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118-414: This article describes a generalized, present-day Standard English – forms of speech and writing used in public discourse, including broadcasting, education, entertainment, government, and news, over a range of registers , from formal to informal. Divergences from the grammar described here occur in some historical, social, cultural, and regional varieties of English, although these are minor compared to

236-505: A cognate of the word substantive as the basic term for noun (for example, Spanish sustantivo , "noun"). Nouns in the dictionaries of such languages are demarked by the abbreviation s. or sb. instead of n. , which may be used for proper nouns or neuter nouns instead. In English, some modern authors use the word substantive to refer to a class that includes both nouns (single words) and noun phrases (multiword units that are sometimes called noun equivalents ). It can also be used as

354-624: A noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an object or subject within a phrase, clause, or sentence. In linguistics , nouns constitute a lexical category ( part of speech ) defined according to how its members combine with members of other lexical categories. The syntactic occurrence of nouns differs among languages. In English, prototypical nouns are common nouns or proper nouns that can occur with determiners , articles and attributive adjectives , and can function as

472-544: A or an (in languages that have such articles). Examples of count nouns are chair , nose , and occasion . Mass nouns or uncountable ( non-count ) nouns differ from count nouns in precisely that respect: they cannot take plurals or combine with number words or the above type of quantifiers. For example, the forms a furniture and three furnitures are not used – even though pieces of furniture can be counted. The distinction between mass and count nouns does not primarily concern their corresponding referents but more how

590-445: A person , place , thing , event , substance , quality , quantity , etc., but this manner of definition has been criticized as uninformative. Several English nouns lack an intrinsic referent of their own: behalf (as in on behalf of ), dint ( by dint of ), and sake ( for the sake of ). Moreover, other parts of speech may have reference-like properties: the verbs to rain or to mother , or adjectives like red ; and there

708-465: A clitic is the subject of debate. It differs from the noun inflection of languages such as German, in that the genitive ending may attach to the last word of the phrase. To account for this, the possessive can be analysed, for instance as a clitic construction (an " enclitic postposition ") or as an inflection of the last word of a phrase ("edge inflection"). Noun phrases are phrases that function grammatically as nouns within sentences, for example as

826-411: A counterpart to attributive when distinguishing between a noun being used as the head (main word) of a noun phrase and a noun being used as a noun adjunct . For example, the noun knee can be said to be used substantively in my knee hurts , but attributively in the patient needed knee replacement . A noun can co-occur with an article or an attributive adjective . Verbs and adjectives cannot. In

944-437: A couple of ) that can play the role of determiners. Determiners are used in the formation of noun phrases (see above). Many words that serve as determiners can also be used as pronouns ( this , that , many , etc.). Determiners can be used in certain combinations, such as all the water and the many problems . In many contexts, it is required for a noun phrase to be completed with an article or some other determiner. It

1062-554: A critique of Fisher's philological work, see Michael Benskin 2004, who calls his scholarship "uninformed not only philologically but historically". Gwilym Dodd has shown that most letters written by scribes from the Office of Chancery were in Medieval Latin and that petitions to the Crown shifted from Anglo-Norman French before c.  1425 to monolingual English around the middle of

1180-415: A heaven ; There are two cups on the table ; There have been a lot of problems lately . It can also be used with other verbs: There exist two major variants ; There occurred a very strange incident . The dummy subject takes the number (singular or plural) of the logical subject (complement), hence it takes a plural verb if the complement is plural. In informal English, however, the contraction there's

1298-463: A language. Nouns may be classified according to morphological properties such as which prefixes or suffixes they take, and also their relations in syntax  – how they combine with other words and expressions of various types. Many such classifications are language-specific, given the obvious differences in syntax and morphology. In English for example, it might be noted that nouns are words that can co-occur with definite articles (as stated at

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1416-546: A lesser emphasis on morphology. Mid-twentieth-century scholars McIntosh and Samuels continued to focus on the distribution of spelling practice but as primary artefacts, which are not necessarily evidence of underlying articulatory reality. Their work led to the publication of the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, which aims to describe dialectal variation in Middle English between 1350 and 1450. The final date

1534-415: A lower frequency of regionally-marked spellings were found in wills from urban York versus those from rural Swaledale ; and texts from Cambridge were less regionally marked than those from the surrounding Midlands and East Anglian areas. However, these late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century supralocal varieties of English were not yet standardised. Medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman and mixed-language set

1652-544: A male animal, is referred to using he . In other cases, it can be used. (See Gender in English .) The word it can also be used as a dummy subject , concerning abstract ideas like time, weather, etc., or a dummy object of a verb or preposition. The third-person form they is used with both plural and singular referents . Historically, singular they was restricted to quantificational constructions such as Each employee should clean their desk and referential cases where

1770-451: A masculine or a feminine subject, for instance "cousin", "teenager", "teacher", "doctor", "student", "friend", and "colleague". Often the gender distinction for these neutral nouns is established by inserting the word "male" or "female". Rarely, nouns illustrating things with no gender are referred to with a gendered pronoun to convey familiarity. It is also standard to use the gender-neutral pronoun ( it ). English determiners constitute

1888-531: A new pronoun to enter the language. Determiners, traditionally classified along with adjectives, have not always been regarded as a separate part of speech. Interjections are another word class, but these are not described here as they do not form part of the clause and sentence structure of the language. Linguists generally accept nine English word classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, and exclamations. English words are not generally marked for word class. It

