An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. It consists of a group of letters taken from the phrase. For example, the word abbreviation can itself be represented by the abbreviation abbr. abbrv. or abbrev. In strict analysis, abbreviations should not be confused with contractions, acronyms, or initialisms, with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all four are connected by the term "abbreviation" in loose parlance. An abbreviation is a shortening by any method. A contraction of a word is made by omitting certain letters or syllables and bringing together the first and last letters or elements. A contraction is an abbreviation, but an abbreviation is not a contraction. Acronyms and initialisms are regarded as subsets of abbreviations, they are abbreviations that consist of the initial parts of words. Abbreviations have a long history, created; this might be done to save time and space, to provide secrecy. Shortened words were used and initial letters were used to represent words in specific applications.
In classical Greece and Rome, the reduction of words to single letters was common. In Roman inscriptions, "Words were abbreviated by using the initial letter or letters of words, most inscriptions have at least one abbreviation." However, "some could have more than one meaning, depending on their context."Abbreviations in English were used from its earliest days. Manuscripts of copies of the old English poem Beowulf used many abbreviations, for example 7 or & for and, y for since, so that "not much space is wasted"; the standardisation of English in the 15th through 17th centuries included such a growth in the use of abbreviations. At first, abbreviations were sometimes represented with various suspension signs, not only periods. For example, sequences like ‹er› were replaced with ‹ɔ›, as in ‹mastɔ› for master and ‹exacɔbate› for exacerbate. While this may seem trivial, it was symptomatic of an attempt by people manually reproducing academic texts to reduce the copy time. An example from the Oxford University Register, 1503: Mastɔ subwardenɔ y ɔmēde me to you.
And wherɔ y wrot to you the last wyke that y trouyde itt good to differrɔ thelectionɔ ovɔ to quīdenaɔ tinitatis y have be thougħt me synɔ that itt woll be thenɔ a bowte mydsomɔ. The Early Modern English period, between the 15th and 17th centuries, had abbreviations like ye for Þe, used for the word the: "hence, by misunderstanding, Ye Olde Tea Shoppe."During the growth of philological linguistic theory in academic Britain, abbreviating became fashionable. The use of abbreviation for the names of J. R. R. Tolkien and his friend C. S. Lewis, other members of the Oxford literary group known as the Inklings, are sometimes cited as symptomatic of this. A century earlier in Boston, a fad of abbreviation started that swept the United States, with the globally popular term OK credited as a remnant of its influence. After World War II, the British reduced the use of the full stop and other punctuation points after abbreviations in at least semi-formal writing, while the Americans more kept such use until more and still maintain it more than Britons.
The classic example, considered by their American counterparts quite curious, was the maintenance of the internal comma in a British organisation of secret agents called the "Special Operations, Executive"—"S. O. E"—which is not found in histories written after about 1960, but before that, many Britons were more scrupulous at maintaining the French form. In French, the period only follows an abbreviation if the last letter in the abbreviation is not the last letter of its antecedent: "M." is the abbreviation for "monsieur" while "Mme" is that for "madame". Like many other cross-channel linguistic acquisitions, many Britons took this up and followed this rule themselves, while the Americans took a simpler rule and applied it rigorously. Over the years, the lack of convention in some style guides has made it difficult to determine which two-word abbreviations should be abbreviated with periods and which should not; the U. S. media tend to use periods in two-word abbreviations like United States, but not personal computer or television.
Many British publications have done away with the use of periods in abbreviations. Minimization of punctuation in typewritten material became economically desirable in the 1960s and 1970s for the many users of carbon-film ribbons since a period or comma consumed the same length of non-reusable expensive ribbon as did a capital letter. Widespread use of electronic communication through mobile phones and the Internet during the 1990s allowed for a marked rise in colloquial abbreviation; this was due to increasing popularity of textual communication services such as instant- and text messaging. SMS, for instance, supports message lengths of 160 characters at most; this brevity gave rise to an informal abbreviation scheme sometimes called Textese, with which 10% or more of the words in a typical SMS message are abbreviated. More Twitter, a popular social networking service, began driving abbreviation use with 140 character message limits. In modern English, there are several conventions for abbreviations, the choice may be confusing.
