Definition and Examples of Absolute Phrases in English

Definition and Examples of Absolute Phrases in English An absolute phrase is a group of words that modifies an independent clause as a whole. Its etymology is from the Latin, free, loosen, unrestricted. An absolute is made up of a noun and its modifiers (which frequently, but not always, include a participle or participial phrase). An absolute may precede, follow, or interrupt the main clause: Their slender bodies sleek and black against the orange sky, the storks circled high above us.The storks circled high above us, their slender bodies sleek and black against the orange sky.The storks, their slender bodies sleek and black against the orange sky, circled high above us. An absolute allows us to move from a description of a whole person, place, or thing to one aspect or part. Note that in traditional grammar, absolutes (or nominative absolutes) are often more narrowly defined as noun phrases...combined with participles. The term absolute (borrowed from Latin grammar) is rarely used by contemporary linguists. Examples and Observations The absolute phrase that adds a focusing detail is especially common in fiction writing, much more common than in expository writing... In the following passages, all from works of fiction, some have a participle as the post-noun modifier...; however, youll also see some with noun phrases, others with prepositional phrases. There was no bus in sight and Julian, his hands still jammed in his pockets and his head thrust forward, scowled down the empty street. (Flannery OConnor, Everything That Rises Must Converge)Silently they ambled down Tenth Street until they reached a stone bench that jutted from the sidewalk near the curb. They stopped there and sat down, their backs to the eyes of the two men in white smocks who were watching them. (Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon)The man stood laughing, his weapons at his hips. (Stephen Crane, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky)To his right the valley continued in its sleepy beauty, mute and understated, its wildest autumn colors blunted by the distance, placid as water color by an artist who mixed all his colors with brown. (Joyce Carol Oates, The Secret Marriage) A second style of absolute phrase, rather than focusing on a detail, explains a cause or condition: Our car having developed engine trouble, we stopped for the night at a roadside rest area. We decided to have our picnic, the weather being warm and clear. The first example could be rewritten as a because- or when- clause: When our car developed engine trouble, we stopped... or Because our car developed engine trouble, we stopped... The absolute allows the writer to include the information without the explicitness of the complete clause; the absolute, then, can be thought of as containing both meanings, both when and because. The absolute about the weather in the second example suggests an attendant condition rather than a cause. (Martha Kolln, Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects, 5th ed. Pearson, 2007) Nominative Absolutes Nominative absolutes are related to nonfinite verb phrases... They consist of a subject noun phrase followed by some part of the predicate: either a participle form of the main verb or a complement or modifier of the main verb. . . . [C]omplements and modifiers may take almost any form...Absolutes have traditionally been called nominative because the absolute construction begins with a noun phrase as its headword. Nevertheless, they function adverbially as sentence modifiers. Some [absolutes] explain reasons or conditions for the action described in the main clause; others... describe the manner in which the action of the main clause is performed. (Thomas P. Klammer, Muriel R. Schulz, and Angela Della Volpe, Analyzing English Grammar, 5th ed. Longman, 2007) More Examples of Absolute Phrases Roy circles the bases like a Mississippi steamboat, lights lit, flags fluttering, whistle banging, coming round the bend. (Bernard Malamud, The Natural, 1952)Harry froze, his cut finger slipping on the jagged edge of the mirror again. (J.K. Rowling,  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Scholastic, 2007)Bolenciecwcz was staring at the floor now, trying to think, his great brow furrowed, his huge hands rubbing together, his face red. (James Thurber, University Days)The spider skins lie on their sides, translucent and ragged, their legs drying in knots. (Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, 1977)His bare legs cooled by sprinklers, his bare feet on the feathery and succulent grass, and his mobile phone in his hand (he was awaiting Lionels summons), Des took a turn round the grounds. (Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo: State of England. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)When Johnson Meechum came up the three steps of his purple double-wide trailer and opened the front door, his wife, Mabel, was waiting for him, her thin hands clenched on her hips, her tinted hair standing from her scalp in a tiny blue cloud. (Harry Crews, Celebration. Simon Schuster, 1998) Six boys came over the hill half an hour early that afternoon, running hard, their heads down, their forearms working, their breath whistling. (John Steinbeck, The Red Pony)Whenever you heard distant music somewhere in the town, maybe so faint you thought you imagined it, so thin you blamed the whistling of the streetcar wires, then you could track the sound down and find Caleb straddling his little velocipede, speechless with joy, his appleseed eyes dancing. (Anne Tyler, Searching for Caleb. Alfred A. Knopf, 1975)Still he came on,  shoulders hunched, face twisted, wringing his hands, looking more like an old woman at a wake than an infantry combat soldier. (James Jones,  The Thin Red Line, 1962)A tall man, his shotgun slung behind his back with a length of plow line, dismounted and dropped his reins and crossed the little way to the cedar bolt. (Howard Bahr, The Year of Jubilo: A Novel of the Civil War. Picador, 2001)The men sit on the edge of the pens, the big white and silver fish between their knees, ripping with knives and tearing with hands, heaving the disemboweled bodies into a central basket. (William G. Wing, Christmas Comes First on the Banks) Hundreds and hundreds of frogs were sitting down that pipe, and they were all honking, all of them, not in unison but constantly, their little throats going, their mouths open, their eyes staring up with curiosity at Karel and Frances and their large human shadows. (Margaret Drabble, The Realms of Gold, 1975)The accused man, Kabuo Miyamoto, sat proudly upright with a rigid grace, his palms placed softly on the defendants table - the posture of a man who has detached himself insofar as this is possible at his own trial. (David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars, 1994)The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his stick. (George Orwell, A Hanging, 1931)You can get a fair sense of the perils of an elevator shaft by watching an elevator rush up and down one, its counterweight flying by, like the blade on a guillotine. (Nick Paumgarten, Up and Then Down. The New Yorker, April 21, 2008)Two middle-aged men with jogging disease lumber past me, their faces pur ple, their bellies slopping, their running shoes huge and costly. (Joe Bennett, Mustnt Grumble. Simon Schuster, 2006) At a right angle to the school was the back of the church, its bricks painted the color of dried blood. (Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life, 1994)Ross sat on the edge of a chair several feet away from the table, leaning forward, the fingers of his left hand spread upon his chest, his right hand holding a white knitting needle which he used for a pointer. (James Thurber, The Years With Ross, 1958)One by one, down the hill come the mothers of the neighborhood, their kids running beside them. (Roger Rosenblatt, Making Toast. The New Yorker, December 15, 2008)I could see, even in the mist, Spurn Head stretching out ahead of me in the gloom, its spine covered in marram grass and furze, its shingle flanks speared with the rotting spars of failed breakwaters. (Will Self, A Real Cliff Hanger. The Independent, August. 30, 2008)Down the long concourse they came unsteadily, Enid favouring her damaged hip, Alfred paddling at the air with loose-hinged hands and slapping the airport carpeting with poorl y controlled feet, both of them carrying Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags and concentrating on the floor in front of them, measuring out the hazardous distance three paces at a time. (Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001) Source Macmillan Teach Yourself Grammar and Style in Twenty Four Hours, 2000.

