only
In popular usage, only is often placed in front of the
verb:
I only bought a coat.
or between the auxiliary and the
headverb:
I’ve only bought a coat.
In speech, we avoid potential ambiguity by emphasising the word that only relates to:
I’ve only
bought a coat.
(and not a Rolls Royce)
I’ve only bought a coat. (though I also fancied a skirt)
In the written
medium, however, it may not always be clear whether only modifies the subject, the predicate, the object or the adjunct. For precision, therefore, only should be placed immediately before
the sentence unit it modifies:
Only Jane got a rise last week. Jane only got a rise last week. Jane
got only a rise last week. Jane got a rise only last week.
Other
limiters that need to be treated similarly include even, exactly, just, merely, nearly
and simply.
See: adjunct,
ambiguity.
onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia is the use or creation of
words which denote an action or object by suggesting a sound associated with
the action or object. Thus, for example, buzz,
crunch, fizzle, hiss and hum convey
meaning largely through sound effects.
The link between sounds and meaning is usually completely arbitrary.
The chemical compound of hydrogen and oxygen is known variously as:
agua eau
wasser water uisce
and none of
these words bears more than a conventionalised connection with H2O.
Other words like cuckoo and peewit derive their form from the sounds
reputedly made by these birds. However, even onomatopoeic sounds can differ
from place to place: a dog barks bow wow in
some parts of the English-speaking world and wuff wuff in others; and an anglophone rooster begins the day with cock-a-doodle-doo whereas his West
African counterpart uses kukaruku.
A number of scholars have pointed out that certain sounds in English
regularly occur with a particular meaning. Thus sl- has unpleasant connotations in:
slime slink
slither slush
(although not in sleep and slim). Fl- and gl- are
respectively associated with movement and light:
flee flow flutter gleam glisten glow
and the vowel
sound in ‘hunt’ 
is usually associated with physical
effort, as in:
grunt munch
thump
When sounds or
combinations of sounds frequently occur with a specific meaning, the phenomenon
is referred to as sound symbolism.
Poets frequently use sound symbolism to reinforce their meanings. Thus
fricatives like /s, z, f, v/ occur when friction, effort or continuity of
movement is stressed, just as plosives like /p, b, t, d, k, g/ are often found
in war poetry.
Sound symbolism is most frequently used in English to appeal to the
ear, but it is occasionally used in connection with the other senses.
Expressions like yum yum can imply
that food tastes good, wolf whistles suggest appreciation of the female form
and yuch! is occasionally a response
to something that is unpleasant to the touch.
See: sound symbolism, synaesthesia.
oral tradition
Every
community in the world has a language and a literature, that is, a spoken or written compendium of significant
beliefs, laws, stories and traditions. All such literatures were originally
oral in that they existed only in the spoken medium and were passed down by
word of mouth from one generation to another. (There is a growing tendency to
use the word orature, from oral+literature,
for traditional wisdom found only in
the spoken medium.)
Since oral traditions could
easily be lost or forgotten, people have made extensive use of mnemonic devices
(memory aids) such as:
1 alliteration:
Look before you leap.
2 antithesis:
The old dog
for the hard road, and the pup for the path.
Easy killed and easy cured.
3 assonance:
A bird in the
hand is worth two in the bush.
4
repetition, of word or structure:
They hadn’t sailed a league, a league, A league but barely three,
When the sky
grew dark, the wind grew strong And gurly grew the sea.
5 rhyme:
An apple a day
Keeps the doctor away.
6 formulaic
openings and conclusions:
Once upon a
time…
And they lived
happily ever after.
See: literature.
orchestrate, organise
Orchestrate and organise have ostensibly similar meanings when they relate to
arranging events in an effective way. However, in media reports orchestrate is often used unfavourably
and organise favourably. This
tendency results in covert influence:
It was an orchestrated demonstration against the
government.
It was an organised event and passed off
peacefully.
See: connotation,
propaganda.
orthography
Orthography derives from Greek orthos (straight, upright)+graphos (writing) and it can refer to:
1
the study of a writing system or writing systems
2
the principles of spelling in a particular language or group of languages. See: morpheme, punctuation, spelling.
oxymoron
Oxymoron from Greek oxus (sharp)+moros (stupid) is a figure of speech
involving two semantically exclusive or contradictory terms:
devoted enemies false truth peaceful war
Oxymoron, like paradox, often features in poetry where
literal truth may be sacrificed to emotional impact.
See: figurative language, paradox.
