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One man's look at English

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What follows are Dan Polansky's highly incomplete and relatively disorganized notes on English, especially English grammar and punctuation. English vocabulary is covered in dictionaries. There is a hope that someone will find the notes useful as well.

Definite and indefinite articles

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The first approximation: if one uses the definite article, the sender and the receiver both have to be able to look up the referent in their mental object collection/database rather than creating a new object record. Thus:

  • A: I see a cat over there. (You cannot know which particular cat that is, and I do not indicate I expect you to know that.)
  • B: Now that I look at the cat, it looks like the neighbor's one. (A and B both created a record for the cat over there, and as if placed a reference to the cat on an imaginary whiteboard for a shared context. Further references to "the cat" look at the context whiteboard to see whether there is a cat. If there are zero cats or more than one cat, the "the cat" reference fails, barring perhaps something like priority list of the multiple cats on the shared whiteboard and barring perhaps some disambiguation hints.)

But this is only a first idea.

Inventions are a special case. With them, one uses the definite article, e.g. "the computer".

Hyponymy/subclass-of and instance-of is indicated using the indefinite article. Thus, e.g. "a cat is an animal", or "The secret buyer turned out to be a large international corporation".

Properties are usually indicated using the definite article, e.g. "the color of the sofa", although, in general, one can think of multi-color sofa.

The construction "the X of Y" with the definite article is common also for non-properties, e.g. in "the president of the United States" or in the book title "The Lord of the Rings". It works as long as there is only one X associated with or belonging to Y.

For proper nouns, there is a dedicated article, Proper name. A first approximation: proper nouns are used without an article; the countless exceptions are hinted at Proper name.

The possessive eliminates the need of an article: it is "Peter's book" rather than "the Peter's book" or "a Peter's book". "The Peter's book" would be probably parsed as "(the Peter)'s book", and "the Peter" is non-standard English. The absence of an article is conventional despite e.g. "X is a Peter's book" arguably making rather good sense: X is an individual instance meeting the description "Peter's book", meaning "book belonging to Peter". On the other hand, one could complain about the grammatical ambiguity of "a Peter's book": is it "(a Peter)'s book" or "a (Peter's book)"; but then, one would respond that it is the latter since the former is non-standard ("a Peter" can be made sense of by treating "Peter" as a peculiar kind of common noun but is non-standard or rare). Be it as it may, we may consider the need of constructions like "the teacher's cat" and realize that the item before "'s" may need an article in general and that the "a (Peter's book)" interpretation would lead us to "X is a the teacher's cat" (with double article), namely "X is an instance meeting the descrition 'the teacher's cat', that is, 'cat belonging to the teacher' (not any teacher but the one). This could justify the convention. Further reading: Definite article before a possessive, ell.stackexchange.com.

The definite article sees use in constructions like "He directed the movie (movie-name)" or "She wrote the novel (novel-name)". This seems confusing since one would expect the part before the name to refer to something given the definite article. One can similarly ask whether there is a definite article before person descriptions/labels followed by the name. An example without an article is this: "In books, essays, lectures, and television documentaries, British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins presented science in terms that could be understood by the general public." from Britannica Kids. An example with an article (from Wikiquote) is this: "The same applies to the biologist Richard Dawkins, with his belief that strict Darwinism can explain everything, and that life is an accidental product of matter."

I must have seen an article indicating different statistical distribution of uses of definite and indefinite articles between men and women. If so, this suggests the "rules" are not as rigid as one might think.

Further reading:

The vs. this vs. that

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Sometimes, there seems to be a choice allowing any of "the", "this" and "that". An explanation for how the choice works to be the most idiomatic/native-sounding would be worthwhile.

Plurals

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Adjectives and verbs have no plurals.