Definition and Examples of Linguistic Purism

Definition and Examples of Linguistic Purism Purism is a  pejorative term in linguistics for a zealous conservatism in regard to the use and development of a language. Also known as  language purism, linguistic purism, and discourse purism. A purist (or grammaticaster)  is someone who expresses a desire to eliminate certain undesirable features from a language, including grammatical errors, jargon, neologisms, colloquialisms, and words of foreign origin. The problem with defending the purity of the English language, says James Nicoll, is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We dont just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary (quoted by Elizabeth Winkler in Understanding Language, 2015). Examples and Observations Like other tabooing practices, language purism seeks to constrain the linguistic behavior of individuals by identifying certain elements in a language as bad. Typically, these are words and word usage that are believed to threaten the identity of the culture in questionwhat 18th-century grammarians referred to as the genius of the language. Authenticity has two faces: one is the struggle to arrest linguistic change and to protect it from foreign influences. But, as Deborah Cameron claims, the prescriptive endeavors of speakers are more complex and diverse than this. She prefers the expression verbal hygiene over prescription or purism for exactly this reason. According to Cameron, a sense of linguistic values makes verbal hygiene part of every speakers linguistic competence, as basic to language as vowels and consonants. (Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge University Press, 2006) Purism in the 16th Century I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges, wherein if we take not heed by tiim, ever borowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt. (John Cheke, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge University ­, in a letter to Thomas Hoby, 1561)- Sir John Cheke (1514-1557) was so determined that the English tongue should be preserved pure, unmixt and unmangeled . . . that he produced a translation of the gospel of St. Matthew using only native words, forcing him to coin neologisms (new words) such as mooned lunatic, hundreder centurion, and crossed crucified. This policy recalls an Old English practice in which Latin words like discipulus were rendered using native formations like leorningcniht, or learning follower, rather than by borrowing the Latin word, as Modern English does with disciple. (Simon Horobin, How English Became English. Oxford University Press, 2016) Purism in the 19th Century A certain Captain Hamilton in 1833 demonstrates the invective the British directed at the language used in America. He claims that his denunciation is the natural feeling of an Englishman at finding the language of Shakespeare and Milton thus gratuitously degraded. Unless the present progress of change be arrested by an increase of taste and judgment in the more educated classes, there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an English man . . .. Hamiltons vituperation exemplifies a purist view of language, which allows only one fixed, immutable, correct version [and] which sees difference and change as degradation.(Heidi Preschler, Language and Dialect, in Encyclopedia of American Literature, ed. by Steven Serafin. Continuum, 1999) Brander Matthews on Lost Causes in the Early 20th Century The purist used to insist that we should not say the house is being built, but rather the house is building. So far as one can judge from a survey of recent writing the purist has abandoned this combat; and nobody nowadays hesitates to ask, What is being done? The purist still objects to what he calls the Retained Object in such a sentence as he was given a new suit of clothes. Here again, the struggle is vain, for this usage is very old; it is well established in English; and whatever may be urged against it theoretically, it has the final advantage of convenience. The purist also tells us that we should say come to see me and try to do it, and not come and see me and try and do it. Here once more the purist is setting up a personal standard without any warrant. He may use whichever of these forms he likes best, and we on our part have the same permission, with a strong preference for the older and more idiomatic of them. (Brander Matthews, Parts of Speech: Essays on English, 1901)D espite the exacerbated protests of the upholders of authority and tradition, a living language makes new words as these may be needed; it bestows novel meanings upon old words; it borrows words from foreign tongues; it modifies its usages to gain directness and to achieve speed. Often these novelties are abhorrent; yet they may win acceptance if they approve themselves to the majority. . . .To fix a living language finally is an idle dream, and if it could be brought about it would be a dire calamity.(Brander Matthews, What Is Pure English? 