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Breaking away from the sports example above: Can periphrastic sentences be considered beautiful in a wild untended sort of manner?
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>ramfeezle got picked up by my spellcheck, but not farshimalt.
my spellcheck (and that used here at AWAD) chokes on 'spellcheck'. heh
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Breaking away from the sports example above: Can periphrastic sentences be considered beautiful in a wild untended sort of manner? I think they're quite beautiful. By sacrificing the simplicity of the basic verb constructions (which simplicity has a beauty of its own, related to its economy,) periphrasis adds convolutions, which - when used judiciously - are able to 1) add complexity and texture for those who appreciate such things, and 2) express subtleties of thought and expression that may be lost with simpler constructions. As a fluent speaker of English, I still have to pause occasionally when assembling a periphrastic phrase in the course of speaking. The innumerable options periphrasis affords (as evinced by this thread) enrich and beautify our language, in my opinion.
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the forms 'more beautiful' and 'most beautiful' are (at a minimum) periphrastic. : )
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We'll have to use them once in a while :-)
Last edited by beck123; 03/15/2010 3:44 AM.
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I think they're quite beautiful. By sacrificing the simplicity of the basic verb constructions (which simplicity has a beauty of its own, related to its economy,) periphrasis adds convolutions, which - when used judiciously - are able to 1) add complexity and texture for those who appreciate such things, and 2) express subtleties of thought and expression that may be lost with simpler constructions.
I could not have put this better, but I am looking for help to answer a simple question should I use a longer sentence if I want to do away with the severity that brevity imposes at the cost of everything beautiful that brevity has to offer? Also will it be correct to generalise that brevity is of the intellect and wordiness is of the senses? Would that mean haiku works a dyptich of brevity and sensuousness? (3 questions. The first is most important for me. Thanks for your thoughts on this.)
Last edited by Avy; 03/15/2010 3:55 AM.
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English got rid of its cases and so did all the Romance languages, but the Slavic languages held on tight to theirs. I guess it depends on your definition of 'case'. Equating 'case' with the grammatical markers used to indicate case makes for some strange combinations. In Latin, for example, in first declension genitive and dative singular are the same case and in second declension dative and ablative singular are the same case. I would prefer to think of case as the actual relation a noun has with other elements in a sentence.
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it depends on your definition of 'case'. Equating 'case' with the grammatical markers used to indicate case makes for some strange combinations.
Most linguists these days go for a bit of both: overt grammatical markings (the surface morphology of case) and the function (the syntax of words and the function of case.
In Latin, for example, in first declension genitive and dative singular are the same case and in second declension dative and ablative singular are the same case.
That's not how the Romans or today's grammarians would have analysed it. They distinguished case from case-endings (or other kinds of overt markers). Even the Indian grammarians of Sanskrit, who came from an entirely different tradition, separated case-endings from case. They also divided the cases into a myriad of functions, e.g., the genitive of possession and the partitive genitive. While the names given to cases are essentially arbitrary--in fact, the Sanskrit grammarians just numbered their cases, first through seventh--they are convenient tags to discuss the various phenomena of case.
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>use them both
irregular periphrastic adjectives, non-beautiful subdivision
more furshlugginer .. most furshlugginer
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It isn't fursluggishness but I'm still trying to get behind periphrastic and following the indications of the American Heritage I went from periphrastic via periphrasis to cir·cum·lo·cu·tion The use of unnecessarily wordy and indirect language. Evasion in speech or writing. A roundabout expression. (and now I vaguely have an impression of where this case leaded to) 
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In morphology, periphrasis is when you use a phrase rather than a single verb form. for example, in Latin the present indicative active and passive forms of a verb are a single verb form: amo 'I love' and [i]amor 'I am loved'. In the English glosses to those two forms, the second one, the passive, is a periphrastic construction.
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@ tsu & Bran: I concur; use them both. What works for haiku (or a limerick) does not work at a retirement luncheon. There are a goodly handful of esoteric names in rhetoric for devices that use repetition of one form or another, and repetition is periphrasis, so the pedigree is there.
