periphrastic adj : roundabout and unnecessarily wordy; "had a preference for circumlocutious (or circumlocutory) rather than forthright expression"; "A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,/ Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle/ With words and meanings."-T.S.Eliot; (`ambagious' is archaic) [syn: circumlocutious, circumlocutory, ambagious]

English

Etymology

From the periphrasis. Cf. périphrastique.

Pronunciation

• (Canada) /ˌpɛrəˈfræstɪk/
• Rhymes: -æstɪk

Adjective

periphrastic

1. expressed in more words than are necessary

   1916 Martin Brown Ruudhttp://www.gutenberg.org/files/16416/16416-8.txt :

   As poetry it does not measure up to Aasen; as translation it is periphrastic, arbitrary, not at all faithful.

2. characterized by periphrase or circumlocution.

   "The daughter of the man" may be used as a periphrastic synonym for "the man's daughter"

3. indirect in naming an entity; circumlocutory

   1870 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in Vril: The Power of the Coming Racehttp://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bulwer/1871/coming-race.htm :

   In writing, they deem it irreverent to express the Supreme Being [... and] in conversation they generally use a periphrastic epithet, such as the All-Good.

Related terms

• periphrase
• periphrasis
• periphrastic conjugation

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 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.

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.

A comparison of some Latin forms with their English translations shows that English uses periphrasis in many instances where Latin uses inflection:

References

See also

• Adposition
• Analytic language
• Compound verb
• Grammatical particle
• Phrase