dialectal, dialectic, dialectical
Dialectal is the adjective deriving
from dialect and relates to varieties
of a language:
There is considerable dialectal variation
within Yorkshire. ‘Gotten’ is considered dialectal
in British speech.
Dialectic is a noun referring to a type of logical procedure:
Plato’s dialectic is
characterised by dialogue.
Dialectical is the adjective relating to
dialectic:
Plato’s dialectical methods have been imitated
for centuries.
diction
Diction, from Latin dicere (to say), has two commonly used meanings, one related to
speech and the other to the choice of vocabulary. As a feature of speech or
singing, diction refers to the enunciation of words. A speaker’s diction may be
clear and so good, or indistinct, and so poor. Good diction, the art of
speaking clearly, was once considered an essential ingredient of good manners.
In relation to vocabulary, diction implies the selection of words. It
is often referred to in the teaching of writing skills, where good diction
involves the choice of clear, effective and appropriate words.
Poetic diction is a term,
usually applied disparagingly to vocabulary items appearing in verse:
feathered friends=birds finny tribe=fish
verdant meadows=green
fields See: bon mot, poetic diction.
dictionary
There are
three main types of dictionary, each
capable of providing a variety of information.
1
The bilingual
dictionary aims primarily at the sort of translations that will help a person who is using two languages.
This aim is usually fulfilled by dividing the book into two halves, each
organised alphabetically. Thus an English-Spanish dictionary will devote the
first half to English words for which Spanish equivalents are provided and the
second half to Spanish words for which English equivalents are given. This
method has been extremely successful in dealing with Indo-European languages where the stems of most parts of speech are isolatable and
where the various forms of regular words begin with the same sound:
man men
hombre hombres
By its very
nature, a bilingual dictionary is crude and oversimplified. It concentrates on denotation since it is impossible to
take account of all connotations or
language-specific viewpoints. To give an example: a speaker of English might
look up girl in a French dictionary
and find fille. This is denotatively
accurate, but French people tend to use jeune
fille for girl because fille can be used for prostitute. Bilingual dictionaries are
perhaps more useful for jogging the memory or adding to something that one
already knows than for providing entirely new
information.
2
The monolingual
dictionary provides information on meaning and contextualisation. Definitions usually include synonyms and the most widely used collocations in which a word occurs.
Cat, for example, may be defined as a feline
and phrases such as cat’s cradle, cat
o’ nine tails and catspaw explained.
The monolingual dictionary may also provide information on:
(a) etymology. This provides information on how a word may
have developed from an earlier word, or been taken over from another language.
For example, emu is generally
believed to come from a modification of Portuguese ema meaning ‘rhea’, another flightless bird.
(b) pronunciation. This can be useful but it
also limits an English language dictionary because of the different
pronunciations found in different parts of the English-speaking world.
(c) forms of the word. These may indicate
irregular plurals, tenses, spellings, or provide other words that are
etymologically related.
(d) style markers. Some dictionaries give
more of these than others, indicating a range of descriptions from formal through informal to colloquial, slang, vulgar and taboo. Related
to style markers are informative
notes such as archaic, ecclesiastical,
obsolete, philosophy or scientific.
Such markers help a reader contextualise an unfamiliar word, but since they are
not standardised one dictionary may label vulgar
what another marks as taboo.
(e)
usage. Some dictionaries, such as
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary,
give a note on
usage for problem words. This is a relatively new practice, incorporating
some of the
properties of usage guides and extending the usefulness of a dictionary as a
reference work.
(f)
appendices. Many dictionaries have
appendices, each arranged alphabetically, giving information on such diverse
subjects as abbreviations, weights
and measures, universities and colleges, foreign words and punctuation. These extend the scope of the dictionary as a
reference book, but are not really part of the lexicographical function.
