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Modern English no longer has quite the same distinction between literary and colloquial registers. [3] English has been used as a literary language in countries that were formerly part of the British Empire, for instance in India up to the present day, [6] Malaysia in the early 20th century [7] and Nigeria, where English remains the official ...
Literal language is the usage of words exactly according to their direct, straightforward, or conventionally accepted meanings: their denotation. Figurative (or non-literal ) language is the usage of words in a way that deviates from their conventionally accepted definitions in order to convey a more complex meaning or a heightened effect. [ 1 ]
English literature is literature written in the English language from the English-speaking world.The English language has developed over more than 1,400 years. [1] The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the fifth century, are called Old English.
For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men").
Literature was thought to act as a replacement for religion in the retention and advancement of culture, and the English Major thus provided students with the chance to draw moral, ethical, and philosophical qualities and meanings of older studies from a richer and broader source of literature than that of the ancient Greek and Latin classics.
In linguistics, the conduit metaphor is a dominant class of figurative expressions used when discussing communication itself (metalanguage).It operates whenever people speak or write as if they "insert" their mental contents (feelings, meanings, thoughts, concepts, etc.) into "containers" (words, phrases, sentences, etc.) whose contents are then "extracted" by listeners and readers.
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
English is also widely used in media and literature, and the number of English language books published annually in India is the third largest in the world after the US and UK. [126] However, English is rarely spoken as a first language, numbering only around a couple hundred-thousand people, and less than 5% of the population speak fluent ...