apposition
Frequently a noun
or noun phrase may be followed
by an explanatory nominal:
Tom, the muffin man
Sweeney Todd, the barber
and the nouns or noun phrases are
said to be ‘in apposition’. Thus ‘the muffin man’ is in apposition to ‘Tom’.
The second nominal is also sometimes called an appositive.
The head noun
and its appositive refer to the same person or thing and agree in number:
my son, the bridegroom, and
my daughters, the bridesmaids
and case:
We, John and
I, will do all we can to help.
and usually either of the nouns
(or noun phrases) can be omitted without syntactic loss:
We will do all
we can to help.
John and I will do all we
can to help.
There is usually a comma before
and after an appositive, except when the headword and appositive together form
a title:
They nicknamed her Attila the Hen.
William the Conqueror won the battle of Hastings in 1066.
Arabic influences
Many words of
Arabic origin have found their way into English, either directly or by way of
other languages including French, Italian, Persian, Spanish and Turkish. The
oldest borrowings date back to the
Crusades and are found in almost all west European languages. Among these are:
albatross admiral alchemy alcohol alkali algebra elixir zenith zero
words that
emphasise the pre-eminence of Arabic scholars of the period in astronomy,
mathematics, medicine, science and seafaring. Arabic numbers, too, were borrowed, and thus all literate speakers of
European languages would recognise 1, 2, 3 although English speakers would call
them ‘one, two, three’ and French speakers ‘un,
deux, trois’.
More recently, other borrowings came into
the language: words for items of clothing:
burnous
culture:
fakir genie houri
food:
kebab lemon
sugar candy
Many of the latest borrowings
were brought into the language by soldiers. Among these items are bint meaning ‘woman’ and buckshee meaning ‘free’.
See: North African English.
archaic retentions
Archaic retentions are those elements in
the language which derive from an earlier period and which preserve features no
longer found in English. For example, willy
nilly comes from will he, ne+will he and retains a type of negation
common until Shakespeare’s day.
Archaic retentions
are most frequently found in legal language:
attorney general (noun+adjective)
the
aforementioned
in liturgical language:
brethren
Lady Day (Our Lady’s
Day) in some types of letters:
inst. (this month)
prox. (next month) in trades
and occupations:
bespoke tailoring houses to let
and in dialects. Many dialects retain older past tense and past participle
forms:
bring brung climb clumb
multiple negation as a form of emphasis:
He didn’t say
nothing to nobody.
and words that are no longer
current in the standard language:
buss (kiss)
thole (endure)
See: archaism, dialect.
archaism
An archaism is a word or expression formerly in use but no longer
occurring naturally in contemporary speech and writing. If a twentieth-century
writer produced the sentence:
Forsooth, ’tis thee, thou
varlet.
he would be using archaisms,
although none of these words would have been archaic to Shakespeare.
An archaism has a certain amount of prestige largely because it has
antiquity value. That is probably the fundamental distinction between an
‘old-fashioned’ expression and an archaism.
Among the
well-known archaisms in the language are:
anon (soon,
immediately) behest (order, request) delve (dig with a spade) thou (you singular) Yuletide (Christmas)
See: address
and reference, archaic retentions.
argot
The term argot has derogatory connotations and like patois tends to be used by educated
speakers to describe the language of a socially inferior group. An argot refers to the special, sometimes
secret, vocabulary and idioms of a group such as thieves and it is sometimes mistakenly
confused with jargon.
See: cant, jargon, patois.
argument
An argument is the process by which the
writer or speaker attempts to convince the reader or audience about the
validity of some conclusion, principle or point of view. The term normally
applies to the sequence of points through which a case is presented and may include
illustrations. A related meaning of argument
(or thesis) is the writer’s or speaker’s particular reason for presenting a
detailed case.
Conventionally, we tend to distinguish four types of writing:
argument, description, exposition and
narration. Although these categories
are not totally discrete (description, for
example, may be involved in narration),
awareness of them is useful when the writer is deciding on the objective of a
particular task.
The writer who intends to present an argument needs to observe the
rules of logic. It is not enough simply to express an opinion or impression,
such as:
Jane Austen’s
humour implies social judgements.
All the
reader needs to do to refute such an unsupported claim is reply:
I disagree.
