3
.pdf"Anything unpleasant, ducky?" Soames looked up as if startled. "Unpleasant? Why should it be unpleasant?"
"I only thought from your face."
Soames grunted. "This Ruhr!" he said. (Galsworthy)
It was that sister Doris — She got hold of him. (Mansfield)
The common function of the demonstrative pronouns this — these; thai — those is to point out exactly one or more persons or things and to distinguish them from others of the same class.
Language varies as its function varies; it differs in different situations. The name now often given to a variety of language distinguished according to its use is "register".
The category of "register" is needed when we observe language activity in the various contexts in which it takes place and find differences in the type of language selected as appropriate to different types of official letters and documents or, say, sports commentaries, popular journalism or scientific English will always be linguistically quite distinct. Reading a fragment from any of these and many more situation types will always help to identify "the register" correctly.
The choice of items from the wrong register, and the mixing of items from different registers, are among the most frequent mistakes made by non-native speakers of a language.
The criteria of any given register are to be found in its grammar and in its vocabulary. Lexical features seem to be the most obvious. The clearest signals of a partial register, say, biology, chemistry, engineering or medicine, are scientific technical terms except those that belong to more than one science, like mathematics and modern linguistics.
Purely grammatical distinctions between the different registers are less striking, yet there can be noticeable variation in grammar also.
Many of the most characteristic stylistic traits of the language are in the field of grammar.
Standard usage of English includes formal, informal and sometimes colloquial English. Each of these, in turn, offers its own set of criteria.
Thus, formal scientific English, where precision and clarity are vital, is generally identified by special patterns of grammatical structure, by its use of complex sentences and by its affinity for precision. Most of its grammatical elements are "denotative", not "connotative".
Scientific technical literature, for instance, abounds in the use of lengthy participial, gerundial and infinitival phrases. Another noticeable feature of scientific English, for example, is the preferable use of the impersonal one, the generalising you, so called pluralis modestial we, or, say, the use of would for all persons in Singular and Plural to denote habitual repeated actions with reference to present, past and future. Not less characteristic is the frequency value of passive verbal forms, generally due to the fact that the agent is unknown or the writer prefers not to speak of him. Thus the author may also avoid showing that he himself is the agent. In its written form, formal English allows no repetition, no rephrasing to explain an abstruse point. The choice of patterns in scientific prose is therefore likely to be most factual and referential with comparatively few subjective emotional elements in it. Formal English
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is very seldom used in speaking — mainly when, for instance, reading from a prepared speech, addressing a meeting, a group or an association of scholars. It is also common in legal documents and announcements, in work-papers, in proceedings, essays, etc.
Colloquial English is generally recognised by its loose syntax, its relatively short and uncomplicated sentence structure, by its frequent use of so-called sentence fragments and readily understood grammatical idioms. It is lively, free in form, often exclamatory, abounding in ellipsis.
Many of its idiomatic patterns of grammatical structure are unacceptable as standard for informal literary usage.
Here is a short passage that illustrates the degree to which J. Galsworthy, alert of mind and quick of ear, succeeded in masterly transferring to his page the very essence and pattern of staccato speech in colloquial English:
"Hallo!... That you, Wilfrid?... Michael speaking... One of our packers has been snooping copies of "Copper Coin". He's got the bird — poor devil! I wondered if you'd mind putting in a word for him — old Dan won't listen to me... Yes, got a wife — Fleur's age; pneumonia, so he says. Won't do it again with yours anyway, insurance by common gratitude — what! Thanks, old man, awfully good of you — will you bob in, then?" (Galsworthy)
Consider also the following examples:
"Burt must be up with Michael, talking about his new book."
"Writing at his age?" said Soames.
"Well, ducky, he's a year younger than you."
"I don't write. Not such a fool. Got any more new-fangled friends?" "Just one — Gurdon Minho, the novelist."
"Another of the new school?"
"Oh, no, dear! Surely you've heard of Gurdon Minho; he is older than the hills... (Galsworthy)
"...You were in the war, Mr. Desert?" "Oh, yes."
"Air service?"
"And line. Bit of both." "Hard of a poet."
"Not at all..." (Galsworthy) Consider also the following example:
...Where to? "Class." "Math?"
"No, Spanish." "In a hurry?" "Rather."
"What for?" "Almost ten."
"Well, so long. Call me up" l.