Pakistani
English
Pakistan, which gained its independence
from the UK in 1947, has a population of approximately 93 million. Originally,
Pakistan (which is in part an acronym for
Punjabi+Afghan+Kurd+Sind) consisted of the modern state of Pakistan (West
Pakistan) and the state of Bangladesh (East Pakistan) but after the war of 1971
Bangladesh (population about 90 million) became an independent state. The
official languages of Pakistan and Bangladesh are Urdu and Bengali respectively,
but English is the most important non-indigenous language in both countries,
being used extensively in commerce, education, literature and international
dealings. The varieties of English used range from standard international
English with a local accent through mother-tongue-
influenced
forms to a limited type of English used by taxi-drivers, waiters and people
involved in the tourist industry.
Islam is a more significant force in Pakistan and Bangladesh than in
India and so there are more lexical items derived from Arabic and Urdu in the
English of Pakistan and Bangladesh than in India.
See: English in the Indian
Sub-Continent.
palindrome
Palindrome derives from Greek palindromos meaning ‘running back
again’. It involves an arrangement of letters and words giving the same message
backwards and forwards:
bib
Malayalam
radar
Able was I ere
I saw Elba. Eros saw Bob was sore. Madam, I’m Adam.
Todd eyed Dot.
Papua New Guinean English
Papua New Guinea, which was a United
Nations Protectorate known as ‘The Territories of Papua and New Guinea’, gained
independence from Australia in 1974. The country has a population of just over
3 million with some 700+ languages in daily use. English is one of the official
languages of the country, as is Tok Pisin (Talk Pidgin), an English- related
Pidgin, and it is the Pidgin rather than Standard English that is most
frequently used in Parliament, commerce and in much internal interaction.
Educated speakers from Papua New Guinea approximate to standard Australian English, although their
pronunciation usually reflects the patterns of their mother tongues. In
general, Papua New Guineans can be distinguished from Australians of similar
education in that they tend:
1 to use
fewer vowel contrasts, so that bit and
beat are often homophones
2 
to use fewer diphthongs, so that gate and take have /e/, rather than / /
3
to devoice voiced consonants at the end of a word, so that bead can
sound like bit
and bag like back
4 to
simplify consonant clusters
5
not to distinguish between he and
she
6
to use stative verbs with the progressive:
I am knowing him well.
7
to use prepositions differently:
We must voice
out our opinion.
I will discuss about this tomorrow. Are you aftering (i.e. following) him?
8
to use an invariable tag, isn’t it? or not so?
He has arrived, isn’t it?
9
to use vocabulary items from their own culture:
bilum (type
of woven bag) kunai (type of grass) taro (type of food)
10 to show
some influence from Tok Pisin.
Tok Pisin is lexically related to English but is not easily understood
by a mother- tongue speaker of English. It has an official orthography, is highly regarded by the government and is used for
many purposes in the country and in dealings with neighbouring countries like
the Solomon Islands, where a closely-related Pidgin exists. The simplest way of
highlighting the differences between Tok Pisin and English is to juxtapose a
verse from the Gospel of St Mark 1:6:
Tok Pisin Standard
English
Na Jon i save putim klos ol i bin wokim long gras
bilong kamel, na em i pasim let long namel bilong en.
And John was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a
girdle of skin about him.
See: Australian English, pidgins and creoles.
paradigm
Paradigm comes from Greek paradeiknynai meaning
‘show side by side’. In language studies, the word refers to a table which sets
out all the inflected forms of a part of
speech. Paradigms relating to nouns are called conjugations; those relating to verbs are called declensions.
Latin-based grammars of English used to
provide such paradigms for nouns as:
Singular Plural
Nominative lord lords
Vocative o
lord o lords
Accusative lord lords
Genitive
lord’s lords’
of
the lord of
the lords
Dative to/for the lord to/for
the lords Ablative by/with/from/in the lord by/with/from/in the lords
and for verbs:
Tense Singular Plural
First Person
Present
I sing we sing
Second Person you sing you
sing
Third Person
First Person
Past
He/she/it sings they sing
I
sang we sang
Second Person you sang you sang
Third Person
First Person
Future
he/she/it sang they sang I
shall sing we shall sing
Second Person you will sing you will
sing
Third Person he/she/it will sing
they will sing
Paradigms work well for inflected
languages such as Latin but are not particularly useful in illustrating
contemporary English.
See: case, case
grammar, grammar, inflection.
paradox
Paradox, from Greek para (beyond)+doxos (opinion), is a figure of speech
involving an apparent contradiction, as in Donne’s ‘Batter my heart’ sonnet:
…for I
Except you
enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Paradox is often used in religious
language, perhaps because it stresses the impossibility of expressing
attributes of the divine in human terms:
A man who
saves his life will lose it.
I am the beginning and the
end, the alpha and omega.
More recently,
the term paradox has been applied to
a person whose behaviour seems contradictory.