Claims like
that above have to be expressed precisely (What is meant by social judgement?),
with explanations (What sort of humour is being referred to?), examples or quotations, and some analysis or
explanation of how the illustrations support the initial claim. In general, a
clear and persuasive argument requires the reader to:
1
be precise, eliminating ambiguous or vague
words, clumsy sentences, poor organisation and irrelevant details
2 avoid
unsupported generalisations
3 define
terms, so that there can be no dispute about meaning or interpretation 4
progress methodically from one step to the next
5 be critical and selective in the use of emotive language.
The main procedures by which an argument is developed are analogy, cause and effect, deduction
and induction. Each provides a means of presenting ideas, evidence and
conclusions.
Analogy This is concerned
with comparison, chiefly of two different things that share a particular
quality. It is a means of explaining the strange or new in terms of the
familiar or known. Well used, an analogy can promote concise explanation and
coherent argument.
Causal statements These are used primarily to convince the reader to accept a particular
interpretation of certain facts. The connections between causes and effects are
indicated by words and phrases (because,
consequently, since, so that, therefore, thus) and can, depending on the
choice of active or passive voice, be overt or covert:
Thus, Joan won
eighteen battles.
Thus, eighteen
battles were won.
Deduction This is a method of reaching a
conclusion from a premise that is accepted as true. For example, we notice that
a book is arranged alphabetically and conclude that it could be a type of
reference work. The basic premise, founded on existing knowledge, is that
reference books are often arranged alphabetically. Deductive reasoning is often
epitomised by the syllogism (A implies B, B implies C, therefore A implies C),
the three stages being known as the thesis, the antithesis and the synthesis.
For deductive reasoning to be valid, the premise (or thesis) must be valid:
All men are animals.
Animals have
brains. Therefore all men have brains.
and the
vocabulary must be used consistently and not as in the following false
syllogism:
A horse for a penny is rare. Rare things are expensive.
Therefore a horse for a
penny is expensive.
Induction This is a method of arguing
from the evidence to the conclusion. For example, we may notice that more and
more shopkeepers use apostrophe+s to
indicate plurality on signs in their shops. We collect samples of the usage and
can then conclude, inductively, that there is a growing tendency to use ’s for plurals in shop signs.
The presentation of an argument relies ultimately on precise, concise
expression as well as on common sense.
See: analogy,
discourse analysis, style.
article
There are two articles in
English: the definite article the and
the indefinite article which is realised
as a before consonants and an before vowels. Both ‘the’ and ‘a’
have two pronunciations, 
and
when unstressed, /ði/ and 
when stressed.
Teachers of English as a Second Language
have found it particularly difficult to
explain when
to use ‘the’, ‘a’ or a plural noun because native speakers can use all of the
following:
The cat is a feline.
A cat is a feline.
Cats are felines.
The best
simplification is that the form of the article is determined by the interplay
of the features ‘definite’ and ‘known to the listener’, thus giving four
possible realisations:
1
Both definite and known to the listener→the
Look at the sun!
2 Definite
but not known to the listener→a/an
I passed through a village.
3 Indefinite
but known to the listener→ 
The lion is
dangerous. A lion is dangerous.
Lions are dangerous.
4
Neither definite nor known to the listener→a/an
If a person wants something…
A number of common expressions
exist without articles. Among them are:
at breakfast/dinner/lunch/supper/tea at home/sea/work
by
boat/bicycle/bus/car/plane/train in/to class/hospital
in bed/church at/from/in/to
school on foot
In addition, the can sometimes replace possessives
before body parts:
The stone hit
him on the head.
This usage
tends to be limited to sentences relating to blows, injury or pain where the
body part follows a preposition:
She poked him
in the eye.
It is a
convention of narrative fiction that a novel, story or poem may open with the even though the reader cannot
possibly be familiar with the character or topic. This usage is like a contract
between writer and reader by which the writer undertakes to make these things
familiar. A random selection of works that open with this ‘promissory the’ includes:
The suburb of
Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London…
G.K.Chesterton, The
Man Who Was Thursday
The Assyrian came down like a
wolf on the fold
Lord Byron, ‘The Destruction
of Sennacherib’
The first thing the midwife noticed about Michael K…
J.M.Coetzee, Life
and Times of Michael K
See: anaphora, determiner.
