KEEP
KEEP is a prime verb, which
means that it is one of the most frequently used verbs in the language. It can
function as a semantic equivalent of ‘be faithful to’:
He always keeps his word.
‘control’:
I could hardly
keep my temper.
‘manage’:
You kept a boarding-house,
didn’t you?
‘preserve’:
The cream kept her skin soft.
‘restrain’:
Don’t keep him from doing what he wants.
and ‘retain’:
They kept all the money they collected.
Keep also collocates with the preposition at to indicate persistence:
He’ll keep at it until he drops.
with on+a present participle to mark repetition:
She kept on practising until she got it
right.
and with up to suggest competition:
It will be
hard to keep up with the Joneses
now.
See: collocation, prime verbs.
Kenyan English
English is a significant language in Kenya (population about 18 million). It is spoken natively by
African-born Whites, but for the majority of Kenyans it is acquired as a second
language and reflects the influence of various mother tongues. In spite of
certain pressures on the government to introduce African languages such as
Kikuyu as lingua francas, English is
still used in advertising, the Civil Service, commerce, the law courts, local
literature, the media and at all levels of education.
See: East African English.
King’s/Queen’s English
The terms King’s/Queen’s English are determined by
the sex of the ruling British monarch and do not imply different varieties. The
King’s English of 5 February, 1952, when George VI was king, is
indistinguishable from the Queen’s English of 6 February, 1952, when Elizabeth
II succeeded her father.
Both terms are a relic of the influence of the English court in
establishing the prestigious variety of English which subsequently developed
into the standard language. The power of the monarchy in affecting attitudes to
language is still strong. In 1984 Prince Charles used Tok Pisin, the Pidgin English of Papua New Guinea, when opening
the newly-built
house of parliament in Port Moresby, and the pidgin which had often been
disparaged attracted widespread positive interest and publicity in Britain.
By King’s/Queen’s English most
users imply correct speech and usage and,
in particular, the standard norms of
Southern Britain. The terms are most frequently invoked when a puristic user of
English laments the ‘slovenliness’ or ‘inaccuracy’ of a modern usage.
See: accent, network norms, purist, Standard English.
langue and parole
These terms
were introduced into linguistics by
the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Langue
represents the pooled language knowledge of a speech community. Parole refers to actual instances of
speech uttered by an individual on a specific occasion. Parole is very similar to the Chomskyan term performance but langue differs
from competence in that langue is the language knowledge
possessed by a speech community, whereas competence
is the knowledge of a language possessed by an ideal speaker- hearer.
See: competence and performance, transformational grammar.
latinate models of grammar
Many grammars of English were based on
descriptions of Latin. Nouns were declined as if they had six cases and two numbers (singular and
plural):
Singular Plural
Nominative sailor sailors
Vocative O sailor O
sailors
Accusative sailor sailors
Genitive sailor’s/of a sailor sailors’/of
sailors
Dative to/for a sailor to/for sailors
Ablative by/with/from/in
a sailor by/with/from/in sailors
In English,
however, only two case differences, sailor
and sailor’s, are marked in the
singular, and two in the plural, sailors and
sailors’. (It will be noticed that
the difference between the genitive singular sailor’s and the nominative and genitive plurals exists only in the
written medium.)
Verbs were
uneconomically conjugated:
Present Past
Future
1st person singular I go I went I shall go
2nd person
singular you go you went you will go 3rd person singular(masc) he goes he went he will go 3rd person singular(fem) she goes she went she will go 3rd person
singular(neut) it goes it went it will go 1st person plural we go we
went we shall go 2nd person plural you go you went you will go 3rd person
plural they
go they went they will go
and described as being in the indicative mood (declarative):
you go/went
you don’t go/didn’t go
the imperative
mood (order):
go
don’t go let
us go
or subjunctive mood (verb used in
expressing a wish or in a subordinate clause):
Far may he go.
…if he go astray
Latin could not
end a sentence with a preposition, take an accusative pronoun after BE or split
an infinitive and so such structures were condemned in latinate models of
English grammar.