2006-417: A noun that represents a unique entity ( India , Pegasus , Jupiter , Confucius , Pequod ) – as distinguished from common nouns (or appellative nouns ), which describe a class of entities ( country , animal , planet , person , ship ). In Modern English, most proper nouns – unlike most common nouns – are capitalized regardless of context ( Albania , Newton , Pasteur , America ), as are many of

2124-632: A number of countries , including the United Kingdom , the United States , Canada , Republic of Ireland , Australia , New Zealand , Jamaica , Trinidad and Tobago , the Bahamas and Barbados and is an official language in many others , including India , Pakistan , the Philippines , South Africa and Nigeria ; each country has a standard English with a grammar, spelling and pronunciation particular to

2242-427: A person in general (see generic you ), compared to the more formal alternative, one (reflexive oneself , possessive one's ). The third-person singular forms are differentiated according to the gender of the referent. For example, she is used to refer to a woman, sometimes a female animal, and sometimes an object to which feminine characteristics are attributed, such as a ship or a country. A man, and sometimes

2360-476: A plural form, and various other phrases such as you guys are used in other places. An archaic set of second-person pronouns used for singular reference is thou , thee, thyself, thy, thine, which are still used in religious services and can be seen in older works, such as Shakespeare's—in such texts, the you set of pronouns are used for plural reference, or with singular reference as a formal V-form . You can also be used as an indefinite pronoun , referring to

2478-514: A precedent model, as Latin and French had long been conventionalised on the page and their range of variation was limited. Supralocal varieties of English took on this uniformity by reducing more regionally-marked features and permitting only one or two minor variants. Later fifteenth- and sixteenth-century supralocalisation was facilitated by increased trade networks. As people in cities and towns increasingly did business with each other, words, morphemes and spelling-sequences were transferred around

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2596-412: A preference for gender-neutral language . Animals are triple-gender nouns, being able to take masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns. While the vast majority of nouns in English do not carry gender, there remain some gendered nouns (e.g. ewe , sow , rooster ) and derivational affixes (e.g. widower, waitress ) that denote gender. Many nouns that mention people's roles and jobs can refer to either

2714-469: A preposition and its complement (and is therefore usually a type of adverbial phrase); and a determiner phrase is a type of noun phrase containing a determiner. Many common suffixes form nouns from other nouns or from other types of words, such as -age ( shrinkage ), -hood ( sisterhood ), and so on, though many nouns are base forms containing no such suffix ( cat , grass , France ). Nouns are also created by converting verbs and adjectives, as with

2832-408: A preposition. For example, one can say the song that [or which ] I listened to yesterday , but the song to which [not to that ] I listened yesterday . The relative pronoun that is usually pronounced with a reduced vowel ( schwa ), and hence differently from the demonstrative that (see Weak and strong forms in English ). If that is not the subject of the relative clause, it can be omitted (

2950-561: A prepositional phrase, as in the twin curses of famine and pestilence (meaning "the twin curses" that are "famine and pestilence"). Particular forms of noun phrases include: A system of grammatical gender , whereby every noun was treated as either masculine, feminine, or neuter, existed in Old English , but fell out of use during the Middle English period. Modern English retains features relating to natural gender , most prominently

3068-453: A relatively small class of words. They include the articles the and a[n] ; certain demonstrative and interrogative words such as this , that , and which ; possessives such as my and whose (the role of determiner can also be played by noun possessive forms such as John's and the girl's ); various quantifying words like all , some , many , various ; and numerals ( one , two , etc.). There are also many phrases (such as

3186-488: A relatively small, closed class of words that function in the place of nouns or noun phrases. They include personal pronouns , demonstrative pronouns , relative pronouns , interrogative pronouns , and some others, mainly indefinite pronouns . The full set of English pronouns is presented in the following table. Nonstandard, informal and archaic forms are in italics . interrogative it Interrogative only. The personal pronouns of modern standard English are presented in

3304-404: A set of orthographic norms than a standardised dialect, as there was no such thing as standardisation of Old English in the modern sense: Old English did not standardise in terms of reduction of variation, reduction of regional variation, selection of word-stock, standardisation of morphology or syntax, or use of one dialect for all written purposes everywhere. The Norman Conquest of 1066 decreased

3422-401: A similar way. The word there is used as a pronoun in some sentences, playing the role of a dummy subject , normally of an intransitive verb . The "logical subject" of the verb then appears as a complement after the verb. This use of there occurs most commonly with forms of the verb be in existential clauses , to refer to the presence or existence of something. For example: There is

3540-573: A singular or a plural verb and referred to by a singular or plural pronoun, the singular being generally preferred when referring to the body as a unit and the plural often being preferred, especially in British English, when emphasizing the individual members. Examples of acceptable and unacceptable use given by Gowers in Plain Words include: Concrete nouns refer to physical entities that can, in principle at least, be observed by at least one of

3658-401: A specific sex. The gender of a pronoun must be appropriate for the item referred to: "The girl said the ring was from her new boyfriend , but he denied it was from him " (three nouns; and three gendered pronouns: or four, if this her is counted as a possessive pronoun ). A proper noun (sometimes called a proper name , though the two terms normally have different meanings) is