1921) Todays Peevers Language peevers write for one another. They are not really writing for the larger public; they do not expect to be heeded by the larger public, and it would not be desirable if they were. Their identities are predicated on the belief that they are an elect, purists holding up the flickering candle of civilization amid the rabble. They write for one another to reinforce this status. If everyone wrote as they prescribe, their distinction would vanish.Actually, there is a small additional audience of aspirants to the club: English majors, journalists, teachers pets in whose minds a handful of shibboleths lodge, to be applied mechanically and unintelligently thereafter. But the great unwashed public pays no attention and does not care, except to the extent that they have been schooled to feel vaguely uneasy about the way they speak and write.(John E. McIntyre, Secrets of the Peevers. The Baltimore Sun, May 14, 2014) The Grammaticaster Tradition Grammaticaster is a  pejorative  term for a  grammarian, especially one whos concerned with petty matters of  usage. - Ð Ã µ tells thee true, my noble neophyte; my little  grammaticaster, he does: it shall never put thee to thy mathematics, metaphysics, philosophy, and I know not what supposed sufficiencies; if thou canst but have the patience to plod enough, talk, and make a noise enough, be impudent enough, and tis enough.(Captain Pantilius Tucca in  The Poetaster, by Ben Jonson, 1601)- Nor have I much troubled their phrase and expression. I have not vexed their language with the doubts, the remarks, and eternal triflings of the French  grammaticasters.(Thomas Rhymer,  The Tragedies of the Last Age, 1677)- Such idiots, despite the rise of scientific pedagogy, have not died out in the world. I believe that our schools are full of them, both in pantaloons and in skirts. There are fanatics who love and venerate  spelling  as a tom-cat loves and venerates catnip. There are  grammatomaniacs; schoolmarms who would rather  parse  than eat; specialists in an  objective case  that doesnt exist in English; strange beings, otherwise sane and even intelligent and comely, who suffer under a  split infinitive  as you or I would suffer under gastro-enteritis.(H.L. Mencken, The Educational Process.  The Smart Set, 1922)  - Purist  is the most persistent of the many terms used to describe those people who concern themselves with correct English or correct grammar. Among other  epithets,  we find   tidier-up, precisian, schoolmarm,  grammaticaster, word-worrier, prescriptivist, purifier, logic-chopper  (H.W. Fowlers word),  grammatical moralizer  (Otto Jespersens term for H.W. Fowler),  usageaster, usagist, usager,  and  linguistic Emily Post. All of these seem at least faintly pejorative, some more than faintly so. The concern with the improvement, correction, and perfection of the existing language goes back to the 18th century, when the first influential grammars of English were written. There was current at that time a notion that a perfect language existed, at least in theory, and that reformation of the imperfect way existing language was used would lead to that perfection. (Merriam-Websters Dictionary of English Usage, 1994)

Critique Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 7

Critique - Essay Example But can morality and law go hand in hand? A moral duty calls for a father to oblige a child’s need for food but law wouldn’t understand the necessity hence highlighting the action as an act of stealing. Imagining plays a vital role in assessing any situation. Perhaps one is not encountering a critical patch in life but can imagine the hurdles and bottlenecks a person has to face in the same scenario. Only imagination can lead to empathy and empathy does not connect with law at all. One needs to understand the aim of author here, who is basically trying to estimate the situation with a legal perspective and moral view. America is looked upon by other nations, who have claimed over the years the view of empathy through indulging into activities for welfare of other states. However, it gives a negative impression if just claims are left to believe in and lofty rhetoric negates our actions. The rights to all are discussed and agreed upon by all but to actually distribute and share them comes under the implication part which unfortunately is not being practiced and somehow law is forbidding it without our knowledge. If only justice can be attain by law and values can be learnt through n orms our nation could be experiencing a dilemma of fear. Fear to see and feel what actually brings misery and helplessness in a society. Immigrants do abide hurdles to adjust into a different culture but to understand the various reasons; they leave their zone of comfort one can only see means of obtaining financial or social security. When we teach our younger ones to imagine, the horizon of their thinking can lead to a global change. This idea can not be exactly legitimate but will be crucial and will contain ethical responsibility in it. Hunger and well fare of offspring are reasons which are commonly observed for a person to take desperate measures. In the history we can see, differences among cultures and regional diversity was regarded