The only rule universally accepted is th
In English, possessive words or phrases exist for nouns and most pronouns, as well as some noun phrases. These can play the roles of nouns. For historical reasons, this case is misleadingly called the possessive, it was called the genitive in fact expresses much more than possession. Most disagreements about the use of possessive forms of nouns and of the apostrophe are due to the erroneous belief that a term should not use an apostrophe if it does not express possession. In the words of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage: The argument is a case of fooling oneself with one’s own terminology. After the 18th-century grammarians began to refer to the genitive case as the possessive case and other commentators got it into their heads that the only use of the case was to show possession.... This dictionary cites a study in whose samples only 40% of the possessive forms were used to indicate actual possession. Nouns, noun phrases, some pronouns form a possessive with the suffix -'s; this form is sometimes called the Saxon genitive, reflecting the suffix's derivation from Old English or Anglo-Saxon.
Personal pronouns, have irregular possessives, most of them have different forms for possessive determiners and possessive pronouns, such as my and mine or your and yours. Possessives are one of the means by which genitive constructions are formed in modern English, the other principal one being the use of the preposition of, it is sometimes stated that the possessives represent a grammatical case, called the genitive or possessive case, though some linguists do not accept this view, regarding the's ending, variously, as a phrasal affix, an edge affix, or a clitic, rather than as a case ending. The possessive form of an English noun, or more a noun phrase, is made by suffixing a morpheme, represented orthographically as's, is pronounced in the same way as the regular English plural ending s: namely as when following a sibilant sound, as /s/ when following any other voiceless consonant, as /z/ otherwise. For example: Mitch /mɪtʃ/ has the possessive Mitch's luck /lʌk/ has the possessive luck's /lʌks/ man /mæn/ has the singular possessive man's /mænz/ and the plural possessive men'sNote the distinction from the plural in nouns whose plural is irregular: man's vs. men, wife's vs. wives, etc.
In the case of plural nouns ending in -s, the possessive is spelled by only adding an apostrophe and is pronounced the same. In the case of singular nouns ending in -s, the possessive was traditionally spelled by adding only an apostrophe, but this is now discouraged in American and Canadian English: the possessive of cats is cats', both words being pronounced /kæts/ the possessive of James is nowadays most spelled James's and pronounced -, but the possessive of Jesus is still spelled according to the older tradition of adding only an apostrophe and is and was pronounced the same. Singular nouns ending in s can form a possessive by adding's, as in Charles's; the Chicago Manual of Style recommends this more modern style, while stating that adding just an apostrophe is correct. The Elements of Style and the Canadian Press Stylebook prefer the form of s's with the exception of Biblical and classical proper names and common phrases that do not take the extra syllabic s. For more on style guidance for this and other issues relating to the construction of possessives in English, see possessive apostrophe.
More the's morpheme can be attached to the last word of a noun phrase if the head noun does not end the phrase. For example, the phrase the king of Spain can form the possessive the king of Spain's, – in informal style – the phrase the man we saw yesterday can form the man we saw yesterday's. Both John's and Laura's house and John and Laura's house are correct, though the latter is more common in idiomatic speech. See § Status of the possessive as a grammatical case below. Scientific terminology, in particular the Latin names for stars, uses the Latin genitive form of the name of the constellation. Unlike with other noun phrases which only have a single possessive form, personal pronouns in English have two possessive forms: possessive determiners and possessive pronouns. In most cases these are different from each other. For example, the pronoun I has possessive determiner my and possessive pronoun mine; the archaic thou has thine. For a full table and further details, see English personal pronouns.
Note that possessive its has no apostrophe, although it is sometimes written with one in error by confusion with the common possessive ending -'s and the contraction it's used for it is and it has. Possessive its was formed with an apostrophe in the 17th century, but it had been dropped by the early 19th century to make it more similar to the other personal pronoun possessives; the interrogative and relative pronoun who h
In linguistics, periphrasis is the usage of multiple separate words to carry the meaning of prefixes, suffixes or verbs, among other things, where either would be possible. Technically, it is a device where grammatical meaning is expressed by one or more free morphemes, instead of by inflectional affixes or derivation. Periphrastic forms are an example of analytic language, whereas the absence of periphrasis is a characteristic of synthetic language. While periphrasis concerns all categories of syntax, it is most visible with verb catenae; the verb catenae of English are periphrastic. The distinction between inflected and periphrastic forms is illustrated across distinct languages; however and superlative forms of adjectives in English provide a straightforward illustration of the phenomenon. For many speakers, both the simple and periphrastic forms in the following table are possible: The periphrastic forms are periphrastic by virtue of the appearance of more or most, they therefore contain two words instead of just one.
