New Lexical Tendencies in English

There are some new tendencies in the use of English you need to be aware of even though they affect the language in general. Knowledge of them is especially important for those who perform research in humanities and social sciences.

The first tendency considered here is the so-called politically correct language. This tendency, characteristic mostly of American English, consists in the use of euphemisms (mild, vague, and indirect words or phrases) that soften accurate meanings in accordance with sociopolitical values. Some examples of "politically correct" American English are as follows:

Blacks, Negroes	Afro-Americans
Indians	Native Americans
foreign students	international students
poor	marginalized
handicapped or	differently abled
stupid	intellectually disadvantaged

The second tendency consists in the avoidance of unnecessary distinctions based on sex in language use. These distinctions are called sexist language. The proper understanding of this important for the Western societies tendency may not be easy for Ukrainians and other speakers of Slavic languages, in which grammar is strongly affected by the category of gender. Thus, to avoid sexist language masculine pronouns sentences are transformed into the plural. Occasionally, if all else fails, he/she or him/her are used. Careful writers also avoid designating sex with suffixes like –man and –ess and substitute nonsexist terms, e.g.:

Gendered	Gender-free
postman	postal agent
chairman	chairperson
landlord	landowner
manmade	synthetic
poetess	poet
air hostess	flight attendant
policeman	police officer

Academic Grammar and Punctuation

Academic writing is a distinct genre of writing with its own rules and conventions. The areas widely covered in the textbooks available in Ukraine do not consider peculiarities of academic style of writing as far as there are no special rules lying outside English grammar in general.

Word order

While in Ukrainian there is no strict word order, a normal English declarative sentence has the following structure, with the subject preceding the predicate:

subject+predicate+object+adverbial modifiers

There are, however, additional rules. Most important of them are given below:

1. Adjectives are used before the noun that they modify in the following order: a) general description, opinion; b) size, shape, condition; c) colour; d) origin; e) purpose, type. For example:

A nice small brown French writing table.

Old red Spanish home-made wine.

2. Adverbs of manner (that answer the question "how") are usually placed after the verb in the final position. However, in academic style, the middle position is preferable.

GENERAL USE: He studied the problem thoroughly.

ACADEMIC USE: He thoroughly studied the problem.

3. Adverbs and conjunctions referring to the whole sentence are placed at the beginning:

Nevertheless, it turned out that the experiment failed.

Finally, I will consider the applicability of the obtained data.

The word order may be inverted (i.e. a word will be moved out of its usual position in a sentence) in the following cases:

1. In some negative sentences (clauses):

We do not assume that the necessary data will be obtained nor do we assume a priori that the experiment will be successful.

In no case does this offer imply any obligation.

2. In unreal conditionals:

Were the truth known, public opinion would change.

Had the data been thoroughly checked, the project would not have been declined.

3. For emphasis:

Much more impressive are the obtained numeric data.