Many noun plurals are regular:

  • cat → cats, dog → dogs (add "s")
  • dish → dishes, and hero → heroes (add "es")
  • kiss → kisses

Some noun plurals are irregular:

  • mouse → mice (but house → houses, not *hice)
  • louse → lice or louses
  • die → dice
  • man → men
  • woman → women

Some noun plurals are irregular based on their Latin origin:

  • corpus → corpora
  • desideratum → desiderata
  • genus → genera

One has to learn these by heart, and in doubt, they can be found in dictionaries.

Further reading:

Possessive

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Examples:

  • cat → The cat's mat (the simple and regular case)
  • cats → cats' (possessive of a plural)
  • James → James's (despite ending in s, "s" is added after the apostrophe)
  • Dickens → Dickens' (no additional s)
  • Dickens → Dickens's (also possible: additional s)

Further reading:

Attributive use of nouns

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Unlike some other languages, English heavily uses nouns on attributive positions instead of adjectives. Corresponding adjectives often do exists but are often much less commonly used, and often stem from Latin. The situation seems to be chaotic enough that a non-native speaker is well advised to check Google frequencies of putative competing renderings.

For example, one would usually use "tree" attributively rather than using "arboreal".

Tenses

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Verb tenses, examples:

  • I swim.
  • I am swimming.
  • I am going to swim.
  • I will swim.
  • I will be swimming.
  • I swam. (Irregular past tense.)
  • I was swimming.
  • I have been swimming.
  • I had been swimming.
  • I would swim.
  • I would have never swam.
  • I will have never swam. (Inspired by Thulsa Doom.)
  • I am in the process of swimming.

Verb simple past tense

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For regular verbs, the simple past tense is made by adding "-d" or "-ed" suffix. For irregular verbs, one has to learn it by heart, although certain patterns can be discerned.

Regular: cook → cooked, look → looked, etc.

Irregular: do → did; go → went; swim → swam; build → built; etc.

Links:

Verb subjunctive mood

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There is the thing called subjunctive mood. It seems rather confusing.

Further reading:

Verb agreement

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Pullum gives the following two examples:

  • None of us are perfect (incorrect according to White)
  • None of us is perfect (correct according to White)

The relative prevalence and the instructions of various usage guides would be good to know. (The Czech version is Nikdo z nás není dokonalý and customarily uses singular není rather than the plural nejsou, corresponding to "is".)

By contrast, statistics clearly shows:

  • Everyone are ... (incorrect/highly uncustomary)
  • Everyone is ... (correct)

Further reading:

Phrasal verbs

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Examples: "look up", used as e.g. "look it up". The meaning of a phrasal verb is often non-compositional: it cannot be derived from the meaning of "look" and "up". If one likens phrasal verbs to German verbs with separable prefixes, and connects that to Slavic prefixed verbs, the surprise kind of disappears. In German, for zugeben, one says Geben sie es zu: the zu- prefix is separable. In Czech vydělat (earn), one does not know the meaning from vy- a dělat.

The one grammatically special thing is that the separable part (called a particle?) is not necessarily tied to the base verb part.

Further reading:

Singular they

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There must be some prescription against singular they; is it in Strunk & White? Singular they is becoming popular as a result of inreased acceptance of the theory and sociopolical program of transgenderism.

Further reading:

Grammatical gender

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Very few words in English have grammatical gender. In particular, nouns have no grammatical gender, the definite and indefinite articles have no grammatical gender, and adjectives and verbs are not inflected for grammatical gender. One could think that a word like e.g. "girl" does indicate a gender, but it does not really do so; it does not indicate grammatical gender. There are many words that indicate the female sex (or as many modern sources say, gender), but that is not grammatical but rather semantical; these include female, woman, girl, mother, grandma, daughter, baroness, actress, etc.

It is some pronouns that indicate gender: he, his, him, himself and then she, her, hers, herself.

When one refers to a generic person in writing using a pronoun, one has to figure out which gender to use. If one uses the masculine (which used to be a usual practice), one can be accused of sexism, male-defaultism or something similar. One can use feminine, but it is not clear how usual that is; one could be accused of female-defaultism, but it is not clear how often that happens. One can use "he or she", but it is not clear how usual that is. Finally, one can use the singular they/their/them, which appears to be increasingly widespread thanks in part the increasing acceptance of the transgenderism. This subject is covered in Wikipedia: Gender in English#Gender neutrality in English and Wikipedia: Gender neutrality in English.

