either, neither
These words, which may function as adverbs, determiners and pronouns, tend to be pronounced
differently in the UK and the USA 
As an adverb in negative structures, either often
occurs in sentence final position:
We didn’t see
the play either.
They didn’t go either.
Adverbial neither and nor, in contrast, often occur in anaphoric reference and take the
initial position:
Neither did we. Nor did they.
(The
construction using nor tends to be
limited to formal or class-marked speech in the UK.)
Adverbial either and neither can be paired with or
and nor respectively to imply
two- part contrasts:
It was either a yam or a sweet potato.
It was neither a yam nor a
sweet potato.
In practice, these ‘two-part
structures’ often relate to more than two:
You can see
him on either Monday, Wednesday or Friday.
If either occurs in initial position in this type of contrast, it can
imply a threat:
Either you leave
quietly or we’ll call the police. Either…or/neither…nor take a
singular form of the verb:
It was either Pat or John.
Neither Pat nor John has said a word.
Normally, the elements in such
structures are equivalent (e.g. two phrases, two sentences, two adjectives, two
verbs):
It was either the one with the bicycle or the one on
skates.
Either he
comes or he doesn’t. He was neither lame nor lazy. She can neither work nor
sleep.
Occasionally, for emphasis, the
structures with either…or are not balanced, but in these
circumstances else is often
introduced:
He is either very stubborn or else he sees something that the rest of
us can’t.
Adverbial either and neither in
balanced structures must be placed directly before the items they modify. Thus
the sentences:
He’ll either phone or leave
a message.
He felt
neither content nor comfortable.
are correct, whereas:
*Either he’ll
phone or leave a message.
*He neither
felt content nor comfortable.
are incorrect, even though they
are frequently heard in speech.
As
determiners, either and neither cannot co-occur with other
determiners and they are followed by a singular noun and verb:
Either answer
is correct.
Neither claim has any value.
As pronouns, either and neither may occur on their own, triggering off a singular form of
the verb:
Either is possible.
Neither has
any merit.
They may also occur in the structure: (n)either+of+determiner+noun phrase
(plural)
or:
(n)either+of+pronoun (plural)
as in:
You can eat
either of those peaches.
Neither of them is ripe yet.
See: adverb, all, anaphora, concord, determiner, pronoun.
elegant variation
There are
three main types of elegant variation, each
concerned with the substitution of learned or polysyllabic words or phrases for
simple words:
It was
subsumed under the rubric.
rather than:
It was listed
under the heading.
1 People
unused to the written medium are often tempted to use unnecessarily elaborate
words and phrases. Long words are not automatically more appropriate than short
ones: ablutions, converse, epistle,
imbibe and ratiocination are
rarely preferable to wash, talk, letter,
drink and reasoning and there is
no advantage in stylistic elaboration for its own sake. There are, it is true, established conventions for specific purposes
(such as letters,
essays,
reports) but the language employed in all circumstances should be as simple,
clear and precise as possible.
The preference for elegant variation resulted in the stylised poetic diction of some
eighteenth-century verse against which Wordsworth reacted in his ‘Lyrical
Ballads’. Today, it is sometimes cultivated by writers whose mother tongue is
not English:
The grim enthusiasm of her ardent lust was bubbling
on her romantic face, and her youthful glances of shyness. She had got all the
zests of the West and mettled her senses, to bolster up alacrity, to crack
love, romance and joke, up to their highest mediocre of acme.
Miller O.Albert, Rosemary and the Taxi-Driver
2
The second type of elegant variation occurs
in the work of professional writers who seek novelty or variety:
Keep in mind, however, a cautionary tale when planning a continental
motoring holiday. A British driver, thrown temporarily off guard by a
refuelling stop, pulled out of a filling station forecourt onto the wrong side
of the road. In the acrimonious aftermath of the resulting collision, the
unfortunate miscreant lambasted the other motorist…
Observer Colour Supplement, 1 July, 1984
3
The aim of the third type is consciously humorous.
It involves such substitutions as
obnoxious emanation for bad smell, a state of pecuniary disadvantage for broke or:
You will always hear me chant this melody Indicate the route to my
abode.
for:
You will always hear me singing this song Show me the way to go home.
Elegant
variation is not just a matter of varying one’s lexical choice. It may
interfere with comprehension, give misleading information or evoke a humorous
response when the writer may be aiming at sophisticated description.
