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Grammar and Style 855

We will now give a brief survey of the grammatical categories and the grammatical phenomena which bear (or tend to bear) some kind of stylistic colouring or other, first those of morphology, then those of syntax.

Morphology

In the sphere of nouns there is not much to be noted in the way of stylistic colouring.

In a very few cases where a noun has alternative plural forms, the irregular form (the one not in -s) naturally tends to have a high-flown, archaic, or poetic flavour. The very fact that there exists a plural form in -s alongside of it gives the other form the character of something unusual and restricted in use to special purposes. The only two words that have to be mentioned in this connection are, brother with its alternative plural form brethren differing from brothers not in stylistic colouring alone, and cow, with its alternative plural form kine having a very strong archaic and poetic tinge.

In the sphere of case it can be noted that the genitive in -'s tends to acquire a specific stylistic flavour when formed from a noun not denoting a living being. As a rule the of-phrase is used to express relation between the thing denoted by the noun and that denoted by another noun. For instance, if this sort of relation has to be expressed between England and history, the usual, stylistically neutral way of expressing it is to say the history of England, and this, indeed, is the title, for instance, of most textbooks on the subject. But alongside of it the variant England's history is also permissible. It has a poetic and possibly patriotic shade about it and it will do very well in an emotional context, but would be out of place in a strictly scientific one.

The exact sphere of nouns whose forms in -'s tend to acquire such a peculiar stylistic character is however extremely difficult, if not impossible, to define, as the forms in -'s tend to spread in recent times, as we noted in our chapter on case (see p. 43). Much concrete observation and analysis is necessary before anything more definite can be said on the subject.

There is little to be said about adjectives, too, which have only degrees of comparison as a morphological characteristic.

What matters here is the stylistic colouring of degrees of comparison in -er, -est of such adjectives as do not usually possess such forms. Where such forms do appear they tend to have a peculiar solemn stylistic quality which would make them unfit for any other context. The English nineteenth-century writer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle would use a superlative in -est of two-syllable

856 Conclusion

adjectives derived from present participles in -ing, as will be seen from the following example: With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows. Waving with yellow harvests, thick-studded with workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest and the willingest our Earth ever had... Neither of these forms occur in ordinary style: the analytic formations most cunning, most willing, etc. would be used instead.

In the sphere of pronouns, there is the use of the forms I or me, etc., which we have already considered in Chapter VI, and we need not dwell on it here.

Another point to be noted about pronouns in the morphological way is the form 'em in sentences like I'll show 'em alongside of I'll show them. Strictly speaking this is a morphological point if we consider 'em to be a different form, not merely a phonetically weakened variant of them. If we take it that way we will state that the morphological variant 'em for the objective case of the third person plural personal pronoun has a definite stylistic colouring of low colloquial style. It would be, for instance, entirely out of place in a serious scientific treatise. It is, however, quite appropriate in reproducing low colloquial (and possibly vulgar) speech.

The main bulk of stylistic remarks in the sphere of morphology belongs of course to the verb. There are a considerable number of details here which point to a peculiar stylistic colouring, either solemn and archaic, or low colloquial and eventually vulgar.

The first to be noted are the forms in -th for the third person singular, present indicative, that is, forms like liveth, knoweth, saith, doth, hath, etc. These have acquired (since the 17th century) a definite archaic and poetical flavour and cannot accordingly be used in any other, or in any neutral stylistic surroundings. Examples of their use in modern texts are rare indeed.

The same stylistic colouring as with the -th-forms is also inherent in forms in -st for the second person singular of both the present and the past indicative (that is, the forms livest, knowest, sayst, dost, livedst, knewest, saidst, didst, hadst, etc.) and also the forms shalt, wilt, art, wert (or wast) of the verbs shall, will, be. These forms are practically inseparable from the second person singular personal pronoun thou. In every other respect the -st-forms of the second person are exactly similar to the -th-forms of the third. They are quite rare in Modern English.

These, then, are forms which may, generally speaking, be derived from every verb.

The other forms with special stylistic colouring belong to definite individual verbs only, though some of them, belonging to verbs which are or may be auxiliary, can accordingly be brought into the system of all verbs which use the auxiliary.

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