In linguistics and literature, periphrasis () is the use of a larger number of words, with an implicit comparison to the possibility of using fewer. The comparison may be within a language or between languages. For example, "more happy" is periphrastic in comparison to "happier", and English "I will eat" is periphrastic in comparison to Spanish comeré.
The term originates from the Greek word περιφράζομαι 'talking around', and was originally used for examples that came up in ancient Greek. In epic poetry, it was common to use periphrasis in examples such as "the sons of the Achaeans" (meaning the Achaeans), or "How did such words escape the fence of your teeth?" (adding a layer of poetic imagery to "your teeth"). Sometimes periphrastic forms were used for verbs that would otherwise be unpronounceable.Smyth, A Greek grammar for colleges, sec. 599. For example, the verb δείκνυμι 'to show', has a hypothetical form *δεδείκνται , which has the disallowed consonant cluster , so one would instead say δεδειγμένοι εἰσί , using a periphrasis with a participle.
In modern linguistics, the term periphrasis is typically used for examples like "more happy": the use of one or more function words to express meaning that otherwise may be expressed by attaching an affix or clitic to a content word. The resulting phrase includes two or more Collocation free morpheme instead of one inflection word.Concerning periphrasis in general, see Matthews (1991:11f., 236–238). Periphrastic forms are a characteristic of analytic languages, whereas the absence of periphrasis is a characteristic of synthetic languages. While periphrasis concerns all categories of syntax, it is most visible with verb catena. The verb catenae of English language (verb phrases constructed with auxiliary verbs) are highly periphrastic.
Examples
| more lovely |
| more friendly |
| more happy |
| most lovely |
| most friendly |
| most happy |
Across languages
English vs. Latin
| stēll-ae | of a star |
| patient-issimus | most patient |
| amā-be-ris | (you) will be loved |
Periphrasis is a characteristic of analytic languages, which tend to avoid inflection. Even strongly inflected synthetic languages sometimes make use of periphrasis to fill out an inflectional paradigm that is missing certain forms.Concerning the use of periphrasis in strongly inflected languages, see Stump (1998). A comparison of some Latin forms of the verb dūcere 'lead' with their English translations illustrates further that English uses periphrasis in many instances where Latin uses inflection.
| 1st person plural imperfect passive indicative |
| 1st person plural present passive indicative |
| 1st person plural future passive indicative |
English often needs two or three verbs to express the same meaning that Latin expresses with a single verb. Latin is a relatively synthetic language; it expresses grammatical meaning using inflection, whereas the verb system of English, a Germanic language, is relatively analytic; it uses auxiliary verbs to express functional meaning.
Israeli Hebrew
According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, the Israeli periphrastic construction (using auxiliary verbs followed by a noun) is employed here for the desire to express swift action, and stems from Yiddish. He compares the Israeli periphrasis to the following Yiddish expressions all meaning "to have a look":
Zuckermann emphasizes that the Israeli periphrastic constructions "are not nonce, ad hoc lexical calques of Yiddish. The Israeli system is productive and the lexical realization often differs from that of Yiddish". He provides the following Israeli examples:
But while Zuckermann attempted to use these examples to claim that Israeli Hebrew grew similar to European languages, it will be noticed that all of these examples are from the slang and therefore linguistically marked. The normal and daily usage of the verb paradigm in Israeli modern Hebrew is of the synthetic form, as in Biblical Hebrew:
Catenae
The role of catenae for the theory of periphrasis is illustrated with the trees that follow. The first example is across French and English. Future tense/time in French is often constructed with an inflected form, whereas English typically employs a periphrastic form, e.g.
Where French expresses future tense/time using the single (inflected) verb catena sera, English employs a periphrastic two-word catena, or perhaps a periphrastic four-word catena, to express the same basic meaning. The next example is across German and English:
German often indicates an object of a preposition with a single dative case pronoun. For English to express the same meaning, it usually employs the periphrastic two-word prepositional phrase with for. The following trees illustrate the periphrasis of light verb constructions:
Each time, the catena in green is the matrix predicate. Each of these predicates is a periphrastic form insofar as at least one function word is present. The b-predicates are, however, more periphrastic than the a-predicates since they contain more words. The closely similar meaning of these predicates across the a- and b-variants is accommodated in terms of catenae, since each predicate is a catena.
See also
- Adposition
- Analytic language
- Compound verb
- Deflexion (linguistics)
- Dependency grammar
Citations
General references
- Matthews, P. 1981. Syntax. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Matthews, P. 1991. Morphology, 2nd edition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Osborne, T. and T. Groß 2012a. "Constructions are catenae: Construction Grammar meets Dependency Grammar". Cognitive Linguistics 23, 1, 163–214.
- Osborne, T., M. Putnam, and T. Groß 2012b. "Catenae: Introducing a novel unit of syntactic analysis". Syntax 15, 4, 354–396.
- Stump, G. 1998. "Inflection". In A. Spencer and A. M. Zwicky (eds.), The handbook of morphology. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 13–43.
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