concord

Concord refers to a system in language where the choice of one element triggers off the use of a particular form of another element.

For example, in the following French sentences, the form of the adjectives and the verbs are determined by the noun:

Ma mère est petite. (My mother is small.)

Mon père est petit. (My father is small.)

Mes parents sont petits. (My parents are small.)

There is relatively little concord in English but we find it in the following circumstances: 1 In the non-past, the subject conditions the form of the verb:

I/you/we/they sing he/she/it sing+s

The base form of the verb is used for all persons except the third person singular. There is no concord between subject and verb in the past:

I/you/he/we/they sang

Slightly different forms of concord affect BE, DO and HAVE. 2 Subject complements sometimes agree with the subject:

They are twins.

We were good students.

3 Certain pronouns trigger off the use of a particular form of the verb:

Neither (of them) has passed. None (of them) has passed.

None is the equivalent of ‘not one’ and so it takes a singular verb. Increasingly, however, speakers use none as the negative equivalent of ‘all’ and so they use a plural verb:

None of them have passed (i.e. they have all failed).

4 Everyone causes problems. Most speakers say:

Everyone/every body has their problems.

but purists argue that since ‘one/body’ is singular, the correct form is:

Everyone has his/her problems.

5 In structures involving continuous aspect, BE triggers off the use of the -ing form of the following verb:

I am singing.

They were singing.

6 In structures involving perfect aspect, HAVE triggers off the use of the past participle of the following verb:

I have gone.

He has sung.

7 In passive structures, BE triggers off the use of the past participle of the following verb:

He was seen.

He has been seen.

See: agreement, aspect, auxiliary, BE, DO, every, HAVE, nobody, passive voice.

conditional

This term is applied to clauses which hypothesise:

If I were a blackbird, I’d whistle and sing.

or imply conditions:

Unless you change your routine, you can expect trouble.

The use of if I were/was is partly determined by the likelihood or unlikelihood of the hypothesis:

If I were a millionaire…(unlikely) If I was there now…(likely)

When in doubt, if I were should be selected.

There is no conditional tense in English. Conditionality can be expressed by means of such subordinate conjunctions as:

as if

on condition that providing that unless

often in conjunction with modals:

You can go if you promise to behave yourself.

I won’t go unless you come too.

Some grammarians insist that should must be used with the first person singular and plural:

I/we should go.

and would with the second and third persons:

You/he/she/they would go.

For many speakers, this distinction does not apply and would or its abbreviated version is used with all persons:

I would/I’d love to go if I had the time.

See: hypothetical, modality, verb phrase.

conjunction

Conjunctions are joining words and in English we find two types: co-ordinating conjunctions (also called co-ordinators) and subordinating conjunctions (also called subordinators).

Co-ordinating conjunctions join units of equal status:

the man and the woman (noun phrase+noun phrase)

He worked diligently and well. (adverb+adverb)

It’s either on my desk or in my bag. (phrase+phrase)

I called but he didn’t stop. (sentence+sentence).

There is a finite set of co-ordinating conjunctions in English:

and either…or or then but neither…nor so yet

Subordinating conjunctions introduce subordinate clauses (also called dependent clauses), often providing information on when, where, why or how an action or event occurred. The commonest subordinating conjunctions are:

after: He came after he made the announcement. (al)though: Although he was tired he went with them. as: The news finally sank in as he walked home. as…as: He left the house as soon as he could.

as if: He behaved as if he owned the place. because: I went there because I wanted to. before: Sign this before you go.

even if: I wouldn’t have gone even if I’d been invited.

if: If you play that tune again I’ll scream.

in case: Set another place in case she comes. more…than: She had more sense than I credited her with. since: We’ve been successful since she joined us.

so that: They saved so that they could have a good time.

till/until: Don’t move till I come back.

when: When you see her tell her I need help.

whenever: Whenever I see her she’s crying.

where: You’ve put them where nobody can find them. wherever: Wherever you see Jack you’re sure to see Jill. whether: He couldn’t decide whether he should apply or not.

while: Wait here while I do the shopping.

Many subordinating conjunctions can also function as prepositions:

Subordinator Preposition

He arrived after I did. He arrived after me. He left before John did. He left before John.

See: class, clause, co-ordination, sentence, subordination.

connotation

Connotation refers to the extra association(s), usually emotional or social, that a word or phrase may have in addition to its denotative or referential meaning. For example, the words boy, brat, child, kid, kiddy, lad, tot, wee’un may all be used of a four-year-old boy, but their connotations vary from favourable or affectionate (wee’un) to hostile (brat). The emotional load of a word like home in contrast to apartment or house lies in its connotation. Social attitudes may affect the connotations of a word. Victorian prudery, for example, gave the words for trousers and underwear strong taboo connotations. And attitudes to race are often implied in the terms selected by a speaker or writer.

