional
shift, pidgins and creoles.
mutation
The word mutation, which
derives from Latin mutare meaning
‘change’, is applied to the vocalic sound changes which mark:
1 certain plurals:
foot feet
man men mouse
mice
2 certain
verbal distinctions:
do did done
sing sang sung
write wrote written
mutual
Mutual has long been a shibboleth, its correct use implying
education and prestige, its incorrect use being associated with carelessness
and poor education. The puristic attitude towards mutual is summed up by the Fowlers in The King’s English (1958:65) where they link the misuse of individual and mutual, adding that mutual is
‘a very telltale word, readily convicting the
unwary’.
The word mutual denotes a
response, attitude or action that is equal, contemporaneous and shared by two.
Thus we find:
mutual affection/assistance/attraction/respect/trust mutual
dislike/distrust/distaste
Mutual modifies a singular noun:
John and Fred
grew up together and their mutual
affection is as marked today as it ever was.
The well-known
solecism our mutual friend, which was perpetuated by Dickens in his novel of
the same name, is unacceptable because it refers not to a relationship between
two but to the feelings of two towards a third. One of the reasons for this
usage is the ambiguity of the correct form:
our common
friend
Mutual needs to be distinguished from reciprocal, which refers to actions and
feelings which are a response to others. Thus if A treats B kindly, it is
likely that B will reciprocate A’s kindness. The kindness would thus be reciprocal rather than mutual.
It is semantically useful to maintain the distinction between mutual and reciprocal but it seems likely that mutual will gradually become acceptable as applying to more than
two in the same way that between is
being extended to contexts in which among
would be more appropriate.
See: among,
‘chestnuts’, individual, shibboleth.
naivete, naivety
The word naïve was borrowed from French naïf/naïve, meaning ‘natural’, over
three hundred years ago, and many users continue to use the dieresis to
indicate that the word is disyllabic.
There is considerable vacillation on the part of native speakers with regard to
the derived noun with the forms naïveté,
naiveté, naivete and naivety all
being acceptable. Since the words have become firmly established in English, it
seems reasonable to use naive, naively and
naivety, but, whatever forms are
chosen, they should be used consistently.
See: accent marks, foreign words in English.
name
In most
traditions, naming is highly significant. The choice of Beverley for a daughter or Todd
for a son may suggest upward social mobility, just as the naming of a
daughter after her maternal grandmother is common in matriarchal societies.
In the past, a name was endowed with the spirit of its owner. To know a
person’s or a god’s name was to have power over him. We have relics of such
beliefs in the commandment:
Thou shalt not
take the name of thy God in vain.
and in
fairytales such as ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, where the discovery of the captor’s name
weakens his power. In the more recent past, Christians named their children
after a saint such as Mary or Peter, who was meant to be the child’s patron and
model, or after a Christian virtue such as Faith or Makepeace.
Throughout the world where English is used as a first or second
language, most users have at least two names, one or more given names and a
family name:
Joanne Brown Ahmed Mubarak
In parts of
Africa and the Indian sub-continent, the family name is often put first:
(Ms) Pushpa P.T. (Mr) Nfon Donatus
even when
signing one’s name. In the USA it is not uncommon to find such male hierarchies
as:
John Brown
John Brown Jr
John Brown III
The titles Senior/Sen and Junior/Jr are occasionally found in the UK and Australia but they
tend to suggest US influence, as does the use of an initial before a given name
as in:
J.David Brown
Double-barrelled
names tend to arise in three main ways:
1 a woman may add her husband’s surname to her own. Thus on marrying
John Smith, Mary Brown may become:
Mary Brown-Smith
2
a man (John
Brown) may take on his mother’s maiden name:
John
Hamilton-Brown
3
where surnames are common (as with Jones,
Rees, Vaughan in Wales), double- barrelled names can be a way of distinguishing
families. Again, the wife’s name precedes the husband’s. Thus Mary Vaughan and
Evan Rees may become Mary and Evan Vaughan-Rees.
See: address and reference.
narration, narrative
The terms narration and narrative, both
from Latin narrare (tell a story),
cover a number of meanings, all associated with giving an account of a sequence
of events.
Narration usually applies to:
1
the act or process of giving an account
2
a traditional form of discourse, the others being argument,
description and
exposition.
Narrative has three main meanings:
1 a continuous account in speech or writing, usually in chronological
order. It may include dialogue, present a particular viewpoint, tell a story or
give an account of an event or series of events. Spoken narrative
conventionally uses non-past verbs (often referred to as the ‘present
historic’) to describe past events, and uses demonstrative adjectives and
locative adverbs to create an impression of the here and now:
This fellow comes up to me here. He looks at me and says: ‘Could I tap
you for a tenner?’
‘For a tenner,’ says I, ‘you
could hit me with a hammer.’
2 A distinction
can be made between simple narrative, in which events are recounted in
chronological order, and more complex narrative, in which events are recounted
in an order that suits a preconceived plot. For example, if we label the events
in a story A, B and C, then simple narrative uses the sequence A B C, whereas a
detective story might use the technique B C A, where the full nature of A is
not revealed until the end, and a psychological thriller may have A C B, where
the precise motivation is not revealed in its chronological context.
