ago
Ago is a temporal marker which links a
time in the past with the present:
I first saw
her five years ago.
That happened
a long time ago.
It thus does not usually collocate
with non-past or aspectual verb forms. These tend to co- occur with since and for:
It is five
years since I saw her.
I have not seen her for five years.
Ago can take a following clause:
It was five
years ago that we met.
but it should not be used with since:
*It was/is
five years ago since we met.
because since involves looking at the present from a point in the past:
It is twelve years since we first met.
and ago reverses the viewpoint:
We first met twelve years ago.
See: since.
agreement
Agreement involves a type of harmonisation between different parts
of a language. Thus in English we have:
The boy sings.
The boys sing.
but never:
*The boy sing.
*The boys
sings.
In French, determiners
and adjectives agree with the nouns they modify and so we have:
la fermière française le fermier français
There is
comparatively little agreement left in contemporary English. With the exception
of the Verbs BE, HAVE and to a much lesser extent DO, we find it only in the
non-past tense where a third person singular subject triggers off the use of a
change in the verb:
I/you/we/they run he/she/it run+s
Such agreement
is not found in the past tense, where all subjects
take the same verb form:
I/you/he/we/they
ran
Often,
subject complements are in agreement with both subject and predicate:
John is a good boy.
John and his
brothers are good boys. It wasn’t my dog.
They weren’t my dogs.
It is,
however, possible to find sentences such as:
His collected papers are now
a book.
His feet are his greatest asset.
It is the subject which determines the
agreement in the predicate.
Similarly, object complements tend to show agreement with the object:
He called his son a fool.
He called his sons fools.
although this
does not happen when the complement is a proper noun:
He called the city Georgetown.
He called the cities Georgetown.
In recent grammatical
analyses the term concord is often
preferred to agreement.
See: complement,
concord, modality.
ain’t
Ain’t is one of the most widespread
nonstandard forms in the language, occurring as a regional and class variant
throughout the English-speaking world. It has many roles, being used as an
undifferentiated non-past negative form
of BE:
I/you/he/we/they
ain’t here no more.
I/you/he/we/they ain’t saying nothing.
as an
undifferentiated auxiliary where the
standard language requires HAVE:
I/you/he/we/they ain’t got
no more money. I/you/he/we/they ain’t been
out all week.
and it is
also found without an overt subject in some varieties of US speech:
Ain’t no joke.
Ain’t occurs most frequently in the
spoken medium but it has been employed by fiction writers as a stereotyping
word to signal a speaker’s low social status or regional origins. In Great Expectations, for example, Dickens
uses a literary variant an’t as a
linguistic device to emphasise Joe Gargery’s humble status:
And I a’nt a master-mind…
and Mark Twain employs ain’t as one of the characterising
elements in the speech of Tom in Tom
Sawyer Abroad:
Why the Holy Land—there ain’t but one.
Occasionally ain’t is adopted by educated speakers as
a marker of solidarity. President Reagan successfully used the slogan:
You ain’t seen
nothin’ yet.
in his 1984
presidential campaign.
See: nonstandard
English, speech in literature, style.
alienable, inalienable
Many languages
distinguish between possession which
is transitory and non-essential, for example a spoon, and possession which is
permanent or essential, for example a leg. Possessions of the first kind are alienable whereas those of the second
kind are inalienable. Gaelic makes
this distinction overt in such structures as:
mo chuid eadaigh (lit. my share of clothes)
mo chuid gruaige (lit. my share of hair)
and:
m’anam (my soul)
mo chos (my foot/leg)
where any possession that can be
lost can be prefixed by the equivalent of ‘share of’. Family, friends and
religion are treated as inalienable.
English does not mark this type of distinction overtly except in the
organisation of adjectives which co-occur to modify a noun. If we look at noun phrases such as:
poor old Joe
ancient
Egyptian architecture the nice little fat Corgi pup
we see that the
more permanent the characteristic/attribute the closer it comes to the noun it
modifies. Poverty, for example, is more easily counteracted than age and the
pup’s most inalienable characteristic is its
Corgi-ness.
The distinction between alienable and inalienable possession is not as
clearly marked in English as in other languages although some speakers of US English use the variants got and gotten to mark alienability:
I’ve got two
brothers. (inalienable)
I’ve gotten two trucks. (alienable)
See: bring/take, location, speaker
orientation.
