defining and
non-defining relative clauses
Defining
clauses (also
called restrictive clauses) narrow
the application of their
antecedents:
the women who
wore make-up…(i.e.
only those wearing make-up)
whereas non-defining
or non-restrictive clauses extend
our knowledge of the antecedent:
the women, who wore make-up…(i.e. and they wore make-up)
Defining
relative clauses limit and reduce the application of the nouns they modify. In sentences
such as:
The men escaped.
The ideas were
impressive.
the subjects have almost general
application. This application is reduced when we introduce defining clauses:
The men who
carried torches escaped.
The ideas which Rachel put
forward were impressive.
Defining clauses are not
separated from their antecedents by commas and, in the spoken medium, the main
and the defining clause constitute one tone group.
Non-defining relative clauses expand their antecedents by
description or comment:
The men, who
carried torches, escaped.
The ideas, which Rachel put
forward, were impressive.
These relative
clauses are marked off in the written medium by punctuation: commas, dashes or parentheses. In speech, such sentences
would have two tone groups and pauses equivalent to the punctuation marks. A
non-defining clause may be deleted without fundamentally altering the meaning
and implication of the antecedent.
The distinction between defining and non-defining clauses is a
significant one. If we contrast the difference in meaning between:
The women who
had children left early (but only two left).
The women, who
had children, left early (all left).
it becomes
clear that punctuation and intonation can play crucial roles in determining the
connection between a relative clause and its antecedent.
See: antecedent, clause.
definition
All definitions involving language are circular, a fact that is quickly
revealed if we look up any word in a dictionary.
If we want to know the meaning of gibberish,
for example, and use The Concise
Oxford Dictionary we are told that gibberish is:
Unintelligible speech, meaningless sounds, jargon, blundering or
ungrammatical talk.
If we seek
additional information we find that jargon
is defined as:
Unintelligible words, gibberish; barbarous or debased language; mode of
speech full of unfamiliar terms…
And The Concise Oxford Dictionary is not
alone in offering such circularity. It cannot be avoided. If for example there
are N words in a language and we look up Word 1:
for Word 1
we get Word 2 for Word 2 we get Word 3 for Word 3 we get Word 4
for Word N we get Word N+1
but there are
only N words in the language and so circularity is unavoidable.
An alternative to a verbal definition is an ostensive definition, that is, we can point. If someone asks: ‘What
is a cow?’ we can point to the animal or to a picture of the animal. Such
definitions have two weaknesses:
1
few nouns are as easy to point at as cow. What could we do for life or intelligence or
God?
2
unless the person already has a good idea of
what a cow is, our pointing may be misunderstood. We might be pointing at horns
or markings on the skin.
See: dictionary.
degree
Adjectives and adverbs can occur in three different
forms, described as positive, comparative
and superlative degrees:
Positive
Comparative Superlative amazing more
amazing most amazing fast faster fastest
huge huger hugest foolishly more foolishly most foolishly
Occasionally, the constructions:
as amazing as/as foolishly as less amazing/less foolishly least
amazing/least foolishly
are included in discussions of degree, the first
described as equative, the second and
third as negative comparison.
See: adjective, adverb, comparison of adjectives and adverbs.
degrees
Academic degrees are normally given after a
person’s name only in formal circumstances directly connected with the person’s
academic or professional activities. Thus a professor writing a reference may
include degrees to indicate status and competence; and someone writing a formal
letter to an academic, a clergyman or a professional person may give degrees
and honours after the addressee’s name. It is usually sufficient to give the
highest degree received by the person, although catalogues, curriculum vitae
and prospectuses often list all the degrees, as well as the institutions at
which they were obtained. The practice of including degrees is distinct from
that of using academic titles:
Dr Brown Professor Brown
These are used
in speech and are more likely than degrees to be given in informal
correspondence.
The conventions for indicating
degrees are:
John Brown,
B.A. (A.B. if the degree is from Harvard)
Mary Brown, Ph.D.
John Brown,
B.A. (London), M.A. (Leeds), Ph.D. (Texas) Dr Mary Brown
The title
‘doctor’ and the degree are mutually exclusive and so the following should not
be used:
*Dr Mary Brown, Ph.D.
There is a
growing tendency to delete full stops in the marking of degrees, especially in
the UK.
See: abbreviations,
address and reference.
deixis
Deixis derives from deiktos, a Greek
word meaning ‘show, point out’, and is related in form and meaning to index as in index finger. Deixis provides information on the location and temporal position of a speaker:
here (close in position to
speaker)
there (far from speaker)
now (close in time to
speaker)
then (removed in time from
speaker)
I (speaker)
you (close to speaker)
they (distanced from speaker)
Deixis refers
to all the units of language which provide information on the time and place of
an occurrence:
adverbs: here, now
anaphoric
reference: the aforementioned, the latter
demonstratives:
this, that, these, those pronouns: 1st, 2nd and 3rd
persons verbs: bring/take, come/go
and perhaps
intonation. The unit which carries deixis is called a deictic.