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3776-470: A subclass of nouns parallel to prototypical nouns ). For example, in the sentence "Gareth thought she was weird", the word she is a pronoun that refers to a person just as the noun Gareth does. The word one can replace parts of noun phrases, and it sometimes stands in for a noun. An example is given below: But one can also stand in for larger parts of a noun phrase. For example, in the following example, one can stand in for new car . Nominalization

3894-465: A wider distribution". Over the later fifteenth century, individuals began to restrict their spelling ratios, selecting fewer variants. However, each scribe made individual selections so that the pool of possible variants per feature still remained wide at the turn of the sixteenth century. Thus, the early stage of standardisation can be identified by the reduction of grammatical and orthographical variants and loss of geographically marked variants in

4012-526: Is a good wine . Countable nouns generally have singular and plural forms. In most cases the plural is formed from the singular by adding -[e]s (as in dogs , bushes ), although there are also irregular forms ( woman/women , foot/feet ), including cases where the two forms are identical ( sheep , series ). For more details see English plural . Certain nouns can be used with plural verbs even though they are singular in form, as in The government were ... (where

4130-480: Is a noun adjunct, student is the noun serving as the head of the phrase, and to whom you were talking is a post-modifier (a relative clause in this case). Notice the order of the pre-modifiers; the determiner that must come first and the noun adjunct college must come after the adjectival modifiers. Coordinators such as and , or , and but can be used at various levels in noun phrases, as in John, Paul, and Mary ;

4248-419: Is a phrase that can be used in a sentence as if it were a noun, and is therefore called a noun phrase . Similarly, adjectival phrases and adverbial phrases function as if they were adjectives or adverbs, but with other types of phrases, the terminology has different implications. For example, a verb phrase consists of a verb together with any objects and other dependents; a prepositional phrase consists of

4366-748: Is a phrase usually headed by a common noun, a proper noun, or a pronoun. The head may be the only constituent, or it may be modified by determiners and adjectives . For example, "The dog sat near Ms Curtis and wagged its tail" contains three NPs: the dog (subject of the verbs sat and wagged ); Ms Curtis (complement of the preposition near ); and its tail (object of wagged ). "You became their teacher" contains two NPs: you (subject of became ); and their teacher . Nouns and noun phrases can typically be replaced by pronouns , such as he, it, she, they, which, these , and those , to avoid repetition or explicit identification, or for other reasons (but as noted earlier, current theory often classifies pronouns as

4484-439: Is a process whereby a word that belongs to another part of speech comes to be used as a noun. This can be a way to create new nouns, or to use other words in ways that resemble nouns. In French and Spanish, for example, adjectives frequently act as nouns referring to people who have the characteristics denoted by the adjective. This sometimes happens in English as well, as in the following examples: For definitions of nouns based on

4602-517: Is derived from the Latin term, through the Anglo-Norman nom (other forms include nomme , and noun itself). The word classes were defined partly by the grammatical forms that they take. In Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, for example, nouns are categorized by gender and inflected for case and number . Because adjectives share these three grammatical categories , adjectives typically were placed in

4720-481: Is distinct from formal English, because it features stylistic variations, ranging from casual to formal. Furthermore, the usage codes of nonstandard dialects (vernacular language) are less stabilised than the codifications of Standard English, and thus more readily accept and integrate new vocabulary and grammatical forms. Functionally, the national varieties of SE are characterised by generally accepted rules, often grammars established by linguistic prescription in

4838-404: Is indicated only by word order , by prepositions , and by the " Saxon genitive or English possessive " ( -'s ). Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are open classes – word classes that readily accept new members, such as the noun celebutante (a celebrity who frequents the fashion circles), and other similar relatively new words. The rest are closed classes ; for example, it is rare for

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4956-442: Is little difference between the adverb gleefully and the prepositional phrase with glee . A functional approach defines a noun as a word that can be the head of a nominal phrase, i.e., a phrase with referential function, without needing to go through morphological transformation. Nouns can have a number of different properties and are often sub-categorized based on various of these criteria, depending on their occurrence in

5074-541: Is mine . Note also the construction a friend of mine (meaning "someone who is my friend"). See English possessive for more details. The demonstrative pronouns of English are this (plural these ), and that (plural those ), as in these are good, I like that . All four words can also be used as determiners (followed by a noun), as in those cars . They can also form the alternative pronominal expressions this/that one , these/those ones . The interrogative pronouns are who , what , and which (all of them can take

5192-514: Is no longer felt necessary to posit unevidenced migrations of peoples to account for movement of words, morphemes and spelling conventions from the provinces into Standard English. Such multiregionalisms in Standard English are explained by the fifteenth-century countrywide expansion of business, trade and commerce, with linguistic elements passed around communities of practice and along weak-tie trade networks, both orally and in writing. Although

5310-447: Is not grammatical to say just cat sat on table ; one must say my cat sat on the table . The most common situations in which a complete noun phrase can be formed without a determiner are when it refers generally to a whole class or concept (as in dogs are dangerous and beauty is subjective ) and when it is a name ( Jane , Spain , etc.). This is discussed in more detail at English articles and Zero article in English . Pronouns are

5428-444: Is not linguistically superior to other dialects of English used by an Anglophone society. Unlike with some other standard languages , there is no national academy or international academy with ultimate authority to codify Standard English; its codification is thus only by widespread prescriptive consensus. The codification is therefore not exhaustive or unanimous, but it is extensive and well-documented. Although standard English