See: figurative
language, oxymoron.
paragraph
Paragraph derives from Greek paragraphein (write beside) and was a
system devised to draw attention to a section of text. Paragraphs developed in
prose in much the same way as stanzas developed in verse: to indicate a sequence.
Externally, a paragraph is a visual aid, signalling a step in an argument
or discussion. Internally, it should contain one central point supported by
homogeneous subject matter. Successive paragraphs should offer a sequence of
steps leading towards a conclusion.
There are no fixed rules as to the length or complexity of a paragraph.
Long paragraphs may be necessary in making coherent points in a philosophical
or formal essay. Short paragraphs may, on the other hand, be more suitable in letters and types of journalism where a
detailed examination of ideas and views is not
required.
A paragraph may be signalled by indenting the first word five letter
spaces or by leaving a double space between paragraphs, but not both.
See: argument.
paralinguistic features
Paralinguistic features are defined in two main
ways:
1
features of speech such as breathiness,
giggling, lisping, loudness, which are meaningful in terms of conveying
attitudes and responses, but are not as integrally involved in linguistic
messages (nor as fully studied) as intonation
2 the
gestures that acompany speech and include eye contact, posture and body
movements. Often these bodily accompaniments to speech are referred to as kinesics.
Paralinguisic features tend to be acquired as we learn language
(children, for example, usually have to be taught to keep quiet in church) and
they differ from country to country, often even from region to region. Some,
like laughing to express amusement and scratching the head to indicate
uncertainty, tend to be widespread, but others such as a victory ‘V’ sign are
more limited. Occasionally, the same gesture can mean different things. It is
rude in western society to stick out one’s tongue at visitors, although this
same gesture is reported to have been a mark of courtesy in ancient Tibet.
See: speech and writing.
parallelism
Parallelism is the arrangement and
repetition of linguistic elements for stylistic effect. Parallelism can apply
to sounds, vocabulary, syntax and semantics or to a combination of some or all
of these. It is regularly employed in poetry, oratory and persuasive language
and can be discussed in terms of:
1 assonance, the repetition of the same
vowel sounds. We can, for example, compare the words Bunyan, swung, strummed, one, sprung and up in:
When Bunyan
swung his whopping axe And forests strummed as one loud lute, And timber
crashed beside his foot And sprung up stretching in his tracks.
Richard Wilbur, ‘Folk-tune’ 2 alliteration,
the repetition of the same consonant:
Round and round the rugged rock the ragged rascal
ran.
3 metre, where the pattern of stressed and unstressed
syllables is regular, as in traditional ballad stanzas like:
I saw the old
moon late last night With the new one in its arm
And if we go
to sea, my lord I fear we’ll come to harm.
4
rhyme:
You’ll wonder
where the yellow went If you clean your teeth with Pepsodent.
5 morphology, where the same morpheme is repeated often with
expansion, as in the following extract from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:
…Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove.
6 lexis, where words are repeated
for emphasis, as in the following line from Milton’s
Samson Agonistes:
Dark, dark, dark, amid the light of day.
7 syntax, where similar sentence patterns may be used:
…if you prick
us do we not bleed? if you tickle us do we not laugh? if you poison us do we
not die?
Shakespeare, The
Merchant of Venice, III.i.58–60
8 semantics, where the same idea is repeated using
different lexical items. An example of this occurs when Macbeth (II.ii. 60–61)
suggests that no amount of water can wash the crime of murder from his hands,
but rather the blood will:
The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.
In ordinary
expository prose, parallelism can be regarded as a type of co-ordination, linking elements that are already logically
connected. Thus an adjective is parallel to another adjective, a noun to a noun
or a verb to a verb:
I felt foolish,
self-conscious and clumsy.
We all have homes and families to consider.
He huffed and he puffed and
he blew the house down.
a phrase to a
phrase:
She had an
Italian accent and an angelic expression.
and a clause
to a clause:
He is totally
consistent in what he says and how he does it.
Parallelism is a feature of similes:
dead as a
dodo/doornail
proverbs:
When trouble
comes in through the windows love goes out through the doors.
and underlies the mnemonic
devices in oral literature. See: alliteration,
assonance, metre, oral tradition.
paraphrase
Paraphrase from Greek paraphrazein (to recount) is an
alternative version of a text, a version that changes the form but not the content of an utterance. The paraphrase may
involve:
1 transformations such as:
Jack killed Jill.
Jill was killed (by Jack). the killing of Jill by Jack Jack’s killing
of Jill
2
producing a humorous version as with:
The Lord and I are in a shepherd/sheep situation, and I am in a
position of negative need.
for:
The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want.