3 More narrowly, narrative can
be applied to the portions of a novel or story that are not conversation. It is
not always easy to draw a line between fictional speech/thought and narrative,
but essentially narrative provides background information, is expected to be
reliable, has a first- or third-person narrator, and conforms more closely than
speech to the written norms.
See: argument,
direct speech, exposition.
negation, negative
Negation involves the contradiction or
denial of an affirmative statement.
In English, negation is normally carried by the negative marker not/n’t either
alone or in combination with the negative response no:
Did he say anything? No, he
didn’t
Will he do it?
No, he won’t.
Negation can
also be marked by: 1 negative morphemes:
happy unhappy legal illegal loyal disloyal
2
negative words beginning with n: neither…nor
never
none nothing nowhere
3 negative
verbs such as:
deny
doubt negate
4
adverbs such as hardly, seldom, rarely: I hardly
ever see him.
He seldom says
anything.
She rarely goes anywhere.
5 intonation:
You’ll go all
right! (i.e.
over my dead body)
Until the seventeenth century,
double or multiple negation was widely used as a form of emphasis, as in:
Nor go neither; but you’ll
lie like dogs, and yet say nothing neither.
Shakespeare, The
Tempest, Act 3, Scene 2
Then,
grammarians introduced the rule that ‘two negatives make an affirmative’ and so
Shakespearean-type emphasis became non-standard. In spite of the rule, however,
such examples as:
He didn’t say
nothing.
They wouldn’t give nothing
to nobody.
occur in mother-tongue dialects of
English throughout the world.
In colloquial
speech, we often use what has been called ‘transferred’ negation with verbs of
thinking:
He doesn’t think they’ll come. (He thinks they won’t come.)
I don’t believe he said it. (I believe he didn’t say
it.)
I don’t suppose she’ll come. (I suppose
she won’t come.) In balanced structures, such as:
He neither spoke nor listened.
Neither John nor his brother can sing.
nor and not or should be used.
See: affirmative, either, parallelism.
neologism
A neologism is a newly-created word or
phrase, or the use of an established word with a new meaning:
Have a wazzy weekend!
(wazzy=exciting,
fun-filled)
What do you
think of his punk hair style?
do-nothingism
Purists often express disapproval of
neologisms, regarding them as unnecessary barbarisms.
Gradually, however, neologisms, like slang,
either disappear or are accepted
into the language. Many neologisms associated with drugs are quickly discarded
but others (e.g. psychedelic) are
absorbed. The terminology associated with computers (e.g. formatting, menu, muffin, parallel interface, ram) contains many
neologisms, which are rapidly being accepted into the language.
See: coinage, jargon, slang.
network norms
Although there
is a standard written English which is essentially the same throughout the
English-speaking world, there are numerous regional pronunciations. A form may
be associated with educated speakers in one area and be of low status in
another: postvocalic
r in words like port, for example, has very different connotations in the USA and
in southern UK. In each area of the world where English is a mother tongue or
frequently- used second language there is a prestigious spoken variety which is
used and spread by radio and television. These network norms are based on educated speech, but because they are
based on speech and not writing they tend to be less formal,
less complex and more open to the changes that are taking place in the language
(the use of less where fewer would occur in the written medium,
for example, and the extension of between
to references involving more than two). In addition, since world-wide
reporting is commonplace and since television programmes are widely circulated,
regional network norms are becoming increasingly alike, with US norms, in
particular, influencing the style of media journalists throughout the world.
See: accent, Received Pronunciation, rhotic, Standard English.
New Zealand English
New Zealand
became a British colony in 1840 and was granted dominion status within the
Commonwealth in 1907. Its population of 3.1 million is made up of approximately
10% Maoris and 90% settlers mainly from the British Isles. New Zealand English is very similar in pronunciation and syntax to Australian English and, in view of
their shared history (New Zealand, for example, was administered in the 1840s
as part of New South Wales) and the place of origin of their settler
communities, these similarities are to be expected. It is in the area of
vocabulary and especially in those items derived from Maori that New Zealand
English is most clearly distinguishable from its neighbour.
Phonology
1 With the
exception of a small community of Scottish settlers in the south of New
Zealand’s South Island, New Zealand English is non-rhotic.
2 The vowel sound in words
such as bit, is, ship tends to be
schwa:
 |
3 The front vowels in words such as peck and pack are close so that peck is
often heard as 
and pack
as /pεk/. Pick is realised as 
4 The long vowels in beat and boot are centralised and occasionally diphthongised so
that beat is realised as 
and boot
as 
5 There
is a tendency to merge the centring diphthongs in hear and hare so that,
for many speakers, such pairs are homophones.
6 The vowel sound in nut is often identical with the sound in not, both
being realised
as
7
 |
The l sound tends to be dark in all contexts, so that the l in light sounds like the l in UK full. In words where the l is syllabic, as in bottle, it is often realised as a vowel
8
The velar nasal /ŋ/ can occur initially in
Maori names such as Ngaio but most
speakers other than Maoris realise such words as if they began with n.