The words more and most contribute functional meaning only, just like the inflectional affixes -er and -est. The distinction is evident across full verbs and the corresponding light verb constructions: The light verb constructions are periphrastic because the light verbs have little semantic content, they contribute functional meaning. The main semantic content of these light verb constructions lies with the noun phrase; such distinctions occur in many languages. The following table provides some examples across Latin and English: Periphrasis is a characteristic of analytic languages, which tend to avoid inflection. Inflected synthetic languages sometimes make use of periphrasis to fill out an inflectional paradigm, missing certain forms. A comparison of some Latin forms of the verb dūcere'lead' with their English translations illustrates further that English uses periphrasis in many instances where Latin uses inflection. English needs two or three verbs to express the same meaning that Latin expresses with a single verb.
Latin is a synthetic language. Unlike Classical Hebrew, Israeli Hebrew uses a few periphrastic verbal constructions in specific circumstances, such as slang or military language. Consider the following pairs/triplets, in which the first is/are an Israeli Hebrew analytic periphrasis and the last is a Classical Hebrew synthetic form: שם צעקה ‘’sam tseaká’’ “shouted” vis-à-vis צעק ‘’tsaák’’ “shouted” נתן מבט ‘’natán mabát’’ “looked” AND העיף מבט ‘’heíf mabát’’ “looked” vis-à-vis the Hebrew-descent הביט ‘’hibít’’ “looked at”. According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, the Israeli periphrastic construction is employed here for the desire to express swift action, stems from Yiddish, he compares the Israeli periphrasis to the following Yiddish expressions all meaning “to have a look”: געבן א קוק ‘’gébņ a kuk’’, which means “to give a look” טאן א קוק ‘’ton a kuk’’, which means “to do a look” the colloquial expression כאפן א קוק ‘’khapņ a kuk’’, which means “to catch a look”. Zuckermann emphasizes that the Israeli periphrastic constructions “are not nonce, ad hoc lexical calques of Yiddish.
The Israeli system is productive and the lexical realization differs from that of Yiddish”. He provides the following Israeli examples: הרביץ hirbíts “hit, beat; the Israeli Hebrew periphrasis דפק הופעה ‘’dafák hofaá’’, which means “hit an appearance” means “dressed smartly”. But while Zuckermann attempted to use these examples to claim that Israeli Hebrew grew simillar to Europian languages, it will be noticed that all of these examples are from the slang and therfore linguistically marked; the normal and daily usage of the verb paradigm in Israeli modern Hebrew is of the synthetic form: צָעַק, הִבִּיט The correspondence in meaning across inflected forms and their periphrastic equivalents within the same language or across different languages leads to a basic question. Individual words are always constituents, but their periphrastic equivalents are NOT constituents. Given this mismatch in syntactic form, one can pose the following questions: how should the form-meaning correspondence across periphrastic and non-periphrastic forms be understood?.
An answer to this question that has come to light is expressed in terms of the catena unit, as implied above. The periphrastic word combinations are catenae when they are not constituents, individual words are catenae; the form-meaning correspondence is therefore consistent. A given inflected one-word catena corresponds to a periphrastic multiple-word catena; the role of catenae for the theory of periphrasis is illustrated with the trees. The first example is across English. Future tense/time in French is constructed with an inflected f
In language, a clause is the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. A typical clause consists of a subject and a predicate, the latter a verb phrase, a verb with any objects and other modifiers. However, the subject is sometimes not said or explicit the case in null-subject languages if the subject is retrievable from context, but it sometimes occurs in other languages such as English. A simple sentence consists of a single finite clause with a finite verb, independent. More complex sentences may contain multiple clauses. Main clauses are those. Subordinate clauses are those that would be incomplete if they were alone. A primary division for the discussion of clauses is the distinction between main clauses and subordinate clauses. A main clause can stand alone, i.e. it can constitute a complete sentence by itself. A subordinate clause, in contrast, is reliant on the appearance of a main clause. A second major distinction concerns the difference between non-finite clauses.
A finite clause contains a structurally central finite verb, whereas the structurally central word of a non-finite clause is a non-finite verb. Traditional grammar focuses on finite clauses, the awareness of non-finite clauses having arisen much in connection with the modern study of syntax; the discussion here focuses on finite clauses, although some aspects of non-finite clauses are considered further below. Clauses can be classified according to a distinctive trait, a prominent characteristic of their syntactic form; the position of the finite verb is one major trait used for classification, the appearance of a specific type of focusing word is another. These two criteria overlap to an extent, which means that no single aspect of syntactic form is always decisive in determining how the clause functions. There are, strong tendencies. Standard SV-clauses are the norm in English, they are declarative. The pig has not yet been fed. - Declarative clause, standard SV order I've been hungry for two hours.