See: anaphora,
bring, speaker orientation.
deletion
Certain items
can be deleted from sentences without interfering with the grammatical
acceptability of the sentence:
That (big) dog
can run (very) (quickly).
Such items tend
to be adjectives, adverbs and co-ordinating conjunctions. In addition, shared
constituents of compound phrases, clauses and sentences can be deleted:
my son and my daughter→my son and daughter
That’s the stick which he picked up and which he shook at me→That’s the stick he picked up and shook at me.
See: deep
structure, transformational grammar, transformations.
demonstratives
There are two singular and
two plural demonstratives in English (this, that, these, those)
which can be used as determiners:
this/that chicken these/those chickens
and as
pronouns:
This/that is
the answer.
These/those are the answers.
This/these imply proximity to
the speaker and that/those imply
distance from the speaker. None of the demonstratives is marked with regard to
closeness or distance from the listener. English used to have a tripartite
system with yon implying distance
from both speaker and listener (and paralleling yonder in spatial orientation):
For most
contemporary users of the language, however, yon and yonder are
archaic or regional.
See: deixis,
speaker orientation.
denotation
Denotation is the referential meaning of
a word, as distinct from its emotional, social or regional associations. For
example, the word immigrant may be
defined referentially as a person who comes into a country of which he/she is
not a native with the intention of permanent residence. This is the kind of
denotative information given in most dictionaries.
However, the word immigrant may also
carry a range of emotional implications (such as colour, poverty) that vary
according to personal experience, location and political or social attitudes.
The additional associations are not the denotation but the connotations of the word.
Few words are exclusively denotative (even scientific or technical
words may arouse strong feelings in some individuals, e.g. ballistics, chromosome, ozone) but the more neutral denotative
references tend to predominate in expository prose.
See: connotation, style, synonym.
dependent
The term dependent is used in
sentence analysis to refer to clauses other
than the main
clause. It is synonymous and in free
variation with subordinate. In a
sentence such as:
He said that
you can come if you finish quickly.
we
have a main clause:
He said
and two
dependent clauses:
that you can
come
if you finish quickly
Dependent clauses, as their name
implies, cannot occur independently but rely structurally on another unit in a sentence.
The term dependent clause has been replaced by embedded sentence in transformational
grammar.
See: clause, embedding, subordination, transformational grammar.
derivation
Derivation is a type of word formation involving the use of prefixes and/or suffixes. The addition of a prefix to the stem normally modifies
the basic meaning with regard to negation (unhappy), repetition (reaffirm)
and time (exhusband). The addition of a suffix to the stem normally
causes the word to shift from one word class to another:
beauty (noun) beautiful (adjective) beautify
(verb)
Suffixes
should be distinguished from the inflectional endings -s, -ed, -en, -ing, -’s, -er, - est, which modify the function of a
word, marking plurality, possession, a verb form or the comparative/
superlative forms of adjectives and adverbs. The basic difference between
inflections and suffixes is that inflections do not change a word’s class:
parent parents
parents’—nouns
write writes
writing written—verbs
whereas suffixes usually do.
Productive affixes are those where the meanings and implications are
well known to native speakers, who can thus produce their own derivatives.
Sometimes a new morpheme becomes productive in the language. This happened with -nik:
beatnik
kibbutznik
refusenik
and with -gate from Watergate which took on the meaning of government scandal,
producing Muldergate in South Africa
and Kincoragate in Ireland.
The word derivation is also
used in the study of relationships between languages or between different
stages of the same language. Thus we can say that many English terms
associated
with food and cooking derive from
French and we can also say that modern
lord derives from Old English hlaf+weard meaning the
‘giver of bread’.
See: affix, etymology, inflection, prefix, suffix, word formation.
determiner
Structuralists
coined the word determiner to
designate a class of words that
function like attributive adjectives and
signal the appearance of a noun in English. The following are the most
widely-used determiners in the language:
1
articles (the, a/an)
2
demonstratives
(this, that, these,
those)
3 possessives (my, your,
our…)
4
interrogatives
(which, what, whose)
5 numbers (one, two…,
first, second…)
6
indefinite determiners: these are all the
items that have a similar distribution to the above determiners but cannot be
so easily classified. They include:
all, any,
both, each, either, enough, every, few (fewer), less, more, most, much,
neither, no, only, several, some.
A good test for a determiner is
to check if the item has a similar distribution to the:
the good man the
good men this good man these good men my good man their good men which good man? what good men? one good man all good men every good man other good men
A number of determiners can
precede articles:
all the trees
only the
lonely
These are frequently referred to
as ‘limiters’.