3 A
number of dictionaries have been compiled which focus specifically on some of
the details listed under 2. These include ‘etymological’, ‘pronouncing’ and
‘school’ dictionaries. In addition, lexical relations such as synonymy and
antonymy are provided in Roget’s Thesaurus
and its imitations; and specialised dictionaries dealing exclusively with catch phrases or idioms have been published.
All dictionaries are related in some way to vocabulary and usage and
each is designed as a reference book. However, it is sometimes forgotten that a
dictionary is the work of an individual or a team and is not, necessarily,
guided by divine inspiration. It is useful to remember that all dictionaries,
including the most revered, are best seen as helpful guides and not as absolute authorities.
See: definition,
denotation, etymology.
differ from, differ with
Differ from is normally used in the
sense of ‘be different, show a difference’:
Cultivated roses differ from wild
ones in colour and shape.
He certainly differs from the
conventional salesman.
Differ with normally means ‘have a
difference of opinion, disagree’:
I differed with her over the colour
scheme.
We differed with the council
over the rates.
different from, than, to
There is some flexibility in
the prepositions that follow different.
Conventionally, UK usage has been different
from in preference to different to:
The book was very different from
what I expected.
and US usage has been different from and different than:
The book was very different from
what I expected.
The book was very different than
I expected.
For some
reason, the structures involving different
can arouse strong feeling, many purists
objecting to different to and different than. There seems to be little
justification for such attitudes since all of these structures have been used
since the seventeenth century, often in the writings of prestigious authors.
Prejudice and purism are, however, strong forces and the different from structure is least likely to be stigmatised.
See: ‘chestnuts’, UK and US grammar.
diglossia
Diglossia, from Greek di (twice)+glossa (tongue), is a term used in sociolinguistics to describe a community where two varieties of a
language coexist, each with its own functions and with little admixture of
varieties. Usually one variety has high status and the other low, the high
variety being used for formal education, literature and religion, the low
variety for intimate conversations and informal communications. Diglossia is
found in some Greek communities (high variety: Katharevousa; low variety:
Dhimotiki) and in Haiti (high variety: French; low variety: creole).
See: pidgins and creoles.
direct speech
The term direct speech is used to describe a set
of conventions by which we express what someone is supposed to have said:
‘Hello!’ said
Michael. ‘Come in. We’ve all been waiting for you.’
Similar
conventions are employed to indicate thought:
‘What a
beautiful girl!’ he mused.
The assumption
that there is such a category as direct speech is a convenient way of referring
to the commonest means of representing speech in novels and stories, but it is
more a description of the impression created by such speech representation than
an isolatable category. Direct speech is seldom an actual record of what is
said: we introduce conventions such as inverted commas and exclamation marks;
we do not normally record
such phenomena
as hesitations, false starts, tempo, loudness or intonation; and what is given
as ‘thought’ is an oversimplified stylisation of mental processes.
The relationship between direct and indirect (or reported) speech is
often complex. The only direct speech samples that can be easily transformed
into indirect speech (or vice versa) are those that are composed. Live speech
is hard to transform into indirect speech as the following recorded utterance illustrates:
Well, you know like, I was never, er, never much of
a talker… But my brother now, well like take him… By God, he could talk the
hind leg off a donkey…
If we turn
this into indirect speech we produce a version such as:
Paddy insisted that he had never been much of a talker but said that we
should consider his brother. He added with an oath that his brother could talk
the hind leg off a donkey…
but this
version loses much of the quality of the original and the solution of replacing
By God with He added with an oath is only partly successful.
The dichotomy direct/indirect
speech is a simplification of the many representations of speech and
thought that occur in literature. It is not always possible to say whether some
samples such as:
‘Will she never come?’ he wondered.
are meant to
represent speech or thought because many attributive verbs (hypothesised, mused, pondered, theorised) can represent both.
