among, amongst
There is no
semantic difference between these words, but the use of one rather than the
other has regional and probably age implications. Amongst occurs in northern and eastern parts of the UK and is
regarded by young speakers as being archaic and/or literary. Many speakers use amongst in prayers:
Blessed art
thou amongst women.
but among in all other contexts and it is
likely that amongst will gradually
cease to be used.
Among/amongst must be followed by a plural noun or pronoun:
They divided
the food among the poor/them.
or by a noun
which may be singular in form but is plural in meaning:
They divided
the winnings among the
crew/family/staff/workforce.
Some scholars argue that among should
be carefully distinguished from between:
They divided the cake among the boys
(more than two).
They divided the cake between the two.
Current usage
permits the use of between when more
than two are indicated, especially in the spoken medium:
Share that
equally between the lot of you.
but among always implies ‘more than two’.
See: while.
anacoluthon
Anacoluthon (plural anacolutha) from Greek anakolouthon
meaning ‘inconsistency in logic’ involves a deliberate or accidental change
from one syntactic structure to another within a single sentence:
He came over
to me and—you’re not listening.
You should
really try to—I only want what’s best.
Most people
produce anacolutha in spontaneous speech and in unedited writing.
See: dangling
participle.
analogy
Analogy has three main language-related
meanings, all concerned with the comparison of different items that share some
significant characteristic.
1 Analogy is a figure of
speech by which two items are compared or equated:
She’s a Greta
Garbo type.
2 Analogy may
be used to explain the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. For example, an
arithmetical process such as subtraction may be explained to a child by giving
him four apples and taking away two, showing that 4−2=2.
3 The term analogy is
frequently used in linguistics to
describe the tendency of all users of language to regularise and classify
according to the familiar rules of their mother tongue. Thus, for example, many
young children produce past tense forms like bited, comed and seed by
analogy with the regular marking of the past time in English.
Analogising is evident at all levels of the language. In vocabulary it
may be seen in the development of back
formations such as craze and laze by analogy with blaze or gaze; in pronunciation it is found in the anglicising of
non-English sounds, making loch rhyme
with rock and rouge with stooge; in morphology it helps to account for the formation of new compounds
such as telethon (from television+ marathon) or coinages such
as pinx (from permanent+jinx); and in
syntax it is apparent in every speaker’s ability to form unique sentences and
utterances in accordance with the rules of the language. Analogy is a
motivating force for both comprehensibility and change.
See: argument,
figures of speech.
analytic
Comparative linguists have,
by examining how words behave in different languages, established two main
types of human language: analytic and
synthetic. Synthetic languages are
further subdivided into agglutinating,
inflecting and polysynthetic.
1
In analytic (also called isolating) languages all words are composed of one invariable morpheme and syntactic relationships
are indicated mainly by word order.
An example of such a language is Korean.
2
In agglutinating languages the word is
composed of a series of distinct morphemes where each morpheme has a specific
meaning. Swahili is an agglutinating language.
3
In inflecting (also called fusional) languages words are composed
of more than one morpheme but it is usually not possible to separate the
morphemes. Welsh is an inflecting language.
4
In polysynthetic (also called incorporating) languages, words tend to
be long and morphologically complex. Amerindian languages like Apache are
examples of polysynthetic languages.
Most languages show mixtures of the above
types.
The terms analytic and synthetic are also applied to the
relationship between
adjectives and semantically related causative
verbs:
analytic synthetic
make better improve
make clean/cleaner clean/cleanse
and between variants such as:
check the truth of
verify give food to feed
See: derivation, morpheme, synthetic,
word formation.
anaphora
In connected
speech and writing many items refer back to others in the discourse. A sentence
such as:
He has!
for example, is
only comprehensible if both ‘he’ and the action performed have previously been
mentioned as in:
John hasn’t
delivered the paper yet.
He has!
The term applied to backward reference is anaphora, a word which comes from Greek anapherein meaning ‘to carry back’. Reference need not, however, be
backward. In the following introductory sentence from a magazine story:
He was tall,
dark, handsome and at twenty-eight John Smith was already a power in the city.
we can only
understand ‘he’ by referring forward to ‘John Smith’. This type of reference is
called cataphora, and it is a device
favoured by people who wish to create a sense of mystery or expectancy.
The term anaphora is
frequently used to refer to both forward and backward reference.
See: discourse analysis, pro-forms.
and
And is
a co-ordinating conjunction, that
is, it joins units of equal value:
Tom and Jerry
the good and the bad He sang and danced.
She was kind and
gentle.
I put them on the table and on the chairs.
Often in colloquial speech and replaces to, especially in imperative constructions using
come, go and try:
Come and have a good time.
Go and see him at once.
Try and call in when you have time.
Some scholars have criticised
this usage as ‘sloppy’ or ‘inelegant’; others have shown that there can be a
semantic difference between, for example:
He came and
saw me.
and:
He came to see
me.
in that only in
the second sentence did ‘he’ come for the purpose of seeing ‘me’. Many speakers
use the structures interchangeably.
Stylists used to condemn the use of and,
but or so at the beginning of
sentences. The practice is more acceptable today, especially in the
representation of colloquial styles. It can be a useful literary device, as in
the writings of Swift and Hemingway, but should be used sparingly.
And is frequently used with so forth/so on at the end of lists:
He did his washing, cleaning, mending and so forth.
She
grows carrots, parsnips, turnips and so on.
