Central African English
None of the
three countries which together form ‘Central Africa’ had English as a colonial
language. The 34 million people of the Central African Republic, Zaire and the
Congo still employ French as their official language but English is taught as
the second foreign language in all schools. The English of this region
resembles that of West Africa, especially countries such as Cameroon, where
French is an official language.
See: African
English, Cameroon English, West African English.
cheap, cheaply
In theory,
the distinction between these two forms is clear: cheap is an adjective and
cheaply an adverb:
He wanted to
buy a cheap car.
He sold it cheaply to get
rid of it.
Increasingly,
however, cheap is used colloquially
as an adverb:
He got it cheap.
and a number
of young speakers refuse to accept:
He got it cheaply.
as an alternative. It is possible that cheaply will gradually disappear from the language and that the
same form will function as both adjective and adverb just as forms like better do at present.
You couldn’t find a better young
man.
He is getting better all the
time.
See: adjective, adverb.
‘chestnuts’
The term ‘chestnut’ is sometimes applied to areas
of the language that people have very strong views on, such as: Should we ever
split an infinitive? Why do people use due
to when they mean owing to? Why
have standards of pronunciation fallen? Why do people insist on using the word aggravate to mean ‘infuriate’? In most
discussion of usage we can predict
that difficulties will be raised in three major areas:
1 grammar (Which is correct: none of them is coming/none
of them are coming?) 2
pronunciation (Should it be 'controversy
or con’troversy ?)
3 words (Why do people insist on misusing unique to mean ‘rare’?) See: purist, split infinitive.
Chinese English
It is
impossible to trace exactly when English was first heard in China, but it is likely that some forms
of English have been used on the Chinese coast since the middle of the
seventeenth century, the English having established a trading post at Canton in
1640. It is also true that China Coast Pidgin English was an important lingua franca in the Pacific region,
especially during the nineteenth century, and was influential in helping to
form the Pidgin Englishes of Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands and
Vanuatu, as well as Plantation Pidgin in Northern Queensland. China Coast Pidgin
English died out during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
leaving small, localised traces in Hong Kong.
Today, the People’s Republic of China is a country of over one thousand
million inhabitants, a large number of whom (perhaps as high as 10%) have some
knowledge of Standard English. English is recognised as a useful international
lingua franca; the language is widely taught in schools, colleges and
universities; and radio and television programmes on the English language allow
workers (in the widest sense) to study the language in their spare time.
English is not a mother tongue in any part of China, nor is it
necessary as an internal lingua franca, and so people acquire the standard
language mainly through education. One’s knowledge depends largely on
linguistic ability and on the extent of one’s exposure to the language, but it
would probably be true to generalise that, in China, passive grammatical
knowledge is greater than active fluency.
Phonology
No set of
points can fully comprehend the variation that occurs in English in China, due
mainly to mother-tongue dialect influences and to the country of origin of the
teachers, but the following generalisations apply to many speakers.
1 Chinese
English is essentially non-rhotic.
2
Since the voiced consonants /b, d, g/ do not
occur in Mandarin Chinese, many speakers replace /b, d, g/ in English words by
unaspirated /p, t, k/, the sounds used by native speakers of English in spin, stick and skin.
3 There is a tendency to impose a CVCV structure on English.
This often involves introducing an epenthetic vowel into consonant clusters and adding a vowel to a word that ends in a
consonant. Thus act is realised
as 
six
as 
and stand as
4 For some speakers of Chinese /n/ and /l/ are in free
variation and so linger may be
realised as 
or
announce as
Others may use /n/ and /Å‹/
interchangeably, thus failing to distinguish between ban and bang.
5
The sounds /θ, ð, ∫/ are all likely to be
replaced by /s/:
thin 
then /sεn/
ship 
and /t∫/ is
frequently replaced by /ts/ thus producing
for
China.
6
Vowels cause fewer problems but /ε/ tends to be realised as 
so that the letter x
is pronounced
7
Because Chinese is a tone language with four contrastive tones, speakers of Chinese find
English intonation difficult. They
either carry over tonal distinctions to English or, in an effort not to do
this, they frequently speak English within a very narrow intonation band.
Vocabulary
Apart
from silk and tea, Chinese has given world English many words for prepared food:
chop suey
chow mein
for the
martial arts:
kung fu
tai chi (shadow
boxing) for philosophy:
yin and yang (two elemental forces—mutually exclusive yet complementary)
and words
derived from China’s dynastic past:
kowtow (show deference)
yamen (office or residence of a public
official)
A number of
other words and phrases have entered English. Among them are kaolin (a fine, white clay), pekinese (dog), shantung (heavy silk), shanghai
(kidnap, force someone to go somewhere or do something), chop sticks (quick+sticks, reinforced by
chop suey meaning ‘odds and ends of
food’) and:
Long time no see<Hen jiu bu jian (Very
long no see)
Grammar
Chinese
students aim to acquire standard International English but mother-tongue
influences are seen in:
1 The marked
preference for active voice where
the passive might be more appropriate:
Some people
told me.
in preference
to:
I was told.