Vocabulary
Much of New
Zealand’s vocabulary is shared with Australia, the UK and the USA, but a number
of words have been adopted from Maori including place names:
Moana (Lake)
Rotorua (Two lake) names for
birds, animals and plants:
hapuku (fish) huhu (beetle) kiwi (bird)
kumara (sweet potato)
rata (tree)
and for
indigenous culture:
haka (war dance)
hui (celebration)
kia ora (good
health) and settler:
pakeha (white person)
Grammar
Standard New
Zealand English is indistinguishable from the standard written language in
Australia and the UK. Many dialect features
such as the use of I done and them things occur in the speech of the
less well educated members of the community but, on the whole, New Zealand
English is homogeneous and, in grammar, close to media norms.
See: Australian English.
news
The noun news is uncountable:
We’ve just had some very good news. an item/piece of news
and although it looks plural news functions as a singular:
The news is good.
Such good news travels fast.
Other words
that are formally plural but can function as singular are: 1 the names of
familiar maladies:
collywobbles (folk etymology of cholera morbus) measles
mumps
2 the
names of certain games:
billiards
checkers
draughts
3 some
words ending in -ics:
aerobics
athletics
mathematics politics
See: countable, -ic, -ical words.
Newspeak
The term Newspeak was invented by George Orwell
in Nineteen EightyFour (1948) to
describe a variety of language designed as a means of controlling thought. The
word has subsequently been expanded and used with a lower case n to refer to the ambiguities and
contradictions often found
in the language of propaganda. In
this latter usage newspeak
is similar in meaning to Doublespeak
or double talk.
Many of the features of Newspeak are
evident in other varieties of English:
1
multifunctionality. In Newspeak all words
(including if and when) can be used as nouns, verbs,
adjectives and adverbs.
2
linguistic irregularities are reduced.
Orwell, for example, eliminates thought, making
think work as both noun and verb and
regularising the past tense to thinked.
Many pidgins use similar techniques. In Cameroon Pidgin English, we have:
Tink nau. Ma
nem bi wεti? (Think
now. What is my name?)
Wi bin tink fain
tink. (We
thought some fine thoughts.)
In addition,
in Newspeak the morpheme -ful is used to mark adjectives and -wise to mark adverbs. The pidgin of
Papua New Guinea uses very similar devices in that the morpheme -pela indicates an adjective:
arapela bikpela haus (another
big house) and -im marks a transitive
verb:
Em i bagarap pinis. (It’s ruined.)
Em i bagarapim
haus bilong mi. (He ruined my house.)
3
vocabulary is reduced. Negatives are
signalled by un- so that warm is replaced by uncold; emphasis is carried by plus
and doubleplus (pluscold,
doublepluscold) and other meanings are carried by ante-, down-, post- and up-.
All of the devices described by Orwell occur naturally in varieties of
English and are not inherently good or bad. What Orwell was stressing was that
language is our means of coming to terms with our individual universes, that
our individuality is in part a conse- quence of our idiosyncratic command of
our language, and that our minds can be controlled, in part at least, by
language.
See: affix, circumlocution, Doublespeak,
euphemism, pidgins and creoles, propaganda, word formation.
nice
The adjective nice provides a clear example of the
semantic changes many words in English undergo. Nice, deriving from Latin nescius
(ignorant), came into English in the fourteenth century with the meanings
of ‘foolish’ and ‘silly’ as well as ‘ignorant’. One hundred years later nice could also mean ‘wanton’ and
‘lascivious’. From wanton its meaning
extended to ‘shy’ and then ‘precise’ as in:
a nice distinction
By the eighteenth century it had
developed its contemporary meaning of approval:
a nice meal (I enjoyed it.)
a nice person (I approve of this person.)
and can now be applied to
anything from activities to zebras. Because of its wide applicability and
vagueness, nice is often criticised
by teachers.
Recent uses of nice suggest
that its semantic shifting is not at an end. It is now frequently used to mean the
opposite of ‘pleasant’. Tone of voice can make:
O that’s nice! That’s really nice!
mean:
‘That is not at all pleasant
or acceptable.’
See: aggravate, cliché, phatic communion, semantic change.
Nigerian
English
Nigeria, with an estimated population of
80 million, is one of the wealthiest countries in Black Africa. Its links with
Britain go back to the fifteenth century, when Portuguese traders first
complained that English adventurers were travelling to the West Coast of Africa.
Independence was granted in 1960 and in 1961 Nigeria became a Republic within
the Commonwealth.
As well as being the most populous country in Africa, Nigeria is one of
the most multilingual. An estimated 400 languages are spoken within its
borders. The three largest of these are Hausa (spoken by 26.7% of the
population), Igbo (10.7%) and Yoruba (17.8%). These, together with Pidgin
English, are widely used throughout the country.
English is the official language and also the educated lingua franca of Nigeria. It is the
medium of education in all but the first three years of primary school, the
language of official and formal functions, and the language of international
and elite intertribal communications. It is also the dominant language of the
press, with 13 daily and 15 weekly newspapers in English, and more air-time on
radio and television is devoted to English than to any other language.