5546-421: Is not usually possible to tell from the form of a word which class it belongs to; inflectional endings and derivational suffixes are unique and specific to. On the other hand, most words belong to more than one word class. For example, run can serve as either a verb or a noun (these are regarded as two different lexemes ). Lexemes may be inflected to express different grammatical categories. The lexeme run has

5664-469: Is often used for both singular and plural. Standard English In an English-speaking country , Standard English ( SE ) is the variety of English that has undergone codification to the point of being socially perceived as the standard language , associated with formal schooling, language assessment, and official print publications, such as public service announcements and newspapers of record , etc. All linguistic features are subject to

5782-406: Is quite limited in its use; see below for more details. The main relative pronouns in English are who (with its derived forms whom and whose ), which , and that . The relative pronoun which refers to things rather than persons, as in the shirt, which used to be red, is faded . For persons, who is used ( the man who saw me was tall ). The oblique case form of who is whom , as in

5900-596: Is taught as standard across Europe , the Caribbean , sub-Saharan Africa , and South Asia , and American English is taught as standard across Latin America and East Asia . This does, however, vary between regions and individual teachers. In some areas a pidgin or creole language blends English with one or more native languages. Although the standard Englishes of the anglophone countries are similar, there are minor grammatical differences and divergences of vocabulary among

6018-453: Is time to lay the types to rest". Simon Horobin examining spelling in Type 3 texts reported "such variation warns us against viewing these types of London English as discrete … we must view Samuels' typology as a linguistic continuum rather than as a series of discrete linguistic varieties". Samuels's Type IV, dating after 1435, was labelled by Samuels 'Chancery Standard' because it was supposedly

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6136-410: Is usually associated with official communications and settings, it is diverse in registers (stylistic levels), such as those for journalism (print, television, internet) and for academic publishing (monographs, academic papers, internet). This diversity in registers also exists between the spoken and the written forms of SE, which are characterised by degrees of formality; therefore, Standard English

6254-766: The Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English did not support the possibility of an East Anglian or East Midland migration, and he replaced it by hypothesising a migration of people from the Central Midlands, although without historical evidence. Like Ekwall, Samuels was not dogmatic and presented his work as preliminary. Samuels classified fifteenth century manuscripts into four Types. These divisions have subsequently proved problematical, partly because Samuels did not specify exactly which manuscripts fall into which class, and partly because other scholars do not see inherent cohesiveness within each Type. Matti Peikola examining Type 1, ('Central Midland Standard') spelling ratios in

6372-419: The head of a noun phrase . According to traditional and popular classification, pronouns are distinct from nouns, but in much modern theory they are considered a subclass of nouns. Every language has various linguistic and grammatical distinctions between nouns and verbs . Word classes (parts of speech) were described by Sanskrit grammarians from at least the 5th century BC. In Yāska 's Nirukta ,

6490-441: The senses ( chair , apple , Janet , atom ), as items supposed to exist in the physical world. Abstract nouns , on the other hand, refer to abstract objects : ideas or concepts ( justice , anger , solubility , duration ). Some nouns have both concrete and abstract meanings: art usually refers to something abstract ("Art is important in human culture"), but it can also refer to a concrete item ("I put my daughter's art up on

6608-443: The sex or social gender of the noun's referent, particularly in the case of nouns denoting people (and sometimes animals), though with exceptions (the feminine French noun personne can refer to a male or a female person). In Modern English, even common nouns like hen and princess and proper nouns like Alicia do not have grammatical gender (their femininity has no relevance in syntax), though they denote persons or animals of

6726-458: The subject or object of a verb. Most noun phrases have a noun as their head . An English noun phrase typically takes the following form (not all elements need be present): In this structure: An example of a noun phrase that includes all of the above-mentioned elements is that rather attractive young college student to whom you were talking . Here that is the determiner, rather attractive and young are adjectival pre-modifiers, college

6844-508: The 18th century. English originated in England during the Anglo-Saxon period , and is now spoken as a first or second language in many countries of the world, many of which have developed one or more "national standards" (though this does not refer to published standards documents , but to the frequency of consistent usage). English is the first language of the majority of the population in

6962-559: The Continent from the 1370s onwards until the language fell out of use in Britain in the 1430s. After the last quarter of the fourteenth century Anglo-Norman written in England displayed the kind of grammatical levelling which occurs as the result of language acquired in adulthood, and deduces that the use of Anglo-Norman in England as a spoken vehicle for teaching in childhood must have ceased around

7080-534: The Crown committed to writing in monolingual English so that the first English royal letter of 1417 did not signal a wholesale switchover. Latin was still the dominant language in the second half of the fifteenth century. As Merja Stenroos put it, "the main change was the reduction in the use of French, and the long-term development was towards more Latin, not less. On the whole, the output of government documents in English continued to be small compared to Latin." Noun#Proper nouns and common nouns In grammar ,

7198-594: The Danelaw in general. Thus his dataset was very limited, by 'standard' he meant a few spellings and morphemes rather than a dialect per se, his data did not support migration from the East Midlands, and he made unsupported assumptions about the influence of the speech of the upper classes (details in Laura Wright 2020 ). Michael Louis Samuels criticised Ekwall's East Midlands hypothesis. He shifted Ekwall's hypothesis from

