Punctuation

 In our writing, we use punctuation marks to indicate the pauses and changes in expression.  Punctuation marks were invented to clarify the expression in language. It is a set of symbols used in writing to help explain meaning and make sentences easier to read. It helps us organize thoughts, show pauses, indicate emotions, and structure sentences correctly.

The Sentence: Subject and Predicate

 Without sentences, we would have a great deal of difficulty in communicating with each other. A sentence is a group of words that makes complete sense by itself. In its simplest form, a sentence may consist of just a noun and a verb, or even of a single word.

A sentence has two main parts, called the subject and the predicate.

Introduction to Some Mythical Characters Based on Seneca's Phaedra

Diana

Diana was an ancient Italian goddess whom the Romans identified with the Greek Artemis. She was a patroness of wild things and of birth, both human and animal. Apparently a fertility goddess of the 'mountain-mother' type, she was the patron goddess of the Roman plebians. At Rome Diana was the

Seneca's Phaedra

 Seneca's Phaedra is a Roman tragedy that retells the ancient Greek myth of Phaedra, Hippolytus, and Theseus. It is based on earlier Greek versions, especially Euripides' Hippolytus, but with Seneca’s own intense, philosophical, and psychological style.

Phaedra is a Roman tragedy by Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger, a philosopher and dramatist before 54 A.D. It is 1280 lines of verse. It is a powerful depiction of the disintegration of the character of a woman driven by desire for her stepson, Hippolytus. Her attempt to resist the passion proves futile.

The Rules of Word Formation

 Word formation stands for the process of forming new words from words or word groups woth the same root.It  refers to how new words are created in a language. It has traditionally been regarded as a branch of lexicology or a branch of grammar equal in importance to jorphology and syntax, or it has been assigned to morphology.

Free Morpheme and Bound Morpheme:

 Morphemes are classified into two types- free morphemes and bound morphemes. A free morpheme can stand alone as a complete word and still have meaning. For example: bag, book, goat, dog, is, and, but, beauty, cruelty, and so on.

Free morphemes are of two types- lexical or referential morphemes and functional or grammatical morphemes.

Amplification

 

Amplification in language is a rhetorical device or technique used to expand, elaborate, or emphasize a point by adding more detail, explanation, or repetition. It is a process of expanding upon or adding detail to a statement to increase its rhetorical effects. It takes a simple statement and helps make it clearer, more persuasive, or emotionally stronger.

English Consonants

 Consonants are a crucial component of speech sounds in the English language. They are produced when the airflow is either completely blocked or partially restricted as it moves through the mouth or throat. Unlike vowels, which are voiced without obstruction, consonants involve some form of contact between different parts of the vocal tract. These speech sounds can occur at the beginning, middle, or end of words and help form the structure and rhythm of language. Consonant articulations are relatively easy to feel and, as a result, are most conveniently described in terms of places and manners of articulation. It is often necessary to specify the duration of the sound, the airstream mechanism involved, and the direction of air flow.

From the phonological point of view, consonants are those units that function at the margins of syllables, either singly or in clusters. Briefly, consonants can be defined as the speech sounds articulated with interruption in the lung air and/or some obstacles in the vocal tract.

Places of Articulation of Consonants

Consonants are speech sounds in which the air from the lungs is seriously obstructed by the different articulators at different places in the vocal tract, and then goes out through the oral passage and, in some cases, through the nostrils. According to their places of articulation, English consonant phonemes can be divided into nine types as discussed below.

The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

 The study of Sociolinguistics learns how language interacts with society. It examines how factors such as region, class, gender, age, level of education, ethnicity, and context influence the way people speak and how language varies and evolves. For example, in a formal job interview, a speaker might use standard grammar and vocabulary, but the same person might use slang and informal expressions with friends-showing style shifting based on social context. Sociocultural theory came from the work of  Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), a Soviet psychologist and social development theorist. Lev Vygotsky. He believed that parents, peers, caregivers, and culture were primarily responsible for the development of higher-order functions. According to Vygotsky, "Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people and then inside the child. This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.”