English began to be taught formally in Nigeria in the nineteenth
century and in the course of over a hundred and fifty years a distinctive
variety has emerged. As in other anglophone communities, the English in Nigeria
is not a single, homogeneous language but a cluster of subvarieties which
include:
(a) Pidgin English
(b) mother-tongue-influenced English
(c) the
Indian-influenced English of many teachers and traders
(d) standard
Nigerian English
(e)
expatriate mother-tongue English
And such a
subdivision hides the fact that standard Nigerian English is spoken with
different accents, owing to the influence of the mother tongues and of distinct
regional policies in education. For example, pan and fan may be homophones for some Hausa speakers, bus and buzz or cheer and sheer for Yoruba speakers, and light and right for speakers of Tiv or Idoma.
Phonology
1 All
varieties of Nigerian English are non-rhotic.
Received Pronunciation (RP) is still
a prestigious accent and educated speakers show varying degrees of
sophistication in their approximation to it.
2 
There are fewer vowel contrasts than in RP, with many speakers conflating /i/ and to /i/, and / to / and /u/ and to /u/, thus making homophones of sheep and ship, nought and not, fool and full.
3
The central vowels and
/з/ are replaced by front or back vowels, usually under the influence of
spelling. Thus:
/bзd/>/bεd/
(bird)
4
The diphthongs in bay and go are
monophthongised; those in bear and beer are sometimes monophthongised and
sometimes realised as /ea/ and /ia/.
5 The
consonants /θ, ð/ as in thin and then are realised as /t, d/ in the south
and as /s, z/ in Northern Nigerian English.
6
The sound that occurs finally in orange is realised as 
in the north and as /∫/ in the south.
7 Consonant clusters
are often modified
either by vowel
epenthesis as in 
for arrangement
or by apocope as with 
for list.
8
The rhythm and stress patterns
of the mother tongues affect Nigerian English.
The
syllables in
polysyllabic words are often more equally stressed than in RP and emphasis is
sometimes suggested by a change of intonation. Thus, a Nigerian speaker who
wishes to stress his intention to go may not give emphatic stress to will in:
I will go.
but change the
falling tone on go to a fall-rise gŏ.
Vocabulary
Nigerian
English differs from other varieties of English in four main ways: 1 Words are
borrowed from Nigerian languages:
akara (bean cake) (Hausa)
chĩchĩ (fritter) (Igbo)
bolekaja danfo molue (public
transport) (Yoruba) 2 There are calques from
the mother tongues:
smell pepper (suffer)
spray money (attach money to musicians,
dancers as a mark of appreciation)
wash an event (celebrate an
event by ‘washing’ it down with drinks) 3 Many words and phrases have been
given additional meanings:
battery charger (person who repairs batteries) essential
commodities (scarce consumer goods) Well
done! (greeting to someone at work)
4 A number of
words have been created in Nigeria, some on analogy with English words. The -ee morpheme, for example, is more productive:
arrangee (someone who arranges illegal money exchanges)
decampee (one who switches to a different political party)
Others derive from acronyms.
The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board, for example, has led to jambite meaning a first-year
under-graduate student and the War Against Indiscipline has produced wai, meaning ‘a type of crusade’.
Grammar
Most educated
Nigerians use standard grammar, especially in writing, but the following
features are widespread:
1 the use of could and would for can and will:
I could remember that you came this
morning.
This is to
inform you that there would be a
meeting tomorrow.
2 the use
of uncountable nouns as countable:
Thank you for your advices.
We have
ordered these equipments.
3
the definite article is sometimes omitted:
Aircraft is fully
booked.
or inserted where it is not
required:
The life after death is
a reality.
4
the use of no+any by Hausa speakers:
I have no any friend.
5
the use of verbs in a reciprocal sense
without each other: We have known for ten
years.
We saw this morning.
and the tendency to use themselves where each other is
required:
They really
love themselves.
6
the different use of prepositions:
The victim died by
twelve o’clock.
Mr Olu is the principal for our school.
On the long run, this won’t
work.
Nigerian
Pidgin is widely used as a lingua franca, especially in coastal and large urban
communities. Like Nigerian English, it differs from region to region,
reflecting the speaker’s mother tongue and degree of exposure to Standard
English. It has been used in literature by novelists, poets and playwrights and
it can be found, mainly for humorous purposes, in some newspapers and on radio
and television. The following extract from Chinua Achebe’s story Civil Peace gives an idea of the
flexibility of Nigerian Pidgin English:
‘My frien, why you no de talk again. I de ask you say you wan make we
call soja?’
‘No.’
‘Awrighto. Now make we talk business. We no be bad tief. We no like for
make trouble. Trouble done finish. War done finish and all the
katakata wey
de for inside. No Civil War again. This time na Civil Peace. No be so?’
‘Na so!’
See: African
English, pidgins and creoles, West African English.
nobody, none, no one
Nobody, meaning ‘no person’, is singular and like no one takes a singular verb:
Nobody has to know.
No one knows anything.
No one occurs in two forms, no one and no-one, with
the first form gaining in popularity.
There are
difficulties in agreement when question
tags occur:
Nobody knows, does he/she/do
they?
No one had the
answer, had he/she/they?
Grammarians insist that since nobody and no one are singular and since he
comprehends
she the correct tags should be:
Nobody knows, does he?
