substantial, substantive
Substantial is an adjective meaning
‘real, true, actually in existence, considerable in quantity or size or
importance, most but not all’:
a substantial house/part of the
inheritance
Substantive can be used as an
adjective and a noun. As an adjective, it means ‘having a separate existence,
real not apparent, enduring, relating to the essence of a thing’:
We need substantive and not just cosmetic improvements in sales.
Recently, substantive has taken on the meaning of
‘relating to matters of national or international concern’:
The East-West arms
negotiators had substantive talks
this morning.
Substantive is used linguistically to refer to BE:
The BE verb
has been called the existential verb, the essive verb and the
substantive verb.
and as a synonym for noun:
There are two substantives in the sentence ‘Bears
love honey’.
The term substantive universals is applied to categories or features thought
to occur in all natural languages. It is thus applied to:
1
units such as S (sentence), VP (verb phrase)
2 features such as ‘+animate’, ‘+human’.
See: problem
pairs.
substitution
When linguists
postulate the existence of such classes as nouns
and prepositions, or the
relationships between classes, they attempt to support their hypotheses by
offering evidence. Much of the evidence offered involves such operations as:
1
insertion:
I am fond of
Tom.>I am very
fond of Tom.
2 deletion:
We must do our best.>We do our best.
3
permutation (or transposition):
I’ll try again
soon.>Soon I’ll try again.
4
substitution. This is the process of
replacing one unit by another:
The big black
cat sat on the mat.>It sat on the mat.>It sat there.
The ability to
substitute ‘it’ for ‘the big black cat’ helps to illustrate the fact that pronouns can be substituted for noun
phrases. The fact that ‘there’ can replace ‘on the mat’ supports the view that
‘on the mat’ is an adverbial phrase.
Substitution frames can be used to show the different types of units
that can occur in certain roles. The object of a sentence, for example, may be
a pronoun, a noun phrase, a proper noun, a clause or a non-finite verb form:
He wanted this.
He wanted all the food. He wanted Bonio.
He wanted whatever he could get. He wanted to smoke.
All the units that can occur in
a certain position in a structure form a substitution
class.
See: anaphora, auxiliary, pronoun, question tag.
such
Like so, such has a variety of
functions, the chief of these being as an intensifier and as a substitute for
other units.
1 Such frequently occurs as an
intensifier. The form such occurs
before uncountable nouns and such a before
countable nouns:
We had such good fun!
You’ve never seen such a crowd!
Such does not co-occur with the definite article or with
demonstrative or possessive adjectives:
*the/these/his such
beautiful children
and the pattern for a countable
noun in a negative construction is often ‘no+such+noun’:
We have no such passenger.
2
Such may be used as a pronoun in
formal discourse:
He was
quixotic, witty and optimistic. Such was
his disposition, but his circumstances were in sombre contrast.
3 Such-and-such can occur in informal speech
to avoid being specific:
He said such-and-such a
thing often.
4 Such as may introduce examples:
Nouns may be
derived from place names, such as ‘cashmere’
(Kashmir), ‘denim’ (de Nîmes) or ‘jersey’ (Jersey Island).
Such as is regarded as being more formal, and in the written medium
more correct, than
like:
Certain
adjectives such as (like) ‘mere’
only occur before nouns and not in constructions such as ‘It was…’
5 The
term suchlike as in:
They may find drugs, smoking and suchlike
activities not only distracting but very easy to participate in.
is generally regarded as
colloquial or nonstandard. It should be avoided in writing or careful speech.
See: as, pro forms, so.
suffix
A suffix is
a morpheme which is added to a stem
or root:
rude+ness→rudeness
Suffixes can be used
derivationally, that is, in the formation of new words which may belong to
different classes:
grand (adj)+eur>grandeur (n)
subtract (v)+ion>subtraction (n)
They may also be used
inflectionally, that is, in distinguishing between singular and plural nouns:
pencil pencil+s
between different verb forms:
look look+s look+ed look+ing
and in marking degrees in
adjectives and adverbs:
great great+er great+est fast fast+er fast+est
See: affix, prefix, word formation.
suprasegmental
A suprasegmental is a feature of speech
which applies to more than one sound segment. Stress, nasality or loudness, for
example, may affect an entire utterance.