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"I love" and "I am loved" do not say the same thing, do they? The comparable passive voice for "I love [her]" would be "She is loved [by me]," not "I am loved [by her]."
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"I love" and "I am loved" do not say the same thing, do they? The comparable passive voice for "I love [her]" would be "She is loved [by me]," not "I am loved [by her]."
No, they don't and I did not mean to imply that they do. I was just trying to illustrate that some constructions are periphrastic in that they have more than one word to convey a grammatical category. So, in English the passive voice is a periphrastic construction, "I am loved", but in Latin the passive is usually a single word, amor.
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it depends on your definition of 'case'. Equating 'case' with the grammatical markers used to indicate case makes for some strange combinations.
Most linguists these days go for a bit of both: overt grammatical markings (the surface morphology of case) and the function (the syntax of words and the function of case.
In Latin, for example, in first declension genitive and dative singular are the same case and in second declension dative and ablative singular are the same case.
That's not how the Romans or today's grammarians would have analysed it. They distinguished case from case-endings (or other kinds of overt markers). Even the Indian grammarians of Sanskrit, who came from an entirely different tradition, separated case-endings from case. They also divided the cases into a myriad of functions, e.g., the genitive of possession and the partitive genitive. While the names given to cases are essentially arbitrary--in fact, the Sanskrit grammarians just numbered their cases, first through seventh--they are convenient tags to discuss the various phenomena of case. I was going for a sort of reductio ad absurdum with my comment on the first declension genitive and dative singular being the same case. If we look at it entirely disconnected from any inflectional morphemes then we would have, who knows, some 25 or 30 cases including at least two for subjects of sentences. This is all in aid of my internal rantings against the Huddleston/Pullum categorization of bush as a preposition in the sentence 'On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head bush on their own.' Pullum's argument is here. Click on the little SHOW.
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I was going for a sort of reductio ad absurdum with my comment on the first declension genitive and dative singular being the same case. If we look at it entirely disconnected from any inflectional morphemes then we would have, who knows, some 25 or 30 cases including at least two for subjects of sentences.
I see. Not sure I quite understand. Do you mean if you ignore the overt markings you can analyse sentences in such a way that in Latin or English there are something like 20 or 30 cases? There's probably way more than that. I once listened to a nervous little East german professor read stiffly from his poorly translated paper why there were hundreds of different kinds of and, logically speaking, not grammatically. I think the Roman, Greek, and Indian grammarians did a fine job of abstracted the overt morphological markers from the grammatical functions when it came to case. If you look at Latin's five declensions, you get a good feel for there being five cases, and maybe an extra one thrown in for the 2nd declension vocative. That some cases in certain declensions have identical endings did not seem to confuse them very much, but who knows, maybe you're on to something. You should write it up and send it to Language or Linguistic Inquiry.
This is all in aid of my internal rantings against the Huddleston/Pullum categorization of bush as a preposition in the sentence 'On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head bush on their own.'
I don't know. I've always felt that the fiddly bits of parts of speech that are left over in the linguistic rag bag after all the heavy lifting and categorization are done, make for interesting perusal. There is something about prepositions, verbal particles, and adverbs, that is all messy and overlappish. Pullum's discovery is at least interesting, but then again if it rubs you the wrong way, rant on, dude! You'll be in good company. every linguistic conference I've ever gone to is full of ranting, peevish linguists disagreeing with each other and sometimes with earlier versions of themselves.
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I guess if you count all the different ablatives as one case I suppose you could limit it to 5 or 6. I just picked 25 or 30 because I don't know of any language that recognizes more than that in the formal grammar. Fifty might work, too. I haven't given the actual number that much thought.
And I don't think that bush in the Pullum sentence is an adverb. It's what it has always been; a noun. It's the word that names the place the chicks go to and it's in whatever case it is that defines things gone to.
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It's what it has always been; a noun. It's the word that names the place the chicks go to and it's in whatever case it is that defines things gone to.
Yeah but, you cannot replace it with another noun AFAIK. You can replace it with an adverb or a preposition or two.
I just see words changing parts-of-speech-hood at the drop of a clitic. Some languages force you to use derivational morphology is all, but some like Mandarin Chinese and to a slightly lesser extent English let you get away with morpher.