The values of such models were:
1 their clarity. It was easy for a
user to know what was right and what was wrong 2 their ability to suggest
underlying similarities in all languages.
Their main weaknesses derived from the facts that:
1 they
did not recognise that each language is unique and must be described in its own
terms
2 they
were prescriptive and did not fully allow for the changes that occur in all
living languages.
See: grammar.
latinism
A latinism may be:
1 a word, phrase or idiom borrowed from Latin:
This is known as a codex.
The case was held in camera.
That’s another reminder of
‘Sic transit gloria mundi’.
2 the
preference for a style involving Latin-derived
words:
He proceeded to affix the insignia.
rather than:
He went on to
pin on the badges.
3 the use
of constructions based on Latin models:
Having acquired the title, he felt fulfilled.
Of arms and
the man I sing.
Much of our
vocabulary derives from Latin and few English speakers are conscious of the
Latin roots of such words as difficult,
grace, ludo or innocent.
Latinisms involve the conscious use of learned language. They are a feature of
formal prose and can be pretentious in speech or expository writing.
See: elegant
variation, foreign words in English.
lay, lie
The verbs lay and lie are sometimes confused because their meanings and some of their
forms overlap.
Lay meaning ‘put someone or something
down’ is phonologically regular: lay, laying, laid, laid. It is usually
transitive:
Lay the baby on
her side.
They laid down the rules at their first meeting.
Lie meaning ‘be down, recumbent’ is an irregular verb, its forms being: lie,
lying, lay, lain. It is intransitive:
I have been lying in the sun.
The baby lay there, sleeping peacefully.
The most
frequent confusion of these verbs involves the use of laying for lying:
* He was just laying there, doing nothing.
See: ergative,
problem pairs.
learn, teach
These are reciprocal verbs:
Mary is teaching John German.
John is learning German from Mary.
and like other reciprocal verbs such as BORROW and LEND one verb is often over- applied. In many
nonstandard varieties of English, LEARN is used for both the productive and the
receptive activities:
*He learned me
to whistle.
Standard usage
has TEACH when the meaning intended is ‘instruct, cause someone to learn’ and
LEARN when the meaning intended is ‘study, receive instruction’.
See: antonym,
borrow.
letters
For most letters, the appropriate style is
signalled by the subject matter (congratulations, gossip, job application,
sympathy) and by the addressee(s) (contemporary, parent, manager of a firm,
bereaved friend). The two main types of letter are personal and official and the conventions differ slightly
in the UK and the USA.
The writer’s address is given at the top right-hand corner of the first
page. The lines of the address start either directly below each other or each
line starts two letter spaces to the right of the line above. The date comes
immediately below this address. A small margin is left at the right-hand side
of the page.
In a business
or official letter, the addressee’s name and address are given close to the
left-hand margin and two spaces lower than the date. The margin on the
left-hand side is conventionally wider than that on the right. Men’s names may
be given as Mr Jones, Mr J.Jones, Mr
James Jones or, increasingly rarely, as James
Jones, Esq. Forms of women’s names include Ms Jones, Mrs Jones, Miss/Mrs/Ms A.Jones, Miss/Mrs/Ms Anne Jones with
Ms being the preferred form for
younger women. It has been a convention for a married woman (but not a widow)
to be addressed by the first name or initial
of her
husband (Mrs J.Jones, Mrs James Jones) but this practice is declining.
Professional titles take the place of Miss, Mr, Mrs and Ms (Dr A.Jones, Professor J.Jones) and first names are used with Dame and Sir (Dame Rebecca West, Sir Clive Sinclair).
A one-line space is left between the recipient’s address and the
salutation Dear X which occurs close
to the left-hand margin. Formal business letters begin Dear Sir or Dear Madam; less
formal letters imply varying degrees of intimacy by such uses as Dear Ms Jones, My dear James. The main
differences between salutation conventions in the UK and the USA are:
UK USA
Dear Mr Jones Dear James Jones Dear Sirs Gentlemen
Dear X, Dear X:
The first
sentence of the letter begins with a capital letter and starts underneath the
end of the salutation but one line down. Subsequent paragraphs are indicated by
indenting five spaces. If indentation is not used, double spaces are left
between paragraphs.