Further reading:

Diminutives

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The English diminutives seem relatively scarce, compared to e.g. German and Czech. One diminutive producing suffix is -let, producing e.g. piglet. Another one is -ie, producing e.g. doggie; -y produces Bobby.

Further reading:

Colons

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The use of colons is well described here:

Examples from there:

  • I have three sisters: Catherine, Sarah and Mary.
  • My mom has three pets: two cats and a dog.
  • There was only one possible explanation: The train had never arrived.
  • In the words of Homer: "Doh!"
  • Patient: Doctor, I feel like a pair of curtains.

    Doctor: Pull yourself together!

  • And more.

Colon is sometimes used in book titles and article titles to separate the main title from the subtitle. The first word after the colon should be capitalized (even if it is "a" or "the"), believing editorsmanual.com.[1]

Capitalization after colon varies with style, depends on the kind of colon use, e.g. before a list vs. before a subtitle.[1]

Further reading:

Commas

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For a start, comma splice is considered to be an error, as in "The cat is on the mat, the cat is hungry". There, the customary character is the semicolon (";"), or one can split it altogether with the period (".").

Commas separate items in a list: "dog, cat, and mouse". The use of comma before "and" depends on the style.

There is no comma before "that", unlike in Czech and German: "I think that you are right". (One can also often omit the "that": "I think you are right", or "You are right, I think".)

Comma is used for an apposition: "Charles IV, the king of Bohemia, founded a university."

Comma is used after the initial "however" (except for the cases where it serves a different function): "However, there are detractors." Similarly, "Therefore, the cat is indeed on the mat, regardless the location of the dog".

Comma is used before "but" and "and" connecting sentences: "I tried to make it, but I failed."

For other cases, see the further reading at Wikibooks.

Further reading:

Semicolon

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The semicolon can be used to tie two sentences together more tightly than a period would, as in "The cat is on the mat; the cat is hungry".

Further reading:

Capitalization

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Sentences start with a capital letter.

Sentences after a semicolon start with a lowercase letter.

Proper nouns/proper names are capitalized; for details, see article Proper name. Examples: Peter, London, New York.

Some proper names have the class word capitalized, e.g. New York City and Hudson River, Liberal Party.

Title case vs. sentence case is covered in a dedicated section below.

Capitalization after a colon that separates a book title from its subtitle remains to be covered.

Words derived from proper names are usually capitalized even when they are not proper names, unlike in Czech and German. Examples: Darwinian (adjective, noun), Californian (adjective, noun), British, New Yorker, Germanize, Americanize, Polonize (but anglicize seems to be often spelled in lowercase in addition to Anglicize). Some of these items are sometimes called proper adjectives, but what is proper about them seems rather unclear. It seems that the term proper adjective was based on the term proper noun, using some kind of twisted reasoning, e.g. that if something is capitalizes, it must be somehow proper. I speculate that the reason why proper names are called proper is that the original narrow meaning of name was proper name, and that common in common noun (noun is from the same Latin origin as name) was originally an alienans.

One can use Google Ngram Viewer to get a first idea about the common practice, although some people have reservations about the tool.

Further reading:

Title case vs. sentence case

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Work titles and work headings use, as a first approximation, two styles of capitalization: title case and sentence case.

Title case example: "The Lord of the Rings" (minor words are not capitalized but the first word is capitalized even if minor).

Sentence case: The first word is capitalized and the other words not unless indicated for a non-title reason, e.g. as a proper noun. Putative example not in use: "The lord of the rings".

Wikipedia uses sentence case in article titles and section titles.

Further reading:

Defining clause vs. extra-information clause

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Defining clause is not separated by commas, unlike extra-information clause.

