countable and
uncountable
These terms are applied to certain types of nouns. Countable nouns
are individual items that we can easily differentiate, number and pluralise.
The singular can also be prefixed by a:
a/one chair two
chairs ten chairs
a/one child two children ten children a/one memory two memories ten memories
Uncountable or mass nouns denote amounts that can be divided but not separated
into entities which can be numbered. We do not, for example, usually count
sugar by the grain or water by the drop. Examples of uncountable nouns are:
cash confidence sand soil
Uncountable nouns may be used with some:
some money not *a money
some sand not *a sand
with the:
the bread
the furniture
with a phrase
equivalent to ‘an amount of’:
an ounce of tea a ton of sand
or without an
article:
I was filled
with shame.
Such nouns
are treated as singular and do not normally have a plural:
The news is
not good.
The distinction
between countable and uncountable nouns is neither wholly logical (some
languages treat hair, knowledge and luggage as countable nouns, others as
uncountable) nor wholly linguistic (news is
uncountable but news item is
countable). Moreover, a noun normally treated as uncountable may become
countable when we refer to a variety:
Lactose and fructose are
both sugars.
or to a
specified amount:
One sugar or two?
The division
between countable and uncountable nouns is language specific and arbitrary. In
English, we make nouns countable when we concentrate on the fact that items are
separable; when we focus on quantity, we make nouns uncountable. We may even
use
this distinction to differentiate meaning, so that the study of people (character observation) is not
confused with the study of peoples (ethnology).
See: collective
nouns, determiner, fewer, noun.
creole
A creole is a pidginised language adopted
as the mother tongue of a speech community. In the process of becoming a mother
tongue, the language is modified so as to fulfil all the linguistic needs of a
community. We have historical evidence of the creolisation of many
European-related pidgins over the last five hundred years: creole Englishes are
found in the Caribbean, creole Dutch in South Africa, creole French in
Mauritius and creole Portuguese in the Moluccas.
The processes by which a group of people learn the rudiments of a
language not their own and are forced (by large-scale social disruption such as
that caused by the Slave Trade) to pass this newly-acquired language on to
their children as a mother tongue have been more in evidence since the
fifteenth century than at any other period in the past. Nevertheless, the
linguistic features associated with pidginisation and creolisation (such as the
loss of redundancies, the dropping
of inflection and concordial agreement, the exploitation of
linguistic common denominators) have occurred many times in history, especially
during times of conquest. The changes that became apparent in the English
language in England after the Norman Conquest differ more in degree than in
essence from the changes that occurred in the English of Jamaica during the
period of the Slave Trade.
Pidgins and creoles have
often been disparaged because they have been used by people of low social
status. Linguistically, however, a creole is no different from any other mother
tongue: it fulfils all the needs of its speakers and is modified to suit
changing needs. Pidgins and creoles that are related to English (and there are
at least sixty varieties along the trade routes of the world) have been
stigmatised in the same way as dialectal Englishes have been stigmatised,
because difference has been equated with deficiency and simplicity of structure
with simplemindedness.
See: mixed
language, pidgins and creoles.
curse and swear
In the
idiolects of many speakers, these words are essentially synonymous, but for
some speakers curse retains its
meaning of ‘malediction’, ‘wishing someone evil’:
May the devil take you.
Swear originally meant ‘take an oath,
calling on God to witness that what is said is true’, a meaning it still has
in:
I swear by Almighty God that the evidence
I give will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Casual
swearing, when the names of heavenly beings were invoked in exclamations:
God Almighty!
Lord God!
was condemned
by law in England in 1606. (Breaking the law could result in a fine of ten
pounds, which was a great deal of money in the seventeenth century.) This law
had three effects:
1 classical
deities were invoked—a device used by Shakespeare and still found today:
By Jove!
Jumping Jupiter!
2 hidden
swearing occurred:
Bloody<By
our Lady
Drat<God
rot you
3 substitutes
(often alliterating substitutes) were found:
Crumbs<Christ
Jeepers<Jesus
More recently, swearing has
taken on the meaning of exclamations involving ‘four-letter words’.
See: euphemism, exclamation, taboo words.
dangling
modifier/participle
A phrase or clause is described as dangling, hanging or misrelated when it is inappropriately
attached to a word or when it is not related structurally to any part of the
sentence. The following sentence taken from the Daily Mirror of 21 July, 1984, illustrates a dangling clause:
Laburnum seeds
are best deadheaded when there are young children about because they are deadly
poisonous.
The effects of
such phrases and clauses may be confusing, misleading, comic or, in some
instances, colloquially acceptable.
The commonest dangling modifiers involve -ing forms, infinitives or preposition phrases. In the following
sentence, for example, ‘driving’ apparently modifies ‘signposts’:
There are no
signposts driving through the Trough of Bowland.
In:
To get to the
Trough of Bowland, signposts must be followed.
the implied
subject of the infinitive ‘a motorist/a tourist’ should be specified:
To get to the Trough of Bowland, a motorist must
follow signposts.
For a motorist to get to the Trough of Bowland, signposts must be
followed.
Similarly,
more detail is required to make the next sentence acceptable:
At the age of
three, his family left Burnley.
‘His family’
cannot be ‘at the age of three’. What is needed is a clause such as ‘When he
was three’. Only when the implied subject of both parts of the sentence is the
same:
When he was three, he left Burnley.
can the first
clause be transformed into a preposition phrase:
At the age of
three, he left Burnley.
There are some modifiers that appear to contradict the
rule:
Assuming that there are
no interruptions, the job should take about two hours.
Knowing him, the gift was no surprise.
Roughly speaking, their house is five miles
away. Seeing there is no
alternative, this outfit will have to do. To
do her justice, she tries very hard.
To give her credit, she is always
polite.