No one had the answer, had he?
but
many feminists suggest that the colloquial usage with they: Nobody knows, do they?
should be adopted.
Etymologically,
none, from Old English nan meaning ‘not one’, is also singular
and should be followed by a singular verb:
None was wasted.
None is, however, often followed by the
construction ‘of+plural NP’ and in these circumstances the plural form of the
verb occurs in colloquial speech and increasingly in the written medium:
None of their
efforts were wasted.
Nobody, no one and none can occur as objects as well as subjects:
I saw nobody.
I met no one.
I like none (of them).
but, colloquially, we are more
likely to use:
I didn’t see anybody.
I didn’t meet anyone.
I don’t like any (of them).
See: all,
concord, every, number.
nominalisation/nominalization
The term nominal
is often used as a synonym for a noun,
a pronoun, a noun phrase or a structure which can
function as a subject, object or noun complement:
The
professor lost her
mortarboard.
She lost it.
The order was founded to
look after the poor. To err is human.
Nominalisation
is the
process of forming nominals from other word classes:
good (adj)→goodness
see (verb)→seeing (Seeing is believing.) arrive (verb)→arrival
See: noun,
noun phrase.
nonce words
Nonce words are created, consciously or
unconsciously, ‘for the nonce’, that is, on or for a particular occasion. They
look and sound like English words in that they do not break the phonological
constraints of the language, but they are ephemeral.
Nonce words
can result from conscious humour:
He’s
wonderful, maybe even twoderful.
a slip of the tongue:
tinty
moothpaste
a false analogy:
He’s becoming Englified. (cf. verified) or blends:
finicky+pernickity→firnickity
Often, advertisers use
nonce-type words as product names:
Nescafé<Nestlé’s coffee/café
although if these or any other
nonce creations cease to be ephemeral, then they cease to be nonce words.
See: coinage, word formation.
nonstandard English
As well as a
written standard language which is accepted (with minor differences) throughout
the English-speaking world, there are several types of nonstandard English in existence:
1 regional
dialects. In Yorkshire, for example, one may hear:
He were stood
at pit gate, were he.
2 working-class
dialects:
I shoulda went
out and bought them boots.
3
mother-tongue-influenced English. This
category includes a wide spectrum of Englishes which are influenced
phonologically, lexically and syntactically by the speaker’s mother tongue:
You should
pick the child (pick up the child) at two.
(This type of
English is often referred to as ‘L2 English’. L1=a mother
tongue, L2=one’s first foreign language, L3=one’s second
foreign language. A Nigerian, for example, might have Hausa as an L1,
English as an L2, Yoruba as an L3 and Pidgin English as
an L4.)
4
inadequately acquired English, where false
analogies or false learning strategies can produce:
I have breaked
it.
I have not the
people seen.
See: dialect, pidgins and creoles, Standard English.
norms
A norm may be regarded as the habitual
language use of a group. The group may be as small as a village community or as
large as all the speakers of US English.
The norm is useful in providing a fixed point from which a series of
comparisons may be made. For example, the norm of Received Pronunciation (RP) in the UK provides a basis for
pronunciation comparisons between speech in Lancashire and in Cornwall as well
as between either of these and RP. There is, however, a tendency for a norm to
become a prestigious standard and for variations to be regarded not simply as
‘different’ but as ‘inferior’.
The study of norms has proved useful in many branches of linguistics.
The selection of norms of pronunciation, for example, has helped in the sociolinguistic studies of ethnic
groups and urban communities. Stylistics,
too, often utilises the notion of norms. A poetic sentence such as:
Me he
condemns!
which has the
structure Object+Subject+Predicate may be seen to deviate from the pattern of
the usual English sentence Subject + Predicate+Object.
Scientific English can be
shown to have a marked preference for passive constructions, pre-nominal
modification and polysyllabic vocabulary:
A specified
quantity of pulverised, pre-tested ammonia crystals was added to the solution.
See: deviation, network norms.
North African English
The countries
described under this heading are Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt,
Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad and the disputed territory of Western Sahara.
The population of the area is just over 113 million and the ten countries have
known four colonial powers: Britain, France, Italy and Spain. With such
diversity, it would normally be hard to offer generalisations, but for all
these countries the Islamic religion and Arabic are unifying forces. English is
most widely used in Egypt but it is widely taught as a second European language
in all francophone territories and as the first foreign language of Libya.
Phonology
Although the
phonology of individuals differs according to their exposure to and competence
in English, the following features are widespread:
1
The prestige English of the region is non-rhotic, but US influence combined with spelling pronunciation is causing a
change, so that post-vocalic r is
becoming common in words such as far and
farm. In other positions, the r is often rolled.
2
Length differences in vowels are rarely
preserved so that:
weep and
whip are realised as /wip/
not and nought are realised as 
fool and
full are realised as /ful/
3
/ε/ as in ten
is often raised to 
causing ten to be realised as tin.
4
The diphthongs 
are often replaced by 
5 Initial
/p/ is often not aspirated and so /p/ and /b/ are not fully contrasted,
resulting occasionally in the confusion of sets such as pump and bump.
6
/t∫/ and as in chop and judge are often
replaced by /∫/ and 
causing words such as chop and shop to be confused.