3
producing an amplification of original
material: In the couplet:
If this be error, and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever
loved.
Shakespeare claims that if the
views which he has expressed in the previous twelve lines are wrong and can be
shown to be wrong, then it follows that neither he nor anyone else has ever
truly loved.
See: parody,
prรฉcis.
parody
Parody derives ultimately from Greek para (near)+oide (song) and refers to a composition which imitates the style of
a serious work for comic effect.
A parody may work by reproducing the form of a passage while changing the content
as in the following passage which imitates the form of the wedding
service:
Dearly beloved, we are come together here today to auction this vase
and this cup to the highest bidder. If they have once passed from their present
owners into a new home, it will be folly to revoke the bond. Therefore, let
anyone who knows of an impediment to the sale come forward. Let such a person
speak now or forever hold his peace.
Many poets have
been parodied, among them A.E.Housman. Housman’s structures are closely
followed in version A, whereas version B parodies the pessimism, the subject
matter and the use of ‘lad’:
Wake; the silver dust returning Up the beach of darkness brims And the
ship of sunrise burning Strands upon the Eastern rims.
Wake; the
vaulted shadow shatters, Trampled to the floor it spanned, And the tent of
night it tatters Straws the sky-pavillioned land.
A.E.Housman, ‘Reveille’
(A)
Rest; the
golden ball declining Over mountains gleaming red, And the galleon-moon
reclining Longs to raise her silken head.
Rest; the
vaunted daylight trembles Parted from the earth it held,
And the force
of night assembles, Darks the sun-tormented veld.
L.J.Todd
(B) What! still alive at twenty two, A clean
upstanding chap like you? Sure, if your throat’s hard to slit, Slit your girl’s
and swing for it.
Like enough
you won’t be glad When they come to hang you, lad; But bacon’s not the only
thing
That’s cured by hanging from a string.
Hugh Kingsmill
Some works
parody both the form and content. Fielding’s novel Shamela, for example, aimed to ridicule
Richardson’s Pamela in the title, in
the epistolary style and in the content. Whereas Pamela was meant to be a poor
but virtuous maiden whose virtue was eventually rewarded by an offer of
marriage from the Squire, Shamela achieved the same end by carefully exploiting
her attractions.
Usually, a parody focuses on one specific piece, but types can also be
ridiculed. Jane Austen satirises Gothic novels in Northanger Abbey, and modern love songs are occasionally parodied
by the selection of over-used rhymes such as ‘moon/June/spoon/tune’,
‘kiss/bliss’ and ‘tender/surrender’.
For maximum effect, parody depends on the addressee having some
knowledge of the work being ridiculed.
See: irony, paraphrase, satire.
participle
Traditional grammarians referred to the
verb forms ending in -ing which
followed the
progressive auxiliary BE as present participles, for example, ‘singing’ in:
They are singing.
The verb forms
that followed the auxiliary HAVE and the passive auxiliary BE were called past participles:
She has arrived.
We weren’t seen.
Many modern linguists prefer
the terms -ing forms and -en forms because so-called
present participles can be used adjectivally:
the swaying trees
and
do not have to refer to the present:
He was travelling all day yesterday.
Similarly, so-called past participles can be used
adjectivally:
the forsaken merman
and need not refer to the past:
She will be employed from the first day of next month.
See: auxiliary,
gerund, -ing forms.
parts of
speech
Traditional grammars were based
on Greek and Latin models and the following parts of speech were taken over and
applied to English:
Adjective (e.g. pretty)
Adverb (e.g. quickly)
Article (e.g. the) Conjunction (e.g. and)
Interjection (e.g. wow) Noun (e.g.
house) Preposition (e.g. in) Pronoun (e.g.
we) Verb (e.g. arrive)
and defined in such ways as:
An adjective qualifies or describes a noun.
An adverb modifies a verb.
An article is
an adjective-like word. There are three articles in English, the definite
article the and the indefinite
articles a and an.
A conjunction is a joining word.
An interjection is an
exclamatory word that expresses emotion. A noun is the name of a person,
animal, place or thing.
A preposition is a word placed in front of a noun or pronoun to show
the relationship of that noun (or pronoun) to other elements in the sentence.
A pronoun
is a word that can replace a noun.
A verb is a doing word. It may express an action, a state or condition.
Modern linguists have criticised traditional definitions. Redundancy is a noun in:
Most workers worry about
redundancy.
but it is hardly the name of a
person, animal, place or thing. Equally, the pronoun he does not replace just the noun in:
The tired old
man in the threadbare clothes walked home.
He walked home.
