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Information about Periphrasis

This article is about the term used in linguistics. For the term used in rhetoric, see Circumlocution.
In linguistics, periphrasis is a device by which a grammatical concept is expressed by more than one word (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 is 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 are 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.[1]

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 is missing certain forms.[2]

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)
stēllaeof a star
patientissimusmost patient
amāberisyou will be loved

References

1. ^ Trask, R. L. (1997). A Student's Dictionary of Language and Linguistics. London: Arnold, 166. ISBN 0-340-65266-7. 
2. ^ Stump, Gregory T. (1998). "Inflection", in Andrew Spencer and Arnold M. Zwicky (eds.): The Handbook of Morphology. Oxford: Blackwell, 13–43. ISBN 0-631-18544-5. 

See also

Circumlocution is a figure of speech where the meaning of a word or phrase is indirectly expressed through several or many words. It may be used when defining a term, for example: "scissors" = "a thing you use to cut other things".
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For the journal, see .
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist.
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Grammar is the study of the rules governing the use of a given natural language, and as such a field of linguistics. Traditionally, grammar included morphology and syntax, in modern linguistics commonly expanded by the subfields of phonetics, phonology, orthography, semantics, and
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Function words (or grammatical words) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker.
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inflection or inflexion is the modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) to reflect grammatical (that is, relational) information, such as gender, tense, number or person.
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In linguistics, derivation is the process of creating new lexemes from other lexemes, for example, by adding a derivational affix. It is a kind of word formation.

A derivational suffix usually applies to words of one syntactic category and changes them into words of another
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English}}} 
Writing system: Latin (English variant) 
Official status
Official language of: 53 countries
Regulated by: no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1: en
ISO 639-2: eng
ISO 639-3: eng  
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In linguistics, an auxiliary (also called helping verb, auxiliary verb, or verbal auxiliary) is a verb functioning to give further semantic or syntactic information about the main or full verb following it.
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In grammar, the comparative is the form of an adjective or adverb which denotes the degree or grade by which a person, thing, or other entity has a property or quality greater or less in extent than that of another. See comparison.
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For the noun case, see .
In grammar the superlative of an adjective or adverb is a form of adjective or adverb which indicates that something has some feature to a greater degree than anything it is being compared to in a given context.
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suffix — a form of affix — follows the morpheme to which it attaches. Suffixes can be inflectional or derivational.

An inflectional suffix is sometimes called a desinence.
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This article or section may be confusing or unclear for some readers.
Please [improve the article] or discuss this issue on the talk page. This article has been tagged since April 2007.
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A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. This linguistic classification is largely independent of morpheme-usage classifications (such as fusional, agglutinative, etc.
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Latin}}} 
Official status
Official language of: Vatican City
Used for official purposes, but not spoken in everyday speech
Regulated by: Opus Fundatum Latinitas
Roman Catholic Church
Language codes
ISO 639-1: la
ISO 639-2: lat
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Arnold M. Zwicky is a perennial Visiting Professor of linguistics at Stanford University, and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University.
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In grammar, a preposition is a part of speech that introduces a prepositional phrase. For example, in the sentence "The cat sleeps on the sofa", the word "on" is a preposition, introducing the prepositional phrase "on the sofa".
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This article or section may be confusing or unclear for some readers.
Please [improve the article] or discuss this issue on the talk page. This article has been tagged since April 2007.
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A compound verb or a complex predicate in linguistics is a multi-word compound that acts as a single verb.

Though compound verbs are rare in English, one may illustrate the form with the example "start reading".
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In linguistics, the term particle is often employed as a useful catch-all lacking a strict definition. In general, it is understood that particles are function words that tend to be uninflected — that is, words which do not have suffixes, for example, that reflect grammatical
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