7 /θ, ð/
are often replaced by /t, d/ or, especially in word-final position, by /s, z/.
8 The l sound
tends to be clear in all positions
and to sound identical in light, fill and
kettle.
9 Intrusive
vowels are often introduced into consonant clusters:
string> 
months> 
10
The velar nasal /ŋ/ is variously realised as
/ŋk/, /ŋ/, /ŋg/ and /n/.
Vocabulary
Apart from the many borrowings from Arabic for words
associated with religion and culture:
Koran
muezzin mullah
influence from French in the
francophone countries encourages the use of items such as:
auto /oto/ for car
fifteen days for fortnight
mandate for money order
In addition, there is a tendency
to confuse near synonyms in such lexical sets as:
hear/listen know/learn/discover see/look strange/foreign
Grammar
1
The copula
is often omitted:
She teacher.
We happy.
2
Adjectives are sometimes used as nouns:
He didn’t tell
me the important (thing).
I work at the British (Council).
and the comparative is sometimes
used where a superlative is required:
She is the older (i.e. oldest) child in the
family.
3
The noun phrase is often recapitulated within
a relative clause:
That’s the man I saw him yesterday.
She followed the girl that I met her on the bus.
4
Intonation is often used to distinguish
statements from yes/no questions:
He has come?
and the word order in wh-questions
tends to be untransformed:
What he is
doing?
When you are
coming?
5
Articles cause many problems: a is sometimes omitted:
This is
shop./This shop.
sometimes relaced by one:
You want one
orange juice?
and,
especially with abstract nouns, replaced by the:
We all need the love.
Some and any tend
to be avoided:
I bought
lovely oranges in the market.
We haven’t money.
6
The preposition to is often used after bring,
buy, give, send, tell and owe: He brought to me the message.
She gave to
me a beautiful present.
and from often
replaces than in comparatives:
He is older from me.
7
Very is frequently replaced by too: This mountain is too high.
See: African English.
noun
Traditionally,
a noun was defined as a ‘naming word’
or ‘the name of a person, animal, place or thing’ and such definitions,
although vague, are still useful. Recent definitions of nouns tend to
concentrate on their form and function rather than on any semantic
criteria. As far as form goes, it can be shown that most nouns change to
indicate plurality and possession:
Singular Plural Possesssion Singular and Plural
the cat the cats The cat’s tail the
cats’ tails the dog the dogs The dog’s
tail the dogs’ tails the horse the horses
The horse’s tail the horses’ tails
In speech,
plurality and possession in regular nouns are both signalled by the addition of
/s/, /z/
or 
to the base form of the word. In the
written medium, s or es indicate plurality, an apostrophe+s indicates singular possession and s+an apostrophe indicates plural possession.
Nouns in English can be subdivided in
different ways:
1 They can be either masculine, feminine or neuter:
Bull cow book Man woman flower stallion mare tree
2 Nouns
can be either proper or common:
Ahmed boy Egypt country Arabic
language
Proper nouns (and the names of languages are proper nouns) always
start with a capital letter, whereas common nouns begin with a small letter:
French fruit Spanish spider
3
Nouns can be either concrete (i.e. they can refer to objects that have a material
existence) or abstract (i.e. they can
refer to ideas, concepts or qualities):
coin intuition dinner duty elevator jealousy
4 Nouns
may be either countable or uncountable (or mass). A countable noun can be preceded by a:
a tree
can have both a singular and a
plural form:
a house houses
and can, as its name suggests,
be counted:
one banana two
bananas ten bananas
Whereas singular countable nouns
can be preceded by a, uncountable
nouns tend to be preceded by some:
some butter some sand
An uncountable noun cannot
normally be pluralised and cannot be counted:
beef *two beefs/beeves
fun *ten funs
rain *five rains
5
In English, there are a number of collective nouns such as:
collection
committee flock
which are
singular in form but which refer to a number of people, animals or things. Such
nouns tend to occur with singular forms of the verb and are replaced by
singular pronouns:
The collection
is priceless. It took years to
assemble.
Nouns can
function as subjects:
Trees should not be cut down.
objects:
He always gave
money to the poor.
and as
complements:
That was John.
They elected
him President.
They can
follow prepositions:
in the trees
and be replaced by pronouns:
John was
President.
He was this.
See: collective nouns, countable, gender, noun phrase, plurals of
nouns, proper nouns.
noun phrase
A noun phrase is
a nominal group with a noun as
headword:
a happy child
a girl in blue
A headword is the unit of central
significance around which other units cluster in a set order. We can have
several noun phrases in a sentence:
The old house was sold to the highest bidder for an undisclosed figure.
There are four types of noun
phrases in English which have essentially the same distribution and which can
often substitute for each other. These are:
1
Substantive phrases which have the
basic pattern: (Determiner) (Modifiers) Headword (Modifiers)
where only
the headword is obligatory:
D Modifier(s) Headword Modifier(s)
people
some people
some ordinary people in glasshouses
some nice, ordinary people who don’t throw stones nice, ordinary people leading
decent lives
2 Proper names, both unmodified:
J.B.Ackroyd
and modified:
the beautiful Ms Green our Fido
47-year-old father of two,
Brian Matthews
3 Pronouns, which can be subdivided into:
(a) personal:
I you we
(b) possessive:
yours ours
theirs
(c) reflexive:
herself
himself ourselves
(d) demonstrative:
this that
these those
(e) interrogative:
who? which?