Letters
opening with the formal greetings Dear
Sir(s), Dear Madam or Gentlemen close
in the UK with Yours faithfully and
in the USA with Yours sincerely,
Sincerely or Yours truly. Letters
with less formal greetings may use a range of endings, Sincerely, Yours, Best wishes, Love or an individual conclusion
such as Aloha, Peace, Stay well. Each
of these endings conforms to the spacing for paragraphs and is followed by a
comma.
The writer’s name is typed or printed below the signature in formal
letters and, if the writer has a special function, this is given either after
or directly under the name:
Anne Jones, Head of Department James Jones
Club Secretary
See: address
and reference, addresses, dates.
lexical verb
In verb phrases one to five verbs may
co-occur as a unit: (he) watched
(he) may have
been being watched
The final verb in the
sequence is known as the headverb or lexical verb; the others are known as auxiliaries. Auxiliary verbs tend to
signal grammatical relationships such as modality:
(he) may watch
or the passive:
(he) was
watched
whereas lexical verbs convey meaning: (he)
may watch
(he) may follow
See: auxiliary, head, verb phrase.
lexicography, lexicology
Lexicography refers to the compiling of
dictionaries and the principles involved in such compilation. Traditionally, dictionary makers have studied vocabulary in alphabetical order. Lexicology, on the other hand, refers to
the study of vocabulary and includes the history, development and organisation
of words. Lexicology is the wider discipline and may study words from the
points of view of antonymy, collocations, hyponymy, idiom, synonymy, toponymy
and polysemy.
See: dictionary, lexicon, vocabulary.
lexicon, lexis
Lexicon derives from Greek lexikon (pertaining to words) and is
used to mean:
1 an
alphabetically-arranged inventory of the words of a language together with
their definitions
2
the vocabulary
of a language (spoken or written) 3 the vocabulary of a speaker or group of
speakers 4 the vocabulary employed in a text
5 the inventory of morphemes in a language
The word lexis, which derives
from the Greek lexis meaning ‘speech,
word’, is often used as a synonym for vocabulary,
especially a subset of the entire vocabulary of a language:
The lexis employed by this writer is
largely Anglo-Saxon in origin.
See: dictionary,
vocabulary.
like, as
Like is a preposition used in comparisons:
It looks like a fossil.
It is frequently used as a conjunction in US English:
He spent money like it was going out of style.
and this usage is gradually
replacing as and as if in casual English:
She doesn’t
love you like I do.
She sings like she has no ear for music.
In formal contexts, as is preferred to like as a conjunction. It may be followed by a prepositional noun
phrase:
As in his other stories, the truth was not rigidly adhered to.
by a clause:
Do as you would be done by.
or by a clause with inverted
word order:
He is
intelligent, as are his sisters.
See: as,
simile.
like, love
Many languages
have only one verb covering the semantic areas of both like and love (for
example, French aimer) and in English
there is a considerable overlap in their usage. They both imply affection, with
love usually being stronger:
I like John but I love James.
enjoyment:
I like baseball and Mary loves cricket.
and desire:
I’d like a pizza and I’d really love some ice cream.
Like rather than love is
used to indicate approval:
I like his character and his taste in
cars.
and choice:
You can do
what you like.
Love rather than like is
used to indicate strong family ties:
She loves her family.
patriotism:
We all love our country.
sexual attraction and (as a
noun) gratification:
John and Mary really love each
other. At that stage, they had not made love.
The noun like is limited in meaning to ‘equal’:
We shall never
see his like again.
It can be pluralised, however,
and occur in such sentences as:
We’ve got to
know all his little likes and
dislikes.
Occasionally, in
regionally-marked English, like is
used as a filler:
He came in, like, but he didn’t stay.
I haven’t seen
him, like.
See: fillers.
lingo
The word lingo probably comes from Portuguese lingoa (language, tongue) and it tends to be used contemptuously for:
1
non-native varieties of languages, such as
pidgins, which have often been referred to as ‘bastard lingos’
2 foreign
languages, especially non-prestigious ones:
I don’t understand the lingo.