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7316-620: The East Midlands (in which he included East Anglia) migrated to London between the Norman Conquest of 1066 and 1360. By this method, he found that most Londoners who bore surnames from elsewhere indicated an origin in London's hinterland, not from East Anglia or the East Midlands. Nevertheless, he hypothesised that East Midlands upper-class speakers did affect the speech of the upper classes in London. He thought that upper-class speech would have been influential, although he also suggested influence from

7434-726: The East to the Central Midlands, he classified late medieval London and other texts into Types I-IV, and he introduced the label '"Chancery Standard'" to describe writing from the King's Office of Chancery, which he claimed was the precursor of Standard English. Samuels did not question Ekwall's original assumption that there must have been a migration from somewhere north of London to account for certain ⟨a⟩ graphs and ⟨e⟩ letter-graphs in stressed syllables, present plural suffix -e(n , present participle suffix -ing , and pronoun they in fifteenth-century London texts, but his work for

7552-756: The adjectives happy and serene ; circulation from the verb circulate ). Illustrating the wide range of possible classifying principles for nouns, the Awa language of Papua New Guinea regiments nouns according to how ownership is assigned: as alienable possession or inalienable possession. An alienably possessed item (a tree, for example) can exist even without a possessor. But inalienably possessed items are necessarily associated with their possessor and are referred to differently, for example with nouns that function as kin terms (meaning "father", etc.), body-part nouns (meaning "shadow", "hair", etc.), or part–whole nouns (meaning "top", "bottom", etc.). A noun phrase (or NP )

7670-477: The alternative pronominal expressions which one and which ones .) Which , who , and what can be either singular or plural, although who and what often take a singular verb regardless of any supposed number. For more information see who . In Old and Middle English, the roles of the three words were different from their roles today. "The interrogative pronoun hwā 'who, what' had only singular forms and also only distinguished between non-neuter and neuter,

7788-416: The box". This kind of construction is infrequent in most other standardised varieties of English. In the past, different scholars have meant different things by the phrase 'Standard English', when describing its emergence in medieval and early modern England. In the nineteenth century, it tended to be used in relation to the wordstock. Nineteenth-century scholars Earle and Kington-Oliphant conceived of

7906-406: The case of -[e]s plurals ( the dogs' owners ) and sometimes other words ending with -s ( Jesus' love ). More generally the ending can be applied to noun phrases (as in the man you saw yesterday's sister ); see below. The possessive form can be used either as a determiner ( Manyanda's cat ) or as a noun phrase ( Manyanda's is the one next to Jane's ). The status of the possessive as an affix or

8024-481: The century. Scribes working for the Crown wrote in Latin, but scribes working for individuals petitioning the king – it is likely that individuals engaged professionals to write on their behalf, but who these scribes were is not usually known – wrote in French before the first third of the fifteenth century, and after that date in English. As with mixed-language writing, there followed decades of switching back and forth before

8142-626: The country by means of speaker-contact, writer-contact and the repeat back-and-forth encounters inherent in trading activity, from places of greater density to those of lower. Communities of practice such as accountants auditing income and outgoings, merchants keeping track of wares and payments, and lawyers writing letters on behalf of clients, led to the development of specific writing conventions for specific spheres of activity. English letter-writers 1424–1474 in one community of practice (estate administrators) reduced spelling variation in words of Romance origin but not in words of English origin, reflecting

8260-401: The definite article is le for masculine nouns and la for feminine; adjectives and certain verb forms also change (sometimes with the simple addition of -e for feminine). Grammatical gender often correlates with the form of the noun and the inflection pattern it follows; for example, in both Italian and Romanian most nouns ending in  -a are feminine. Gender can also correlate with

8378-535: The dialect in which letters from the King's Office of Chancery supposedly emanated. John H. Fisher and his collaborators asserted that the orthography of a selection of documents including Signet Letters of Henry V, copies of petitions sent to the Court of Chancery, and indentures now kept in The National Archives, constituted what he called "Chancery English". This orthographical practice was supposedly created by

8496-426: The differences in pronunciation and vocabulary . Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Indo-European in favor of analytic constructions. The personal pronouns retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more extensive Germanic case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function

8614-459: The effects of standardisation, including morphology , phonology , syntax , lexicon , register , discourse markers , pragmatics , as well as written features such as spelling conventions , punctuation , capitalisation and abbreviation practices . SE is local to nowhere: its grammatical and lexical components are no longer regionally marked , although many of them originated in different, non-adjacent dialects , and it has very little of

8732-401: The end of the fourteenth century. An examination of 7,070 Hampshire administrative (episcopal, municipal, manorial) documents written 1399–1525 showed that Anglo-Norman ceased to be used after 1425. The pragmatic function for which Anglo-Norman had been used – largely administering money – became replaced by monolingual English or Latin. Anglo-Norman was abandoned towards the end of

8850-878: The following hypotheses have now been superseded, they still prevail in literature aimed at students. However more recent handbook accounts such as those of Ursula Schaeffer and Joan C. Beal explain that they are insufficient. Bror Eilert Ekwall hypothesised that Standard English developed from the language of upper-class East Midland merchants who influenced speakers in the City of London. By language , Ekwall stipulated just certain ⟨a⟩ graphs and ⟨e⟩ letter-graphs in stressed syllables, present plural suffix -e(n , present participle suffix -ing , and pronoun they , which he thought could not be East Saxon and so must be from eastern Anglian territory. He, therefore, examined locative surnames in order to discover whether people bearing names originating from settlements in