(f) relative:
that which
whose
(g) distributive:
all (of you) both
(of us)
(h) indefinite:
any some
Pronouns are used to replace other noun phrases:
The people we met were called Smith.
They were called
Smith.
4
Nominalisations,
that is,
nouns derived from other parts of speech:
descend Their descent was rapid.
poor The poor seem to be getting poorer.
Noun phrases can function as subjects:
The people wanted to
leave.
objects:
Have you read much poetry?
and complements:
What is the problem?
They also occur after prepositions in preposition phrases:
with all my
heart
See: complement,
head, nominalisation, noun, object, pronoun, subject.
number
Number is used in the classification of words which can display a
contrast between singular and plural:
The cat likes me.
The cats like
us.
Number is
thus apparent in nouns, non-past verbs and, to a lesser extent, in pronouns.
Number often
corresponds to life:
Tabby/he
likes John. Ginger/she likes Mary. The cats/they like them.
but the
correlation is not perfect. There are, in English, nouns which are singular in
form but plural in reference:
congregation
jury
or plural in
form but singular in reference. These include certain games:
checkers
draughts
illnesses:
measles mumps
and studies:
physics
psycholinguistics
In addition, certain uncountable
nouns like sugar refer to quantities
rather than specific entities.
With regard to verbs, number is
only apparent in the non-past:
Non-past Past
He likes
cheese. He liked cheese. We like cheese. We liked cheese.
although,
again, there is not a one-to-one correlation between grammar and life. The
third person singular only affixes an s or
es to the base form of the verb, whereas the first and second persons
singular and the first, second and third persons plural take the base form:
I/you/we/they/Tom and Jerry like apples. he/she/it/Tom likes apples.
Personal
pronouns have been subdivided into first, second and third persons singular and
plural:
Person Singular Plural
1
I/me/my/mine we/us/our/ours
2
you/your/yours you/your/yours
3 fem. she/her/hers they/them/their/theirs masc. he/him/his
they/them/their/theirs neut. it/its they/them/their/theirs
Although we is
plural, it is not equivalent to I+I+…but rather to I+you+he/she/they.
See: collective nouns, concord, countable, news, plurals of nouns.
numbers
The
conventions which apply to numbers can
be summarised as follows: 1 Use words for:
(a) numbers
one to twelve. When numbers above twenty are spelt out, they should be
hyphenated (twenty-two). Figures can
be used to avoid too many hyphens:
a 22-year-old
cyclist
(b) round
figures a thousand, two million
(c) numbers
which occur with per cent, especially
at the beginning of a sentence, but figures plus the % symbol are preferable in
the middle of a sentence and in notes and tables.
2 Use figures for:
(a) numbers
from 13 upwards
(b) before abbreviations:
2 kg
3 km
5
cc
6 pm (but six
o’clock)
(c) percentages,
except at the beginning of a sentence
(d) for dates, except in very formal writing
(e) in
addresses:
7 Becket Avenue
1234 Becket Drive
(f) for
exact sums of money:
£3.95
$2.63
3 The following conventions
should also be adhered to:
(a) Use a
comma after thousands and millions:
16,124
1,346,925
Full stops/periods are more
common in continental Europe:
16.124
1.346.925
(b) Place
the decimal point half-way up the number:
0·5
In continental Europe a comma is
used:
0, 5
(c) With
consecutive numbers, keep the last two digits:
12–14
234–48
1254–59
(d) Indicate
the plural of a figure with s: all the 3s
twelve 5s
1990s
(e) The
figure ‘0’ is normally called nought in
the UK and zero in the USA. It is
also referred to as 0 (pronounced oh) in a series of numbers:
My car registration number is six
nine oh. (UK) as zero in temperature measurements:
The temperature will fall below zero tonight. (UK and US)
as nil is sports matches:
Coventry lost two-nil. (UK) and as love in tennis matches:
She’s leading
forty-love. (UK and US)
In US English, there is a tendency to leave out and in such numbers as 105 and 250:
UK US
one hundred and five one hundred five
two hundred and fifty people two hundred fifty
people
The
symbol 
is frequently used to indicate number: number
thirty-five (UK) 
35 (US)
and throughout the English-speaking world megaton can be used for one million tons:
a twenty
megaton bomb
See: age,
billion, measurements, money, UK and US words.
object
Many verbs can co-occur with two
or three noun phrases:
John loved his
cat.
Mary wrote John a letter.
Such verbs are transitive, that is, they can take an object. Verbs like BRING, BUILD, GIVE,
MAKE, WRITE can take both a direct and an indirect object:
Subject Predicate Indirect Object Direct
Object
|
John |
built |
Mary |
a house. |
|
Mary |
gave |
him |
the money. |
An indirect object can be moved and preceded by the
prepositions for or to: John built a house for Mary.
Mary gave the money to him.
A direct object can be identified as follows:
1 It normally follows the predicate
in finite sentences:
I saw Penelope.