Symbols and Their Names

 A sign is a symbol or mark that is used to represent or indicate something else. It is often used to communicate without using words.  There are different symbols used around the world for numerous purposes, like science, grammar, currency, and so more.  Some important symbols and their names are given below:

Symbols and Their Names

Symbol	Name	Symbol		Name
æ	ash	Λ		wedge
θ	theta	ε		epsilon
ʒ	ezh	ŋ		angma
∫	Esh	ɔ		Open o
ǝ	schwa	ɣ		gamma
ß	Eszett/ sharp s	α		alpha
Δ	Delta(uppercase)	β		beta
λ	Lamba	∑		summation
₶	Franc (obsolete)	Ω		Ohm (omega)
∏	product	∩		intersection
∙	Bullet/dot	√		Square root
∞	infinity	∶		ratio
≈	Approximately equal	≠		Not equal
≡	Identical / congruent	≤		Less than or equal
≥	Greater than or equal	ℳ		Script M (used in math)
₵	Ghanaian cedi	₤		Lira (old currency)
৳	Bangladeshi taka	|		Vertical bar/ pipe
¥	Yen	©		Copyright
¶	Pilcrow/ paragraph	±		Plus-minus
£	Pound Sterling (UK)	฿		Thai Bath
₹	Indian Rupee	₺		Turkish lira
₴	Ukrainian hryvnia	₨		(Old) rupee sign (various)
€	Euro	℮		Estimated symbol (e-mark)

 

 

 

 

 

Rhetoric

Rhetoric (Greek rhetor, a public speaker) is the art and study of effective communication, particularly the skillful use of language to inform, persuade, or motivate an audience. It is a discipline that dates back to ancient civilizations and has been a central part of education, politics, philosophy, and literature throughout history. The word is, however, now generally used to mean the whole art of elegant and effective composition, whether spoken or written. Indeed, knowingly or unknowingly, every person uses a bit of rhetoric when they try to express themselves effectively and beautifully.

Syllable

 A syllable is a phonological unit that is composed of one or more morphemes. It is a single, unbroken sound of a spoken or written word. It is a unit of pronunciation that contains one vowel sound, with or without surrounding consonants.

Tense: Present Tense

Definition:

Grammatically Tense refers to the conjugation or form of a verb to reflect the time of the action or state -that is, when the action occurred.

Verbs in their basic form inherently describe the time.

There are three main types of tenses in English:

Lenis and Fortis

 Lenis and fortis are two terms that represent a dichotomy of a voiced/ voiceless pair. Phonetically, lenis refers to the consonants articulated with relatively less muscular energy and weaker breath effort, and are usually voiced. It is a softer, weaker consonant sound. For example, [ b d g] .  Fortis refers to consonant

Manners of Articulation of Consonants:

 When producing the consonant sound in the English language, different speech organs or articulators (such as the tongue, lips, and teeth) behave in diverse manners. According to the manners of articulation, the consonants in the English language can be categorized as follows:

Consonants: Place of Articulation

Phonetically, consonants are one of the two general categories used for speech sounds, the other being vowel sounds. Consonants are speech sounds in which the air from the lungs is seriously obstructed by the different articulators at different places in the vocal tract, and then goes out through the oral passage and, in some cases, through the nostrils. According to their areas of articulation, English consonant phonemes can be divided into nine types as discussed below:

Bilabial Consonant:

 To produce the bilabial consonants, the two lips function as the primary articulators. They first make contact to block the lung air and then separate to release it. English bilabial consonants include /p, b, m/. For example: pat, bat, mouse, etc.

 Labio-dental consonant:

 To articulate the labiodental consonants, the lower lip makes contact with the upper teeth. English labio-dental consonants are / f, v /. For example: fan, van, etc.

Phonology

 Phonology is a level of linguistics that studies the sound systems of languages. Phonology is concerned with the range and function of sounds in specific languages, and with rules that can be written to show the types of phonetic relationships that relate and contrast words and other linguistic units. so, it is concerned with the systemetic organization of sounds in spoken languages. 