8968-525: The following, an asterisk (*) in front of an example means that this example is ungrammatical. Nouns have sometimes been characterized in terms of the grammatical categories by which they may be varied (for example gender , case , and number ). Such definitions tend to be language-specific, since different languages may apply different categories. Nouns are frequently defined, particularly in informal contexts, in terms of their semantic properties (their meanings). Nouns are described as words that refer to

9086-419: The forms runs , ran , runny , runner , and running . Words in one class can sometimes be derived from those in another. This has the potential to give rise to new words. For example, the noun aerobics has given rise to the adjective aerobicized . Words combine to form phrases . A phrase typically serves the same function as a word from some particular word class. For example, my very good friend Peter

9204-474: The forms that are derived from them (the common noun in "he's an Albanian "; the adjectival forms in "he's of Albanian heritage" and " Newtonian physics", but not in " pasteurized milk"; the second verb in "they sought to Americanize us"). Count nouns or countable nouns are common nouns that can take a plural , can combine with numerals or counting quantifiers (e.g., one , two , several , every , most ), and can take an indefinite article such as

9322-563: The fourteenth century, though the consequent absorption of many of its written features into written English paralled the socio-economic improvement of the poorer, monolingually English-speaking classes over that century. When monolingual English replaced Anglo-Norman French, it took over its pragmatic functions too. A survey of the Middle English Local Documents corpus, containing 2,017 texts from 766 different locations around England written 1399–1525, found that language choice

9440-482: The fridge"). A noun might have a literal (concrete) and also a figurative (abstract) meaning: "a brass key " and "the key to success"; "a block in the pipe" and "a mental block ". Similarly, some abstract nouns have developed etymologically by figurative extension from literal roots ( drawback , fraction , holdout , uptake ). Many abstract nouns in English are formed by adding a suffix ( -ness , -ity , -ion ) to adjectives or verbs ( happiness and serenity from

9558-524: The government is considered to refer to the people constituting the government). This is a form of synesis , and is more common in British than American English. See English plural § Singulars with collective meaning treated as plural . English nouns are not marked for case as they are in some languages, but they have possessive forms, through the addition of -'s (as in John's , children's ) or just an apostrophe (with no change in pronunciation) in

9676-444: The government of Henry V, and was supposedly the precursor of Standard English. However, this assertion attracted strong objections, such as those made by Norman Davis, T. Haskett, R. J. Watts, and Reiko Takeda. Takeda points out that "the language of the documents displays much variation and it is not clear from the collection what exactly 'Chancery English' is, linguistically" (for a critique of Fisher's assertions, see Takeda. ) For

9794-762: The grammar and vocabulary of United Kingdom Standard English (UKSE); in Scotland , the variety is Scottish English ; in the United States, the General American variety is the spoken standard; and in Australia, the standard English is General Australian . By virtue of a phenomenon sociolinguists call "elaboration of function", specific linguistic features attributed to a standardised dialect become associated with nonlinguistic social markers of prestige (like wealth or education). The standardised dialect itself, in other words,

9912-406: The grammatical basis, adding in nouns, noun-modifiers, compound-nouns, verb-stems and - ing forms from Anglo-Norman French and Middle English. This mixing of the three in a grammatically regular system is known to modern scholars as mixed-language , and it became the later fourteenth and fifteenth-century norm for accounts, inventories, testaments and personal journals. The mixed-language system

10030-465: The late fifteenth century were still regional, but less so than fourteenth-century Middle English had been, particularly with regard to morphemes, closed-class words and spelling sequences. As some examples: less regionally-marked features "urban-hopped" in texts from Cheshire and Staffordshire ("urban-hopping" refers to texts copied in cities being more standardised than those copied in smaller towns and villages, which contained more local dialect features);

10148-582: The local culture. As the result of colonisation and historical migrations of English-speaking populations, and the predominant use of English as the international language of trade and commerce (a lingua franca ), English has also become the most widely used second language. Countries in which English is neither indigenous nor widely spoken as an additional language may import a variety of English via instructional materials (typically British English or American English ) and consider it "standard" for teaching and assessment purposes. Typically, British English

10266-545: The man whom I saw was tall , although in informal registers who is commonly used in place of whom . The possessive form of who is whose (for example, the man whose car is missing ); however the use of whose is not restricted to persons (one can say an idea whose time has come ). The word that as a relative pronoun is normally found only in restrictive relative clauses (unlike which and who , which can be used in both restrictive and unrestrictive clauses). It can refer to either persons or things, and cannot follow

10384-427: The matching green coat and hat ; a dangerous but exciting ride ; a person sitting down or standing up . See § Conjunctions below for more explanation. Noun phrases can also be placed in apposition (where two consecutive phrases refer to the same thing), as in that president, Abraham Lincoln, ... (where that president and Abraham Lincoln are in apposition). In some contexts, the same can be expressed by