- Declarative clause, standard SV order...that I've been hungry for two hours. - Declarative clause, standard SV order, but functioning as a subordinate clause due to the appearance of the subordinator thatDeclarative clauses like these are by far the most occurring type of clause in any language. They can be viewed as other clause types being derived from them. Standard SV-clauses can be interrogative or exclamative, given the appropriate intonation contour and/or the appearance of a question word, e.g. a. The pig has not yet been fed? - Rising intonation on fed makes the clause a yes/no-question.b. The pig has not yet been fed! - Spoken forcefully, this clause is exclamative.c. You've been hungry for how long? - Appearance of interrogative word how and rising intonation make the clause a constituent questionExamples like these demonstrate that how a clause functions cannot be known based on a single distinctive syntactic criterion. SV-clauses are declarative, but intonation and/or the appearance of a question word can render them interrogative or exclamative.
Verb first clauses in English play one of three roles: 1. They express a yes/no-question via subject–auxiliary inversion, 2, they express a condition as an embedded clause, or 3. They express a command via e.g. a. He must stop laughing. - Standard declarative SV-clause b. Should he stop laughing? - Yes/no-question expressed by verb first order c. Had he stopped laughing... - Condition expressed by verb first order d. Stop laughing! - Imperative formed with verb first ordera. They have done the job. - Standard declarative SV-clause b. Have they done the job? - Yes/no-question expressed by verb first order c. Had they done the job... - Condition expressed by verb first order d. Do the job! - Imperative formed with verb first orderMost verb first clauses are main clauses. Verb first conditional clauses, must be classified as embedded clauses because they cannot stand alone. Wh-clauses contain a wh-word. Wh-words serve to help express a constituent question, they are prevalent, though, as relative pronouns, in which case they serve to introduce a relative clause and are not part of a question.
The wh-word focuses a particular constituent and most of the time, it appears in clause-initial position. The following examples illustrate standard interrogative wh-clauses; the b-sentences are direct questions, the c-sentences contain the corresponding indirect questions: a. Sam likes the meat. - Standard declarative SV-clause b. Who likes the meat? - Matrix interrogative wh-clause focusing on the subject c. They asked. - Embedded interrogative wh-clause focusing on the subjecta. Larry sent Susan to the store. - Standard declarative SV-clause b. Whom did Larry send to the store? - Matrix interrogative wh-clause focusing on the object, subject-auxiliary inversion present c. We know. - Embedded wh-clause focusing on the object, subject-auxiliary inversion absenta. Larry sent Susan to the store. - Standard declarative SV-clause b. Where did Larry send Susan? - Matrix interrogative wh-clause focusing on the ob
Part of speech
In traditional grammar, a part of speech' is a category of words which have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech display similar behavior in terms of syntax—they play similar roles within the grammatical structure of sentences—and sometimes in terms of morphology, in that they undergo inflection for similar properties. Listed English parts of speech are noun, adjective, pronoun, conjunction and sometimes numeral, article, or determiner. Other Indo-European languages have all these word classes. Beyond the Indo-European family, such other European languages as Hungarian and Finnish, both of which belong to the Uralic family lack prepositions or have only few of them. Other terms than part of speech—particularly in modern linguistic classifications, which make more precise distinctions than the traditional scheme does—include word class, lexical class, lexical category; some authors restrict the term lexical category to refer only to a particular type of syntactic category.
The term form class is used, although this has various conflicting definitions. Word classes may be classified as open or closed: open classes acquire new members while closed classes acquire new members infrequently, if at all. All languages have the word classes noun and verb, but beyond these two there are significant variations among different languages. For example, Japanese has as many as three classes of adjectives; because of such variation in the number of categories and their identifying properties, analysis of parts of speech must be done for each individual language. The labels for each category are assigned on the basis of universal criteria; the classification of words into lexical categories is found from the earliest moments in the history of linguistics. In the Nirukta, written in the 5th or 6th century BC, the Sanskrit grammarian Yāska defined four main categories of words: नाम nāma – noun आख्यात ākhyāta – verb उपसर्ग upasarga – pre-verb or prefix निपात nipāta – particle, invariant word These four were grouped into two larger classes: inflectable and uninflectable.