It replaces the
entire noun phrase, ‘the tired old man in the threadbare clothes’. Contemporary
linguists prefer to look at the form and
functions of units in speech and
offer definitions based on such criteria. Nouns, for example, tend to form
their written plurals by adding -s (occasionally
-es):
window windows potato potatoes
and they tend
to fit into such test frames as:
 |
Using the
criteria of form and function we can distinguish two main types of words in
English: open sets which contain a
large, potentially infinite number of units and closed sets which contain a finite set of units. The open set
contains four classes: nouns, verbs,
adjectives, adverbs; the closed set contains six: determiners, pronouns,
auxiliaries, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections/ exclamations. This list
is not dissimilar to the one provided by traditional grammarians. Perhaps the
greatest difference between traditional and modern grammarians is the
insistence of the latter group that a word can only be fully classified by
examining the ways in which it can function. For example, although the is usually an article (determiner),
it can function as a noun in such a
sentence as:
I can’t find a
single the in that entire passage.
See: class, multifunctionality.
pass, passed,
past
The word pass when used as a verb is regular in
form:
pass passes passing passed have passed
Past is not a verb but can function as an adjective:
I’ve been very
busy this past year.
an adverb:
They walked past without saying a word.
a noun:
He lives in
the past.
and as a preposition:
She ran past the entrance.
The use of past as a verb in such sentences as:
*We past the time playing cards.
is incorrect and unacceptable.
passive voice
Transitive verbs (i.e. verbs which can take objects) can occur in two types of
sentences: A The cat chased the mouse.
B The mouse
was chased (by the cat).
A-type
sentences are called active and it
will be noticed that the subject is typically the agent or instigator of the
action or event. B-type sentences are called passive and they are usually characterised as follows:
1
The subject is typically the recipient of the action.
2
The predicate involves BE+the past participle of the headverb. 3 The agent
need not be mentioned:
The mouse was
chased.
When the agent is not specified, we have what is
called a truncated or non-agentive
passive.
4
The agent, when present, is introduced by by.
5 The
rule for transforming an active into a passive sentence is:
 |
In colloquial
speech, GET rather than BE can occur in passives:
He got beaten up.
We’ll get massacred.
See: active voice, ergative, participle, transformations, voice.
patois
This term,
pronounced /'patwa/, originally referred to non-metropolitan French. Gradually,
it was expanded to mean:
1
a nonstandard dialect of French
2 a
French creole such as the variety
spoken in Martinique
3
a creole, irrespective of its lexical source
language. Many speakers of Jamaican creole refer to their mother tongue as
‘patois’.
4 a
regional dialect
5
a special language of an occupation or group
A patois like a dialect differs from the standard
language in phonology (sounds and sound patterns), morphology (the forms words
can take), vocabulary and syntax. All of these differences can be seen if we
juxtapose a Jamaican creole sentence with its English equivalent:
Di nyam a fi
mii. (The
food is mine.)
See: dialect, pidgins and creoles, West Indian English.
perfect
Traditional grammarians referred
to structures involving HAVE+ Ven as perfect tenses
thus:
I have gone—present perfect
he had gone—past perfect (also ‘pluperfect’)
we shall have gone—future perfect
to have gone—perfect infinitive
Modern linguists refer to
the structure involving HAVE+Ven as perfect aspect rather than perfect
tense because tense relates
strictly to time whereas aspect refers to the continuity of an
action or to its completion.
See: aspect, tense.
period
The period (USA) or full stop (UK) is appropriate in the following positions:
1 at the
end of sentences: sentences that are not exclamations or questions are closed
with a period.
2
to end footnotes.
Footnotes, even when they do not contain a verb, are conventionally treated
like full sentences.
3 for ellipsis: three spaced periods.
4 for abbreviations that end with a lower
case letter, e.g. Lat. for Latin. (There is a growing tendency to
reduce periods in abbreviations.)
5
with parentheses. The position of the period
should suit the sense.
6
in quotations: US practice includes commas
and periods within quotation marks:
He is puzzled
by ‘The Waste Land.’
UK practice prefers the period
outside the quotation marks but this practice varies according to publishers’
house styles.
7 after
verbless proverbs or well-known expressions:
Always a
bridesmaid, never a bride.
One man, one vote.
8
between dollars and cents, pounds and pence:
$5.95
£4.21
The period should not be used:
1 after a title, such as that
of an essay or book, unless the title ends the sentence:
*Far from the Madding Crowd. is a great book.
I really
enjoyed Far
from the Madding Crowd.
2 after footnote numbers
3 at the
end of items in a table
4
after an abbreviation which has a period or
after a period, exclamation mark or question mark which appears in quotation
marks or italicised at the end of a sentence:
The article was called ‘John Brown Esq.’ She was a journalist employed
by Which?