3 the
vocabulary of a specialised subject:
Some doctors have developed a lingo
to cover their own ignorance. A temperature they can’t explain, for
example, is labelled PUO—pyrexia of unknown origin.
4 the
language of a particular group of people:
The lingo of the crew of the
SS Mary
Jane was a type of English.
See: cant, jargon, pidgins and creoles.
Lingua Franca
Lingua Franca derives from Italian and
means ‘Frankish Tongue’. When written with capital letters it refers to a
simplified language used in the Mediterranean as a means of communication
between trading partners who did not share a mother tongue. It probably
predates the Crusades but the crusaders helped to spread Lingua Franca because
it facilitated communication between Christian and Muslim and among the
multilingual crusaders.
The vocabulary of Lingua Franca was Romance, inflections were dropped and the syntax was simple, regular and fixed, thus making Lingua Franca one
of the earliest known pidgins. Its value continued throughout the period of
European expansion, mainly because its structure remained stable even when the
vocabulary differed from place to place. Travellers were recommended to learn
it as recently as 1746:
In the first
place it is requisite for the person that designs to travel into those parts
[i.e. Guinea and the Americas] to learn languages, as English, French, Low
Dutch, Portuguese and Lingua Franca.
John
Barbot, ‘A description of the coasts of north and south Guinea’
Molière used a form of it in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme:
Se ti sabir, If you know
Ti respondir; You reply
Se non
sabir If you don’t
know
Tazir,
tazir. Be quiet, be quiet.
The Portuguese
variety of Lingua Franca was known as Sabir and its use can be attested along
most of the trade routes of the world, probably giving world English the words palaver, pickaninny and savvy.
The term lingua franca with
lower case letters was gradually extended to mean any language employed to
facilitate communication between people with different mother tongues:
Pidgin English is a lingua
franca in West Africa.
French was once the lingua
franca of the diplomatic service.
Since the
phrase is Italian, its etymologically correct plural is lingue franche as in:
English and French are lingue
franche in the Common Market.
but
increasingly its plural is being anglicised to lingua francas: There were three main lingua francas in the country.
See: pidgins and creoles.
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of
language. Language has been studied as far back as our records go but the
attempt to study language with objectivity and precision is essentially a
twentieth-century phenomenon.
Linguistics
studies all aspects of language including:
Phonology — the study of sounds and
sound patterns
Morphology — the study of morphemes or
meaningful combinations of
sounds
Lexicology — the study of words
Syntax — the study of meaningful
combinations of words
Semantics — the study of meaning
and each of
these areas has its own subdivisions and areas of overlap.
Modern linguistics has drawn attention to the differences between
speech and writing and between diachronic studies (where a language is examined
over a period of time) and synchronic studies (where a language is examined at
a particular time and/or place). Distinct subdisciplines have also developed: descriptive linguistics sets out to
establish the rules governing a particular language; contrastive linguistics compares and contrasts languages, usually
to improve language teaching; and transformational
linguistics attempts to show the relationships between surface structure
and the underlying patterns of language.
Among
the hybrid disciplines which are studied by linguists are: psycholinguistics — which studies the
relationships between language and the mind sociolinguistics — which concentrates on the uses of language in
society
stylistics — which uses linguistic
insights to examine style, particularly
literary style
See: grammar.
linkage
Linkage may be defined as the patterning
that gives cohesion to a text. It
may involve intonation, rhythm, alliteration, assonance and rhyme in the spoken
medium and any devices, such as repetition, which link one part of a text with
another.
See: anaphora, cohesion, discourse analysis, discourse marker,
parallelism.
literary genre
The word genre, from French genre meaning ‘kind, type’, is used in describing categories of
artistic compositions in literature, music and painting. A literary genre is a subdivision of literature according to purpose
(a lyric poem versus a prose drama), structure (a short story versus a novel)
or technique (prose versus verse). The three basic genres are poetry, drama and
the novel, but finer distinctions are introduced into literary discussions to
facilitate the particular analyses being made.
