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E-Prime (short for English-Prime, sometimes denoted É or E′), a prescriptive version of the English language, excludes all forms of the verb ''to be''. E-Prime does not allow the conjugations of ''to be''—''be'', ''am'', ''is'', ''are'', ''was'', ''were'', ''been'', ''being''—the archaic forms of ''to be'' (e.g. ''art'', ''wast'', ''wert''), or the contractions of ''to be''—'m, 's, 're (e.g. ''I'm'', ''he's'', '' she's'', ''they're''). Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing.〔 〕 For example, the sentence "the film was good" could not be expressed under the rules of E-Prime, and the speaker might instead say "I liked the film" or "the film made me laugh". The E-Prime versions communicate the speaker's experience rather than judgment, making it harder for the writer or reader to confuse opinion with fact. Kellogg and Bourland use the term "Deity mode of speech" to refer to misuse of the verb ''to be'', which "allows even the most ignorant to transform their opinions magically into god-like pronouncements on the nature of things". ==History== D. David Bourland, Jr., who had studied under Alfred Korzybski, came to the idea of E-Prime as an addition to Korzybski's general semantics in the late 1940s.〔Cullen Murphy, "Just curious: essays", 1995, ISBN , 039570099X (p. 78 )〕 Bourland published the concept in a 1965 essay entitled ''A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime'' (originally published in ''General Semantics Bulletin''). The essay quickly generated controversy within the general semantics field, partly because practitioners of general semantics sometimes saw Bourland as attacking the verb 'to be' as such, and not just certain usages. Bourland collected and published three volumes of essays in support of his innovation. The first (1991), co-edited by Paul Dennithorne Johnston, bore the title: ''To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology'' 〔 〕 For the second, ''More E-Prime: To Be or Not II'', published in 1994, he added a third editor, Jeremy Klein. Bourland and Johnston then edited a third book, ''E-Prime III: a third anthology'', published in 1997. Korzybski (1879–1950) determined that two forms of the verb 'to be'—the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication—had structural problems. For example, the sentence "The coat is red" has no observer, the sentence "We see the coat as red" (where "we" indicates observers) appears more specific, and describes light waves and colour as determined by the human brain. Korzybski pointed out the circularity of many dictionary definitions, and suggested adoption of the mathematical practice of acknowledging some minimal ensemble of primitive notions as necessarily 'undefined'; he chose 'structure', 'order', and 'relation'. He wrote of those that do not lend themselves to explication in words, but only by exhibiting how to use them in sentences. Korzybski advocated raising one's awareness of structural issues generally through training in general semantics. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「E-Prime」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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