The broadest aim of phonology is to isolate the distinct thorough interacting pressures that underlie both the cross-linguistically common and language particular sound patterns that our data analyses reveal. Broadly, these pressures derive from speech production and sound perception. it deals with the abstract, cognitive aspects of sounds rather than the physical production.

In linguistic theories, phonology is seen in one of two main ways:

Monopthong, Dipthong and Tripthong

 Every language possesses vowel sounds that play an inevitable role in producing speech. Vowel is one of the two general categories used for the classification of speech sounds, and this type of sound is articulated with the air from the lungs passing through the vibrating glottis and the vocal tract without any interruption.

That is, the speech sounds that are produced without any obstacles in the vocal tract are called vowels. However, vowels can be defined in terms of both phonetics and phonology.

Phoneme Theory

 The concept of phoneme has been studied and explained in three different schools of phonetics. Firstly, according to a school, the phoneme represents a physical phonetic reality. According to David Jones (1931), a phoneme is a family of sounds in a given language and consists of an important sound of the language together with other related sounds. It takes place in particular sound sequences. Gleason (1955) defines the phoneme as a class of sounds that are phonetically similar and show certain characteristic patterns of distribution in the language or dialect under consideration. Under this view, the phoneme is seen as a convenient label for several phonetic units. For example, /p/ may stand for [p], [p:], [ph], etc.

Phoneme, Phone and Allophone:

 In linguistics, the theory used to describe a language's distinctive sounds and their relations to one another is labeled the phoneme theory. In order to investigate, analyze, and interpret the various aspects and behaviors of speech sounds, there are three basic terms used in phonetics and phonology, and they are phoneme, phone, and allophone.

One Word Substitution

 The use of a single word to replace a phrase or a group of words without changing the meaning is called One-word substitution. It is commonly used to make language more concise and efficient. Some examples are given below:

Nouns that Name Specific Things

1. The author of a book
2. The bank of a river
3. The lens of a camera
4. The bark of a dog
5. The Beak of a bird/duck
6. The bottom of a well
7. The brim of a hat
8. The lid of a jar
9. The belief in God
10. Hope for peace
11. The love of music
12. The screen of a laptop
13. The lawyer of a court
14. The claws of a lion
15. The crown of a king
16. The conductor of an orchestra
17. The capital of a  country
18. The zipper of a jacket
19. The center of a city
20. The crown of a king
21. The door of a building
22. The coast of a sea
23. The bank of a river
24. The belief in God
25. The concept of love
26. The doctor of a patient
27. The envy of success
28. The edge of a cliff
29. The floor of a room
30. The envy of success
31. The bottom of a shirt
32. The love of music
33. The hate of war
34. The fur of a cat
35. The heel of a shoe
36. The horns of a bull
37. The hooves of a horse
38. The handle of a door
39.  
40. The hero of a story
41. The king of a kingdom
42. The lawyer of a court
43. The lid of a pot
44. The mane of a lion
45. The paws of a bear
46. The pockets of a pants
47. The pride of achievement
48. The pages of a notebook
49. The pilot of an airplane
50. The president of a country
51. the roof of a house
52. The roots of a tree
53. The robe of a judge
54. The shell of a Snail/ turtle
55. The summit of a mountain
56. The tail of a dog
57. The teacher of a class
58. The scales of fish
59. The sole of a shoe
60. The stem of flower
61. The shame of failure
62. The staff of a wizard
63. The hooves of a horse
64. The paws of a bear
65. The theory of gravity
66. The pouch of a kangaroo
67. The stripes of a zebra
68. The spots of a leopard
69. The brush of a painter
70. The branches of a tree
71. The eyes of an owl
72. The tongue of a dog
73. The hump of a camel

Linking Words

Linking words are words or phrases used to connect ideas, sentences, or paragraphs smoothly in writing  or speech. They help the readers to follow the logic of thoughts and understand how ideas relate to each other.