10502-403: The mixed-language stage, with no knowledge that monolingual English would be the eventual outcome and that it was in fact a stage of transition. For much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, writing in mixed-language was the professional norm in money-related text types, providing a conduit for the borrowing of Anglo-Norman vocabulary into English. From the 1370s, monolingual Middle English

10620-418: The neuter nominative form being hwæt. " Note that neuter and non-neuter refers to the grammatical gender system of the time, rather than the so-called natural gender system of today. A small holdover of this is the ability of relative (but not interrogative) whose to refer to non-persons (e.g., the car whose door won't open ). All the interrogative pronouns can also be used as relative pronouns, though what

10738-519: The nobility and lower commoners, were the main users of French suffixes in a survey of the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, 1410–1681. This finding that the middling classes uptook French elements into English first is in keeping with estate administrators' reduction of spelling variation in words of French origin: in both cases, the literate professional classes ported Anglo-Norman writing conventions into their English. Standard English

10856-582: The noun ( nāma ) is one of the four main categories of words defined. The Ancient Greek equivalent was ónoma (ὄνομα), referred to by Plato in the Cratylus dialog , and later listed as one of the eight parts of speech in The Art of Grammar , attributed to Dionysius Thrax (2nd century BC). The term used in Latin grammar was nōmen . All of these terms for "noun" were also words meaning "name". The English word noun

10974-467: The nouns present those entities. Many nouns have both countable and uncountable uses; for example, soda is countable in "give me three sodas", but uncountable in "he likes soda". Collective nouns are nouns that – even when they are treated in their morphology and syntax as singular – refer to groups consisting of more than one individual or entity. Examples include committee , government , and police . In English these nouns may be followed by

11092-541: The orthography of 68 hands who wrote manuscripts of the Later Version of the Wycliffite Bible, concluded: "it is difficult to sustain a 'grand unifying theory' about Central Midland Standard". Jacob Thaisen analysing the orthography of texts forming Type 2 found no consistent similarities between different scribes' spelling choices and no obvious overlap of selection signalling incipient standardisation, concluding "it

11210-568: The partial standardisation of Older Scots . After the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms by Alfred the Great and his successors, the West Saxon variety of Old English began to influence writing practices in other parts of England. The first variety of English to be called a "standard literary language" was the West Saxon variety of Old English. However, Lucia Kornexl defines the classification of Late West Saxon Standard as rather constituting

11328-421: The pragmatics of law and administration, which had previously been the domain of Anglo-Norman and mixed-language. This shows that the reduction of variation in supralocal varieties of English was due to the influence of Anglo-Norman and mixed-language: when English took over their pragmatic roles, it also took on their quality of spelling uniformity. Members of the gentry and professionals, in contradistinction to

11446-452: The referent's gender was unknown. However, it is increasingly used when the referent's gender is irrelevant or when the referent is neither male nor female. The possessive determiners such as my are used as determiners together with nouns, as in my old man , some of his friends . The second possessive forms like mine are used when they do not qualify a noun: as pronouns, as in mine is bigger than yours , and as predicates, as in this one

11564-536: The regularisation of the grammar, spelling, usages of the language and not to minimal desirability or interchangeability (e.g., a standard measure ). For example, there are substantial differences among the language varieties that countries of the Anglosphere identify as "standard English": in England and Wales , the term Standard English identifies British English , the Received Pronunciation accent, and

11682-458: The same class as nouns. Similarly, the Latin term nōmen includes both nouns (substantives) and adjectives, as originally did the English word noun , the two types being distinguished as nouns substantive and nouns adjective (or substantive nouns and adjective nouns , or simply substantives and adjectives ). (The word nominal is now sometimes used to denote a class that includes both nouns and adjectives.) Many European languages use

11800-439: The song I listened to yesterday ). The word what can be used to form a free relative clause – one that has no antecedent and that serves as a complete noun phrase in itself, as in I like what he likes . The words whatever and whichever can be used similarly, in the role of either pronouns ( whatever he likes ) or determiners ( whatever book he likes ). When referring to persons, who(ever) (and whom(ever) ) can be used in

11918-518: The standardisation of English in terms of ratios of Romance to Germanic vocabulary. Earle claimed that the works of the poets Gower and Chaucer , for instance, were written in what he called 'standard language' because of their amounts of French-derived vocabulary. Subsequently, attention shifted to the regional distribution of phonemes. Morsbach, Heuser and Ekwall conceived of standardisation largely as relating to sound-change, especially as indicated by spellings for vowels in stressed syllables, with

12036-456: The start of this article), but this could not apply in Russian , which has no definite articles. In some languages common and proper nouns have grammatical gender, typically masculine, feminine, and neuter. The gender of a noun (as well as its number and case, where applicable) will often require agreement in words that modify or are used along with it. In French for example, the singular form of

12154-486: The suffix -ever for emphasis). The pronoun who refers to a person or people; it has an oblique form whom (though in informal contexts this is usually replaced by who ), and a possessive form (pronoun or determiner) whose . The pronoun what refers to things or abstracts. The word which is used to ask about alternatives from what is seen as a closed set: which (of the books) do you like best? (It can also be an interrogative determiner: which book? ; this can form

12272-465: The table above. They are I, you, she, he, it, we , and they . The personal pronouns are so-called not because they apply to persons (which other pronouns also do), but because they participate in the system of grammatical person (1st, 2nd, 3rd). The second-person forms such as you are used with both singular and plural reference. In the Southern United States, y'all (you all) is used as