These phrases
serve no useful purpose and should be avoided in writing and careful speech.
Either they should be omitted:
He did his
washing, cleaning and mending.
or replaced
with a phrase which provides more information:
She grows
carrots, parsnips, turnips and other root vegetables.
See: conjunction.
Anglicism
An Anglicism is a word, expression or idiom which is characteristic of the
English language. Language-specific structures such as the method of indicating
possession:
the minister’s
authority
can be
considered Anglicisms. Anglicism, and
its equivalent Briticism, is more
frequently applied, however, to a usage that does not occur in the USA, for
example lecturer (US professor).
See: Americanism, Anglo-English, UK and US words.
Anglo-English
The word English is increasingly ambiguous. It
can refer to ‘mother-tongue English’, ‘international English’ or any variety of
the language spoken in any part of the world. It is particularly ambiguous in England, where
it is frequently used to mean both ‘the English of England’ and ‘the English of
the UK’. To avoid confusion, the term Anglo-
English is sometimes used to refer to the varieties of English spoken in
England; ‘British English’ has the wider connotation of ‘the types of English
used in Britain, that is, England, Scotland and Wales’; and ‘UK English’
comprehends the varieties occurring in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern
Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of
Man.
See: Standard
English, UK English.
Anglo-Irish
This term has
been used to refer to:
1
the English gentry who were granted lands in
Ireland in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century
2
the type of English used by these people,
often virtually identical in the written medium to the educated variety in
England, but marked in the spoken medium by the retention of certain features
of pronunciation that changed in England. The most obvious retention was the
/e/ sound in words like ‘receive’ and ‘tea’. The name of the Anglo-Irish
poet Yeats
rhymes with ‘hates’ whereas the name of the English poet Keats rhymes with
‘heats’.
3
the literature written by people who were
born in Ireland but were of English origin.
Among such
writers were Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.
4
the literature of people born in Ireland who
were not of English origin but who used English as a literary medium. Among
these are Sean O’Casey, James Joyce and Seamus Heaney.
5
the English used by Irish people whose
ancestral mother tongue was Gaelic.
There are marked differences in the speech of people whose ancestors
spoke English and those whose ancestors spoke Gaelic. The former differs only
superficially from the English of their peers in other parts of the UK; the
latter shows the influence of Gaelic in phonology, vocabulary, idiom and
grammar. Recently, linguists have called this variety Hiberno-English, reserving the term ‘Anglo-Irish’ for the language
of the English who settled in Ireland and for the literature written by their
descendants.
See: Hiberno-English, Irish English.
Anglo-Romani
Romani, in one of its many dialects, is
the mother tongue of perhaps 50% of the six to ten million Gypsies in the
world. The Romanis originated, not in Egypt as Gypsy suggests, but in northern India and Romani (or Romnimos) is
an inflected language closely related to Hindi. Below is part of the Lord’s
Prayer in Romnimos:
Amro dad, ka shan ar’o ravnos, t’ avel Tiro nav
parikedo.
Our father, who art in+the heaven, that become Thy name esteemed.
T’ avel Tiro kralisesko them; t’ aven kede Tire lava
That comes Thy kingly land; that becomes done Thy words
ar’ o them
odzha-sar ar’ o ravnos.
in the land same-as in the
heaven.
In the UK for
the past five hundred years some Romani people have also spoken Anglo- Romani, a restructured Romani
also used by Romanis in the USA, Australia and South Africa. Anglo-Romani
contains many English words and morphemes,
as can be seen in the following version of part of the parable of the
Prodigal Son (Luke 15):
But his dadrus penned: ‘My chavvi, tuti’s with mandi
But his father said: ‘My son, you are with me
sor the cherus and tuti can have sor of my kovels…’
always and you can have all of
my possessions…’
Anglo-Romani
shares features with Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ in which the syntax is
English but much of the vocabulary is new:
Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the
wabe.
See: Gypsy,
pidgins and creoles.
animal terms
All languages
seem to have similes and metaphors based on the perceived or
assumed similarity between human beings and animals.
In English, many everyday language uses are based on metaphor, as can
be seen from a brief listing of the commonest nouns, verbs, adjectives and
adverbs applied to people and deriving from animal names or characteristics.
Nouns ape, ass, baboon,
badger, bear, beaver, bird, bitch, bulldog, canary, cat, chicken, clam, cock, cow, crow, cuckoo, dog,
donkey, elephant, fox, goat, goose, gopher, guineapig, hen, hog, horse, kitten,
lamb, lark, lion, louse, magpie, march hare, minx, mole, monkey, mouse, mule,
ox, parrot, peacock, pig, pup(py), rabbit, rat, shark, sheep, squirrel, snake,
stoolpigeon, toad, tortoise, turkey, turtle, viper, weasel, wolf, worm.
Verbs As well as many of the
above nouns which can be used as verbs, the following animal attributes can
occur as verbs: bark, bleat, bug, catnap, claw, ferret (out), flap, flounder,
fly, gallop, gobble, growl, hare, hiss, lionise, paw, peck, pussyfoot, roar, rook,
snap, snarl, snort, toady.
Adjectives bearish, bullish,
bullnecked, catty, dog-eared, dogged, dovetailed, elephantine, fishy, flighty,
foxy, hare-brained, kittenish, lousy, mousy, pig-headed, ratty, sheepish.
Adverbs Many adverbs can be formed from the adjectives above. See: metaphor, simile.