1 A. H. Mагсkwardt. Introduction to the English Language. New York, 1950, p. 146.
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The style of the language of everyday life, or colloquial language, answers the needs of everyday communion in everyday matters. It is essentially a dialogue in which all the participants exchange their thoughts freely. Situation, gesture, intonation help the unambiguous understanding, therefore there is no great need for the speech to be very exact, very clear. We often limit ourselves with mere hinting, and the full expressions of thought may seem pedantic. The vocabulary is neither very rich nor refined, we often recur to non-standard layers of language. The structure of sentence is simple, often elliptical to the utmost. The enunciation is negligent and contracted forms prevail.
Bernard Shaw has very wittily spoken on "Spoken English and Broken English":
"...no two native speakers of English speak it alike; but perhaps you are clever enough to ask me whether I myself speak it in the same way.
I must confess at once that I do not. Nobody does, I am at present speaking to an audience of many thousands of gramophonists, many of whom are trying hard to follow my words syllable by syllable. If I were to speak to you as carelessly as I speak to my wife at home, this record would be useless; and if I were to speak to my wife at home as carefully as I am speaking to you, she would think that I was going mad.
As a public speaker, I have to take care that every word I say is heard distinctly at the far and of the large halls containing thousands of people. But at home, when I have to consider only my wife within six feet of me at breakfast, I take so little pains with my speech that very often instead of giving me the expected answer, she says "Don't mumble and don't turn your head away when you speak. I can't hear a word you are saying." And she also is a little careless. Sometimes I have tosay"what" two or three times during our meal; and she suspects me of growing deafer and deafer and deafer, though she does not say so, because, as I am now over seventy, it might be true.
No doubt I ought to speak to my wife as carefully as I should speak to a queen, and she to me as carefully as she would speak to a king. We ought to; but we don't. ("Don't" by the way is short for "do not").
We all have company manners and home manners. If you were to call on a strange family and listen through the keyhole — not that I would suggest for a moment that you are capable of doing such very unladylike or ungentlemanlike thing; but still — if, in your enthusiasm for studying languages you could bring yourself to do it just for a few seconds to hear how a family speak to one another when there is nobody else listening to them, and then walk into the room and hear how very differently they speak in your presence, the change would surprise you...
Suppose I forget to wind my watch, and it stops. I have to ask somebody to tell me the time. If I ask a stranger, I say "What o'clock is it?" The stranger hears every syllable distinctly. But if I ask my wife, all she hears is "clokst". This is good enough for her; but it would not be good enough for you. So I am speaking to you now much more carefully than I speak to her; but please don't tell her!"
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The aesthetic and emotional impact produced by a work of literature is largely conditioned by the alternative choices of grammatical forms. The connotative analysis must essentially involve the identification of the various dimensions along which messages may differ.
R e v i s i o n M a t e r i a l
Review your knowledge of coordination and subordination in composite sentences in Modern English and be ready to discuss:
a)the problem of classification of these two types of sentence structure;
b)the synsemantic value of coordinated clauses; overlapping relations in different types of such patterns;
c)sub-clauses of different types; peculiarities of their grammatical organisation in Modern English; the synsemantic value of different types of sub-clauses;
d)transposition and functional re-evaluation of syntactic structures; e)problems of implicit predication;
f)neutralisation of oppositions in patterns of subordination; g)transformations in sentence sequences;
h) compression of sub-clauses by nominalisation.