See: abbreviations, ellipsis, numbers,
punctuation.
periodic sentence
A periodic sentence is a complex, formal
structure that reserves an essential piece of information, usually contained in
the main clause, for the end of the sentence. Early writers of English prose
often imitated the Ciceronian period (or sentence) which compressed an entire
argument into one sentence. The following sentence from Milton’s Of Reformation in England (1642)
illustrates the technique:
Then, amidst the hymns and hallelujahs of saints, some one may perhaps
be heard offering at high strains in new and lofty measure to sing and
celebrate thy divine mercies and marvellous judgments in this land throughout
all ages, whereby this great and warlike nation, instructed and inured to the
fervent and continual practice of truth and righteousness, and casting far from
her the rags of her old vices, may press on hard to that high and happy
emulation to be found the soberest, wisest and most Christian people at that day,
when thou, the eternal and shortly expected King, shalt open the clouds to
judge the several kingdoms of the world, and distribute national honours and
rewards to religious and just commonwealths, shalt put an end to all earthly
tyrannies, proclaiming thy universal and mild monarchy throughout heaven and
earth; where they undoubtedly, that by their labours, counsels and prayers,
have been earnest for the common good of religion and their country, shall
receive above the inferior orders of the blessed, the regal addition of
principalities, legions and thrones into their glorious titles, and in
supereminence of beatific vision, progressing the dateless and irrevoluble
circle of eternity, shall clasp hands with joy and bliss in overmeasure for
ever.
Although long
periodic sentences have remained prestigious in serious prose writings, they
are rare in contemporary prose. When used skilfully as a rhetorical device, a
periodic sentence produces a climax, as in the following advice offered to
readers by Francis Bacon:
Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for
granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
Parallelism
is often used to support the periodic technique.
See: foregrounding,
parallelism, rhetoric
periphrasis
Periphrasis, from Greek peri (around)+phrazein (to declare), is, like circumlocution, a method of expressing
something in a roundabout way:
He gave a
positive response.
for:
He said yes.
Periphrasis is often found in pidgins and creoles:
gras bilong
hed (hair=grass
belong head)
pikinini bilong diwai (fruit=children
belong tree) See: circumlocution,
gobbledygook, pidgins and creoles.
person
When person is used in a linguistic context it refers to the marking of
the relationships between participants in discourse. In English, distinctions
of person are made in the set of pronouns:
|
First person
singular ‘speaker’ |
= I |
|
First
person plural ‘speaker+others’ |
= we |
|
Second
person singular ‘addressee’ |
= you |
|
Second
person plural ‘addressees’ |
= you |
|
Third
person singular ‘person referred to’ |
= he/she |
|
Third person singular
‘thing refered to’ |
= it |
Third person plural ‘people/things referred to’ =
they
English
indicates person in the verb in the non-past tense, where the first and second
persons singular and the first, second and third persons plural take the base
form of the verb:
I/you/we/they
love.
and
a third person singular subject takes -s/-es:
He/She/It/The friend loves.
He/She/It/The
friend watches.
See: pronoun, speaker orientation, speech and writing, verb.
phatic communion
Bronislaw Malinowski created the term phatic communion to describe the language used by people to
establish bonds rather than to exchange information. In phatic communion, it is not so much what one says as that one
speaks which is significant. In English, phatic communion often involves
comments on the weather, on one’s general health or one’s family:
Nice day!
How are you?
And the family?
A great deal of
our conversation with people we do not know well is of the phatic variety.
Silence may be golden when we are in the company of intimate friends but it can
be threatening or offensive when we are with strangers or acquaintances.
Most societies have stylised
phatic courtesies for greetings:
Hello! Hi!
Good morning!
introductions:
This is my
brother, John.
How are you?/How do you do?
requests:
Could you let us have the
order immediately?
polite orders:
Would you mind
shutting the door, please?
excuses:
I’m sorry I’m
late. There was more traffic than I expected.
thanks:
Thank you very much.
You’re
welcome./Don’t mention it.
and for
farewells:
See you soon.
Have a nice
day.
The form of the
courtesy may vary in different regions but the need for such formulaic
utterances is felt by all communities.
See: fillers,
paralinguistic features.
phenomenon
The word phenomenon derives from the Greek verb phainein (to show). Its plural is phenomena, a form which is sometimes
incorrectly used as a singular. (A similar misuse occurs with criterion/criteria.)
In early uses, phenomenon was
a philosophical term meaning ‘something that is perceived by the senses’ but
its meaning has been extended to include:
1 an occurrence or fact that is
of scientific value and worthy of study 2 an unusual event, fact or occurrence
3 any notable fact, person or occurrence See: plurals of nouns.