If, for stylistic purposes, the
object is foregrounded, then it precedes the subject as well as the predicate:
Penelope I saw.
2
There is no concordial agreement between the predicate and the object:
He loves his
cat.
He loves his cats.
3 It can
only occur with a non-passive predicate:
Subject Predicate Object The detective overheard the thief. The
thief was
overheard.
4 The
most frequently occurring objects are nouns:
I enjoy baseball.
noun phrases:
I have enjoyed
every single game.
and object pronouns:
The dog
followed me home.
The object pronouns are: me, him, her, us, them and whom. Other pronouns such as: you, it, this can occur as both subjects
and objects. Occasionally, the object can be a finite clause:
She described what she had seen.
I denied that I had said it.
or a non-finite
clause:
He wanted to go home.
They denied being involved.
5 The
object does not occur in question tags:
She saw him, didn’t she?
6 The
object relative pronoun may be omitted:
the letter that
I wrote
the letter which I wrote the letter I wrote
7 The
object may be omitted with pseudo-intransitive verbs:
He shaved (his
beard) this morning.
She wrote (a letter) to her
son. We usually eat (lunch) at noon.
See: transitive, verb phrase.
of, off
The words of and
off derive from the same Old English root and they are sometimes
confused or compounded in regional dialects:
The wind took
the roof from off of the house.
They are, however, clearly distinguished in the standard language.
Of is a preposition
which can be used to indicate position:
the bottom of the road
attributes:
the wisdom of
Solomon
origin or status:
the barber of Seville a man of means
material used:
a sword of
gold studded with precious stones
contents:
a cup of
coffee
cause:
She died of
pneumonia.
possession:
the wealth of
Croesus
relationships:
a cousin of my
father’s sister-in-law
part of a whole:
most of the
money
weights and measurements:
a pound of tomatoes
a metre of
this material
and time in the USA:
a quarter of
two (1:45)
When of occurs as an indicator of possession, it can often be replaced
by a structure involving an apostrophe+s:
a daughter of a king=a king’s
daughter daughters of kings=kings’
daughters
Such replacement is unlikely:
1 when the nouns involved are inanimate:
the leg of a table→the tableleg (*the table’s leg) 2 when
the phrase is idiomatic:
a hair of the dog (a drink)
the dog’s hair (literal)
Of occurs in
the structures: 1 NP+of+NP:
the time of your life
2
Adjective+of+NP:
hard of
hearing
3
Adverb+of+NP:
out of sight
4
VP+of+NP:
die of grief
Off can occur as an adverb:
The plane took off on time.
as a preposition:
They ran him
off the road.
and as an adjective:
an off day
Unlike of, off normally has locative force, implying distance or movement
away from something:
The house was
still ten miles off.
They moved off
quickly and were soon out of sight.
Thus, the off side of a car is the driver’s side (away from the kerb) while
the near side is the passenger’s side
(close to the kerb).
See: location.
okay
Okay (also written O.K., OK)
is widely used in informal language as an expression of agreement:
Will you take
it? Okay.
as an adjective:
He’s okay now.
as a noun:
We got his okay yesterday.
and as a verb:
I don’t think
he’ll okay the party.
There is no
satisfactory etymology for okay. Some linguists claim that it
derives from an abbreviation of oll korrect, a variant form of ‘all
correct’; others that it was borrowed from the O.K. Club which was founded in 1840 by supporters of a presidential
candidate who came from Old Kinderhook in New York; a few suggest that it is a
variant of the Scottish expression Och aye;
and Africanists have pointed out that many West African languages have
expressions of agreement such as oki, oka
and okai. Whatever the etymology,
the word, which was first recorded in the early nineteenth century, is one of
the most frequently used in the English language.
See: etymology.
Old English
Old English (also referred to as Anglo-Saxon) is the name given to the
varieties of English spoken in parts of England from about AD 450 to 1100 and
with written documents from the seventh century. Old English was composed of
Germanic dialects, derived from the dialects brought to Britain by the Angles,
Saxons and Jutes in the middle of the fifth century and mutually intelligible
with many Germanic dialects in Scandinavia and northwestern Europe. The Old
English dialects were highly inflected: all nouns, both animate and inanimate,
had grammatical gender, adjectives
agreed with the nouns they modified, predicates
agreed with subjects, and an elaborate system of case endings permitted considerable freedom of word order.
Many of the most frequently-used words in the language (child, man, woman, BE, COME, GO, bad, good,
full) derive from Old English, but the language changed dramatically
between 1100 and 1400: inflections and grammatical gender were largely lost and
much vocabulary was adopted from French. An indication of the fundamental
differences between Old English and contemporary varieties can be given by
juxtaposing a brief passage from the Gospel of St Mark in Old English with the
same passage from the New English Bible:
Old English Contemporary
English
Her ys godspellys angyn Hælyndes Cristes, Godes
Suna.
Swa awriten is on ðaes witegan bec Isaiam, ‘Nu ic
asende minne engel beforan ðinre ansyne, se gegearwað ðinne weg beforan ðe…’
Here begins the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of
God.
In the prophet Isaiah it stands written: ‘Here is my
herald whom I send on ahead of you, and he will prepare your way…’