Various types of linking verbs depend on the use or place in sentences.  These are:

Three Unities of Dramatic Composition

 

The three principles of dramatic composition are that a play should consist of one main action, occurring at one time(not longer than the play takes to perform), and in one place; expanded from Aristotle's “Poetics” by 16th-century Italian critics, and by French classical dramatists of the 17^th century. The unities were often modified; e.g., the time limit was extended to twenty-four hours, and the place to one house or town, rather than one room or street.

                         The Oxford Companion to English Literature by Sir Paul Harvey

Limerick:

A limerick is a short, humorous poem with five lines, with a distinct rhythm and rhyme style. It is a type of nonsense verse with a definite pattern: a five-line STANZA rhyming aabba in which lines one, two, and five have their anapestic feet and lines three and four have two anapestic feet. The origin of the limerick is uncertain. It first appeared in print with the publication of Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Young Ladies and History of sixteen Wonderful Old Women in 1820. Still, they were popularized by Edward Lear and his book of Nonsense in 1846. During the early twentieth century, especially in America, the improvisation of limericks became a popular parlor game.

Phonetics: The Sounds of Language

 Phonetics is concerned with describing the speech sounds that occur in the languages of the world. We want to know what these sounds are, how they fall into patterns, and how they change in different circumstances. ..The first job of a phonetician is… to try to find out what people are doing when they are talking and when they are listening to speech.

                                                                   Peter Ladefoged, A Course in Phonetics, 1982,^nd Edition

Knowledge of a language includes knowledge of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. It also includes knowing what sounds are in the language and how they may be ‘strung’ together to form these meaningful units.  And although there may be some sounds in one language that are not in another, the sounds of all the languages of the world together constitute a limited set of all the sounds that can be produced by the human vocal tract. To describe speech sounds, it is necessary to know what an individual sound is and how each sound differs from all others. It is also necessary to analyze and interpret the physical, psychological, and physiological aspects of speech sounds. Phonetics is the branch of linguistics that studies the sound of human speech- how they are produced, transmitted, and perceived.

Semantics vs Pragmatics

 

Semantics and pragmatics are two fields of linguistics. Both of them are concerned with the study of the meaning of human speech signs. However, each of the tackles meaning from different angles:

Semantics:

Semantics is the branch of linguistics that studies the meaning of words, phrases, sentences, and texts. It pays attention to the literal meaning of words (dictionary meaning).  It seeks to understand how language represents ideas, objects, and relationships, and how meaning is constructed and interpreted i.e. it combines words into phrases and sentences. It is essential for clear communication, and it helps to detect ambiguity and resolve misunderstandings.

Pragmatics:

Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics that studies how people understand and use language in context. It focuses on the intended meaning of an utterance (what the speaker means) that is conveyed not just by the words themselves, but by how, when, where, and to whom something is said. It is concerned with the use of language in different contexts and ways in which people produce and comprehend meaning through language.  

For example, when someone says, “it is cold here,”- semanticist will explain the meaning as dictionary; a pragmatist will explain it by saying the speaker wants.

Pragmatics helps to explain why the same sentence can mean different things in different situations.

Semantics is the level of linguistics that has largely been affected by pragmatics, but they have some differences. They are given below:

Lexicology

 

Lexicology is the branch of linguistics, the science of language that studies words- their nature, meaning, structure, elements, relation between them, word groups, origin, and the whole lexicon or dictionary embodying all the words, idioms, and phrases used in a particular language.  The term lexicology is composed of two Greek morphemes: lexis, meaning ‘word, phrase’, and logos, denoting ‘learning, a department of knowledge’. That is, the literal meaning of the term lexicology is the ‘science of the word’.

classification of Pronoun

 Definition:

In English, the word ‘pro’ means before but in Latin, it means instead of.  So, Pronouns are words that we use in place of nouns. Example: I, we, you, she, he, they, her, our, etc., the noun being replaced is known as the antecedent of the pronoun.

Categories of Pronouns: 

There is a wide range of different categories of pronouns that we use in everyday speech and writing. Each kind of pronoun has a unique function in a sentence; many pronouns belong to multiple categories and can serve different purposes depending on the context.