Philippine English
The Philippines, made up of a group of
approximately 7,000 islands, has a population of just over 48 million, 52% of
whom claimed in the 1980 census that they could speak English. This would make
the Philippines the third largest English-speaking country in the world after
the USA and the UK. The country was a Spanish colony from 1565 to 1898 when, as
a result of the Spanish-American War of 1898, it was occupied and governed by
the USA until independence was granted on 4 July, 1946.
It is not clear how many indigenous languages are spoken in the
Philippines but the number is unlikely to be lower than 85 and may well
approach 300. A local vernacular, Tagalog, was selected as a national language
in 1937, taught as a subject in all primary
and secondary
schools from 1946 and renamed Pilipino in
1959. In 1973, parliament decided to form a common national language, to be
called Filipino. This was a
standardised, common-core variety of Tagalog and this language is gradually
replacing English in certain domains, including early education and local
business transactions.
Philippine English is based on Standard US norms. The extent of the influence of the mother tongues usually
depends on the length and the quality of a speaker’s education.
Phonology
1 The articulatory setting tends to be dental
rather than alveolar (as in the USA) and all words involving the sounds /t, d,
s, z, l, r, n, t∫, 
/ are
affected.
2 Word-initial
/p, t, k/ are usually not aspirated and so native speakers of English often
mistake words
like pet, tin and cull for bet, den and gull.
3
Word final /b, d, g/ tend to be devoiced and
heard as /p, t, k/. 4 The consonants /f, v/ are usually replaced by /p, b/:
five>paib
and /t, d/
are regularly substituted for /ฮธ, รฐ/:
thing>ting then>den
5
Only voiceless sibilants occur with the
result that /s/ is substituted for /z/:
hens>/hฮตns/ and /∫/ for 
rouge>/ru∫/
6 Post-vocalic
r is favoured but the /r/ is a flap
rather than a continuant.
7
Consonant
clusters tend
to have intrusive vowels when they occur in initial position:
school>eschool string>sitring
and to be reduced in word-final
position:
banned>ban friends>frien(s)
often leading to errors of tense
or agreement.
8 There is no regular distinction between /i/ and 
as in beat and bit, /u/
and 
as in pool and pull and 
and 
as in got and goat.
9 Philippine English tends to be syllable-timed rather than stresstimed and so there is
little vowel reduction and many
disyllabic and polysyllabic words are accented on syllables which are usually
unaccented in US English:
'achieve
'deceive
'deco'rate
10 Wh-questions,
like yes/no questions, have a rising intonation.
Vocabulary
1
Many words associated with local culture have
been absorbed into Philippine English:
buko (type of lollipop) sarisari (food store) tao (ordinary
person)
Others have been taken over from
Spanish:
career (college course)
carretela (horse-drawn vehicle)
2
English words are used with a local meaning:
jeepney (modified jeep used
for public transport)
stepbrother (half-brother)
stepsister (half-sister) 3
Different phrasal verbs occur:
It’s up for you. (i.e. up to you)
He was sounding off his ts and ds. (i.e.
sounding) 4 Many mass nouns are treated as countable:
advices hairs furnitures informations
Grammar
1
The articles
the/a/an have a different
distribution. When the noun is non-specific, there is a tendency to avoid
articles:
Everyone has
car now.
Majority of the respondents answered no.
Where
it is specific but unknown to the listener one
is often preferred to a/an: He has bought one beautiful house.
Often
this is preferred to the: She spent all this money.
2
The word order of direct speech is often used in indirect speech:
I don’t know where is he.
He is asking where did you get
your bag.
3
Often aspect,
rather than tense, is
emphasised:
He is going every day. (US He goes every day.)
She has visited me yesterday. (US She visited me yesterday.) 4
There is often lack of agreement between subject and predicate:
He usually come here on Mondays.
5 Often third person singular
pronouns and possessive adjectives are used without regard to gender:
My mother he buy me one
fine dress.
She gave me his address. (i.e. her
address) Sec: US English.
philology
Philology, coming from Greek philos
(friend)+logia (learning) and
meaning ‘love of learning’, was originally applied to the study of:
1 literature (often literature of
an earlier period) 2 the language used in the literature.
Today, the
term is most frequently applied to the scientific study of language and
particularly to the study of the changes undergone by a language over a period
of time.
See: etymology.
phoneme
A phoneme is usually defined as the smallest significant unit in the
sound system of a language. There are three phonemes in each of the following
words:
pin 
beef /bif/
shed /∫ฮตd/
Each language has its own set of
distinctive sounds which can be arrived at by studying minimal pairs such as:
pit and bit revealing /p/ and /b/
pin and pen revealing 
and
/ฮต/
pin and pick revealing /n/ and /k/
These words are only
differentiated, in each case, by one distinct sound or phoneme.