Certain words have stronger evaluative loading than others and this can vary from one context to another. For example, the terms communist or fascist may be used to whip up feeling at a political rally but appear relatively neutral in a book on modern history. Because connotations depend largely on context (or indeed on intonation), dictionaries cannot normally provide more than the denotative meaning, with perhaps a descriptive label such as ‘derogatory’ or ‘vulgar’. Similarly, words that are denotatively equivalent, such as girl and lass, may have a variety of differing connotations (affection, class, region) that rule out synonymy.

The connotative force of words is often exploited in persuasive language such as advertising and propaganda. Most people have been attracted to a product or idea because of the pleasant, positive or prestigious associations conferred on it by loaded language. For different motives, poetry and descriptive prose depend on connotations to extend meanings and evoke particular sensations, but expository writing normally requires a more neutral vocabulary.

See: cliché, denotation, euphemism, racist language, synonym.

consonant cluster

A consonant cluster involves the co-occurrence of two or more consonants:

state

strip

English permits up to three consonants at the beginning of a syllable but there are strict rules as to the consonant sounds that can occur:

Position 1 Position 2 Position 3

p l/r/j

s + t + r/j

k l/r/w/j

The patterns above refer to sounds and not letters and can be illustrated by the words:

splash sprain spurious (pronounced ‘sp+your+ious’)

strain stew (UK English)

sclerosis screech squander skew

In word final position, English permits up to four consonants in a cluster:

exempts

glimpsed

Consonant clusters can cause pronunciation problems to both native and non-native speakers. The standard orthography illustrates how many clusters have been simplified in the past:

gnaw knight lamb

and the simplification continues: 1 clusters are reduced:

san(d)

vu(l)nerable

2 intrusive vowels are introduced:

ath(e)lete

chim(i)ney

See: epenthesis, intrusive vowels, pronunciation.

contemporary, contemporaneous

Contemporary refers to ‘the same period of time, simultaneous’ and may be used as a noun and an adjective:

Wordsworth was a contemporary of Coleridge.

Coleridge’s poetry benefits from comparisons with the works of

contemporary poets.

Adjectival contemporary is increasingly used to mean ‘modern, current’ so that ‘contemporary poets’ in the example above could be ambiguous, meaning both ‘poets of Coleridge’s time’ and ‘poets of today’. Since both interpretations are possible, the need to use contemporary cautiously is clear.

Contemporaneous is an adjective meaning ‘occurring at the same time’. It normally refers to events:

The Civil War and the Irish rebellion were contemporaneous.

but it is possible that it will take over the adjectival sense of contemporary, thus doing away with the present ambiguity.

context

The term context is used in three main ways.

1 It can refer to the words, structures and punctuation surrounding a particular word or usage. Out of context, words seldom have precise meanings, a fact that can be illustrated by the word bear. On its own it may evoke very different responses in the minds of different people, but in the following contexts we have no difficulty in giving it very specific meanings:

The brown bear hibernates throughout the winter. He’s in one of his moods—a regular bear today.

It is wrong to bear false witness against a neighbour. She can’t bear the heat.

In the first example, the use of bear as a noun and its collocation with brown and hibernates eliminate other possible interpretations. Similarly, in the fourth sentence, where bear is a verb and collocates with can’t, the meaning ‘tolerate/endure’ is clearly indicated. The functions and relationships between words thus constitute a very specific meaning of context.

2 A more general use of the term is literary context. This normally includes the linguistic details mentioned above together with information about the genre (play, poem, novel), the type (lyric, ode, sonnet) and the time when it was written. Alliteration in an Old English epic, for example, can have a very different significance from alliteration in a short twentieth-century lyric.

3 A still more general use of context occurs in psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic studies, where it refers not simply to the linguistic environment but also to the extralinguistic details, often known as the context of situation. These details may include the ages of the participants, their sex or nationality, their gestures and movements, the time of day, the place or the occasion (a wedding, for example). Such information may shed light on entire utterances. The following forecast:

Outlook: warm and close.

Further outlook: a little sun.

takes on a different meaning when it is read out at a wedding celebration.

Because context plays an essential role in defining meaning, the quotation of something out of context can cause severe distortion and misrepresentation. The easiest example of this is the statement that ‘There is no God’ occurs in the Bible. It does, but in the context: ‘The fool hath said in his heart: There is no God.’