But it's not worth getting hot and bothered about, so I'll let it slide. Heading on out of here or skywards, p'raps.
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in English the passive voice is a periphrastic construction, "I am loved", but in Latin the passive is usually a single word, amor. Got it. Thanks, too, as this is all new to me. This has been a very informative thread so far - more in line with what I expected when I signed up.
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"Yeah but, you cannot replace it with another noun AFAIK. You can replace it with an adverb or a preposition or two"
What about a gerund like "hunting?" Would "hunting," if used in place of "bush" in that sentence, even be a gerund?
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ZM In morphology, periphrasis is when you use a phrase rather than a single verb form. for example, in Latin the present indicative active and passive forms of a verb are a single verb form: amo 'I love' and amor 'I am loved'. In the English glosses to those two forms, the second one, the passive, is a periphrastic construction. Yes, I understood right away that here periphrastic is used for a grammatical construction. You cannot get behind this when you look it up as an independant word in a dictionary. FALD. This is all in aid of my internal rantings against the Huddleston/Pullum categorization of bush as a preposition in the sentence 'On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head bush on their own.' People like to make these constructions, whatever you call it grammatically, as a way of being creative with language. (often in advertizing) It can be irritating when those things become too fashionable. I hope the chicks made it safely to the bush though God knows which chick devouring creatures were lurking there.
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Yeah but, you cannot replace it with another noun AFAIK. You can replace it with an adverb or a preposition or two.
Umm. Lessee. 'On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head bush (north/east/south/west/home) on their own.'
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(north/east/south/west/home)All adverbs for me. It's pretty uncontroversial categorization, (see, for instance, A-H link). YMMV. I should also say, bush is not an adverb for me, but I see how Pullum could analyze it that way for the Australians who made the utterance..
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What about a gerund like "hunting?"
I suppose if the -ing form was used as a noun, it'd be OK., But remember those forms are sometimes adjectives. Cf. His hunting days are over with Hunting gave him great joy.
1. On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head bush on their own.
2. On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head hunting on their own.
For me both sentences are weird, but then I don't savvy Strine.
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Thanks, too, as this is all new to me.
You're welcome.
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What about a gerund like "hunting?"
1. On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head bush on their own.
' Still with number 1. Does it look strange because when heading means moving somewhere, it is usually followed by 'for'? VERB: intr. To proceed or go in a certain direction: head for town. To form a head, as lettuce or cabbage. To originate, as a stream or river; rise. I mean, this looks quite kosher, I think. On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head for bush on their own.
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On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head for bush on their own.
I would write: On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head for the bush on their own. The prepositional phrase for the bush fills the adverbial adjunct slot in this sentence for me. Pullum is not saying that bush has become preposition in standard English, he was just enthusing over a preposition in the birthing process. For those who like their grammar and language fixed, like a butterfly pinned to a placard, this can be annoying.
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Yes, the the sounds even betterder. But head bush is fine with me. I think I'll head book for the rest of the day. 
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I think it can be correct without the article, but it definitely needs the preposition in the northern hemisphere.
On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head for (shelter, town, Mom, high ground, etc., none of which requires an article) on their own
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I should have written:(within this context) I'll head book and read for the rest of the day.
It can become really ugly when like me people take it one step further by messing it up. Since the seventees we are left with results from people making creative derivations from bibliotheek=library. People thought it cute to combine all sorts of words with the ending: "theek" .
From art-o-theek , which was still an artworks lending service to
Snack-o-Theek, the old fashioned cafetaria or "frietkot".
(fiets/Bike-o-Theek, speel/Play-o-theek, kook/Cook-o-theek) Things that no longer have to do with preservation or lending at all.
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(north/east/south/west/home)All adverbs for me. It's pretty uncontroversial categorization, (see, for instance, A-H link). YMMV. I should also say, bush is not an adverb for me, but I see how Pullum could analyze it that way for the Australians who made the utterance.. Pullum and Huddleston classify all of the above as prepositions.
