There are minor changes in the use or omission of articles. Several nouns denoting illnesses and afflictions have recendy ceased to occur with articles, so that a sunstroke (1902 Nesbit, 5 Children ix.183), the influenza, the mumps seem old-fashioned now - although the flu is still quite possiblee, nd indeed usual in AmerE, as is the mumps. Jane Austen's the headach is now quite impossible syntactically, in standard anyway, as well as in spelling (Phillipps 1970: 174). George Eliot wrote without taking percentage from druggists (1871-2 Middlemacch xv.147) and in literature and the drama (ibid. xxxi.300), where PDE would prefer a percentage with article but possibly drama without.23 In journalism, at any rate, nouns denoting political or other office can be used in apposition to the name of the office-holder without an article and without an intonation break, thus Prime Minister John Smith rather than the Prime Minister, John Smith; the usage still strikes many Britons as an Americanism. Jucker (1992) reports that it remains far less frequent in the upmarket British press than in mid - or downmarket papers.
There have been minor changes in the usage of the demonstratives. The OED records as originally American the use of this to denote someone or something not previously mentioned:
(75) Did you read about this fellow that went and paid a thousand
Dollars for (1922 S. Lewis, Babbitt viii. 116 [OED\)
So-called 'new-ibtf is traced by Wald as far back as the 1930s (1983: 94), though a similarity is noted to the 1ME vivid narrative use of this at the second lexical mention of a character (CHEEII: 218).
Buy custom Literature essay, Literature term paper, Literature research paper.