Normally, pronouns are classified into the following categories:

1. Personal Pronoun 2. Demonstrative Pronoun 3. Relative Pronoun,4. Interrogative Pronoun 5. Distributive Pronoun 6. Indefinite Pronoun 7. Reflexive Pronoun and 8. Reciprocal Pronoun.

1. Personal Pronoun: Personal pronouns have different forms depending on the person, number, and gender. Based on the person, it can be classified into three categories, and they are:

·         Subjective pronoun: I, we, you, they, he, she, it, etc.

·        Objective pronoun: the teacher loves me/ us/ you/them/him, etc.

·        Possessive pronoun: It is a pronoun that shows who or what owns something. For example: the fishing rod is mine/ yours/his/her/ others/ ours/ theirs.

2. Demonstrative Pronoun:

To identify a specific person or thing, we use demonstrative pronouns.  It has different forms depending on number of person or things. for example: this, that, these, those, such etc.

3. Relative Pronoun:

We use relative pronouns to relate or connect relative clauses (als

Branches of Linguistics

Language is concerned with human life, behavior, society, activity, and so on. So, linguistics looks at and explores language from varied perspectives, and studies a large number of ways to uncover its relation to human beings and their communication needs. The major branches of linguistics are given below:

Micro linguistics:

Micro linguistics covers the basic components of a language. It is referred to as theoretical linguistics.it covers the study of the structural aspects at the broad level of grammar.

Macro linguistics:

Macro linguistics includes the aspects of linguistic study that involve the application of findings of micro linguistics or theoretical linguistics to the analysis of language in use. It is called Applied linguistics because it involves the application of linguistics in relation to other disciplines. Sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, mathematical linguistics, ethnolinguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, clinical linguistics, and others are subfields of this macro linguistics.

Theoretical linguistics: Theoretical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. This theoretical linguistics includes phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, graphology, and lexicology. This linguistics examines a language at different levels of analysis, such as its phonological system, articulation and perception of sounds(phonetics), word formation(morphology) and phrases and sentences(syntax), the meaning of linguistic expressions (semantics), language use (pragmatics), and so on.

Comparative linguistics:

 Comparative linguistics is a part of historical linguistics that studies the similarities and differences between languages to determine their historical relationship.  For example, if we compare English, Dutch, and German, we can find several words that are similar in phonetic form and meaning, such as English Book, Dutch boek, and German buch. If we compare the equivalent words in French livre, Spanish libro, and Italian libro, it is clear that English, Dutch, and German are similar to each other. This fact implies that English, Dutch, and German belong to a language family distinct from that which French, Spanish, and Italian belong to.

The main goals of comparative linguistics are:

By comparing related languages, linguists try to reconstruct the features of the common ancestor language (called proto language), such as Proto-Indo-European.

Comparative linguistics helps to classify languages into families based on shared features and systematic sound changes, e.g. Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Sino- Tibetan).

Comparative linguistics sheds light on how languages evolve over time including phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic changes.

Contrastive linguistics:

Contrastive linguistics is part of applied linguistics and seeks to establish the similarities and differences between a language learner’s first language and the targeted language, where he/she will have difficulty and make mistakes. It is the study of two or more languages to improve language teaching and learning. Unlike comparative linguistics, which focuses on historical relationships, contrastive linguistics focuses on present-day structures of language. For example, languages like Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin do not have articles. We can then predict that speakers of these languages will have difficulty learning articles when they learn English.

Sociolinguistics:

Sociolinguistics is the study of how language interacts with society on society or the relationship of language to society. It investigates how factors like region, class, gender, age, level of education, ethnicity, and context influence the way people speak and how language varies and changes over time. For example, in a formal job interview, a speaker might use standard grammar and vocabulary, but the same person might use slang and informal expressions with friends-showing style shifting based on social context.

Psycholinguistics:

It is the study of how the human mind processes and produces language. It combines the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. It is concerned with the psychological mechanisms underlying speech production and reception. It also studies how children acquire their first language, speech perception, and the loss of the ability to use and understand language.