See: phonetics,
phonology.
phonetics
Phonetics is the scientific study of speech sounds. It provides a
systematic method of describing and transcribing all the sounds of all
languages.
The chief
organs of speech are the lips, teeth, tongue, palate, uvula, pharynx, vocal
cords and lungs, and the mobile organs are in constant movement when we speak.
There are two main types of speech sound: consonants and vowels.
Consonants are formed when the airstream is restricted at some point. At each
point of contact two consonants can be formed: a voiceless consonant, made when
the vocal cords are open and not vibrating, and a voiced consonant, made when
the vocal cords vibrate. Consonants are defined in terms of:
1
their place of
articulation.
In English, the main points of articulation are bilabial (involving the two lips as with /p/), labio-dental (involving lip and teeth as with /f/), alveolar (involving the alveolus or
ridge behind the top teeth and the tongue as with /t/), palatal (involving the tongue and the hard palate as with /j/), velar (involving the tongue and the the
soft palate as with /g/) and glottal (involving
the glottis as with /h/).
2
their manner
of articulation. The chief subdivisions for English
are:
(a) Plosives or stops.
These involve complete closure of the mouth. The air pressure builds up and is
released with plosion. (US descriptions prefer the term stop.) There are three sets of plosives in English:
/p,
b/—bilabial plosives (pit, bit)
/t,
d/—alveolar plosives (tin, din)
/k, g/—velar plosives (cull, gull)
(b) Fricatives. These involve incomplete
closure in the mouth. The sounds are made with audible friction. English has
the following fricatives:
/f,
v/—labio-dental (fine, vine)
/ฮธ, รฐ/—dental
(thin, then)
 |
/s, z/—alveolar (sing, zing)
/h/—glottal (hat)
(c) Approximants. These involve a degree of
narrowing but no audible friction. These consonants are sometimes referred to
as ‘frictionless continuants’ or ‘semi-vowels’. English has the following approximants:
/j/—voiced palatal (yes)
/w/—voiced labio-velar (wet)
/r/—voiced alveolar (red).
(The r sound is pronounced
differently in different regions. In the USA it tends to be retroflex, in
Scotland trilled or rolled. In Received
Pronunciation it initiates syllables only and does not occur after a
vowel.)
(d) Laterals. These sounds are made when the air pressure
is blocked by the tip of the tongue but allowed to escape around the sides of
the tongue. Occasionally, l is
classified as an approximant.
/l/—voiced alveolar lateral
(e) Affricates. These sounds involve complete closure as
for plosives, followed by a slow release of air. The English affricates are:
 |
(f) Nasals. These sounds are made by diverting the airstream
through the nose. There are three voiced nasals in English:
/m/—bilabial
nasal (dim)
/n/—alveolar
nasal (din)
/ล/—velar nasal (ding)
Vowels cannot
be defined by touch because they demand an open passage in the mouth. The
following vowels occur in Received Pronunciation and in General American English:
RP GAE monophthongs
1 I i —long,
front vowel
(bee, ease, keep)
2
—short, front vowel
(in, kit)
3 ฮ ฮต —short,
front vowel
(epsilon, get)
4 ร รฆ —short,
front vowel
(apple, hat)
5 
—long, back vowel
(arm, palm)
6 
—short, back vowel
(operate, got)
7 
—long, back vowel
(awe, lawn, saw)
8 
—short, back vowel
(foot, put)
9
U u —long, back vowel
(boom, true)
10
—short, central vowel
(up, strut)
11
ะ ะทr —long,central vowel
(urge, church, fur)
12 
—short,
central vowel, called ‘schwa’ (the)
RP GAE Diphthongs
13 —narrow
diphthong
(age, cape, day)
14 
—narrow diphthong
(over, home, go)
15 
—wide diphthong
(I, file, sty)
16 
—wide diphthong
(owl, loud, allow)
17 
—wide
diphthong
(oil, join, toy)
diphthongs in RP only
18 
—narrow diphthong
(ear, hear)
19 ฮตr —narrow diphthong
(air, hair)
20 
ฮตr —narrow diphthong
(short, war)
21 
—narrow diphthong
(sure, poor)
Every language
has its own distinct set of phonemes and each variety of English has a
distribution of sounds that differs to some extent from the system described
above.
See: articulatory setting, phoneme, pronunciation.
phonology
Phonology is the scientific study of
sounds and sound patterns in a particular language. The phonology of an
individual language describes the unique patterns into which the phonemes of
that language can be arranged.
See: phoneme, phonetics.