INDEX OF GRAMMATICAL POINTS TREATED
Absolute comparative, 91, 92 Absolute superlative, 91, 92 Absolute synonyms, 53 Abstract nouns, 4, 74, 94 Active voice, 118, 119
Actual division of the sentence, 199— 208 Ad-
jective:
base, 89, 90 derived, 89, 90
place of adjectives, 190, 237 qualitative, 89
relative, 89 Adverb, morphemic structure, 164, 165
separable adverbs, 165 Adverbial use of nouns, 77, 78 Adverbial adjuncts, 194, 195 Adverbial clauses:
of cause, 267,
of concession, 274—277 of condition, 270—273
of manner and comparison, 277, 278
of place, 268 of purpose, 214
of result, 273, 274
of time, 269, 270 Ambiguity, 40, 41, 45, 47, 50, 68, 152,
153, 190, 195, 228—233, 237, 287 Allomorph, 60 Analytical forms, 64 Anaphoric to, 219 Archaic forms, 55, 160, 293 Article, 84—88
contrasting use of the article, 86 definiteness — indefiniteness, 84, 85
generalisation — concretisation, 84, 85
stylistic functions of the article, 86, 87
the use of the article in substantivation, 96—98 Aspect:
actions of single occurrence, 134— 136,
common ~ progressive, 130 ingression (inchoative aspect), 130, 132
repeated actions, 132—134 Asymmetry, 46, 180, 221 Asyndeton, 252, 283—285 Attribute, 189—190 Attributive bond, 189 Attributive clauses
continuative, 265, 266 restrictive, 265, 266 synonymic alternatives of attributive clauses, 266—277
Back-formation, 103 Be:
auxiliary, 106 copulative, 106
representative, 106, 217—220
Can and could, 114, 115 Case, 78—83
Category of state, 166 Causative, 131, 153 Cognate object, 193, 194 Cohesion, 287, 290 Colloquial English, 87, 296
Communicative unit, 169, 170 Comparative 'elatives', 92 Comparison, 90—95 Completive bond, 189 Complex sentence, 253 Composite sentence, 252—257 Compound predicate, 186 Compound sentence, 253
Compression by nominalisation, 289— 291, 265, 267, 270, 272, 274 Con-
cord, 176 Conjunctive adverbs, 260 Connotation, 47, 51, 53, 115, 292, 295 Consituation, 49, 127, 160—163, 172 Contact clauses, 252 Context, significance in judging, 37—
42, 91, 184, 287
Context-sensitive, 32, 195, 272, 273, 287 Conversion, 68, 69 Covert grammar, 80 Current relevance, 150
299
Deep sense-structure, 32, 273 Denotation, 37—42, 45, 47 Direct object, 190—194
Discourse analysis, see Text-linguistics Distribution, 29, 69
Do:
auxiliary verb, 248
emphatic auxiliary, 106, 107, 248 half-auxiliary verb, 105—106 notional verb, 248 semi-auxiliary, 247
substitute, 217—220 Doublets, 55, 58 Durative aspect, see Aspect
Ellipsis, 212
Emphasis, 49—52, 96—98, 117, 220— 225
Emphatic verb-forms, 106, 107 Expressivity:
adherent, 291—298 inherent, 291—298
Factitive object, see Cognate object Field structure, 42—45
Finitude — non-finitude, 99, 100 Form-word, see Function-word Formal English, 87
Free morpheme, 61 Foreign plural, 76, 77
Free indirect speech, see Represented speech
Function-word, 31, 62, 69, 71, 105 Futurity, 154—159
Functional re-evaluation of grammatical forms, 45
Functional sentence perspective,
see Actual division of the sentence
Generative grammar, 34 Get-pass- ive, 119, 125 Go, verb-intensifier, 106, 107, 223 Going to-future, 157, 158 Gradable meaning, 91 Grammeme, 61 Grammatical category, 61 Grammatical colligation (collocation), 234—249
Habitual action, 138 Half-aux- iliary verbs, 130—134 Headword, 234—236 Historic present, 141 Homonymy,
constructional, 228—233
inflectional, 68 interparadigmatic, 68 Hypotaxis, 252—280
Idiom, grammatical, 81, 118, 121, 132, 158
Idiomatic sentences, 225—228 Idiosyncrasy, 286, 294, 201 Immediate constituent (IC's analysis),
29, 187, 188, 189 Imperative mood, 108, 109 Imperative modality, 108, 109 Imperative sentences, 270—273 Implicit predication, 281, 282 Implied plurality, 72, 78 Included clause, 254 Included sentence, 254 Incongruity, 228—233 Indefinite subject, 184 Inflection, 31, 63, 101, 102 Informal English, 291—298 Inner object, see Cognate object Intensity, 90, 92, 220, 291—298 Intonation, 31, 291 Intransitive verbs, 190, 193 Introductory subject, see Subject Inversion, 110, 195, 198 It:
anticipatory, 185
it is..., it was..., see actual division of the sentence Iterative
aspect, see Aspect
Kernel sentence, 33
Lexical collocation, 174 Lexico-gram- matical periphrasis, 181, 182
Major syntax, 170 Minor syntax, 170 Modal verbs:
primary functions, 111 — 118 secondary functions, 111—118 Modality, 11—114, 172, 173, 186, 291 —
298 Mood, 107 —111
mechanistic analysis, 187 mentalistic analysis, 187 Modification, 65 Morphology:
paradigmatics, 60
subject-matter of morphology, 60 syntagmatics, 60
Must, 112, 113
primary functions, 112, 113 secondary functions, 112, 113
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