See: bombast, circumlocution, diction, poetic diction.
elision
Elision involves the loss of sounds in speech or of letters in
writing:
can+not>can’t there+is>there’s we+will>we’ll
Vowels, consonants and entire
syllables can be elided.
enquire, inquire
The spellings enquire/inquire and enquiry/inquiry are interchangeable. Both forms are correct
throughout the English-speaking world. There is a slight tendency to prefer the
en- form for the verb:
We enquired about the times of the
services.
and in- for the noun:
The inquiry opens tomorrow.
but this is a
tendency and not a fixed rule.
In the UK enquiry/inquiry is pronounced / 
/ as if it were in+choir+ee
whereas the US pronunciation is usually / 
/.
See: pronunciation.
epenthesis
This term
refers to a process which is almost the reverse of syncope. Epenthesis involves
the inclusion of a vowel or consonant medially in a word, often making the word
easier to pronounce:
film>filum chimney>chimminey/chimbley
It most frequently involves the
insertion of a short neutral vowel into a consonant
cluster:
 |
strong>sətrong
and is
frequently found in the English of people whose mother tongues do not have the
consonant clusters found in English or whose mother tongues have a CVCV
structure (i.e. consonant vowel consonant vowel, e.g. nama, pita). English permits a maximum of three consonants in
initial position and four in word final position:
CCCVCCCC strengths
/strεŋkθs/
and in
non-mother-tongue English these clusters are often broken up by epenthetic
vowels so that screw driver, for
example, is realised as ‘sukuru daraiva’.
A form of written epenthesis occurs in words like debt and doubt, which
used to be written dette and dout but had the b inserted by scholars
who felt that the English words should reflect their Latin origins in debitum and dubitare. Many other words had their spellings changed so that
their classical origins might be more easily seen. These include:
adventure (previously aventure)
baptism (previously bapteme)
The omission of one or more lines of poetry in a quotation may be
signalled by a full line of spaced stops:
I’ve seen them
come and seen them go Like summer rain and winter snow.
...........
I’ve watched
them, dumb.
and
intrusions into a quotation must be enclosed in square brackets:
…[he] watched them, dumb.
The omission of a paragraph of prose from a quotation is indicated by
three stops at the end of the preceding paragraph. In printed texts (as
elsewhere in this book) a 3-dot leader, consisting of three unspaced dots, may
be substituted for ellipsis. In a typescript,
however, ellipses are preferable.
2 The term is used by linguists for the omission of a part of a
sentence which is recoverable:
Where did
Joanne go?
To Toronto.
We can reconstruct the full
equivalent of the elliptical reply as:
Joanne went to
Toronto.
See: anaphora,
punctuation, quotation.
embedding
The term embedding
is used in transformational grammar to
refer to the process by which one sentence
is included within another. For example, the sentence:
The man who
came in is my father.
is a combination of two
sentences:
The man is my
father.+The man came in.
The second sentence is embedded in
the first:
The man (the
man came in) is my father.
and the
repeated phrase ‘the man’ is
replaced by a pronoun, in this
example, ‘who’. Often, sentences involving non-finite verbs can be shown to
involve embeddings:
His constant smoking of cigars irritates me.
(He smokes cigars constantly.+It irritates me.)
He asked me to
help him.
(He asked me.+I helped him.)
Embedding differs from co-ordination in that the latter
utilises co-ordinating conjunctions to join units of equal rank:
He loves Mary but Mary doesn’t love him.
See: co-ordination, subordination,
transformational grammar.
emphasis
The term emphasis comprehends the many methods of
putting extra stress on a sound,
word, phrase or idea so as to give prominence to it. Emphasis may involve
choices from all areas of the language and its effect may depend on a
statistical change (e.g. regular increased volume, a ten percent increase in
the number of negatives per paragraph) or on an unquantifiable impression
created by a writer. In Dylan Thomas’s phrase ‘a grief ago’, for example, there
is no way of measuring mathematically the increased prominence given to ‘grief
by its unexpected collocation.
The commonest types of emphasis are:
1
Parallelism. This device uses repetition of sounds as in Tennyson’s:
Over the
rolling waters go
Come from the
dying moon, and blow Blow him again to me
of word:
Sweet and low,
sweet and low, Wind of the western sea,
Low, low,
breathe and blow Wind of the western sea!
or of rhythm. Many traditional ballads, for
example, have four strong stresses in the first and third lines and three in
the second and fourth:
I wish the
wind may never cease Nor fishes in
the flood
Till my three
sons come home to me In earthly flesh and blood.
Often, as in all three
examples above, several features (alliteration,
assonance, rhythm,
rhyme) co-occur and reinforce each
other.