See: adjective,
all, article, demonstratives.
deviation
The terms deviance and deviation are applied to linguistic units which do not conform to
the rules of the language. Thus, in English, a word such as:
*mna
a phrase such
as:
*of out mind his
or a sentence
such as:
*I am liking
you muchly.
are deviant or
‘ill-formed’ because they break the phonological and syntactic rules of the
language. (It is customary to mark a deviant form with an asterisk.)
As with so many aspects of language, there are no clear cut-off points
between deviance and non-deviance. Deviation presupposes a norm but the norm can change. A question such as:
Is you is or
is you ain’t my baby?
is deviant,
according to the rules of Standard
English, but is acceptable in the song from which it is taken. Equally, a
sentence such as:
I knowed she
would come.
deviates from
standard grammar but is acceptable in a number of regional dialects.
The notion of deviation is frequently invoked in stylistic analysis to
account for a poet’s exploitation of the language. Most poems use sentences
containing words and phrases. Edwin Morgan, however, in ‘Off Course’ uses only
noun phrases, two to a line, each beginning with ‘the’:
the golden flood the weightless seat the cabin song
the pitch black…
The effect of
this pattern is of dislocation and, since the poem describes an astronaut
adrift in space, the deviation from established syntactic forms reinforces the
meaning.
Deviations may occur at any level of the language (alliteration and other phonic adornments can be seen in this light)
but if the deviations are too many or too varied then comprehensibility may be
lost.
See: norms,
style.
dialect
No brief definition of this term will be totally satisfactory because
the word dialect has been used in so
many different ways. It derives ultimately from a Greek word meaning
‘discourse, conversation, a way of speaking, a language of a country or
district’ and all these meanings, and several more, are implied by the term
today. Indeed, dialect is so
ambiguous that several linguists have tried to replace it with other terms such
as:
cryptolect (a secret variety, e.g. Anglo-Romani)
ethnolect (an ethnic variety, e.g. Black English)
lect (any variety of language without social or regional implications)
register (a variety of language defined according to user)
sociolect (a variety used by a social class or occupation)
The word dialect has both scholarly and popular
connotations. Scholars have used the word to imply all of the following:
1 a language at different periods
in its evolution 2 regionally-marked varieties of a language
3 socially-marked varieties of a
language 4 the language of literature
5
the speech of the uneducated
6
the idiosyncratic language use of an individual
7
non-standard varieties of a standardised
language 8 languages of the third world
9 languages of minority groups
The popular view of dialects overlaps the scholarly in that the term
is usually applied to: 1 regionally-marked speech
2
the speech of lower socio-economic groups
3 regional pronunciations
Popularly, dialects are also often associated with
warmth, humour, vitality, incorrectness, slovenliness, lack of intelligence.
With so many and such varied implications, the term dialect needs to be used with care.
A dialect is not just a form of pronunciation. The word relates to a
variety of language and comprehends pronunciation, vocabulary choice and
syntax. A Yorkshire woman, seeing an old lady drop her parcels, may say to her
son:
Pick those [i.e. parcels] up and carry them for her.
or:
Sam ’er them up an’ hug ’er
them.
The first is
standard English with a regional accent; the second is an example of Yorkshire
dialect.
Dialects are in no way linguistically inferior to any other
mother-tongue speech. They are perfectly adequate for the needs of their
speakers and can be easily modified to accommodate changes in society. Usually,
dialects do not have their own orthography
and, since most remain unwritten, they lack the prestige that accrues to a
standard language with a recognised system of writing. All dialects can be
given orthographies and any dialect could be moulded to suit the needs of any
society. Standard English was once a
regional dialect, considered by many to be incapable of expressing cultural or
literary aspirations.
It is not always easy to distinguish between a dialect and a language.
Often the decision is made according to political rather than linguistic
criteria. As one cynic put it:
A dialect is a language without armies and
navies.
Expressing essentially the same point another way, Swedish, Danish and
Norwegian are classified as three languages although there is a high degree of
interintelligibility among them. If the same degree of interintelligibility
were found in African or South Pacific speech communities, the communities
would be said to speak closely-related dialects. Attitudes to dialects are
changing slowly but the claim made by Einar Haugen in 1972 is still widely
applicable:
As a social norm…a dialect is a
language that is excluded from polite society.
As well as
regional dialects, there are class dialects. Working-class people tend to have
less formal education than their more affluent peers and often use a variety
described as ‘nonstandard’ (‘substandard’ until the late 1960s). As far as
English is concerned, working-class dialects show considerable similarities.
First, they are all being influenced by the media and so are coming closer to network norms. Secondly, there is a
‘standardness’ about the nonstandard features that are found in working-class
English from London to Adelaide or the Apalachians:
1 the
tendency to use them as a
demonstrative:
them boots
2
the tendency to simplify verb forms:
I see I seen I have seen
3
the tendency to use multiple negation:
I didn’t say
nothin’.
4 the
tendency to use local pronunciation.