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Usage Note: It was John Dryden who first promulgated the doctrine that a preposition may not be used at the end of a sentence, probably on the basis of a specious analogy to Latin. Grammarians in the 18th century refined the doctrine, and the rule has since become one of the most venerated maxims of schoolroom grammar. But sentences ending with prepositions can be found in the works of most of the great writers since the Renaissance. English syntax does allow for final placement of the preposition, as in We have much to be thankful for or I asked her which course she had signed up for. Efforts to rewrite such sentences to place the preposition elsewhere can have stilted and even comical results, as Winston Churchill demonstrated when he objected to the doctrine by saying "This is the sort of English up with which I cannot put."·Sometimes sentences that end with adverbs, such as I don't know where she will end up or It's the most curious book I've ever run across, are mistakenly thought to end in prepositions. One can tell that up and across are adverbs here, not prepositions, by the ungrammaticality of I don't know up where she will end and It's the most curious book across which I have ever run. It has never been suggested that it is incorrect to end a sentence with an adverb.  the calamities of ungrammaticalities
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"theek"I've always liked the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. It was founded in 1882. The Glyptothek in Munich, opened in 1830, is also cool. Also, in Germany there is often an Apotheke on the corner to buy something to help with your language-squeamishness.  But, seriously, Greek βιβλιοθηκη ( bilbiothēkē) just meant a 'bookcase' or 'collection of books'. Thēkē. just means receptacle. Nothing to do with lending. I admit the first time i saw a department store in France called magasin it gave me pause to wonder. They must have a lot of journals and newspapers to sell in there.
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Pullum and Huddleston classify all of the above as prepositions.
Well, bully for them. I said in the beginning (or in some other thread), there's a whole lot of similarity between things called adverbs, prepositions, and verbal particles. I'll have to crack my copy of H&P's Grammar and read up to see if I agree with their analysis. In the late days of the waning of American Structuralism (right before the enfant terrible of linguistics, Noam Chomsky came along and stirred things up), folks like Zelig Harris (Chomsky's advisor at UPenn) advocated dumping all the old terminology and starting anew with semantically opaque terms like class X or class Q. Pretty much all of grammar these days has to do with the slot filling of sample phrases or sentences.
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"theek" your language  squeamishness. . Allright, allright and thanks for the theek, but would you mind calling it a light case of language sensitivity?
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would you mind calling it a light case of language sensitivity?Sure, and very light it is. Course, it's better than prepositional preservation anxiety syndrome. It's interesting how these bits of language get reanalyzed and assigned to different categories. for example, back in the '50s and '60s, - orama (< panorama < Gk οραμα ( horama) 'sight', got tacked on to a whole bunch of words; later, - gate (< toponym Watergate) developed and is still with us. Another long-lived one is - burger (< Hamburger 'of or relating to Hamburg').
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[quote=zmjezhd](north/east/south/west/home)
Pullum and Huddleston classify all of the above as prepositions. Altho I haven't read CGEL, my understanding is that the argument goes that there's no reason to reclassify a preposition as an adverb when it isn't followed by a noun phrase. For instance, why classify "down" different ways in "I fell down the stairs" and "I fell down". After all, verbs are still verbs whether or not they are followed by noun phrases.
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What about a gerund like "hunting?"
I suppose if the -ing form was used as a noun, it'd be OK., But remember those forms are sometimes adjectives. Cf. His hunting days are over with Hunting gave him great joy.
1. On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head bush on their own.
2. On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head hunting on their own.
For me both sentences are weird, but then I don't savvy Strine. I only savvy a little Strine, but "to head bush" is subtly different to "to head to/for/towards/into the bush". I'm not really sure I can explain it though, which isn't particularly useful for anyone. The bush in the former implies a state rather than a place and "head bush" is the verb, if that makes any sense. If I come up with anything better I'll let you know.
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I only savvy a little Strine, but "to head bush" is subtly different to "to head to/for/towards/into the bush". I'm not really sure I can explain it though
Ah, an informant. Wonderful!
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"to head bush" is subtly different to "to head to/for/towards/into the bush".
To 'head bush' or 'go Bush' is to get away from it all.
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