The ancient work on the grammar of the Tamil language, Tolkāppiyam, argued to have been written around 2,500 years ago, classifies Tamil words as peyar, vinai and uri. A century or two after the work of Nirukta, the Greek scholar Plato wrote in his Cratylus dialog that "... sentences are, I conceive, a combination of verbs and nouns ". Aristotle added another class, "conjunction", which included not only the words known today as conjunctions, but other parts. By the end of the 2nd century BC grammarians had expanded this classification scheme into eight categories, seen in the Art of Grammar, attributed to Dionysius Thrax: Noun: a part of speech inflected for case, signifying a concrete or abstract entity Verb: a part of speech without case inflection, but inflected for tense and number, signifying an activity or process performed or undergone Participle: a part of speech sharing features of the verb and the noun Article: a declinable part of speech, taken to include the definite article, but the basic relative pronoun Pronoun: a part of speech substitutable for a noun and marked for a person Preposition: a part of speech placed before other words in composition and in syntax Adverb: a part of speech without inflection, in modification of or in addition to a verb, clause, sentence, or other adverb Conjunction: a part of speech binding together the discourse and filling gaps in its interpretationIt can be seen that these parts of speech are defined by morphological and semantic criteria.
The Latin grammarian Priscian modified the above eightfold system, excluding "article", but adding "interjection". The Latin names for the parts of speech, from which the corresponding modern English terms derive, were nomen, participium, praepositio, adverbium and interjectio; the category nomen included substantives and numerals. This is reflected in the older English terminology noun substantive, noun adjective and noun numeral; the adjective became a separate class, as did the numerals, the English word noun came to be applied to substantives only. Works of English grammar follow the pattern of the European tradition as described above, except that participles are now regarded as forms of
A portmanteau or portmanteau word is a linguistic blend of words, in which parts of multiple words or their phones are combined into a new word, as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog, or motel, from motor and hotel. In linguistics, a portmanteau is defined as a single morph; the definition overlaps with the grammatical term contraction, but contractions are formed from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as do and not to make don't, whereas a portmanteau word is formed by combining two or more existing words that all relate to a singular concept. A portmanteau differs from a compound, which does not involve the truncation of parts of the stems of the blended words. For instance, starfish is not a portmanteau, of star and fish; the word portmanteau was first used in this sense by Lewis Carroll in the book Through the Looking-Glass, in which Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of the unusual words in "Jabberwocky", where slithy means "slimy and lithe" and mimsy is "miserable and flimsy".
Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the practice of combining words in various ways: You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word. In his introduction to The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll uses portmanteau when discussing lexical selection: Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words "fuming" and "furious." Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … if you have the rarest of gifts, a balanced mind, you will say "frumious." In then-contemporary English, a portmanteau was a suitcase. The etymology of the word is the French porte-manteau, from porter, "to carry", manteau, "cloak". In modern French, a porte-manteau is a clothes valet, a coat-tree or similar article of furniture for hanging up jackets, hats and the like. An occasional synonym for "portmanteau word" is frankenword, an autological word exemplifying the phenomenon it describes, blending "Frankenstein" and "word".
Many neologisms are examples of blends. In Punch in 1896, the word brunch was introduced as a "portmanteau word." In 1964, the newly independent African republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar chose the portmanteau word Tanzania as its name. Eurasia is a portmanteau of Europe and Asia; some city names are portmanteaus of the border regions they straddle: Texarkana spreads across the Texas-Arkansas border, while Calexico and Mexicali are the American and Mexican sides of a single conurbation. A scientific example is a liger, a cross between a male lion and a female tiger. Many company or brand names are portmanteaus, including Microsoft, a portmanteau of microcomputer and software. "Jeoportmanteau!" is a recurring category on the American television quiz show Jeopardy!. The category's name is itself a portmanteau of the words "Jeopardy" and "portmanteau." Responses in the category are portmanteaus constructed by fitting two words together. Portmanteau words may be produced by joining together proper nouns with common nouns, such as "gerrymandering", which refers to the scheme of Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry for politically contrived redistricting.
The term gerrymander has itself contributed to portmanteau terms playmander. Oxbridge is a common portmanteau for the UK's two oldest universities, those of Oxford and Cambridge. In 2016, Britain's planned exit from the European Union became known as "Brexit". David Beckham's English mansion Rowneybury House was nicknamed "Beckingham Palace", a portmanteau of his surname and Buckingham Palace. Many portmanteau words do not appear in all dictionaries. For example, a spork is an eating utensil, a combination of a spoon and a fork, a skort is an item of clothing, part skirt, part shorts. On the other hand, turducken, a dish made by inserting a chicken into a duck, the duck into a turkey, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2010; the word refudiate was first used by Sarah Palin when she misspoke, conflating the words refute and repudiate. Though a gaffe, the word was recognized as the New Oxford American Dictionary's "Word of the Year" in 2010; the business lexicon is replete with newly coined portmanteau words like "permalance", "advertainment", "advertorial", "infotainment", "infomercial".
A company name may be portmanteau as well as a product name. Two proper names can be used in creating a portmanteau word in r