2 The meaning
carried by the perfect aspect in
English is not realised in the verb phrase in Chinese but is carried by an
adverbial or particle. Many speakers often confuse the simple past with past
perfect, producing such sentences as:
I have spoken
to him yesterday.
I’m not hungry. I had
already my dinner.
See: Hong
Kong English, pidgins and creoles.
circumlocution
Circumlocution is the use of an
excessive number of words to state something that could be expressed more
economically. Like elegant variation and
tautology, it is a tendency to
increase the length of an utterance, often in an attempt to impress listeners
or readers. A number of terms are used for circumlocution, the most widely
known of which are:
periphrasis, pleonasm,
redundancy, roundabout expressions, tautology, verbiage,
verbosity and wordiness.
There are three ways of eliminating the problem.
1 Unnecessary
words should be removed. For example, all the words in parentheses can be
dropped from the following phrases:
five (years of age) four (in number)
it is true (to
say) that pink (in colour)
six foot (in
height) triangular (in shape) until (such time as)
2
Expressions involving circumlocutions should
be rephrased:
at this
moment/point in time (now)
during the
time that (while)
five percentage points (five percent)
in the event that (if)
in the order of (about)
in this day
and age (now/today)
shower activity (showers)
3
Whole sentences and paragraphs should be
assessed to see if they can be organised more simply and concisely. For
example, the following sentence:
In the event that the robber, named Smythe, was unknown to the
shopkeeper, and the shopkeeper to him, the curious feature of the situation is
that he must have obtained his information about the shopkeeper’s property as
such from a third party. (42 words)
can be rewritten as:
Curiously, someone must have told the robber Smythe about the
shopkeeper’s property, because the two men did not know each other. (21 words)
Circumlocution
is usually a symptom of a lack of discrimination or control. Most users could
improve their style by checking
sentence structure carefully and paying more attention to clarity and
precision.
See: fillers, periphrasis, pleonasm, redundancy, tautology,
verbosity.
class
This term is
often applied to a set of items in a language which share certain formal
properties, such as the ability to occur in certain positions in a sentence.
Structuralists designed test frames to divide English words into classes. A frame such as:
 |
reveals some adjectives and a
frame like: The…+s are here.
reveals some nouns. Different grammatical analyses
subdivide English word classes in different ways but the following classes are
recognised by most:
adjectives (good, obvious) adverbs (happily, truthfully) conjunctions (and, if) determiners (a, the) exclamations (Oh! Wow!) nouns (child, tree) prepositions (at, in) pronouns (I, which)
verbs (come, sing)
Many
individual words can occur in several word classes:
Arthur’s round
table (adjective)
We walked round and round. (adverb) They went for a round of golf. (noun) He went round
the bend. (preposition)
He rounded the corner at 90 miles an hour. (verb)
Words are
usually subdivided into those which belong to closed sets and those which are
found in open classes. By closed set we
mean that there are a finite number of items in the set. Conjunctions,
determiners, exclamations, prepositions and pronouns belong to closed sets.
Adjectives, adverbs, nouns and verbs belong to open classes, which means there
are many items in these classes and we can add more. If we invented a new soft
drink called ‘shing’ for example, we would have a new noun, and if drinking shing
became popular, we might have a ‘shing party’ at which we would all ‘shing’,
thus adding a new adjective and verb to the language.
clause
Not all models
of English deal with clauses but for
those that do a clause is a unit of
language smaller than a sentence and
larger than a phrase. A clause
resembles a sentence in having a subject and a predicate. Clauses can be subdivided into:
1
main clauses and dependent/subordinate clauses as illustrated by the following
sentences:
Main Clause Subordinate Clause
He heard what you said.
I know that you are tired.
A subordinate clause can precede
the main clause as in:
Subordinate Clause Main Clause
If you do that you’ll get into trouble.
and a sentence may have several
subordinate clauses:
(If you take
the road) (that turns left at the traffic lights) [you’ll see a signpost] (that
will direct you.)
The sentence above has a
main clause (you’ll see a signpost) and
three subordinate clauses.
2
finite and non-finite clauses. All
the subordinate clauses above are finite, that is, they have a verb which can
take a subject from the following set of pronouns: I, he, she, it. A non-finite clause contains a non-finite verb form,
that is, the infinitive (to hide), the
present participle (hiding) and the
past participle (hidden):
Main Cl+ Finite
Sub Cl Main Cl+ Non-Finite
Sub Cl
He thought I should
hide. He advised me to hide. He insisted I was hiding it. I
was blamed for hiding it.
He knew we had hidden it. We left it hidden from
view.
Clauses can
function in three different ways in a sentence: 1 as noun clauses:
I heard what he said.
He wanted to smoke.
2 as
adjective/relative clauses:
The man who was leading fell.
The man leading the rest fell.
3 as
adverbial clauses:
He retired after he lost.
He retired after losing.
Transformational grammar does not use the concept of clauses but deals with sentences which
are embedded in other sentences. TG would describe such a sentence as:
The man who
was leading fell.
as
being composed of two simple sentences:
The man was
leading.
The man fell.
with the first embedded in the
second as follows:
The man (the
man was leading) fell.