Prescriptively, "that" is used for defining clauses to the exclusion of "which", but educated speakers often use "which" nonetheless.

For extra-information clauses, "which" seems to be dominant.

A terminological mapping relating to G. K. Pullum: integrated relative → defining clause; supplementary relative → extra-information clause.

A terminological mapping relating to Merriam-Webster: restrictive clause → defining clause; nonrestrictive clause → extra-information clause.

The contrast between defining clause and extra-information clause: the defining clause is as if part of an SQL statement, part of a selecting sequence of words returning one or multiple items. By contrast, extra-information clause assumes some other sequence of words did the selection work already, and acts as a predicate on the selected item or items. Thus: "The person who won the competition was a male" means: "give me all people, among those select those who won the competition under discussion or context, make sure there is only one item in the result or throw an analogue of an exception, and assert that this item is a male". By contrast, "The person, who won the competition, was a male" means "Given the context or current discussion, select the one person that is most salient or of the highest referential priority in the context for the class of person, assert that the person won the competition and assert that they were a male". Admittedly, the second example is a bit contrived in that the phrase "the person" is a bit too short to be the complete selector.

General further reading:

Further reading from Language Log and related:

Relative pronouns

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Relative pronouns in English are which, that, who, whom and whose.

A subtopic is Defining clause vs. extra-information clause.

For persons--whether human or non-human, e.g. the hobbit Bilbo--pronouns who, whom and whose are meant.

Further reading:

Quotation marks

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It seems customary to default to double quotes ("), but some books default to single quotes ('). Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies defaults to single quotes, and so does Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.

For nesting, one can use this: "This sentence refers to the word 'cat'", or this: 'This sentence refers to the word "cat"'. The choice depends on the house style. This topic is covered in Wikipedia: Quotation marks in English#Primary quotations versus secondary quotations.

When quoting whole paragraphs, one usually places the opening quotation mark at the beginning of each paragraph in the quoted paragraph sequence, while the end quotation mark is only placed at the end of the final paragraph in that sequence.

Curly quotation marks used in English: “...”. (For my reference, those in German: „...“; and Czech: „...“.)

Further reading:

Apostrophes

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Examples:

  • Peter's (belonging to Peter)
  • Your (belonging to you)
  • His (belonging to him)
  • Its (belonging to it)
  • Their (belonging to them)
  • You're (you are)
  • He's (he is)
  • It's (it is)
  • They're (they are, they were)

Further reading:

Italicization of quoted words

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It seems that especially in linguistics, quoted or discussed words (mentioned rather than used) are usually typeset in italics rather than using quotation marks. Verification pending.

Hyphens and dashes

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Hyphenation is described in the linked Wiktionary appendix together with links to external sources.

Dashes and hyphens:

  • — (em dash)
  • – (en dash)
  • - (hyphen-minus?)

Examples (two of them from Wikibooks):

  • Three unlikely companions—a canary, an eagle, and a parrot—flew by my window in an odd flock. (unspaced em dash; is this for the U.S.?)
  • Three unlikely companions — a canary, an eagle, and a parrot — flew by my window in an odd flock. (spaced em dash; sometimes seen in the U.S.?)
  • Three unlikely companions – a canary, an eagle, and a parrot – flew by my window in an odd flock. (spaced en dash; is this for the U.K.?)

Questions:

  • Which style guides recommend which dash convention?
  • Which classic authors substantiate a dash convention?

Further reading:

Book titles

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One convention for formatting book titles in the middle of text (as opposed to in the list of references or bibliography) is putting them in italics.

Gödel, Escher, Bach's bibliography section seems to put book titles in italics but journal article titles in quotation marks.

Further reading:

English as a hybrid language

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Arguably, English is a hybrid language, a Romance-Germanic one, not based on grammar but rather based on vocabulary. There is a dedicated article on this: English as a hybrid Romance-Germanic language.