See: phonetics,
stress.
syllable
A syllable is a unit of language which can
occur in isolation. In speech, it is often the equivalent of a morpheme in that it is usually larger
than a sound but smaller than a word. Syllables in English may consist of:
1 a vowel
alone (V): a, for example, in alone
2
a consonant+a vowel (CV): de in
delight
3 two
consonants+a vowel (CCV): dry in drying
4 three
consonants+a vowel (CCCV): scree in screeching
5 a
syllabic consonant, that is, nasals and laterals in words such as:
button
cattle
6
a consonant+a vowel+a consonant (CVC): cat
7
patterns involving CCVCC (spurt), CCCVC (sprig), CCCVCC
(sprint), CCCVCCC
(sprints) and CCCVCCCC (strengths) also occur.
In the written
medium, we can hyphenate syllables and this is usually done by dividing words
as follows:
beside be-side betting bet-ting costing cos-ting loving lo-ving
It will be
noticed that the syllable in the written medium does not exactly match the
morpheme. Conventionally, we divide a word before a consonant when only one
consonant occurs (bi-ting), between consonants when two occur (bat-ting,
bas-ting) and after the second consonant when three or more occur
(streng-then). Some linguists and publishers prefer to equate the syllable with
the morpheme, producing cost-ing,
lov-ing,
bit-ing, bast-ing and strength-en. Such a
method, however, runs into problems with words such as batt-ing.
Some languages are referred to as syllable-timed
because syllables tend to occur at regular intervals of time whereas stresses occur randomly. English is a stress-timed language because stresses
occur at regular intervals with a random number of syllables occurring between
stresses.
See: metre, morpheme, stress.
syllepsis
Syllepsis, from Greek syllepsis (taking
together), is a figure of speech with two overlapping uses:
1 It can refer to a syntactic relationship where a number of words
depend on one word only but this word cannot agree with all of them in number:
It is doubtful
if John or the children know.
or gender:
Janet and John
each have his/her/their responsibilities.
2 It is often used as a synonym for zeugma,
that is, the application of a word to two or more other words, often with
one meaning being literal and the other metaphorical:
He opened his house and his heart to his
new family.
See: figurative language, polysemy.
synaesthesia
Synaesthesia comprehends the study of two linguistic phenomena:
1
the correlation between sounds and meaning.
Certain sounds and sound combinations can evoke a particular reaction. Human
nouns ending in -ard, for example,
are often pejorative (bastard,
coward, laggard); words involving high front vowels (/i/
and 
) often imply closeness or smallness (here, this, bit, little); colloquial
adjectives ending in -ky can suggest
criticism (cocky, kinky, wonky); and
abstract nouns ending in - ery are
often unfavourable (flattery, mockery, and trickery).
2
the transference of meanings from one sensory
domain to another. Thus, the adjective sharp
relates to the sense of touch but can be applied to sound (flats and sharps) and to taste (a sharp sauce); and sound adjectives
like loud are frequently applied to
colour (a loud yellow). Of all the
senses, smell seems to have fewest descriptive adjectives directly relating to
it (acrid, pungent) and tends to use
taste adjectives instead (a sweet smell).
There seem to be regular patterns in the transfer of adjectives from one
sensory domain to another, with touch adjectives being most mobile and
adjectives of smell being least mobile:
 |
Meanings can, of course, be
transferred from sensory domains to other fields:
a cold nature
a sharp mind a blue movie
This phenomenon is a subdivision of metaphor.
See: metaphor,
onomatopoeia, sound symbolism.
syncope
Syncope, pronounced 
from Greek synkope (cutting short), refers to the loss of one or more sounds
or letters from the middle of a word:
boatswain is
pronounced bosun coxswain is pronounced coxun
Syncope is frequent in British
pronunciations of names:
Featherstonehaugh is
pronounced Fanshaw Worcester is pronounced Wooster
See: aphesis, apocope, clipping, epenthesis.
synecdoche
Synecdoche, pronounced 
is from Greek synekdoche (interpretation). It is a figure of speech in which a
significant part is used to represent the whole:
The hand (the mother) that
rocks the cradle rules the world. or the whole is used to represent a part:
The union (some members) voted
to return to work. or the name of a material is used for the object it was
used for:
He trod the boards (the stage) for forty years.
Many people confuse synecdoche and metonymy
because they are both figures of speech in which one noun represents
another. The difference is that with synecdoche the equated nouns bear a
special relationship to each other:
A is part of B (as hand is of human being) A includes B (as union
does members)
A was used in making B (as stage is made of boards)
With metonymy,
one noun (A) is used for another (B) when A is closely associated with B, thus crown for monarch in:
The Gambia was
once a crown colony.