Strictly, these
modifiers are all misrelated: ‘assuming’ does not modify ‘the job’, ‘knowing’
‘the gift’, ‘speaking’ ‘their house’, ‘seeing’ ‘this outfit’ nor ‘to do/to
give’ ‘she’. However, these constructions, and others like them, are
distinguished from the earlier examples by the following facts:
they are colloquially acceptable
they behave more like fillers than
modifiers
their verbs involve estimation,
perception or mental processes they all imply a first-person subject
The essential
rule is to use modification carefully, ensuring that there is no chance of
misinterpretation.
See: fillers,
infinitive, -ing forms, modifier, participle.
data
The Latin singular datum meaning
‘one piece of given information’ is rarely used. Instead, the plural form data may be used with a plural verb:
The data collected so far make such a
condusion unlikely.
Increasingly, the word data is used as a collective noun with a singular verb:
The data suggests that further research would be worthwhile.
and, where
necessary, with singular determiners:
This data is beautifully
presented.
See: collective
nouns, plurals of nouns.
dates
UK and US
conventions differ slightly in the writing of dates:
UK US
9th October, 1984 October 9, 1984
9 October, 1984 9 October 1984
9 October 1984
1 A form
with commas is normally used when the full date is written within a sentence:
They planned to leave on 9
October, 1984.
When the day of the week is
added, another comma is used:
They planned
to leave on Tuesday, 9 October, 1984.
When only the month and year are
used, the month is usually followed by a comma but this is not obligatory:
They planned
to leave in October, 1984.
2
Except in formal and legal documents, the day
and year are usually expressed in Arabic numerals. In business letters, months with more than four
letters are sometimes abbreviated:
9 Oct., 1984.
When the whole
date is written in numbers, the conventions are:
UK US
9–10–1984
(day, month) 10–9–1984 (month, day) 9–x–84 10/9/84
9/10/84
3 When
dates are spoken or read aloud, they should
be:
the ninth of
October nineteen eighty-four
or:
October (the) ninth nineteen
eighty-four
4 Years
and centuries should be written as follows:
200 BC
AD 323
the 1980s the
eighties
in 1983–84 (*in 1983–4)
nineteenth-century
novels the nineteenth century
5
In footnotes,
dates may be abbreviated (Oct., 19th century).
It is clear that conventions are necessary in the writing of dates if
we are to avoid ambiguity. The International Certificate of Vaccination
specifically instructs:
Misunderstandings have arisen as to the date of issue, and therefore
the period of validity, of International Certificates of Vaccination, due to
differences in national or other practice of recording dates: for example, the
10th August, 1957, may be written as 10 Aug., 1957, or Aug. 10, 1957, or
10.8.57 or 8.10.57. These misunderstandings can be avoided if dates on
International Certificates are always written
thus:-
the day should be placed first in Arabic
numerals; the month should appear
second in letters;
the year should come last in Arabic numerals. The above example would
then appear as “10 August, 1957”.
There is a
growing tendency to get rid of all commas and there is a certain amount of
choice in the writing of dates but whatever form a speaker or writer chooses
should be used consistently.
See: abbreviations, footnotes, punctuation.
decimate
Decimate means ‘reduce by one tenth’.
Originally it applied to the practice of punishing troops for cowardice or
mutiny by killing every tenth man. The word was generalised to mean the
reduction by a tenth of anything countable, from fruit trees to profits.
Decimate is often used
loosely as an emphatic and emotive word for the destruction of a large
proportion of something:
The drought has decimated their
herds—fewer than half have survived.
This usage
should be avoided.
See: problem words.
declarative
The term declarative is identical in meaning to indicative and is applied to sentences
of the form:
He is doing his best.
She doesn’t
sing well.
Both terms contrast with imperative:
Go away.
and interrogative:
Didn’t you see
anything?
See: affirmative, imperative, indicative,
interrogative.
declarative question
A declarative
question has the form of a statement:
You’re leaving?
but has the intonation of a
question when spoken and is marked by a question mark in writing.
A declarative question differs from a rhetorical question such as:
Do you think I was born
yesterday?
in two ways:
1 A rhetorical question has the
form of a question:
Was I tired?
2 A declarative question seeks an
answer. A rhetorical question requires no answer since it is semantically
equivalent to an emphatic declaration:
Do you think
I’m stupid? (i.e.
I’m certainly not stupid.)
Am I tired? (i.e. I’m
extremely tired.) See: question.
deep structure
The idea of a
level of structure or grammar other
than that revealed by actual samples of language was implied by traditional
grammarians when they claimed that the subject of such a sentence as:
Go away.
was you (understood). Similarly, many
structuralists expressed dissatisfaction with methods of analysis which did not
make clear that superficial similarity could hide underlying differences.
Noam Chomsky specifically attempted to describe deep structure and to explain how the levels of language could be
explicitly related. In his various writings since the publication of Syntactic Structures (1957) Chomsky and
linguists influenced by him have shown how:
1 differing underlying patterns can have the same surface manifestation.
This is particularly easy to show with regard to structures involving Ving+NP:
Visiting relatives (i.e. when they visit) can be a
nuisance. Visiting relatives (i.e.
when we visit) can be a nuisance.
2 different
surface structures can have the same underlying pattern:
We were
terribly shocked and grieved when he died.
Our shock and grief at his death was terrible. His death caused us
terrible shock and grief.
Deep structures
can be transformed into surface structures by a number of explicitly stated
rules. Such rules allow us to account for:
1 deletion:
The card (I wrote the card)
arrived late→The card I wrote arrived late.
2 substitution:
The man (I saw
the man) was fat→The man that I saw was fat.
3
permutation:
He died last
summer→Last summer he died.
4 insertion:
This is the cat→This is the cat that killed the rat.
