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The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar SECOND EDITION BAS AARTS SYLVIA CHALKER EDMUND WEINER Bas Aarts is Professor of English Linguistics at University College London. He has published many books and articles on English grammar, most recently the Oxford Modern English Grammar. The late Sylvia Chalker was the author of several grammar books, including Current English Grammar and the Little Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar. She was also a contributor to the Oxford Companion to the English Language. Edmund Weiner is Deputy Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and co-author (with Andrew Delahunty) of the Oxford Guide to English Usage. A This is a web-linked dictionary. There is a list of recommended web links in the Appendix, on page 454. To access the websites, go to the dictionary’s web page at www.oup.com/uk/reference/ resources/englishgrammar, click on Web links in the Resources section, and click straight through to the relevant websites. www.ebook3000.com 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Original material: # Sylvia Chalker and Edmund Weiner 1994 New and revised material: # Oxford University Press 2014 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First edition published 1994 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback 1994 Reissued, with corrections, in new covers 1998 Second edition published 2014 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available ISBN: 978–0–19–965823–7 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. www.ebook3000.com Contents Preface to the First Edition v Preface to the Second Edition vi Organization vii Notational Conventions ix Abbreviations x Dictionary 1 References 448 Useful Web Links 454 www.ebook3000.com www.ebook3000.com Preface to the First Edition Grammar, etymologically speaking, is related to glamour. Though few people might claim that grammar is glamorous in the modern sense, there is considerable interest in English grammar today and no shortage of grammar books, ranging from small basic books aimed at children or elementary-level foreign learners, through more advanced manuals to large scholarly works. The trouble is—they may be about the same language, but they do not always speak the same language. The very range of the grammar books on offer presents problems. There are many ways of describing grammar, and a wealth of terminology. Some of it strikes the layman as jargon (disjunct, matrix, pro-form, stative); other words appear ordinary enough but conceal specialized meanings (comment, focus, specific). Worse, the same terms, old or new—comparison, formal, pronoun, reported speech, root, stress—are used by different grammarians with different meanings. Such difficulties are not entirely avoidable. Any subject of study needs specialist words. Different grammarians are entitled to analyse language in different ways, and fresh viewpoints may call for new terms. But while grammarians sometimes explain what they mean by a new or unusual term, it is rarer for them to point out that they are using an existing term in a different way. This is a cause of real confusion. Another problem is that new terms may in the end turn out simply to be alternatives for an old concept—a synonym in fact (e.g. progressive, continuous). We have tried in this dictionary to indicate the range and variety of meanings that may lie behind a single term. The main emphasis is on the terminology of current mainstream grammar, but we have also included a considerable number of entries on the related areas of speech and meaning—more grandly known as phonetics and semantics. Users will also find some terms from Generative Grammar, which has greatly influenced mainstream grammar in recent years—but some of the more theoretical terminology of linguistics and semantics is excluded. We have also on the whole excluded outdated grammatical terminology, apart from a few traditional terms which may be familiar to the general reader. The authors would like to thank Professor Flor Aarts, of the Katholieke Universiteit, Nijmegen, who read an early draft of the book: his comments, we believe, have led to many improvements, but the authors are alone responsible for any blemishes that remain. We would also like to thank our families for their support, encouragement, and, at times, forbearance. sc escw London, Oxford 1993 www.ebook3000.com Preface to the Second Edition Students of English are faced with an ever-expanding list of terms when studying the grammar of present-day English. The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar offers help by defining current terminology clearly with the help of numerous example sentences and quotations from the scholarly linguistic literature. Where the same terminology is used differently by linguists, these differences are explained, and where different terminology is used in the same way, this is also clearly signalled. This new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar differs from the first edition in many ways: All entries have been completely revised and updated. There are many new entries covering recent terminology, for example from The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. There are new short entries on the most important grammars of English published since the beginning of the twentieth century. Usage advice is given where appropriate, though it is never prescriptive. Advice is sometimes given regarding the use of terminology that most linguists would agree is best avoided. Readers familiar with the first edition will notice that the entries on English phonetics have been removed. The reason for this is that it is very unusual for phonetics to be covered under the heading of ‘grammar’, and this terminology is best dealt with elsewhere. The term ‘grammar’ is conceived of in this dictionary as encompassing syntax and morphology, and the aim is to cover terminology that is used in the current literature on English grammar. The dictionary also has entries on related fields of study, such as corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, lexicology, (lexical) semantics, sociolinguistics, stylistics, and so on, but only when this terminology is broadly relevant to grammar. Terms from theoretical frameworks are also covered to some extent, especially those from Generative Grammar and Systemic Grammar, though for a fuller treatment the reader is referred to Peter Matthews’s Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. I am grateful to the late Sylvia Chalker and to Edmund Weiner for their excellent work on the first edition of this book, and to Rebecca Lane and Jamie Crowther at OUP for their support during the writing process. Finally, thanks are due to Jill Bowie for her meticulous copy-editing and to Donald Watt for proofreading. bas aarts University College London www.ebook3000.com Organization 1. Entries are strictly alphabetical. Thus: agent agentive agentless passive agent noun 2. Cross-references to other entries are signalled by an asterisk when they occur in running text, e.g. Aktionsart The lexical expression of *aspect ... 3. In formal cross-references, the entry referred to is indicated in small capitals, e.g. focusing subjunct See focusing adverb. A cross-reference to a phrase listed within an entry is given in a mixture of small capitals (for the entry headword) and italics (for the remainder of the phrase), e.g. complex sentence. 4. When a cross-reference relates to a particular numbered sense in another entry, the number of the relevant sense is indicated, e.g. *base (2) or base (2). 5. Where a word is not a grammatical term in itself, but forms part of a phrase which is dealt with elsewhere, this is indicated, e.g. act See speech act. 6. Where a term is dealt with at the entry for some larger term, this is indicated, e.g. formulaic subjunctive See subjunctive. 7. Where two or more terms are synonyms, the definition appears under the preferred term, usually with a reference to the alternative term, e.g. folk etymology ...Also called popular etymology. and the other term is cross-referenced with an asterisk, e.g. popular etymology The same as *folk etymology. 8. Where two or more terms are in a contrastive relationship, this is stated at the beginning of both entries, e.g. abstract ... ...Contrasted with *concrete. concrete ... ...Contrasted with *abstract. 9. See (also) at the end of (part of) an entry indicates that further information will be found at the entry indicated. Sometimes the user is referred to a closely related word, e.g. coordinate ... ...See also coordination. At other times the reference is to a ‘background’ concept, e.g. discord ... www.ebook3000.com Organization viii ...See agreement.