Such repetition need not be limited to poetry. It is a feature of
oratory, excellently illustrated by Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’
sermon and can occur naturally in speech. The reduplicated adjectives in
phrases like:
a big, big
mountain
for example,
involve emphasis.
2
Word Order. The normal word order
of:
Subject+Predicate+Object+Complement
I+called+him+a fool. may be modified to:
A fool I called him.
emphasising ‘a fool’. Such
change of word order is common in Yiddish-influenced
English:
So lucky I
should be.
and in
poetry:
Where dips the
rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood in the lake
W.B.Yeats, ‘The Stolen Child’.
3
Figures of
Speech.
Most of these are used for emphasis. For example in the following rhyming
couplet from Alexander Pope, antithesis and
anticlimax combine to highlight the trivial:
Here Thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey Dost sometimes counsel
take and sometimes tea.
4
Deviation. Deviations from the norm (like inversion) catch the reader’s or listener’s attention. The
deviations may be in the imagery or unexpected adjectives as in Dylan Thomas’s:
Her fist of a
face died clenched on a round pain…
or in Charles
Dickens’s description of Mr Chadband in Bleak
House:
Mr. Chadband
is a large yellow man, with a fat smile, and a general appearance of having a
good deal of train oil in his system.
5
Proportion. The amount of space
devoted to each stage of an argument may indicate a writer’s priorities.
Similarly, the deliberate exclusion of something that is expected may represent
a form of emphasis.
Emphasis is thus not simply, or even primarily, a matter of talking
loudly or punctuating heavily. It permeates language at every level, reflecting
and promoting certain attitudes and details. It may vary regionally and also
socially, but most types of language involve emphasis of some kind.
See: deviation, figurative language,
foregrounding, parallelism, word order, Yiddish-influenced English.
empiric, empirical, empiricism
These words
all derive from a Greek word empeirikos meaning
‘experience’.
Empiric is a derogatory term
most frequently used by the medical profession with reference to a charlatan or
a doctor who relies solely on experience. The word has been adopted by literary
critics so that empiric criticism is
untrained or unskilled criticism that does not take account of theoretical
approaches to the study of literature.
Empirical and empiricism are philosophical terms
applied to the practice of evolving rules to fit experience. Empirical has, however, been generalised
to denote any procedure that relies on experience or observation alone, and it
is sometimes used of an experimental method.
The term empirical is often
used inaccurately by speakers and writers as an equivalent for proven.
-en forms
The term -en form is used as a synonym for past participle:
BE been He has
been…
GO gone He has
gone… HAVE had He has had… PUT
put He has put…
As is clear
from the list above, not all past participles
end in -en but the term is used as a means of distinguishing between the
past tense and the past participle of verbs.
There is no difference in form between
the past tense and the past participle of regular verbs:
I walked six miles yesterday.
I have walked six miles today.
but there is a difference in
function.
See: aspect, -ed forms, verb.
English in the Indian Sub-Continent
Southeast Asia
contains approximately one fifth of the world’s population and the area is one
of the most multilingual and multicultural on earth. Limiting this account to
India (population c. 714 million), Bangladesh (population c. 93 million),
Pakistan (population
c. 93 million),
Sri Lanka (population c. 15 million) and Nepal (population c. 14.5 million), we
are still dealing with an area where there are five language families and
hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages (India alone has an estimated 850
languages in daily use). The need for lingua
francas is thus obvious.
Because Britain was the colonial power in all these areas, English
became the inter- and the intra-national language. Admittedly, English was
associated with power, but it was not associated with a particular caste,
region, religion, language family or group, and so even when it was phased out
as an official language (as happened in India in 1965) it remained a language
of education, culture, prestige and aspiration. As a link language it has often
been preferred to a local lingua franca. This statement is particularly true of
South Indian speakers, who often use English rather than Hindi in interstate
contacts.
As one would expect in such a large, highly populated area, we find a
continuum of Englishes ranging from standard international English,
indistinguishable in the written medium from the UK standard, through a
spectrum of mother-tongue-influenced Englishes to pidginised varieties. Our
description will concentrate on the standard end of the spectrum and, although
it is difficult to offer firm generalisations for such a diverse area, we shall
select those features which characterise the English of most people from the
region.
Phonology
1 The articulatory setting tends to be
retroflex, that is, the tip of the tongue curls slightly towards the roof of
the mouth. The retroflexion affects all speech, but the consonants most
particularly affected are /t, d, s, z, l, r, n/. (If the reader wishes to check
the fundamental influence of retroflexion on pronunciation, he should curl the
tongue slightly and then say aloud: ‘What did you intend to do?’)