See: collocation.

continuous aspect

The sentences:

It is boiling at 100 degrees centigrade. It boils at 100 degrees centigrade.

have several differences. The first emphasises that the action is occurring now and is continuous whereas the second concentrates attention on the universality of the action. ‘It’ invariably boils at 100 degrees centigrade even if the action is not taking place now. The first sentence involves the use of the continuous or progressive aspect which is characterised by the use of BE plus the present participle of the following verb:

I am swimming.

You were swimming.

Continuous aspect can co-occur with perfective aspect as in:

He has been swimming.

She had been swimming.

See: aspect, auxiliary, Black English, progressive, verb phrase.

contraction

Contraction is a process whereby a word is phonologically reduced and attached to an adjacent form. It can be illustrated by:

I+am>I’m they+have>they’ve dare+not>daren’t

and is a feature of colloquial speech.

See: aphesis, apocope, clipping, elision, strong and weak forms, syncope.

controversy

The BBC receives many complaints about the pronunciation of controversy. Listeners object to announcers who stress the second syllable, insisting that the word should be pronounced with the strongest stress on the first syllable. The same listeners, however, would also criticise the stressing of the first syllable in laboratory, although both words had first-syllable stress in Britain until the 1930s. It would thus appear that the British speakers who say:

con'troversy

are following the same rule that shifted:

'laboratory

to:

la'boratory

in the UK.

See: ‘chestnuts’, purist.

co-ordination

Co-ordination is the process of linking units of equal status, usually by means of a co- ordinating conjunction:

tall and handsome time and tide

Come in and sit down.

but sometimes, especially when more than two units are involved, co-ordination is achieved by juxtaposition:

tall, dark and handsome time, talk and tide

Come in, take off your coat and sit down.

In co-ordinated phrases and clauses, shared constituents can be elided:

my mother and (my) father

That very pretty girl came in and (…) sat down.

or replaced by pronouns, auxiliaries and so:

I saw the Swedish boy yesterday and recognised him at once.

You will be able to come, won’t you?

I thought he was very handsome and said so.

See: anaphora, conjunction.

copula

This word, which derives from Latin copula meaning ‘bond’, refers to verbs such as BE

which link a subject and a complement:

He is a doctor.

He is in a hurry.

The following verbs can also be used as copulas:

APPEAR: He appeared tired.

BECOME: He became a nurse.

GET: He is getting too big for his boots. GROW: He is growing taller all the time. LOOK: He looked suspicious.

SEEM: He seems a very kind person.

See: BE, complement, verb phrase.

core vocabulary

Our control of language determines the words we use (active vocabulary) and the words we understand but may rarely use (passive vocabulary). Most speakers have a unique inventory of words, acquired from the network of contacts (spoken and written) in which they are involved, but most speakers of a language also share a set of words for basic body parts and functions, common foods and activities. This shared vocabulary is known as the core vocabulary.

Morris Swadesh produced various lists of words (60, 100, 200, 400) which could be assumed to be known and used by all native speakers of a particular language. These lists included:

animals commonly found in the area body parts and functions

colours

commonly-used clothes commonly-eaten foods kin relationships natural phenomena numbers

pronouns question words

references to location references to possession

words relating to age (young, old) and size (big, small)

Since such words are frequently used in speech, they tend to be the least susceptible to change. (The core vocabulary of modern English is still almost exclusively Germanic in spite of centuries of contact with speakers of other languages.)

Linguists use core vocabularies to examine whether or not languages are related. The following lists in English, French and Gaelic, for example, suggest that the languages are related, albeit distantly:

English French Gaelic

cat chat cat

nose nez sron father père athair mother mère mathair snow neige sneachta one un aon

you toi/vous tu/sibh

old vieux sean

big grand mór

The closer the resemblance of the core vocabulary items and the more similarities there are, the closer the relationship between the languages.

Some linguists have evolved techniques for comparing core vocabularies and calculating the time since the languages or varieties of one language separated. The comparison of core vocabularies is known as lexicostatistics and the quantification techniques as glottochronology.

Although core vocabularies exist and are useful in assessing relationships, glottochronology is a controversial discipline. It assumes that languages change slowly and at a regular rate. In the words of Swadesh (1972):

One general rule applies to all forms of linguistic change: It goes on slowly…

Our knowledge of pidgins and creoles over the past 400 years, however, shows us that fundamental phonological, lexical and grammatical changes can occur within a generation. In addition, glottochronology can in some cases give very wrong results. It is right when it tells us that UK and US English are closely related in time and space, but wrong when it indicates that English and Tok Pisin (the pidginised English of Papua New Guinea) diverged over two thousand years ago.