There are consequences for the learner, especially as pertains to the mixture of Romance and Germanic morphology/etymology. An etymological dictionary comes to the rescue, helping the learner recast etymology as quasi-morphology and gain the kind of look at vocabulary that one has in a less hybrid language. Thus, one can analyze e.g. "inscription" as "in-" + "scrib-" + "-tion", as if inwriting (we turned "p" back to "b", from which it came).

Pronunciation

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English pronunciation is fairly irregular in that it has no simple correspondence to spelling. Nonetheless, partly applicable regularities or correspondences do exist. Google Translate is able to pronounce even non-existent spellings, and therefore, its pronunciation is not based on a mere hard-coded mapping of individual word forms to their pronunciations.

Date format

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In the U.S., a format often seen is on the model of January 1, 2020. The English Wikipedia sometimes uses e.g. 1 January 2020, which matches the British format indicated by dictionary.cambridge.org.

Example dates on newpaper articles:

  • The Wall Street Journal (US): Dec. 2, 2023
  • Los Angeles Times (US): Dec. 3, 2023
  • New York Times (US): Dec. 16, 2011
  • The Independent (UK): 13 October 2023
  • The Telegraph (UK): 12 November 2023
  • Daily Mail (UK): 29 September 2023

The ISO 8601 date format is e.g. 2020-01-31.

Further reading:

Citation style

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Citations styles vary with domain of publishing and the stylebook.

Examples of two styles found in Wikipedia's Wikipedia:Citing sources:

  • Ritter, R. M. (2003). The Oxford Style Manual. Oxford University Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-19-860564-5.
  • Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 1.

An example from Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach:

  • Allen, John. The Anatomy of Lisp. New York: McGraw-Hill. 1978.

An example from Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene:

  • Allee, W. C. (1938) The Social Life of Animals. London: Pitman.

An example of MLA style:

  • Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads. Oxford UP, 1967.

An example of CMOS style:

  • Grazer, Brian, and Charles Fishman. A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

An example of APA style:

  • Derwing, T. M., Rossiter, M. J., & Munro, M. J. (2002). Teaching native speakers to listen to foreign-accented speech. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 23(4), 245-259.

Further reading:

Spelling varieties and variability

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From spelling perspective, English is not a single standard but rather a multitude of standards. Thus, there is U.K. spelling (actually, multiple varieties as for e.g. -ise vs. -ize), U.S. spelling, Canadian spelling, etc. One can approximate the division as British/Commonwealth vs. American, but this breaks down in some cases. (English much differs from e.g. Czech in this regard: Czech is subject to strenuous government-backed effort at spelling standardization, and Czechs generally make a great effort at using the "correct" spelling.)

Some example dualities:

  • -o- vs. -ou-: color vs. colour
  • -ize vs. -ise: theorize vs. theorise
  • -er vs. -re: theater vs. theatre
  • -se vs. -ce: license vs. licence
  • -ogue vs. -og: dialogue vs. dialog
  • -ic vs. -ical: theoretic vs. theoretical (guess: this one does not have much to do with British vs. American)

I tend to standardize on American English in my writing, which includes color, theorize, center, etc.

As for -ize vs. -ise, -ize in additionally part of the Oxford variant of British spelling.

When one works with a copyeditor and a publisher, one probably submits to their house style.

Further reading:

Multiple vs. several

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The way I have learned it: several: more than one but not many; multiple: more than one (two or more). Requires verification. Multiple as more than one matches M-W 1[2], but M-W 2 has "many, manifold". How is one to know which sense of "multiple" is meant? None of the two leading senses in M-W have any context label; one cannot even claim that M-W 2 is informal.

(This is here even though it is a vocabulary question and not a grammar question.)

Further reading:

Number words

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Some English number words can be a bit surprising, from a Czech point of view. For instance, there is one-third and two-thirds spelled with a hyphen. Moreover, e.g. twenty-one and fifty-six are spelled with a hyphen.

Further reading:

References

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  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Is a Word after a Colon Capitalized?, editorsmanual.com
  2. ↑ multiple, M-W

Further reading

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