all, both
All and both can function as determiners:
All the children
arrived late.
Both the children arrived late.
and as pronouns:
All is not lost.
Both are useful.
They can occur in a number of different
patterns: All/both+(definite article)
All/both+(possessive adjective)
All/both+(demonstrative
adjective) All/both+(of+possessive adjective/personal object pronoun)
NP/pronoun+all/both
as in:
All/both the letters arrived late.
All/both his horses were scratched before the race.
All/both those words
are misspelt. All/both of his
children are tall. All/both of us
are exhausted.
The girls all/both love swimming. We all/both thought the same.
All/both can occur as the subject (as
above), object or complement:
It pleased all/both of us.
It pleased us all/both.
(Notice that
when a personal pronoun occurs before all/both,
then of is not required.) They
are also found after the first element of a complex verb phrase:
We have all/both had as much as we can take.
They may all/both have seen the film.
When all/both occur in the subject position
they tend to be negated differently. Such sentences as:
All the letters arrived late.
are normally negated:
Not all of the letters
arrived late.
whereas sentences such as:
Both the letters arrived late.
are usually negated as follows:
Neither letter arrived
late.
As well as meaning ‘everyone’, all can approximate to the meaning of
‘complete, entire’:
I’ve done it all my life.
You can’t work
all the time.
In this role, all resembles ‘whole’ and not both:
He has worked
hard all his life/his whole life.
and it takes a
singular noun. All can also function
adverbially, especially in colloquial speech:
He’s all at sea.
She’s all washed up.
Both often
occurs in a balanced structure with and:
They drink both tea and coffee.
It is usual for both parts to be
followed by structurally equivalent items:
They like both
cricket and baseball. (noun+noun)
He can both sing and dance. (verb+verb)
See: determiner, either.
all right, alright
In UK English only the two-word
spelling is acceptable:
It will be all right on the night.
In the USA, alright is not fully accepted.
alliteration
Alliteration developed as an aid to
memory and is based on the repetition of consonant sounds in closely associated
words or syllables. In the following couplet from Tennyson’s Lotus Eaters, for example, we have an
interlacing pattern of r, f, l and t:
Ripens and
fades and falls and hath no toil Fast rooted in the fruitful soil.
A number of
scholars have claimed that vowels can also alliterate but we shall use the term
assonance in our description of
vowel patterning, leaving alliteration for
consonants.
Alliteration is a type of sound
symbolism which can appeal to the listener’s ear, evoking associations and
conditioned reflexes. It also links the alliterating words, focusing attention
on their interrelated meanings. In the following lines from Shakespeare’s
sonnet number 30, for example, alliteration helps to forge a link between the
debtor’s court (sessions, summon; waste) and
emotions (sweet, sigh; woes, wail):
When to the
sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.
Alliteration
is a traditional Germanic device, preceding rhyme in English poetry. In Old
English verse, the lines were divided into halves, the first half line
having two alliterating segments and the second half one, as in the following
lines:
hreran mid hondum hrimcealde sae
wadan wraeclastas: wyrd bith
ful araed.
When French
verse began to influence literature in England, rhyme tended to replace
alliteration as a metrical device:
Whan Zephirus
eek with his sweete breath Inspired hath in every holt and heath
The tendre
croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne
Chaucer, Prologue to the Canterbury Tales
but
alliteration has never been totally absent from English poetry and often when
poets seek to register strongly-felt emotion or to recreate proverbial wisdom
they tend to use alliteration:
Hurrah for revolution and
more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon
horseback lashes a beggar on foot. Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
Yeats,
‘The Great Day’
In prose, alliteration has been employed
to reinforce rhetorical patterns, as in Robert Greene’s ‘The Carde of Fancie’
(1584):
Nay, there was no fact so filthie, which he would not commit, no
mischief so monstrous, which he would not enterprise: no daunger so desperate,
which he would not advanture…
to
focus attention on details, as in Frank O’Connor’s story ‘In the Train’:
The woman sat alone. Her shawl was thrown open and beneath it she wore
a bright blue blouse. The carriage was cold, the night outside black and
cheerless, and within her something had begun to contract…
or for the
sheer enjoyment of revelling in sound patterns, as in Dylan Thomas’s ‘Holiday
Memory’:
I remember the sea telling lies in a shell held to my ear for a whole harmonious,
hollow minute by a small, wet girl in an enormous bathing- suit marked
‘Corporation Property’.
Because of
its value as an aid to memory, alliteration is commonly found in proverbs:
Look before you leap.
Wilful waste
makes woeful want.
in clichés:
come hell or high water tried and true
and in
advertising:
Lilt—with the totally tropical taste.
Generally
speaking, it is impossible to avoid some alliterative patterns in any prose
style, but this device should be used with care since it could distract
attention from the argument to details of style.
See: assonance, sound symbolism.
allusion, delusion, illusion
These words
are often confused or misused. An allusion
is a passing, indirect reference to an unnamed person, place, time or
event:
While telling
us her present problems, she made several allusions
to her troubled past.
A literary
allusion makes a reference to a writer or his work. The allusion may be in the
form of a quotation (sometimes incorrectly remembered) but assumed to be well
known:
A little knowledge is a
dangerous thing.
Tomorrow to
fresh fields…
It may also be
a parody of the style or content of
an unnamed work, as Fielding’s Shamela is
a parody of Richardson’s Pamela, and
Pope’s Dunciad alludes to Paradise Lost in both form and content.
A delusion is a mental
condition involving a sincerely held false impression or opinion:
Lady Macbeth
suffered from the delusion that
nothing could remove Duncan’s blood from her hands.
An
illusion is a false image or concept,
a false belief often based on misleading evidence:
Because he
always wore a beret she was under the illusion
that he was French. He was, in fact, a baker from Barnsley.
See: malapropism.
