Everything about Periphrasis totally explained
In
linguistics,
periphrasis is a device by which a
grammatical category or relationship is expressed by a
free morpheme (typically one or more
function words modifying a content word), instead of being shown by
inflection or
derivation. For example, the
English future tense is periphrastic: it's formed with an
auxiliary verb (
shall or
will) followed by the base form of the main verb. Another example is the
comparative and
superlative forms of adjectives, when they're formed with the words
more and
most rather than with the
suffixes
-er and
-est: the forms
more beautiful and
most beautiful are periphrastic, while
lovelier and
loveliest are not.
Periphrasis is a characteristic of
analytic languages, which tend to avoid inflection. Even
synthetic languages, which are highly inflected, sometimes make use of periphrasis to fill out an inflectional paradigm that's missing certain forms.
A comparison of some
Latin forms with their English translations shows that English uses periphrasis in many instances where Latin uses inflection:
| Latin (inflected) |
English (periphrastic) |
| stēllae |
of a star |
| patientissimus |
most patient |
| amāberis |
you'll be loved |
Further Information
Get more info on 'Periphrasis'.
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