12390-525: The twenty-first century, scholars consider all of the above and more, including the rate of standardisation across different text-types such as administrative documents; the role of the individual in spreading standardisation; the influence of multilingual and mixed-language writing; the influence of the Book of Common Prayer ; standardisation of the wordstock; evolution of technical registers; standardisation of morphemes; standardisation of letter-graphs, and

12508-553: The usage of Old English, but it was still used in parts of the country for at least another century. Following the changes brought about by the Norman Conquest of 1066, England became a trilingual society. Literate people wrote in Medieval Latin and Anglo-Norman French more than they wrote in monolingual English. In addition, a widely used system developed which mixed several languages together, typically with Medieval Latin as

12626-407: The use of pronouns (such as he and she ) to refer specifically to persons or animals of one or other genders and certain others (such as it ) for sexless objects – although feminine pronouns are sometimes used when referring to ships (and more uncommonly some airplanes and analogous machinery) and nation-states. Some aspects of gender usage in English have been influenced by the movement towards

12744-400: The variation found in spoken or earlier written varieties of English. According to Peter Trudgill , Standard English is a social dialect pre-eminently used in writing that is distinguishable from other English dialects largely by a small group of grammatical "idiosyncrasies", such as irregular reflexive pronouns and an "unusual" present-tense verb morphology . The term "Standard" refers to

12862-443: The varieties. In American and Australian English, for example, "sunk" and "shrunk" as past-tense forms of "sink" and "shrink" are acceptable as standard forms, whereas standard British English retains only the past-tense forms of "sank" and "shrank". In Afrikaner South African English, the deletion of verbal complements is becoming common. This phenomenon sees the objects of transitive verbs being omitted: "Did you get?", "You can put in

12980-590: The words talk and reading ( a boring talk , the assigned reading ). Nouns are sometimes classified semantically (by their meanings) as proper and common nouns ( Cyrus , China vs frog , milk ) or as concrete and abstract nouns ( book , laptop vs embarrassment , prejudice ). A grammatical distinction is often made between count (countable) nouns such as clock and city , and non-count (uncountable) nouns such as milk and decor . Some nouns can function both as countable and as uncountable such as "wine" in This

13098-452: The writing of individuals. The rise of written monolingual English was due to the abandonment of Anglo-Norman French between 1375 and 1425, with subsequent absorption into supralocal varieties of English of much of its wordstock and many of its written conventions. Some of these conventions were to last, such as minimal spelling variation, and some were not, such as digraph ⟨lx⟩ and trigraph ⟨aun⟩ . Anglo-Norman

13216-529: Was abandoned over the fifteenth century, and at different times in different places, it became replaced by monolingual supralocal English, although it was not always a straightforward exchange. For example, Alcolado-Carnicero surveyed the London Mercers' Livery Company Wardens' Accounts and found that they switched back and forth for over seventy years between 1390 and 1464 before finally committing to monolingual English. Individual scribes spent whole careers in

13334-555: Was chosen to reflect the increasing standardisation of written English. Although as they note, "The dialects of the spoken language did not die out, but those of the written language did". A number of late-twentieth-century scholars tracked morphemes as they standardised, such as auxiliary do , third-person present-tense -s , you/thou , the wh- pronouns, and single negation, multiple negations being common in Old and Middle English and remaining so in spoken regional varieties of English. In

13452-562: Was conditioned by the readership or audience: if the text was aimed at professionals, then the text was written in Latin; if it was aimed at non-professionals, then the text was written in Anglo-Norman until the mid-fifteenth century and either Latin or English thereafter. More oral, less predictable texts were aimed at non-professionals as correspondence, ordinances, oaths, conditions of obligation, and occasional leases and sales. The supralocal varieties of English which replaced Anglo-Norman in

13570-457: Was not to settle into its present form until the early nineteenth century. It contains elements from different geographical regions, "an urban amalgam drawing on non-adjacent dialects". Examples of multiregional morphemes are auxiliary do from south-western dialects and third-person present tense -s and plural are from northern ones. An example of multiregional spelling is provided by the reflex of Old English /y(:)/ – Old English /y(:)/

13688-584: Was the variety of French that was widely used by the educated classes in late medieval England. It was used, for example, as the teaching language in grammar schools. For example, the Benedictine monk Ranulph Higden , who wrote the widely copied historical chronicle Polychronicon , remarks that, against the practice of other nations, English children learn Latin grammar in French. Ingham analysed how Anglo-Norman syntax and morphology written in Britain began to differ from Anglo-Norman syntax and morphology written on

13806-411: Was used increasingly, mainly for local communication. Up until the later fifteenth century, it was characterised by great regional and spelling variation. After the middle of the fifteenth century, supralocal monolingual varieties of English began to evolve for numerous pragmatic functions. Supralocalisation is where "dialect features with a limited geographical distribution are replaced by features with

13924-471: Was written as ⟨i⟩ in the north and north-east Midlands, ⟨u⟩ in the south and south-west Midlands, and ⟨e⟩ in the south-east and south-east Midlands. Standard English retains multiregional ⟨i, u, e⟩ spellings such as cudgel (Old English cycgel ), bridge (Old English brycg ), merry (Old English myrig ). Unlike earlier twentieth-century histories of standardisation (see below) , it

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