Attributive verbs are a means of influencing the opinion of a reader. Almost
all verbs of saying and thinking as well as many action verbs can be used in attribution:
ask, begin, cry, groan, hiss, hurry, imply, infer, insist, nod, preach,
rush, scream, screech, simper, squeak, squeal
Our list is not
meant to be comprehensive but it is sufficient to stress that the verb of
attribution can imply the sex of a speaker (contrast simper with thunder), the
state of mind (groan, worry), and
whether or not the writer is in sympathy with the character (hiss, wheedle).
Direct speech is characterised by quotation marks. A punctuation mark at the end of the
speech precedes the closing quotation mark. The first line of direct speech is
indented from the left-hand margin. If a speech consists of more than one
paragraph, each paragraph starts with an opening quotation mark, but a closing
quotation mark is used only at the end of the speech or before a verb of
attribution. In the conversion of direct into indirect speech, temporal,
spatial and pronominal references and verbs like GO and BRING, which indicate speaker
orientation, are moved one step further from the reporter:
‘Come here at
once,’ shouted the teacher.
The teacher shouted that he
should go there immediately.
The
conventions involved in transposing from one mode to another suggest that
speech can exist in more than one form without alteration of meaning. Reported
speech is, however, less precise. Such a report as:
She said she
would not go.
does not
distinguish between:
‘I will not
go,’ she said.
and:
‘I would not
go,’ she said.
(Perhaps this
is one reason why writers of detective stories often prefer reported speech.)
Moreover, some conversions from direct to reported speech require changes such
as the deletion of titles:
‘Can I help
you, madam?’ he asked,
He asked (politely) if he
could help her.
the substitution of more formal
lexical items:
‘Can I come
too?’ he asked.
He asked if he could also
go.
the deletion of exclamations:
‘O! You
frightened me,’ he exclaimed.
He exclaimed that she had
frightened him.
and the expansion of contractions:
‘We’ll go
tomorrow if it doesn’t rain,’ she promised.
She promised that they would
go the following day if it did not rain.
Such changes inevitably affect meaning.
In reality, speech and its
written representation are much more flexible, subtle and varied than the terms
direct and indirect/reported speech suggest.
See: reported
speech, speech and writing, speech in literature.
discourse analysis
Grammatical
analysis tends to be limited to the sentence.
Yet, it is clear to any sensitive user of language that there are many links
between sentences in a continuous stretch of coherent speech or prose. Discourse analysis is the study of such
links and of the patterns likely to occur in different types of discourse
(narrative, conversation, religious ritual, political persuasion) and on
certain occasions (marriages, funerals, christenings, bar mitzvahs).
Links between sentences add to the cohesion
of a passage and these links are most apparent in:
1
consistency of tone (voice quality may
contribute to cohesion in speech; stylistic appropriateness may achieve the
same end in writing)
2
consistency of vocabulary (no item appears
out of place in the context and lexical sets may occur, e.g. game, set, match, fifteen, thirty, forty,
love, deuce, advantage would form a lexical set in a description of tennis)
3
consistency of syntax (we do not expect rapid and inexplicable changes in tense,
aspect, location, narration)
4
anaphora (backward and forward
references involving pronouns, auxiliary verbs, adverbials such as finally, furthermore, later and
conjunctions, both co-ordinate (and, but,
either…or) and subordinate (because,
if, when).
See: anaphora, cohesion, discourse marker, linkage, parallelism.
discourse marker
Discourse markers are items of linkage which lend cohesion to
a text. There are a number of types of discourse marker:
1 items
which suggest addition: as well as,
furthermore, moreover
2
items which suggest alternatives: besides, either…or, however
3 items
which suggest cause and effect: because,
hence, so
4
items which suggest conditions: as long as, if, unless
5 items
which suggest sequences: then, thirdly,
to conclude
6 items
which suggest time: afterwards, formerly, meanwhile
7
noun substitutes: pronouns, the former, the latter
8 verb substitutes: auxiliary
verbs, DO (so). See: anaphora, cohesion, discourse analysis.