2
The consonants /p, t, k/ are not aspirated in
initial position, that is, they are not accompanied by the breath that
characterises their articulation in most communities where English is spoken as
a mother tongue. Since most native speakers of English use aspiration as a guide to distinguish between initial p, t, k, and
b, d, g they tend to hear bit for pit, den for ten, gum for come and,
since thousands of words are distinguished by initial p or b, t or d, k or g,
the possibility for confusion is considerable.
3
Many do not distinguish between v and w or
between n and ng, thus producing extra homophones in vie and why, vine and wine, sin and sing, and in thin and thing.
4
Consonant clusters involving s are often
prefixed by / /, the vowel sound in bit, as
in ispeak, iscream, istatue.
Alternatively, the cluster is broken up by the insertion of a vowel as in sicrew.
5
Post-vocalic r is not pronounced in words
such as car and cart. Nor is it used as a linking device in such phrases as better or
worse.
6 There
are fewer vowel contrasts than in Received
Pronunciation, with such pairs as
par and paw as
well as hot and hat becoming homophones.
7 The
diphthongs in words such as gate and show are monophthongised.
8
Fewer reduced vowels are used, thus the a in about is similar in quality to the a in
cat.
9
The stress
pattern is different from mother-tongue varieties. Often, all syllables are
equally stressed or, when an attempt is made to reproduce the stress-timed
pattern of English, the wrong syllable is stressed as in de'finitely.
Vocabulary
Many words in
international English were adopted from the languages in the sub- continent,
words like bungalow, copra, chintz,
curry, mango, pyjama/pajama and polo.
These are naturally also found in the English of the sub-continent, as are the
majority of items current in Standard English. There are, however, four
categories of words occurring in the English of this region which are
sufficient, even in the written medium, to distinguish it from other varieties.
1
Items taken originally from Portuguese (ayah, peon); and from Arabic or Persian
during the time of the Moghul Empire (bakshish,
chowkidar, sepoy).
2
Items taken into English from the local vernaculars. Among these are the terms ji attached to a name as a means of
expressing respect (Guluji, Mamaji, Daddyji);
Namaste as a greeting (both hands are joined as in prayer while the word is
said); items of clothing (choli, dhoti,
sari); names of persons or trades (dhobi
walla(h), punka walla(h), saddarji).
3
Items taken from English and modified in
form: co-sister (brother-in-law’s
wife), decoction (concoction, usually
an infusion), delink (abolish), freeship (scholarship), inskirt (undergarment, petticoat).
4
Words taken from English and modified in
meaning: batch (group of people),
drumstick (green vegetable), jack (authority),
stand first (come first in an
examination).
Grammar
Again, as with
pronunciation, there is an enormous range of grammatical possibilities, often
depending on the extent of one’s education. The following patterns tend to
characterise the English of the area:
1
Distinctions are not always made between stative
and dynamic verbs. This means that most verbs are capable of occurring with
the present progressive:
I am remembering you now.
He is seeing me often.
2
‘BE+there’ is used in existential
constructions such as:
What will you
eat? Vegetable is there; rice is there.
Mother-tongue speakers of English
would prefer to use a construction involving HAVE:
We have vegetables and rice.
3 Inversion
of subject and predicate is rare after the question words what, when, where, which, who, how:
What you’ve
been doing?
How you’ve been
able to buy this fine house?
4
There is a tendency to omit the when the reference is generic:
We all went to
look at solar eclipse.
Let’s go to
pictures.
5
Many speakers from the region use a universal
tag, often isn’t it? but occasionally not
so?:
You will come
again, isn’t it?
Your children are still
schooling, not so?
6
Prepositions are often used differently:
He backed out in
the last moment.
That goonda
fellow has just torn off my notes.
The streets are jamming up with
traffic.
7
Word compounding often follows a rule that
reverses the order found in native English, thus:
board notice for notice board glass pane for
pane of glass key bunch for bunch of
keys
See: Pakistani English, Sri Lankan English.
enormity
Enormity strictly used refers to the great wickedness of a crime or
action:
We were
shocked by the violence last night and after twenty-four hours we are only
beginning to recognise the full enormity.
Margaret Thatcher (interviewed
after inner city riots)
Frequently,
however, especially in speech and in loose writing, enormity is used as a synonym for size:
We were
impressed by the enormity of the
park.