Major areas of psycholinguistics: 

1. Language acquisition:

·       How children learn their first language

·       How adults learn a second language

2. Language comprehension

·       How we understand spoken and written language involves perception, memory and interpretation of words and sentences

3. language production:

·       how we think about what we want to say and turn it into speech

·       includes planning, word retrieval, and articulation

4. Language and the brain (Neurolinguistics

·       Studies how language is represented in the brain

·       Includes research on brain regions

 Historical or Diachronic linguistics:

It is the branch of linguistics that studies the development and evolution of languages over time. It focuses on how languages change in their phonetics, grammar, semantics, and vocabulary across different historical periods. It was developed in the 19^th century. During this time, linguists were concerned with the historical development of languages. The aim of such investigations was to arrive at general hypotheses about how languages change over time and is therefore also known as diachronic linguistics as opposed to synchronic linguistics, which is non-historical linguistics.  Historical linguistics did not originally develop as a branch of linguistic study as it is today. It began as the core of linguistic research with its investigation into the historical development of English from Anglo-Saxon, which is currently referred to as the Romance languages- French, Spanish, and Italian, which in turn originated from Latin. Historical linguistics classifies languages into families based on relationships with other languages.  

Structural or Synchronic Linguistics:

Structural or synchronic linguistics, opposed to historical or diachronic linguistics, covers the study of languages at a specific point in time- typically the present -without considering its historical development. A synchronic study of language is a comparison of languages or dialects- various spoken differences of the same language used within some defined special region and during the same period of time. For most of the twentieth century, synchronic linguistics was considered to be prior to diachronic linguistics.

Mathematical Linguistics:

Mathematics is now linked to linguistics and is the study of linguistics using mathematical methods of analysis. It covers broad areas of linguistics, probability theory, speech synthesis, speech recognition, and computational linguistics. It focuses on the statistical and mathematical representation of information in texts.  Statistical and algebraic linguistics constitute two different areas of mathematical linguistics.

Ethnolinguistics:

Ethnolinguistics is the field of linguistic anthropology that studies the language of a particular ethnic group. It is often associated with regions where ethnicity plays a major role in language description and status. Ethnologists study the way perception and conceptualization influence language and show how this is linked to different cultures and societies. As ethnolinguistics studies on the relationship between language and culture, it is useful for language preservation and revitalization, cultural anthropology and sociolinguistics, cross-cultural communication, and education.

Computational Linguistics:

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. It is not related to any particular field of linguistics. Traditionally, computational linguistics was usually performed by computer scientists who specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. Recent research has shown that human language is much more complex than previously thought; so computational linguists often work as members of interdisciplinary teams, including linguists, language experts, and computer scientists. That is, computational linguistics draws upon the knowledge of linguists, computer scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychologists, mathematicians, and logicians, amongst others.

Clinical Linguistics:

Clinical linguistics is a branch of linguistics and involves the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology. The central focus of Clinical linguistics is the application of the theories, methods and findings  of linguistics  to the assessment , diagnosis, and treatment of language disorders in individuals.

Clinical linguistics is applicable for analyzing a child’s grammar errors to diagnose developmental delays, assessing a stroke patient’s ability to produce and comprehend language, and helping autistic individuals improve pragmatic language skills.

Corpus Linguistics:

Corpus linguistics is the study of language through the systematic analysis of large collection of real-life language data, known as corpora (singular: corpus). corpus linguistics is use to analyze and research a number of linguistic questions and offers a unique insight into the dynamic of language which has made it one of the most widely used linguistic methodologies. Since corpus linguistics involves the use of large corpora that consist of millions or sometimes even billion words, it i

 Forensic Linguistics:

Forensic linguistics, referred to as forensic stylistics, is a branch of linguistics that focuses on taking the analytical techniques of the field and applying them to legal and criminal issues as far-ranging as trial, investigation, rehabilitation, and punishment. As a discipline, forensic linguistics reviews spoken and written materials and, using the scientific techniques of linguistics, analyzes them. This branch of linguistics is concerned with such things as determining who authored a written document and identifying speakers of oral material, such as taped conversations. Forensic linguistics also measures as well as determines both the content and meaning of both spoken and written material.

Cognitive Linguistics:

Cognitive linguistics is the branch of linguistics that studies the relationship between language and the human mind in its cognitive function. The term cognitive here refers to the crucial role of intermediate informational structures in our encounters with the world. This branch of linguistics assumes that our interaction with the world is mediated through informational structures in the mind. It is more specific than cognitive psychology, however, by focusing on natural language as a means of organizing, processing, and conveying that information

Contact Linguistics

The term ‘contact linguistics’ was introduced in 1979 at the First World Congress on Language Contact and Conflict in Brussels. Whenever people speaking different languages come into contact, they naturally tend to seek ways of bypassing the communicative barriers facing them by compromising their forms of speech. Such contact can have a wide variety of linguistic outcomes: internal, that is, linguistic, and external, that is, social and psychological.

Folk Linguistics

Folk linguistics is the study of non-expert beliefs and opinions about language and its use. It explores how ordinary people perceive, describe, and evaluate language. Folk linguistics helps linguists understand public attitudes toward language. It is useful in education, sociolinguistics, and language policymaking.

Stylistics

Stylistics, a branch of linguistics, is traditionally known as the study of literary texts or discourse by employing formal linguistics tools. It can also investigate literary texts or discourse through sophisticated computer-based applications. Some stylisticians, experts in stylistics, quantitatively analyze large amounts of data and texts, not possible otherwise, and thus can provide answers to queries, such as what Robert Frostt’s writing style is inhn his poetry or how one can state, solely on the basis of textual evidence, that Milton or Shakespeare’s works are historically arranged. Literature is the object of study in Stylistics. The traditional connection between stylistics and literature brings with it two important caveats. The first is that creativity and innovation in language use should not be considered as the exclusive preserve of literary writing. The second caveat  is the techniques of stylistic analysis are as much about deriving insights about linguistic structure and function as they are about understanding literary texts. Thus, stylistic analysis attempts to provide a commentary which is objective and scientific, based on concrete quantifiable date and applied in a systematic way.

Phrase and Idiom:

 1. under the weather- somewhat ill or gloomy/ feeling unwell

2. Weather permitting- If the weather is fine

3. Weather the storm- To experience a very difficult situation and survive it

4. Under a cloud- someone who is suspected of having done something wrong

5. Lovely weather for ducks- Rainy weather

6. Right as rain- All right

7. In a fog/ In a haze- Confused, dazed, disoriented

8. Come rain or shine- Regardless of the weather or circumstances

9. Every cloud has a silver lining- There is always something good even in an unpleasant, difficult, or even painful situation.

10. Add fuel to the fire- Make a bad situation worse

11. A piece of cake- Something very easy

12. All ears- Paying full attention

13. cool as a cucumber- very calm and composed

14. Strike while the iron is hot- to take action at the right time

15. Break the ice- Start a conversation in a social setting

16. The ball is in your court- it’s your decision or responsibility

17. Spill the beans- Reveal a secret

18. Burn the midnight oil- Work late into the night

19. Hit the nail on the head- Describe something accurately

20. Once in a blue moon- Very rarely

21. Bite the bullet- Face a difficult situation bravely

22. Let the cat out of the bag- Accidentally reveal a secret

 23. Pull someone’s leg- Joke with someone

24. Sit on the fence- Avoid making a decision

25. Kick the bucket- To die/ Pass away

26. Throw in the towel- Give up or admit defeat

27. Hit the books- Start studying seriously

28. hit the road- Leave or depart

29. zip your lip- Be quiet

30. two peas in a pod- Very similar

31. See eye to eye- Agree completely

32. miss the boat- Miss an opportunity

33. The last straw- The final event that makes something unbearable

34. Pull yourself together- Calm down and regain control

35. Jump on the bandwagon- Follow a trend